Indian cricket is arguably going through one of its toughest periods in recent history, especially in red-ball cricket. The 2024-25 test season began with a home series win over Bangladesh, but everything was downhill from there. A whitewash 0-3 home loss to New Zealand ended their enviable home streak. Next, they lost the Border Gavaskar Trophy 1-3, ending their decade-long dominance over the Aussies.
Not mincing my words, the batting was abysmal. Horrible captaincy and tactical calls just added to the turmoil. So much so that Indian skipper Rohit Sharma overworked Bumrah in the boxing day test in Australia to the extent that he couldn’t even enter the field in the final innings in the final test in Sydney. Since then, Bumrah’s fitness concerns have risen putting his availability for the upcoming Champions Trophy in jeopardy.
After such an overwhelming test season, you would expect a good cricket board to do a full post-mortem of what went wrong and take action to combat it. BCCI did but not on what went wrong on the cricket field, what they think went wrong off it. No captaincy change calls, nothing about changing the head coach, nothing about putting pressure on senior players to either perform or get dropped, but a two-page list of rules that the team needs to follow.
Back to school
In case you missed it, I will summarize the 10-point set of rules and regulations for the Indian team to follow going forward:
Participation in Domestic Matches is mandatory.
All players have to travel with the team, no traveling with the family.
Baggage limit and new baggage policy for international and domestic tours.
Restriction on personal staff on Tours/series (managers, chefs, assistants, etc.).
Players bear the cost to send bags separately to the Center of Excellence, Bengaluru.
No leaving practice sessions early, all players need to attend the entire session.
No personal shoots/promos during the series/tour.
Restrictions on families and partners visiting on tours.
Players must be available for BCCI’s official shoots and functions.
Players cannot return home early if matches end early.
That’s right, an international side has a set of rules that puts restrictions on them as a school would. The second point about all players having to travel with the team is valid but the question has to be posed, why were they allowed to travel separately in the first place?
BCCI held a meeting to discuss the failures down under and this is the outcome of it. No questions on Rohit’s captaincy, in fact, reports suggest he is going to be captaining for the team at least until the English tour. No questions on Virat Kohli’s performance. No questions about Gautam Gambhir’s awful selection calls, absence of plans, and zero tactical awareness.
The conclusion of an embarrassing test season is not allowing families and partners to be there on tours because ofcourse that is the reason the Indian team had zero plans throughout the series, were humbled and destroyed by a depleted Kiwi side at home. Partners and families were the reason our senior pros failed to step up time and again andthey were the reason Rohit overworked Bumrah.
Again, I am not going to mince my words, this is a circus. This is a clown show that’s going to sink the already drowning Indian cricket’s boat. Head Coach Gautam Gambhir has taken zero accountability for the laughable selection calls and absence of plans in Australia. For the big mouth that he once was, going on shows and news channels and criticizing and questioning every decision the team made left right, and center, he has been quiet, absent, and clueless.
Sack families
What is even worse is that there has been no official communication from the BCCI about these new sets of guidelines and rules. This story has been reported by several reporters and journalists. They were the ones to break the story and yet there has been no official communication from the cricket board itself. Fundamentally, this is what is wrong with the BCCI.
They treat their fans very poorly. Without fans, there is no sport, there is no revenue and there is no BCCI. Fans are arguably the most important commodity for a sporting board like the BCCI. And rightfully so, fans are furious and frustrated about the cricket they have seen over the last few months. There have been growing calls to drop Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli, if not drop then at least sacking Rohit from test captaincy, and yet the outcome of a highly important meeting was to not allow families on tour.
No future
With how it’s going right now, the Indian test team has a very grim future. No leader can step up if the BCCI does decide to remove Rohit from test captaincy. Bumrah isn’t a choice owing to his fitness and how important he is to the bowling unit. The leadership situation is a mess. Shubman Gill has highly underperformed and showed no significant signs of being a good leader. Rishabh Pant hasn’t evolved into the leader BCCI would’ve hoped he would. And guess where this mess can be traced back to? You’re right, Sourav Ganguly.
It is no secret that the removal of Virat Kohli from all captaincy positions was an organized and structured hit job. Former selector Chetan Sharma admitted Ganguly’s dislike towards Kohli in a leaked video. Whatever opinion you have about Virat the captain, you have to admit he was preparing the side for a transition. He had asked the board to remove Rohit as vice-captain and was grooming both KL Rahul and Shreyas Iyer to be the next captain. His efforts were cut short with his resigning from test captaincy in January 2022, which was very evidently his surrendering to Ganguly’s orchestrated hit job.
Now, the Indian test side finds themselves in a hole they dug for themselves. They need to find a way to get out of it, but their decisions are only digging the hole deeper making it that much harder for them to get out.
Domestic cricket? Sure
Since 2020, 20 players have debuted for India in tests. 10 batters, three all-rounders, and seven bowlers. Out of the 10 batters, only five of them have an average above 45 in first-class cricket. Suryakumar Yadav was handed the test cap before Sarfaraz Khan, a domestic monster.
Granted Rahul Dravid did a below-average job in preparing the side for a transition, but he handed debuts to Yashasvi Jaiswal, Mukesh Kumar, Prasidh Krishna, Sarfaraz Khan, and Dhruv Jurel in his last few series. Mukesh Kumar more so is a domestic giant. He has picked 196 wickets in 47 matches with an average of 20.94 in domestic first-class cricket.
Gautam Gambhir and Chief Selector didn’t even pick him in the squad for any of the test series. Instead, they handed the test cap to Harshit Rana who has picked 43 wickets in 10 matches at an average of 24. Now don’t get me wrong, these are decent stats but he is very new and Mukesh Kumar at least deserves to be in the squad, but Agarkar and Gambhir don’t feel like it.
The mess doesn’t end here. Gautam Gambhir clearly talks a lot about domestic cricket and how important it is. One would assume he would also give a higher priority to domestic players performing well. No of course not, you’d be dumb to expect that.
Abhimanyu Easwaran scored 1135 runs at an average of 117.5 over the 2022-23 and 2023-24 Ranji Trophy seasons. He was in the squad for the BGT but didn’t make his debut. Instead, Devdutt Padikal who scored 816 runs at an average of 64.9 made his debut. These are Easwaran’s stats from these two seasons only, he has been an absolute giant in domestic cricket. He has scored 7674 runs in 101 matches at an average of 48.87. If there is still something he needs to do to don the whites for India then there is something critically wrong with Indian cricket.
Sinking ship
This conversation and discourse is more so because of Gambhir’s obsession with domestic cricket yet he refuses to select players that have been doing well there. Appointing Gautam Gambhir as India’s head coach across all formats was already a questionable choice but it just seems like with every move he makes he is determined to be more hypocritical and clueless whilst being equally arrogant about it.
India’s red-ball future is in trouble, it is a team in transition but the team management and the board are doing absolutely nothing to make it as smooth as possible. Instead, the ridiculous 10-point guidelines have come out. The good news is that whenever young players have been given opportunities, they have performed. So, it might not be too late to make changes, but the board and the team management seem determined not to. They seem determined to be a regressive cricket board venturing into oppression and ridiculous rules. One thing is for sure this is going to blow up in their faces, it’s a question of when, not if.
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