Virat Kohli & Co have a great chance to buck the trend of India losing Test series in England; the last win in 2007 seems so far away
Skipper Virat Kohli (left), deputy Ajinkya Rahane and pace ace Jasprit Bumrah can do wonders this summer in England. Pic/Getty Images
MIND THE GAP. It’s something you hear with compelling regularity at tube stations in London. The caution cry stays with you even when you leave the capital city for other destinations in the United Kingdom.
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The mention of the gap also reminds one of the time that has lapsed between India’s last Test series win in England and the Pataudi Trophy that began in Nottingham yesterday: Fourteen years.
The English summer of 2007 was the last time an Indian team tasted Test series-winning bubbly there.
Although the best of sports psychologists believe there is no gain in looking back while approaching a challenge, 14 years is a long time; near incomprehensible too. For, quite a few times in those years, India have been high on the rankings charts. They certainly were the world’s best team before England, under Andrew Strauss, whitewashed Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s team 4-0 in 2011.
India have since improved with the red ball on the English greens and their wins at Lord’s in 2014 and Trent Bridge in 2018 prove that. But those two series ended England’s way nevertheless.
This won’t ease the blow but here’s how far behind 2007 is: The Indian Premier League (IPL) was still one year away from its 2008 birth; Rohit Sharma, the premier one-day batsman in world cricket today, had played only a couple of games; Sachin Tendulkar was still six years away from his 2013 Test retirement; Dhoni, who quit Test cricket in 2014-15, was only in his second year in the traditional form of the game and current coach Ravi Shastri was back to full commentary duty after doing a one-off stint as cricket manager in Bangladesh in 2007. And 14 years is how long it takes the average student to go from junior KG to senior college.
Why has England dominated India on home turf for so long? There is no single reason, but in the main, they have got better in all formats. Look how they picked themselves up from a torrid 2015 World Cup to champions in 2019. Some of their pace bowling stocks have turned blue chip and importantly, which is often forgotten in talk of needing 20 wickets to win a Test, their batsmen have put up big runs on the board.
The focus is now on Trent Bridge. I covered the 2007 and 2011 Tests there. The former ended in a memorable win for India and the latter, a depressing defeat.
In 2007, Zaheer Khan, probably incensed by the fact that someone from the England team threw jellybeans on the turf when he walked in to bat on the third evening, added a fifer to his four-wicket effort in the first innings and bowled India to victory. The Test victory tasted extra sweet because this was the first triumph outside Asia after the World Cup flop show. It was also a Test which led to a series triumph.
India had no business to escape defeat in the opening Test at Lord’s. To bowl out a charged up opposition for 198 at Nottingham took some doing. Then came the first innings total of 481 which didn’t include a single century (Sachin Tendulkar top-scored with 91).
Like in 2007, the second Test of the Pataudi Trophy was held in Nottingham, where India lost by 319 runs despite bowling the hosts out for 221 on Day One. Stuart Broad bagged a hat-trick and England were never in serious trouble after that. The win for the home side moved all-rounder-turned-journalist Derek Pringle to write in the Daily Telegraph from Nottingham: “It was a pounding, delivered with the swaggering élan of the two finest sides of the past 30 years: the West Indies under Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards; and Australia under Mark Taylor and Steve Waugh.”
It’s not easy to win a session leave alone a Test in England with the weather changing from cloudy to sunny and vice-versa. This is more than just confronting to overseas teams.
But when the sun shines, batting looks so easy and there is applause from an appreciative audience for the ball passing the boundary ropes and the skill involved in getting it to reach there.
Runs matter. When England beat India 4-0 in 2011, three of their batsmen got double centuries—Kevin Pietersen (202 at Lord’s), Alastair Cook (294 at Edgbaston) and Ian Bell (235 at The Oval)—while all three Indian centuries came off the blade of Rahul Dravid (146 not out at The Oval being his highest for the series). It must be said though that India were without their pace spearhead Zaheer Khan, who suffered a hamstring injury on the first day of the Test series at Lord’s. Indeed, it left India rudderless. The pace trio of James Anderson, Broad and Tim Bresnan, who operated together in three of the four Tests, along with the off-spin heroics of Graeme Swann, contributed to a destructive force which led to some pundits calling it the best-ever English attack.
The current Indian team are in prime position to reverse the trend in their Test battles on English soil. There seems to be a ring of vulnerability around Joe Root’s team who are coping with injury-induced absentees and the aftershocks of a Test series loss to New Zealand and of course a walloping in India a few months ago.
Come to think of it, it is they who should MIND THE GAP.
mid-day’s group sports editor Clayton Murzello is a purist with an open stance. He tweets @ClaytonMurzello
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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