Wake-up call for BCCI

The abject capitulation of the Indian cricket team in the second Test match against South Africa in Guwahati on Wednesday, Nov. 26, should trigger alarm bells in the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI).

The defeat, by 408 runs, was India's heaviest in Test cricket, and the first in a home series against South Africa in 25 years. On a pitch supposedly tailor-made to its strengths, the team crumbled twice, losing the series 2-0 to an opponent who coped vastly better.

The fact that this was the second whitewash suffered by India at home, following the 3-0 series loss to New Zealand last year, should make the Indian cricket establishment sit up and review its preference for lucrative festival matches like the Indian Premier League (IPL) at the expense of time-tested domestic tournaments.

The first response of analysts to the Guwahati debacle has been to blame the coach, Gautam Gambhir. Arguably, as a decision-maker on team selection and match tactics, he has his share of responsibility. He is a combative personality who has the same traits that are the hallmark of Indian cricket today, the tendency to mistake abrasiveness for aggression, which expresses itself as quarrelsome behaviour on and off the pitch and must predispose the team to making petulant decisions. The coach’s personality is not a good fit with a team that is very inexperienced and therefore needs mentoring rather than hectoring. Conventionally, Indian Test match squads have achieved better results under calmer coaches like John Wright, Gary Kirsten and Rahul Dravid.

However, Gambhir is not entirely to blame if the batting lineup he has been given is short on some of the attributes necessary in Test match cricket, such as good defence on a crumbling track, mature shot selection and the patience to bide one’s time. The departure of proven long-format campaigners like Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma and Cheteshwar Pujara has left the team shorn of both technical mastery and resilient temperament, leaving KL Rahul and Shubhman Gill as the only batsmen with a capacity for endurance.

The BCCI’s poor transition planning has left the team rudderless, forcing Gambhir to rely on bits-and-pieces cricketers in the middle order.

Multi-format players like Kohli and Sharma come by once in a decade. They are nurtured in the unglamorous domestic championships, not carnival tournaments. Unfortunately, since 2008, the board’s focus has overwhelmingly shifted towards lucrative but ephemeral ventures such as the IPL.

This has led to the whole supply chain of academies, coaches, talent spotters and state associations reorienting itself to slam-bang cricket, eschewing technique and temperament. Promising youngsters in the longer format are often overlooked in favour of marketable IPL types, with a preference for players who can bat a bit and bowl a bit. The current batting lineup clearly reflects this skew: Most of them bat like they have a flight to catch, revelling in audacious strokeplay that excites the crowd rather than judicious play that wins the match.

It is no one’s recommendation that cricket be played only in the puritan way. Test match cricket is engrossing, and sometimes enthralling, because it is a fine balance of many skills, including stylish strokeplay, stodgy defence, smart catching and probing bowling, on all of which counts Gautam Gambhir’s team was found wanting. The BCCI needs to reexamine its entire value chain if this is not to become a permanent failing.