The crown sits well on the young captain’s head. His succession had come at a time of crisis with the indefatigable Dhoni suddenly deciding that his Test time was up. He was the last of the set of fabulous five to six players who were part of the Indian team which had first been ranked the best in Tests back in the 2009 season and who had all hung up their boots, including Sachin Tendulkar after his breathtaking record of 200 Test match appearances.
Virat Kohli took over a team bereft of stars in Australia two years ago, in which time he has managed to mould it well enough for this to be the second occasion on which the team are no. 1 on the computerised rankings.
Looking back, the first Team India to attain the honour was filled with champion batsmen who were still around the peak of their careers — Sehwag, Gambhir, Dravid, Tendulkar, Laxman, Ganguly and Dhoni — besides two match winning bowlers in Zaheer Khan and Harbhajan Singh. Filled as it is with a relatively inexperienced middle order, the current batting line-up seems much the lesser. But, it has already fetched India two series wins abroad, including in Sri Lanka where India have traditionally struggled to win. The West Indians are, of course, the whipping boys of the world game now and yet they had to be beaten on their home soil for India to get back to the top of the totem.
The two away wins plus some doughty performances in Australia where Kohli’s men were beaten but not humbled is suggestive of a team that travel well and are prepared to scrap for much of the time. The point can be made that India have not won Test series in Australia and South Africa, but then that has been true since 1947 and 1991 respectively. Testing Team India against the ultimate litmus trial of series wins in Australia and South Africa will be Kohli’s challenge in the future. The only promising sign that his team won’t be a pushover lies in the quality of the two fast bowlers Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Md. Shami.
You would pick Kumar for any conditions except maybe in Australia where the ball does not swing. He has already been the architect of two recent Test wins, the first in the Caribbean and now in Kolkata where he used traditional conditions favourable for swing at the Eden Gardens. Old timers would swear that it was the tide change in the Hooghly and the consequent change in the wind pattern that allows substantial movement in certain parts of the day at Eden. ‘Bhuvi’ may have used it to great effect in the Kiwis’ first innings when he demolished them with quality swing bowling, helped certainly by a pitch of variable bounce.
Shami was effective in the second innings with his reverse swing, some of it quite prodigious even in a Test in which the ball moved around a lot. Between them, they took a dozen wickets making this more of a fast bowler’s Test than one routinely dominated by the Indian spin twins, Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja. This was one Test in which the combination of four bowlers worked well with the spinners invariably extracting the breakthrough in times of resistance and there were a few from the Kiwi top order at least in the second essay even if they were chasing an impossible target close enough to 400 while the best anyone has achieved batting last is to make 120/2 in a winning cause at Eden.
The batsmen lent their shoulders to the wheel too. Wriddhiman Saha’s brave show in both innings in which he demonstrated he could take a bit of physical punishment from the Kiwi quicks on a pitch of such a nature fetched him the match award. Rohit Sharma repaid the faith reposed in him by those who know he can be very useful in the long format as well. That left only Shikhar Dhawan as a bit of a failure. The opener just could not leave a recent run of very poor form behind and it’s quite likely we won’t see him often around the Test arena in the future.
Team India are in a happy place at the moment. The real test will come only when having to set out to play beyond Asia, but that won’t be for a while. The long home season will give plenty of opportunities for them to further their ranking points and aim for the Test mace, which is currently with Pakistan who were no. 1 at the cut-off date this season. The return of the mace will be a satisfying moment. The challenge in trying to win Test series in Australia and South Africa is some time away. As Kohli is wont to say, we will cross the bridge when we come to it.
