India are a quality Test side at home. The South Africans are fine travellers who take local conditions in their stride. They are also the indisputably best Test team in the world at the moment. India has a captain who is the country’s finest Test batsman currently while the Proteas are led by one of the prolific run scorers in modern cricket, Hashim Amla. A good series is certainly in the offing.
It should not matter too much if Team India lose the battle against the visitors provided they have not fixed the pitches by calling for paddy fields to fox the opposition, as we did the Australians in 2013 and came away with the false notion that we are still one of the world’s best Test teams. Two years after a designer Chepauk struck terror offering turn from outside the line of the stumps but playing true wicket-to-wicket, the Test rankings tell the real story.
This Team India are a work in progress in all formats. While the Test sheen was lost some time ago, its limited-overs capabilities have been tested of late as two consecutive series have been lost after the World Cup — to Bangladesh and South Africa — both in conditions said to favour India’s big hitters and big turners of the ball. The Test win in Sri Lanka against the odds was the performance that rated this year.
There is no reason to believe the young Test captain will have to contend with old prejudices like his ODI counterpart MS Dhoni who made a hash of the ODI batting order thanks to his blinkered view of Ajinkya Rahane. Kohli should know who his best batsmen are and where to employ them in the batting order and back them until they start delivering consistently. He should consider himself fortunate that he has more than five options plus the ‘keeper for the six batting slots.
It must be assumed Kohli will stick to his guns over picking five bowlers, which means one or two specialist batsmen have to be left out. That should hardly matter in home Tests in which Ravichandran Ashwin can be the handy all-rounder who can contribute meaningfully with the bat and Amit Mishra is no mean performer with the willow either, at least in these more batsmen-friendly conditions. Jadeja’s Ranji form suggests he will be the third spinner. Two new ball bowlers will make up the attack.
The composition of the batting line-up and the batting order of the three specialists behind the openers Shikhar Dhawan and Murali Vijay will be fraught with interest. Will India continue to back Pujara who opened the innings and won the decisive Test and series in Colombo Leaving him out would be a cruel blow. A Test match winning performance is something that stands out while we tend to quickly forget even great individual performances in ODIs. As a specialist batsman with Test match skills, Pujara is virtually in a club of one member these days.
Assuming Kohli would stay at two drop, the other specialist at five would have to be Ajinkya Rahane, India’s most improved batsman in the last couple of years. This might mean leaving out Rohit Sharma who along with Kohli and Rahane makes the top three performing batsmen in the country across formats. To leave out one batsman is never a huge dilemma as greater players have been forced to miss out. But Team India would probably be leaving out two of three in Pujara, Rahul and Rohit.
That is a tough call indeed. But Kohli would have to pursue his five-bowler principle if India is to prosper in Test cricket and move beyond their current ranking of five. If you want to beat the world’s best Test side you would need bowling firepower first.
