8 greatest Indian Test captains of all time

#5 Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi

MAK Pataudi led India to their first ever away series victory in Tests – against NZ

All of the aforementioned captains led sides who knew how to win Test matches. From Gavaskar to Azharuddin, each captain led a side that had players with sufficient Test experience and who knew what it took to win Test matches. These captains had gifted sides; Gavaskar had the spin quartet, Azhar had Sachin, Sourav and Dravid, Kapil had Gavaskar, Vengsarkar, Srikanth et al, but there was one man in India’s history who had to build everything from scratch.

Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi, or the Nawab of Pataudi, as he was known as back then, was the captain who inculcated the winning habit into the Indian cricket team in Tests for the first time. Only 3 out of the 13 captains who had preceded MAK Pataudi managed to win Test matches during their tenures.

Pataudi’s stats of 9 wins and 19 losses from 40 Test matches might seem ordinary at the outset, but behind these numbers lies the tale of lifting a side that didn’t know how to feature in international cricket and leaving it at a position from where it could challenge the best in the arena.

It didn’t begin all too well for him, though, as in his first assignment as India’s captain his team was whitewashed 5-0 by the West Indies in their own backyard in 1962. India managed to draw the next two series that they played – at home – against Australia and England, with MAK scoring 308 runs and 270 runs against them respectively.

A 1-0 victory came thereafter against New Zealand at home, but it was soon followed by series defeats, once against the West Indies, this time at home, and then in England and Australia – both of them being clean sweeps. Pataudi scored a brilliant 148 at Leeds, albeit in a losing cause in 1967, and also scored 3 fifties in Australia in the Aussie summer of 1967-68.

BS Bedi, S Venkatraghavan, and BS Chandrasekar had already made their debuts under Pataudi and has started creating ripples all around the world. The toil and the struggle finally bore results when India won their first ever away Tests series, defeating New Zealand 3-1 in a 4-Test series in 1968.

E Prasanna took three 5-wicket hauls in that series, Bapu Nadkarni took 2 five-fors, while Bedi took one five-wicket haul. This was the beginning of the domination of Indian spinners at the international level, something that has continued till date. The aforementioned gentlemen combined to blow away England in January-February 1973 defeating them 2-1 in a 5-match series.

India now knew how to win Test matches and the captains who followed MAK were rendered a lot luckier.