The road to redemption for Kohli’s troops

When India arrived on English shores, many thought they would give England a run for their money. However, they contrived to pull off the most abject of displays to fall 2-0 behind in the series. India made a good fist of things at Edgbaston, owing to the brilliance of their captain. Unfortunately, Kohli couldn’t get among the runs at Lords and India managed a grand total of 237 runs across their two essays. The evidence suggests that when Kohli has a bad game, India doesn’t perform well. The troubling question now: Has India become a victim of Kohli’s brilliance?

India have come a long way from how they played cricket in the 90s, where everyone expected Sachin to score all the runs. Starting with Ganguly’s reign at the helm, India started to become more of a collective unit and the results are for everyone to see.

Since Kohli has taken over, he has made the jump to the next level and is the undisputed best batsman on the planet. Though it is not a crime to rely on his runs, the meek surrenders when he fails to score, surely is.

Over the last two away tours to South Africa and England, India has crossed 250 twice in ten innings. The two occasions being the 1st innings at Centurion and the 1st innings at Edgbaston. The common thread: a huge hundred by Kohli.On all other occasions, the vaunted Indian batting has been found wanting. While the problem isn’t as severe in white-ball cricket, in tests, it has the potential to undo all of Kohli’s good work.

The problems for India start right at the top with none of the openers scoring consistently enough. Vijay has been on a wretched run of form, with his only notable score coming against Afghanistan on a featherbed at the Chinnaswamy. Pujara has been poor away from home and has had his defence breached more often than he would like. The lesser said about Dhawan, the better.

Vijay gets castled by Anderson

The only in-form player they seemed to possess was KL Rahul. However, he was a victim of the constant chopping and changing of the Indian side and now finds himself completely out of sorts.

Moving to the middle order, Rahane seems like a batsman who is past his expiry date. Though he starts off nicely, he invariably makes a silly error to lose his wicket. When playing abroad, such mistakes have devastating consequences.

Coming to the lower order, they do not seem to know who their best No.6 and No.7 are. Though they have been able to replace Dhoni-the keeper, the same can’t be said about Dhoni-the batsman. Saha, Parthiv and Karthik have been tried but none has been able to assert themselves and give India that cushion of runs lower down the order.

The signs of Pandya maturing as a batsman are encouraging. At a time when everyone around him fell like a pack of cards, he held fort before eventually running out of partners. Investing in his batting might not be too bad an option.

Pandya has grown as a Test batsman on this tour

The fact that Ashwin top-scored in both innings at the Mecca of Cricket speaks volumes of the issues plaguing India.

As echoed by Mr. Sunil Gavaskar, not everyone boasts of the same batting prowess as Virat. The batsmen need to work out what works best for them rather than just trying to become a Kohli clone. After Kohli’s success, nearly everyone bar Ashwin started standing outside the crease to play the Kohli way. Sadly, they were as bad, if not worse, than what they were at Edgbaston.

The most hurting aspect, however, has to be the lack of ‘heart’ shown by the other batsmen. At a time when our bowling is taking 20 wickets consistently, the batsmen are making sure we don’t surge ahead in tests.

Though I am not a huge fan of chopping and changing, the consistently mediocre performances of the top and middle order leave no choice. Rather than rotating within the same bunch of batsmen, it is time to expand horizons and blood new talent.

The likes of Prithvi Shaw, Mayank Agarwal, Rishabh Pant and Hanuma Vihari have been scoring truckloads of runs. It is essential that we give these boys the platform to express themselves when they are in red-hot form, rather than making them rot on the fringes. The time has come to bring in people who have something to prove to the whole world.

Mayank is an exciting option that should be explored

If India continue to pick reputation over form, they would travel the dreaded path of being a one-man team. Though Kohli is the best, he surely can’t rescue them all the time.

Like Robert Frost, the Indian team has two options in front of it. It can either create its own destiny by making the bold move or travel on the conventional path and risk slipping into oblivion.