Make Indian Test Cricket Great (Again?)

‌Nostalgia is derived from two Greek words ‘nostos’ and ‘algos’, meaning the returning pain. It was coined after soldiers came back from war acutely homesick, which often culminated in severe bouts of depression. In the centuries since, research has shown nostalgia to have a largely positive connotation, attached with ideas of self-preservation and esteem, to aid clarity in vision by drawing from the past. However, nostalgia remains the most unreliable of human emotions, prone to incredulous manipulation and fragilities of memory. It has thus become the trademark tool of new age populist leaders, given it blurs the line with delusion and affords ideas of grandeur in a realm beyond reality. You may have caught yourself reminiscing about certain incidents you were not even present for, simply because various retellings have made it seep deep into the subconscious. Much like Indian cricket fans harking back to when they were the best Test team in the world, which was never.

India in the 2010s put together one of the grandest home streaks Test cricket has seen, winning 18 series on the trot. In the same timeframe, they also won twice Down Under and made two World Test Championship finals. On the other end of the aisle, a record-breaking broadcast deal took the Indian Premier League at par with legacy American franchise leagues, stamping India’s position as the sports’ overlords. The same population that fuelled the IPL economy also captured the other domain where eyeballs matter the most – social media. It took little time for inflated perceptions of the new overlords of cricket to become rife, and comparisons to the Hall of Fame Australian teams became ubiquitous.

However, a millennium of invasions, incursions, and subjugations has left the Indian mind not conditioned to have such monopoly on power. It is no coincidence Mahatma Gandhi is the most famous Indian of modern times, and he is the face of anti-overlords. So the Indian rise was portrayed to be Titanic, and it fulfilled its fate; the ensuing meltdown felt like an Avatar of Shiva the Destroyer himself, ready to tear everything apart in the Indian ecosystem.   

“Make Indian Cricket Great Again,” goes the chant around the fraternity now. Like the days of 18-0. Fast bowler beatdowns. Opposition suicide missions. Bring back winning. Nine years ago, Donald Trump set out with a similar agenda on faraway shores. Make America Great Again. Economic boom. No immigrants in the land of immigrants. More crack than books. Oh, the good old days! Except for civil rights, of course. And women rights. The AIDS epidemic, and all that. Do you see where I am going with this?

India being infallible at home was merely an exaggerated projection of two unprecedented careers, and a revolution that went too far because of them. While Virat Kohli and Ravichandran Ashwin blinded the world with their magnanimous talent, cracks still simmered beneath but the blaze of glory was enough to seal them over for the time. To understand how pivotal their playing performances were to Indian home dominance, let’s delve into some numbers.

In contemporary times, no batter has dominated at home relative to peers and conditions like Kohli did during India’s invincible era. He had a true average of 54 with the bat, the only batter to average over 50 in the said timeframe between 2013 and 2024, with 12 tons to show for it. The rest of the Indian top seven in the games he played averaged 14 runs less altogether at 40, while the opposition top seven in those games averaged a combined 25. To put that into context, Steve Smith at home averages just 10 runs more than his compatriots through his career, while Joe Root averages 16 more despite being part of one of England’s weakest batting generations. Similarly, Ashwin’s ridiculous average of 20.04 in the period is unmatched for any bowler with over 50 wickets. While his spin twin Ravindra Jadeja comes close with 20.39, he has 101 wickets less in just eight less matches, and will be the first to credit a large portion of those scalps to Ashwin’s wizadry at the other end. Such was the duo’s reign that Axar Patel is the third highest wicket-taker with 47 scalps, galaxies away from Jadeja’s 219 and Ashwin’s 320.

Kohli and Ashwin’s brilliance harmonized elegantly for India to put matches to bed by the halfway stage more often than not, on typical flat Indian decks. India thus averaged 411 in the 12-year period in their first batting innings, as compared to 261 for the opposition. This meant they were set to chase over 200 only thrice in the 14 Tests they had to chase (India lost all three), and were bowled out just eight times in the the third innings compared to 10 declarations. Their opposition on the other hand managed to survive or declare on only seven out of the 52 occasions they batted in the third or fourth inning, including just 15 200-plus totals.

Kohli had a true average of 63.43 in the first innings, with only Murali Vijay marginally better albeit having played half as many matches as Kohli. Pujara was the only other batter to aggregate (exactly) 2,000 runs, 791 less than Kohli with five less centuries despite playing just four fewer games. Ashwin, meanwhile, averaged 22.35 with the ball in the first bowling innings, four less than all other Indian spinners combined while the opposition spinners averaged 35-plus. Even the gulf to Jadeja was greater, his average 23.54. However, in the brief while Ashwin has been gone, Jadeja’s nous on roads has already come under some questions, evidenced in how he took ages to go around the wicket in Manchester despite the rough screaming out for it, and again looked out of ideas when the West Indies put up 400-plus in Delhi.

This allowed Kohli to push India to make more seam-friendly home decks with an eye on success abroad, confident that as long as Ashwin is bowling on an Indian deck the results will come his way. The averages against pace bowling in the Ranji Trophy drastically fell from over 32 in 2017 to less than 25 in 2020. The move worked, as India stayed invincible at home and won increasingly on foreign soil but the hosts failed to recognize the long-term consequences. Indian batters began to feel increasingly at sea against spin, and in the 2024 Ranji Trophy the batting average against pace bowling exceeded that of spin for the first time this century. India then exacerbated matters by producing horrid pitches in the early 2020s, perhaps as another throwback to the uncovered dung strips of yore, or perhaps with hopes of extracting the last bits of potential from Ashwin who was entering his twilight years

In the meantime, Kohli kept trying to keep Babel intact. The then-skipper proposed having fixed Test centres time and again to drill down home advantage, as he did backing talent and grooming role-players even when it was easy to look the other way. The fans responded by garlanding him as the saviour of Test cricket, and the BCCI used it as distraction to debut 10 new venues between 2016 and 2024, allow franchises to let foreign players train in their academies ahead of a series in India, and increasingly looking to the IPL for red-ball talent.

The farther India moved from traditions and gave a cold shoulder to the principles that had brought them to the crowning moment, the more susceptible they became to what has culminated in the present day. The Kohli captaincy era was simply the result of decades of grind, where all ingredients came together at the perfect time. Even then, they needed a top-five spinner of all-time and a batter with arguably the greatest peak since Don Bradman to produce a win rate upwards of 75% at home. But Indian pitches were never meant for a draw only every six Tests, as was the case under Kohli – Dhoni’s era saw a draw every five Tests, while Anil Kumble’s captaincy saw five draws in the seven times he led. 

The American golden era sowed the seeds of and was soon followed by the biggest financial collapse in modern history. The West Indies lost just one home series in a 25-year period to close out the previous millennia, but have lost 20 in the 25 years since. Australia went 28 consecutive home series unbeaten between 1993 and 2009, only to lose twice each to South Africa and India since as well as give up the Ashes urn on home soil after a 25-year gap in 2010/11. Indian fans need to embrace that. Eras end, often catastrophical, but delusions of grandeur only grow. Rome was not built in a day but it burnt down in one. Indian cricket took decades of toil to put together a historic streak, but perhaps the fans should stop expecting it to become great again like a spring held down by a Gautam Gambhir-shaped boot. Instead, they should be grateful for the era gone by, and ask how they can gradually begin to build another era fertile enough for a prolific harvest if they get lucky enough to once again be blessed with two generational freaks at the correct time. Come on guys, we are better than Trump and America, right?