Can Test Cricket be saved in India?

Chris Woakes dismisses Mahendra Singh Dhoni for a duck during the final testIndia had just lost the Test series to England, and as he walked into the press conference hall at the Oval, it was inevitable that Mahendra Singh Dhoni would face the question, "Will you resign?" Dhoni looked the curious reporter in the eye and said, "You will have to wait and watch if I am strong enough or not strong enough." Then he added cryptically: "Don't blame the IPL."To put it in perspective, the Oval was India's third-biggest Test defeat ever. India's batting counted for just 90.3 overs in the Test, marginally bet-ter than the 89.4 overs seen out in the preceding match at Old Trafford. After the victory at Lord's, India reg-istered their worst run of consecutive innings totals in decades. So it is tempting to guess at the question hanging in the air that Dhoni chose to address: are India now officially an ODI and Twenty20 team? Put another way: can Test cricket survive in India? Kapil Dev spells it out: "If the BCCI doesn't take it seriously enough, Test cricket will be gone for us."The 3-1 series defeat highlights the arc of Dhoni's captaincy going back to India's previous tour of England, in 2011, when they capitu-lated 4-0. To make it worse, in the 16 overseas Tests under Dhoni during this period, India have won just that solitary Test, at Lord's in this series. They lost 12 of these Tests.A defeat as comprehensive as this one begs two related questions. Was the captain as good or as wanting as his team? Or, was the team as good or as wanting as the captain? Virat Kohli and Cheteshwar Pujara, heirs to the legacy of Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid, got exposed cruelly. Virat av-eraged 13.40 and Pujara 22.20. In the five Tests, India saw a collapse almost every innings-they lost 22 wickets for 98 runs in the first innings col-lapses and 27 wickets for 172 in the second innings overall in the England series. And India's match-winner at Lord's, Ishant Sharma, bowled 16 no balls in the three Tests he played.Wasim Akram singles out the lead-ership for the mess: "They knew what to expect in England. Yet they thought things would just fall into place." There was a touch of defiance to Dhoni's approach, a refusal to assess the conditions and course-correct when things started going wrong. England scored almost 20 per cent of their runs behind square on the off side, yet India did not bring a third man. His obsession in placing a leg slip yielded not even a single wicket, but the fielder wasn't asked to move..preferred-source-banner{ margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom:10px;}His insistence on first playing Ravin-dra Jadeja at the expense of Ravichandran Ashwin and then ask-ing him to bowl to a negative leg-side line neither fetched wickets nor stopped the flow of runs. He was brave with the bat amid the collapse but his wicket-keeping was painful to watch. He failed to go for half-chances, and rarely ran up to the stumps to collect throws."You can fail with the bat or the ball but I was shocked when India did not even try changing things in the en-tire series," says Sourav Ganguly. "They could have changed the batting order, for example. If Virat was strug-gling at four or Pujara at three, why not swap places and get the in-form Ajinkya Rahane at three, Pujara four and Virat five? I wonder what they discussed in team meetings. They were an embarrassment."Mohammad Azharuddin suggests radical action: "You need to change the Test captain." Kapil would have Dhoni change his style. "I have always said we don't need Captain Cool," he says. "We need Captain Hot and Aggressive." One of the big unknowns about Dhoni is whether he prioritises Test cricket. Word from the dressing room is that he gets bored with five contin-uous days of Test cricket. When he needed to rest his back and fingers in the summer of 2008, he decided to skip the Test leg on India's tour of Sri Lanka, playing instead in the one-day matches. On the tour of New Zealand in 2009, India won the Hamilton Test in four days and rather than travelling to Napier, the sleepy, nondescript venue for next Test, Dhoni's team took a detour and spent a couple of days in bustling Auckland.Test cricketers also rebuild or set-tle into durable strategy, as the case may be, as a coherent unit. After the retirement of key members of the team that came to be called New India-Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly, Laxman, Anil Kumble-their succes-sors are flaking out at a much younger age. Virender Sehwag, Harbhajan Singh, Yuvraj Singh and Gambhir have run out of steam in their early 30s, while New India continued into their mid-late 30s. "It can happen with one player, or two, but with four?" says a former selector. "It was almost if the dressing room wanted them to fail so they could be dropped."After the Test drubbing, the BCCI has appointed Ravi Shastri as team di-rector for the one-day series. Coach Duncan Fletcher stays on, but his exact role is not clear. It's as if India want to hurtle forward into the rest of the tour without being detained by a con-structive analysis of their preparedness for Test cricket.Follow the writer on Twitter @vikrantgupta73Published By: AtMigration Published On: Aug 21, 2014--- ENDS ---

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Can Test Cricket be saved in India?

The England series raises questions about Mahendra Singh Dhoni's ability to get his game together and lead his team.

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