There was an air of invincibility surrounding the Indian team before the beginning of the first Test of the five-match series against England. The reigning world number one team in the longest format of the game was churning out some phenomenal performances and was making winning a habit. While there is no denying the fact that the batsmen played a key role in it but the people who watched the games will know that the Indian spinners were the biggest architects of those wins. Not only in India, they were giving brilliant performances outside the country too.
The journey started when the Indian team visited Sri Lanka in 2015 under their maverick skipper Virat Kohli. After losing the first Test, the Indian team won the remaining two games to win its first away series since 2011. The spin duo of Ravichandran Ashwin and Amit Mishra played a pivotal role in the historic win. They were the top two highest wicket-takers in the series. Ashwin took 21 wickets while Mishra bagged 15. The brilliant performance continued in the next series too when Kohli’s men decimated South Africa 3-0 at home. Once again Ashwin was the highest wicket-taker of the series with an astonishing 31 wickets in only seven innings and he was ably supported by the comeback man Ravindra Jadeja, who grabbed 23 scalps. Ashwin was the highest wicket-taker on the West Indies tour too with 17 wickets. In the last Test series against New Zealand, the spin duo of Ashwin and Jadeja once again wreaked havoc and took 27 and 14 wickets respectively.
With the Indian spinners in such deadly form, it was widely expected that performing against an English side, that struggled to counter the Bangladeshi spinners, will be a cake-walk for them. Not only that, it was very much expected that the English spinners would find it tough to contain the Indian batsmen let alone troubling them.
However, after the conclusion of the first Test in Rajkot, it is quite safe to say that the match did not go as the script. Not only England outperformed the hosts in most of the departments, the visiting spinners also faired better than their Indian counterparts. The English tweakers took 13 wickets in the drawn match compared to the Indian spinners who could pick only nine.
Indian captain outplayed the fact by saying:“I don’t think so (the visiting spinners had outshone his spinners). They bowled well but it’s not that they outperformed our spinners. It’s not that they took five-fors and totally turned around the game. They should have won the game if they outperformed our spinners.”
Well, the stats do not show much of a difference between the two sides of spinners but a true observer of the game will know that Cook’s spinners did a far better job than the Indian spinners. On a pitch where world number one spinner R Ashwin registered his worst figures on home soil (3-230), Adil Rashid gave the Indian batsmen all sorts of trouble with the turn and bounce and recorded his best bowling figures in Tests (7-178). Moeen Ali and Zafar Ansari were also quite effective and performed really well on a pitch that had little to offer for the spinners.
The result of the match has shown that India’s fortunes in the longest format of the game depend a lot on their spinners and the bowlers will have to buckle up if they want to outshine their English counterparts and want a positive result in the remaining games of the series.