Over-dependence on heroics, failure as collective unit script frequent India collapses

India slipped into yet another embarrassing defeat in Leeds by enduring monumental collapses in both innings which has now become a worrying pattern for the Virat Kohli-led side.

Kohli, to his credit, has not offered any excuse such as the absurd “45 minutes of bad cricket” he had offered after the top-order collapse against New Zealand in the 2019 ODI World Cup and instead has come forward to own up the mistakes of his own and teammates.

At Headingley as well, he conceded that the team did not play good shots and failed to apply themselves in the face of an exceedingly good spell of bowling by James Anderson and Ollie Robinson.

He owned up the failure at the Adelaide oval as well after the historic low of 36 all out against the Australian bowling attack comprising of Mitchell Starc, Patt Cummins and Josh Hazlewood.

One can change the protagonist, villain and plot of their story, but the script has remained the same, at least over the last couple of years. They have been vocal about that those periods of the game don’t define the quality of the side, but they would not be honest to themselves if they don’t find this problem worth addressing.

But, are they even taking cognisance of the frequent batting collapses that have marred them from becoming an impossible side to be defeated?

Let’s see how they responded to the question of batting collapses after the game ends? Kohli had left the squad to come back to India after the capitulation in Adelaide, and the stand-in skipper Ajinkya Rahane said that the team did not discuss the innings of 36 while starting their preparing for the MCG Test, where they bounced back admirably.

On the face of it, the approach of not making a huge issue of a bad phase of play does not appear faulty as too many “conversations” will make players, especially young ones doubt their ability to handle pressure situations while batting.

Kohli too reiterated the same stance after the twin collapses in Leeds and said that India will “analyse” only after the next two Tests on what went wrong in the batting department.

If the problem was actually an “aberration” as Kohli conveniently suggested, not having a conversation over it and trying to find answers to uncomfortable questions would have been reasonable. But, the issue has developed into a crisis of their own making and hence the point of not terming it as it is becoming untenable.

Kohli owned up to failures both in Adelaide and Headingley, but what good is owning up if it does not lead up to a process of crisis management? 

This space is not suggesting that the team is incapable of handling good bowling in a tough phase of play or it is necessarily a technical issue on the part of batsmen. It’s impossible to ascertain that batsmen who otherwise put on a brilliant display of batting in the very next innings or match right after collapses can fail to arrest a collapse due to technical deficiency.

But, why they have suffered so many batting collapses in the recent past?

The answer to this question lies in the scoreboard of matches they have played in this period. They seem to have relied heavily on pieces of individual brilliance to get over tough batting conditions instead of putting on a collective batting effort to get through to a big score.

Let’s see the games after the collapse in Adelaide and understand the fragility of the batting group and more often than not have been bailed out by one or two batsmen out of seven in the side.

At the MCG, after a decent partnership between Cheteshwar Pujara and Shubman Gill, India had slipped to 175/5 although a major chunk of those runs was made by the skipper Rahane who went on to score a magnificent ton and also stitched a 121-run partnership with Ravindra Jadeja to bail them out of trouble. 

Australia batted horribly in the game in the face of hostile and accurate Indian bowling but if it had not been for the partnership between Jadeja and Rahane, India would not have taken the lead and the hosts would have come hard at them with a target of more than 200 runs to defend in the final innings. In the first innings of the MCG Test, more than 50 per cent of the runs were scored by two batsmen while the rest nine batsmen added 157. If Gill’s 45 will be taken away, the rest eight of them could manage only 112 runs with no other batsmen crossing the 30-run mark.

In the next Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground, there were valuable contributions from the top order but none of them could make it big on a flat surface to make Australian bowlers toil hard. Not one batsman scored more than 50 runs and India paid for it by conceding a big lead of 94 runs. It took herculean efforts from Ashwin and Vihari to secure a draw on the final day of the game.

In the series decider at the Gabba, which turned out to be a generational win for India, the game was folding completely as per the same script. They were down and out in a position to once again concede a big lead before the brilliance of Shardul Thakur and Washington Sundar rescued them with outrageous stroke playing. They were up for the fight in the second round and won the game after a remarkable innings from Rishabh Pant on the final day.

The lessons from the tour of Australia would have been that there are chinks in their armour in terms of batting and the Test series against England at home should have been the perfect place to launch the remedial process. However, they slipped into another collapse against the innocuous off-spin of Dominic Bess in the first innings of the first Test and in-form Joe Root made them pay.

In that home series against England as well, after the collapses in Chennai, it was the partnership between Rohit Sharma and Rahane that rescued them after Moeen Ali had threatened to bring another collapse. The pitches in the last two Tests was shoot out between bowlers and England were too poor to compete with them while it required Pant and Washington’s batting once again that bailed them out of trouble.

There have been patterns of the team not being able to produce a collective brilliance where all batsmen produce some sort of scores and take the team towards a score of respectability. The team has produced many heroes in the recent past but the fact that they needed heroics to win games and that it did not come in the form of what should have been a normal affair for top sides as they boast of being is telling a lot of story of their fragility.

The story has not been changed on this tour as well. First, they collapsed against New Zealand to hand them over the World Test Championship, while the brilliance of KL Rahul and Rohit saved the day in Nottingham and the first innings of the Lord’s Test. 

When chips were down in the second innings the pair of Pujara and Rahane put on an attritional partnership before another heroic partnership lower down the order between Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammed Shami took them in front of the game. If they would be clinical with the bat overall as a team, they won’t have to rely on one individual to do the heavy lifting.

Over-reliance on openers had to go awry at some point in time considering England are blessed with the riches of James Anderson and the consistency of Ollie Robinson, who will not have too many off days in their home conditions, and it did happen on the first day of the Leeds Test. 

Hoping on individual brilliance can not be a strategy and most certainly India would not be too happy at those methods of a win as well. But, as the failings have become too frequent, there are questions marks over the team management’s inability to find a solution to it.

If India have to come back from the drubbings in Leeds, Virat Kohli and Ravi Shastri must fix responsibility in the dressing room albeit by not “demoralising” them. The batting group should seek some inspiration from their bowling attack which is not built around the brilliance of individual players instead all of them present formidable challenges to the opposition by bowling well as a collective unit.