Mumbai: In India’s practice session on match eve, captain Shubman Gill and head coach Gautam Gambhir sat in close proximity at The Oval outfield discussing the eleven men they would pick and trust to level the series. A win would propel the arrival of Gill, the leader, and win Gambhir the critical acclaim for his Test coaching credentials. Any other result and India’s English summer of 2025 would go down as a missed opportunity.
The India captain knew pace ace Jasprit Bumrah had run out of gas for a pitch that would offer the most assistance to pacers in the series. In a departure from previous three Test matches where they loaded the team with three all-rounders — Ravindra Jadeja, Washington Sundar and Nitish Reddy/Shardul Thakur — India went back to picking an extra specialist batter (Karun Nair) over a bowler, like they did in the opening Test at Leeds. Nair was preferred over Thakur’s medium pace. India also shunned the idea of picking swing bowler Arshdeep Singh to make it a four-pronged pace attack like England.
“When you pick a team, you try and pick a balanced side. You don’t say, because three batters got hundreds, let’s pick a batter less,” Sitanshu Kotak, India’s batting coach had explained before the fifth Test. “Another thing is because both our spinners are good batters, we are playing them, three seamers and a pace bowling all-rounder. There too, we feel, our sixth bowler is not getting enough bowling.”
Picking a playing eleven to score a competitive advantage over five days and two innings has always been a complex decision, especially away from home, where hosts almost always dish out surfaces uncomplimentary to the opposition’s strengths. Gill’s wretched luck with the toss — he called the coin wrong for the fifth successive time on Thursday — has made it even tougher.
It’s evident by now that Gill and Gambhir do not like to compromise on batting depth. Which is why, despite hundreds by Washington and Jadeja at No 5 and 6 to pull off a draw at Old Trafford, India refused to take the bait and make the more aggressive call of picking the fourth specialist bowler. Gill will therefore have to employ a lot more spin than England, once his three pacers are done with their opening bursts. But there will again be no sighting of Kuldeep Yadav, who will go back home as the most talked about not-to-be-used spinner in the series.
Given the movement English fast bowlers were able to extract on Day 1 on a pitch with 8 mm grass underneath, India’s bowling tactics will again be tested. With only three pacers — Akash Deep, Prasidh Krishna and Mohammed Siraj into his fifth back-to-back Test — they will have to do the heavy lifting with wicket taking and also bowl longer spells.
But Gill and Gambhir would have factored in all this, along with Rishabh Pant’s absence, to conclude that they needed the services of a capable batter at No 8. Backing up this selection call, India’s seventh wicket partnerships have made crucial plays in the series. In the first innings of the second Test, Washington helped Gill to a brilliant 269 by stitching a 144-run stand. In the third Test at Lord’s, the Washington-Jadeja partnership helped India match England’s first innings 387. In the first innings of the fourth Test, Shardul came in handy as the night watchman and scored useful 48 runs with Washington.
India’s safety first approach has helped the inexperienced visiting team to take the series deep. But here at The Oval, the onus is on them to chase a win. Will they rue the absence of a fourth pacer given the conditions? Have they squandered an opportunity much earlier, to break open matches with a counter punch of a different variety — the left-arm wrist spinner Kuldeep, a rare breed in the modern game? Gill and Gambhir would never know, because they went searching for balance. Never went for the jugular.
