WTC Final: India's aging Test squad needs a few new faces

It is telling that opening batter Shubman Gill is the only player below 29 in a squad with an average age of 31.9.

When India begin preparations the World Test Championship final against Australia at The Oval in London next month, eight of the 15-member squad will be able to draw from their experience of playing in the final of the inaugural edition two years ago. Will this past involvement serve as an advantage? Or will the baggage of defeat to New Zealand in 2021 clutter their minds against the Aussies?

India's Rohit Sharma and Shubman Gill in action (REUTERS)

We will have the answer only at the conclusion of the final. Whatever the outcome, what there shouldn’t be doubt about is the need for India to strike a greater balance between experience and exuberance in the near future. Otherwise, it will ultimately lead to a less-than-ideal situation where the decision-makers are compelled to usher in a bunch of youngsters all at once. While the injuries to Rishabh Pant and Shreyas Iyer have contributed to the current circumstances, it is still telling that opening batter Shubman Gill is the only player below 29 in a squad with an average age of 31.9.

Even accounting for Pant, 25, and Iyer, 28, soon returning to the fold, a number of key positions in the current team are occupied by players in their mid-30s. In the batting department, skipper Rohit Sharma is 36 and Cheteshwar Pujara 35 while Virat Kohli and Ajinkya Rahane will turn 35 later this year. India’s two premier spinners, R Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja, will be 37 and 35 respectively by the end of this year. Among the pacers, Mohammed Shami, Umesh Yadav, Shardul Thakur and Jaydev Unadkat are all in their 30s while Mohammed Siraj will turn 30 next year. Jasprit Bumrah, who is currently injured, will also turn 30 in December.

Though most of these players are supremely fit and athletic, the lack of younger alternatives particularly among the batters and spinners merits close attention. The recall of Rahane is a case in point. On March 25, a month before the squad for the WTC final was announced, he was conspicuously absent in the list of BCCI’s centrally contracted players for the 2022-23 season. It seemed to signal the end of the road for him, but the news of Iyer’s unavailability due to back surgery, which emerged in the first week of April, compelled the selectors to go back to Rahane eventually.

Never mind that his tally of 634 runs in the 2022/23 Ranji Trophy season placed him at only 14th in the list of highest run-getters. Instead, his experience of 82 Tests and the optics of being the man in form, courtesy his IPL exploits, were enough for the selectors to be convinced about the merits of his inclusion.

“Rahane was well ahead of other contenders in the selection race for the WTC final. He has played more than 80 Tests and has the quality that frankly the batters in domestic cricket don’t quite have,” a BCCI official said of Rahane’s inclusion.

Like Rahane, Pujara too was dropped from the team for two Tests against Sri Lanka in March 2022. At the time, it appeared that the seeds were being sown for a gradual transition in the batting ranks. But Pujara’s heavy volume of runs in the second division of the 2022 County Championship in England — 1094 in eight games including five centuries — meant that his time away from the Test team lasted merely for the Sri Lanka series.

“I totally agree that not too many are making a case in the five-day format. Right now, there is a dearth of (good) performances in the middle-order in domestic cricket,” said former chief selector MSK Prasad.

India’s spin bowling stock, too, wears a depleted look. While left-arm spinner Axar Patel covers up adequately for Jadeja whenever the latter isn’t available, it’s difficult to find a young off-spinner of promise despite the vast expanse of India’s domestic system. If you glance through the records in Ranji Trophy in recent seasons, a bevy of left-arm spinners, mostly in the mould of Jadeja and Patel, feature in the list of highest wicket-takers. Among off-spinners, 36-year-old Jalaj Saxena, 34-year-old K Gowtham and 33-year-old Jayant Yadav (six Tests) have been the only performers of note in domestic cricket, though seldom fancied to pass muster at the international level.

“One or two youngsters will gradually come in. There is a lot of talent in India. You can’t straightaway compare a young player to someone like Kohli or Ashwin. We will definitely look at it in the time to come. We don’t have too many Tests right now. We will have to see how to bring them in,” the official added.

“During our tenure, we had Gowtham, Yadav and Saxena as back-ups for Ashwin,” Prasad said. “But they are not young anymore. The search for the next generation should happen and we have to groom players through India A cricket.”

Since the onset of Covid-19 though, there has been a substantial decline in the number of India A tours. When the India A programme was functioning robustly, it was an ideal platform to gauge the readiness of young domestic performers.

“We have to go back to 2018 and 2019, when several players graduated from India A to international cricket,” Prasad, who was a selector at the time, said. “There has to be a sync between the senior squad, India A squad and the U-19 squad. You talk about Rishabh Pant or Mayank Agarwal. We had a systematic process. We used to send the India A team to a particular country a couple of months before the senior team was touring there. There was a wonderful system in place and there was smooth transition. That needs to resume.”

After the World Test Championship final, India have two Tests against West Indies in the Caribbean in July. In a year where all the focus will shift to the 50-over World Cup, the selectors should make the most of that chance to at least try a couple of new faces.