Jasprit Bumrah had a five-for, there were five hundreds by Indians, and yet England cruised to a win, chasing down 371 with ease in the first Test at Leeds. With Bumrah slated to play just two more Tests, Indian management has a series of headaches with an inexperienced bowling line-up. Which bowlers are to be replaced for the second Test? Why despite extending the batting by not including their main spinner Kuldeep Yadav did lower middle-order and tail fail? Why didn’t Prasidh Krishna course-correct in the first innings by bowling a fuller length as he finally did a few hours before the end of the game? Was Shardul Thakur handled rightly in the first innings or his lack of control with the ball left the captain Shubman Gill with no other choice? And how to manage Bumrah, should he play the next game or be kept for the third Test at Lord’s, where conditions are likely to help him more?
Gautam Gambhir tried to answer a few of those questions at the end of the game, but deep down he would have known that his team is yet to find proper solutions. India at least had Jasprit Bumrah, England’s bowling unit was a stitched up unit of men coming from injury or more inexperienced than India’s – Brydon Carse played 5 Tests and Josh Tongue just three before this series, Chris Woakes is battling a battered body to try to lead in absence of Mark Wood and Jofra Archer. Their weak bowling was exposed by the top-order Indian batsmen and yet they managed to instigate collapses in both innings. Indians couldn’t, and they lost.
“We will have to give them time. Earlier, we used to have four fast bowlers in the squad with an experience of more than 40 Tests. It doesn’t make such a big impact in one-day or T20 matches, but when you go to Australia, England, or South Africa for Tests, experience matters,” Gambhir said. “Being a young team is not an excuse (for the defeat). We represent 140 crore people,” he stressed. He had uttered the same words, verbatim, when New Zealand clean-swept India at home too.
He was also empathetic towards his young team, especially the seam bowlers who have come under flak. The bowlers’ inability to defend 371 as well as their incompetence to grab 20 wickets in five of their last six Tests away from home, was repeatedly put to his attention. He defended those as stiffly as he did late-swinging deliveries during his 10-hour vigil in Napier. “These are early days. If we start judging our bowlers after every Test, how will we develop a bowling attack? Outside Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammad Siraj, we don’t have that much experience,” he pointed out.
He defended Prasidh, whose match figures read 35-0-220-5, the worst economy rate for an Indian bowler who has bowled at least 20 overs. “We picked him because we thought that he’s got something different. He’s got that bounce, and in the first innings, he used that bounce really well. Even in the second innings. He’s got all the ingredients of being a very good bowler, best bowler.”
It’s a team in flux, a predominantly young team with an inexperienced captain (“pushed into the deep sea” as Gambhir described Shubman Gill’s plight), and it would take time to blossom into a match-winning firm. The fast-bowling group captures the callowness. Prasidh Krishna had featured in only three Tests before the Leeds game. Shardul Thakur had played in 11 Tests, the last of which had arrived in December 2023, in a start-stop career. The quartet that sat out—Nitish Kumar Reddy, Harshit Rana, Arshdeep Singh and Akash Deep—have a combined experience of 14 Tests.
“But they have quality, which is why they are in this dressing room. We have to back them because it’s not about one tour. It’s about building a fast-bowler battery that can serve India for a long time. When we pick the squad, we pick the squad on trust, not on hope,” he stressed.
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The new captain Gill’s comeback ambitions rest on Bumrah too. Having bowled 43.4 overs in Leeds, his workload would be carefully monitored. The physios have set his appearance limit to three Tests and Gambhir said that the team would not stretch him more. “For us to manage Bumrah’s workload is more important because there’s a lot of cricket going forward and we know what he brings to the table as well,” Gambhir said. “But let’s see how his body turns up. But we haven’t decided which two other Test matches he’s going to play,” he added.
Even without Bumrah, Gambhir was optimistic about India’s ability to bowl out England twice. “We absolutely have the bowling attack. We believe in them. We trust in them. Those are inexperienced bowlers, but they will keep getting better, and we saw in this Test match as well that, for the first four days, we were in a position, and even on day five we were in a position, where we would have won the Test match. So we believe and we trust that we can. These boys will deliver for us.” How soon they start reposing the coach’s unwavering faith would decide the series, with or without Bumrah.
