England’s India tour: Why it could rekindle the charm of five-Test series

In the summer of 2014, India travelled to England for five Test matches. Like many others in the Indian set-up, for Virat Kohli too, then three years young in Test cricket, a five-Test series was a novelty.

By then, the mercurial right-hander had smashed six Test hundreds, including in Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. He was rightfully expected to lead the charge in England too, but came a miserable cropper, aggregating a meagre 134 runs in ten innings for a dismal average of 13.4. His highest score was an unedifying 39; more alarmingly, he was dismissed four times by James Anderson, all to catches behind the sticks as his failings outside the off-stump stood ruthlessly exposed.

To Kohli’s great credit, he reinvented himself rapidly and smashed four centuries in as many Tests in Australia in fewer than six months. But that five-Test series in England reiterated that when so many matches are so compactly packed in such a short span of time – the five Tests were played out over a duration of seven weeks – it’s practically impossible to address technical shortcomings on the go.

Chance to bounce back

But no other series of any other duration affords teams, especially travelling outfits, the opportunity to bounce back from a poor start and come up trumps. Take England’s tour of India in 1984-85, for instance. In the first Test in Mumbai, little leggie L Sivaramakrishnan bamboozled David Gower’s men with six-wicket hauls in both digs, bowling the hosts to an eight-wicket victory. Siva also picked up six wickets in the first innings of the next Test in Delhi, but as the series unravelled, England got on top of the leg-spinner. In the last six innings of the series, Siva took just five wickets and England, confident that they had got the measure of the conditions as well as the star opposition bowler, rallied to complete a fabulous 2-1 triumph.

India and England will renew their five-match rivalry over the next seven weeks when they traverse the length and the breadth of the country in the quest for crucial World Test Championship points. This will be India’s first five-Test series since the 2016-17 season when, under Kohli, they schooled Alastair Cook’s side 4-0 at home. Kohli will miss at least 40% of this face-off after having taken a break from the first two Tests for personal reasons, but India will still believe that in their own conditions and armed with two of the finest spinners to have come out of this land ever – R Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja – they hold most of the aces.

Shrinking Test cricket

One of the more strident criticisms in recent times has revolved around the shrinking milieu of the Test landscape. The introduction of the WTC in 2019 came with the caveat that no Test series should be shorter than two matches; in deference to the Ashes which has continued to dabble with tradition, the upper limit was capped at five. It suited the bigger nations; because all teams were required to play three home and three away series in the two-year cycle of the WTC, they played longer series against each other and kept matches against teams like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, for example, or even New Zealand at times, to no more than two. Indeed, one of the more disappointing developments was India’s tour of South Africa in December-January for just two games, certainly anything but ideal given that despite their No. 1 Test ranking, South Africa is the only country where India haven’t won a Test series.

Going forward, there will be more five-Test series beyond the Ashes. India are already pencilled in to play five matches when they tour Australia at the end of the year and the immediate future will witness India, England and Australia all playing five Tests against each other while playing two, or at best three, against the others. To those who say that is not fair, the counter will be that cricketing schedules aren’t drawn up merely for cricketing reasons, that commercial considerations influence who plays how much against whom.

Logistical challenges

The thing about extended five-match skirmishes, however much they might appeal to the connoisseurs, is the logistical challenges when it comes to scheduling. Everyone wants a piece of the Indian team, and most of them aren’t as keen on hosting even a three-Test series as a bouquet of white-ball internationals, primarily of the T20 variety, which will not only keep several of their member units happy but also send the cash registers ringing. If they had the choice, India would have played three Tests in South Africa, but Cricket South Africa opted instead for three One-Day Internationals, as many T20Is and two Tests. That’s the way the world is headed, and the sooner one accepts that, the better.

The scheduling challenge that five Tests will entail will revolve not just around finding space in the already overflowing calendar but also ensuring that key players are kept fresh and motivated so that they are not overcome by the physical strain and the mental fatigue that going toe-to-toe for so many matches against hard-nosed opponents will invariably induce. “It's tough for teams like us, and even England, for that matter (to play five Test series often),” Rahul Dravid, the India head coach, conceded. “You play a lot of cricket, different formats of the game. For teams like us to keep playing five-Test match series means you've got to keep people on the park and you have got to manage out the other formats of the game as well. So going forward, if there are more five-match series, then that’s going to become a big factor -- how do you manage the schedules of our more busy players and whether then they'll have to choose a specific time as to which form of cricket that they're playing in.”

India are fortunate that their key on-field influencers, Rohit Sharma now and Virat Kohli before him, have uncompromisingly thrown their lot behind Test cricket. In so many ways, this might well be the last generation of Indian cricketers – Ashwin, Jadeja, Mohammed Shami, Jasprit Bumrah, KL Rahul – that is so invested in Test cricket. If the Shubman Gills and the Yashasvi Jaiswals aren’t as fascinated by the ebbs and flows of the five-day game, so be it. But for now, five Tests it is; five potentially exhilarating Tests, England’s revolutionary ‘Bazball’ against India’s crack spinners. It should be quite the spectacle.