Watching India lose the second Test and the three-match series to New Zealand, I was surprised by my equanimity. I’ve felt more depressed after Arsenal defeats. Not only is North London not my watan, I only began following the Premier League seriously some twenty years ago. I’ve been tracking India’s Test sides for sixty years now, beginning with the 1964 home series against M.J.K. Smith’s team. Rohit Sharma’s men represent not just India but the ghost of every Indian team that I’ve rooted for, from M.A.K. Pataudi’s to Virat Kohli’s. I have skin in this game; I should have felt that defeat in Pune more keenly than I did.
When India lost the first Test of the recent home series against Ben Stokes’s England, I was stupidly angry in the thin-skinned, post-colonial way that only desis my age can be. Winning the next four Tests was a balm; to lose to England at home is insupportable. So why is losing to New Zealand less painful, given that this defeat also meant the end of India’s unbeaten record in home series that went back all the way to 2012?
India’s record against New Zealand over the last five years isn’t flattering: seven Tests, five defeats. To salt the wound, New Zealand beat India in the final of the inaugural World Test Championship in 2021. There should be more needle between the two sides, but there isn’t. Why not?
Time was when the West Indies were the most fearsome side in the world. Once the West Indies went into terminal decline at the start of this century, desis found an acronym for countries that were a proper test of India’s cricketing mettle on tour: SENA: South Africa, England, New Zealand and Australia.
Given New Zealand’s recent record against India and the fact that informed Indian cricket followers acknowledge that the Kiwis are a tough nut to crack, what accounts for the fact that losing to them doesn’t roil up Indians like losing to England or Australia does? Part of the answer, I think, certainly for older Indian fans, is that New Zealand, despite SENA, is lodged in their minds as a minor Test playing nation.
There are reasons for this. While India has always played New Zealand home and away in a regular cadence, the Black Caps had never won a Test series in India from their first tour in 1955 till now. On the other hand, India’s first away series win was achieved on its first tour of New Zealand in 1967-68, when Pataudi led his team to a decisive 3-1 win. This was a big deal for an Indian team that was used to losing on tour. Losers abroad, we assumed that a team that lost to India at home was a minnow.
The other reason Indian fans didn’t rate New Zealand was that their outstanding players didn’t show to advantage in India. Bert Sutcliffe, John Reid, Richard Hadlee and Brendon McCullum did very well on their Indian tours but players like Bevan Congdon, Glenn Turner, Martin Crowe, Kane Williamson and Daniel Vettori didn’t do justice to their talent in India and didn’t, therefore, bulk as large in our minds as the champions of the ‘major’ Test playing nations. Also, they belonged to losing sides. Great players embedded in winning teams overawe their opponents and their supporters; that never quite happened with New Zealand in India.
The evolving desi feeling that New Zealand wasn’t a top-tier Test team is evident from the fact that the series India played against them started off as five and four Test affairs in the 50s and 60s but shrank to three and on occasion two Test engagements in the decades that followed. This is not unlike England’s traditional attitude towards touring Indian sides; India never got to play a five Test series in England till India’s television market and the BCCI’s financial clout became impossible to ignore. It wasn’t till the turn of the century that India was ‘granted’ a four Test series in England. A full, five Test series had to wait till 2014.
The analogy with England is instructive. The annoying thing about playing England has been the sense that the country’s cricketing establishment is always looking past the ongoing contest towards an Ashes horizon. When Kohli’s touring team had England on the mat in 2021, 2-1 down in that Covid-interrupted series, English commentators were still going on about how the series was useful prep for the Ashes tour later that year.
In our recently acquired pomp, we saw the series against New Zealand as a way of limbering up for the Border-Gavaskar trophy. When the Black Caps were blanked 2-0 by Sri Lanka before landing in India, this assumption that they were a warm-up act for the real thing Down Under — our dismal recent Test record against them notwithstanding — was confirmed.
The mistakes that Rohit Sharma owned up to in Bengaluru — playing three spinners and choosing to bat on a rain-freshened pitch — were born of not paying attention to the here-and-now. We were first beaten by their seamers and then comprehensively out-bowled by their spinners in Pune. Without their best batter, Kane Williamson, Tom Latham’s team methodically made the runs their bowlers needed. This was a demolition. The Bengaluru Test was received as an error-induced blip; after Pune, sage pundits took to talking about transition.
Something good might yet come of this. The BCCI might learn to take teams like South Africa and New Zealand seriously and play them over four and five Test series instead of reducing Test cricket to a Big Three buffet, with other countries dining off the crumbs from the top table.
Condescending to a nation of five million people because you are a Goliath whose population gives you eyeballs you can monetise is a bad idea; it makes you look ridiculous when David body slams you in your backyard. It’s time for the BCCI to take a per capita view of cricketing excellence. I’m hoping for a whitewash in Mumbai; that might drive the lesson home.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com
