What’s going wrong for India in Tests? Rahul Dravid reveals
The Indian cricket team has been struggling in the Test format for over a year. Team India suffered defeats at home against New Zealand and South Africa. In the away series, India suffered defeat against Australia. The test side & especially head coach Gautam Gambhir, faced severe criticism for poor performance. In between, many great players said goodbye to this format, including Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma and Ravichandran Ashwin.
Recently, former Indian captain & head coach Rahul Dravid revealed the reason why Indian batters struggle in test cricket constantly. According to him, players from all formats are not spending enough time with red ball, which prevents their red-ball capabilities not improves.
Furthermore, Dravid also shared his coaching tenure experience. He emphasised that the lack of preparation time before Test matches is making it harder for players to adjust to red-ball demands.
“One of the things I understood as a coach, especially the guys that play all three formats, is that they keep moving from one format to the other. In my generation, when there were only two formats in the game, and there wasn't really the idea of franchise cricket, there were a lot of times where I would have a whole month of practicing for a Test series and I would be able to play with the red ball, and I would be able to develop my skills,” Dravid said.
“Now, one of the things that has become a bit tougher in red-ball cricket is a lot of our guys who play all three formats, or who play the amount of cricket that they are playing, sometimes don't have the time to be able to practise red-ball cricket as much,” he said.
According to Rahul Dravid, this lack of extended exposure has an impact on the formation of strategies required for tough situations.
“That's become really a challenge, how do you almost find the time to be able to develop some of the skills that are hard. To play on turning tracks, or play on seaming wickets, doing that for hours and hours in a Test match is not easy. It requires skill,” former head coach added.
Rahul Dravid became the head coach of the Indian team after the 2021 T20 World Cup. Under his coaching, India played 4 ICC tournaments and every time, India successfully reached into top-4. India also won the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2024. India reached to the ICC Cricket World Cup 2023 finals and ICC World Test Championship 2023 finals. He mentioned the moment when Rohit Sharma, as skipper, wanted to change the approach of the Indian team and how he did that.
"I think the easy part in this thing was working with Rohit, someone who himself really had quite a dispute with him. He was also recognising that the game was changing.
"I think, you know, the nature of batsmanship in white-ball cricket over the last 10 years or so... everything had started to change. In some ways, there was a feeling that we were slightly behind, and we needed to get better at that. We needed to push the envelope a little bit more.
"We needed to take a few more risks. Run rates were going up. All of these things were going up. So, it was then actually just very easy to have that conversation with him. I think he was completely on board. He was someone who took the responsibility of setting the game forward," said Dravid.
