India's Journey from a Grand Victory to a Grand Defeat

India was defeated by Australia by a massive ten wickets in the second test of the Border Gavaskar Trophy. This defeat has raised several concerns about the team, as they can't blame any external reason for the loss. The pitch was fine, and the bowling attack was similar. So, what went wrong that led to this shameful defeat?

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 The most significant cause of India's defeat was the batter's non-performance in both innings; Nitish Reddy was the highest run scorer of the innings. He scored 42 runs in both innings; when the team's number 7 batter scored the highest run of the innings, which was 42, it speaks to the batting performance of the team in the match. In both the innings, there was not even a single batsman who played 50 balls. 

The team surely missed a batter like Chateshwara Pooja, who, during his time, acted like glue and a defensive batter who just tried to face the ball and make the bowler tired. If any of the batters had tried to hold an end, the situation would have been different. The fact that the Indian team didn't even do better for 50 overs in both innings suggests the weak link in the match.

Bowling Coach Morne Morkel added, "The bowlers were able to execute their plans, but the batters were perhaps guilty of not doing that."

Senior Players didn't Perform.

Alongside Virat and Kl Rahul, Rohit, who batted number six, didn't perform either. Rahul, who performed well in the last test match and scored a 200-run partnership, tried to form a partnership with Shubman Gill but got out at 37. In the previous Match, Kohli scored his 81st century, but in this match, he didn't score the runs and got out on Starc and Boland in a single-digit score. While we talked about Rohit Sharma's poor form in detail in another article, he struggled with the bad form, scoring just 3 and 6 runs in the match.

During the press conference after the match, Rohit Sharma mentioned that the batter wasn't in the habit of playing with the black side screen in the test match. For context, a black side screen is used in pink ball matches. He mentioned that there could be several excuses, but the fact is that the Australians played better cricket than India, and they won.

During the match, bowling didn’t get up to the mark, inconsistent line and length, lousy execution of the plan, and average field placement were no reasons to blame. Despite Travis's previous performance against India, the team should have come up with better plans against him for the field placement, which could have been better, and neither was their bowling strategy. Travis Head, who had been the team's headache in the World Cup final and WTC final, was expected by the team management to come up with a solid plan to tackle him, but that didn't show during the innings.

Captain and Coach

After returning back as captain in this match, Rohit showed an average captaincy along with the fl field placement for the Travis head and not having the plan to tackle, less use of Bumrah during the fourth session of also was a lousy decision as Head scored a lot of runs during that time, Bumrah bowled only four over during that time. While the test matches, it also marks the fourth loss out of the fifth test in which Gambhir was coach. Though we shouldn't expect a result this early, the poor performance draws attraction to that side.

Several former players commented on the performance; Akash Chopra commented.

 "There is not one person in the team who said he would play 80-100 balls. Not a single player played 50 balls," pointing out the pitch wasn't unplayable.

While the legend Sunil Gavaskar urged players to utilize the extra days for practice instead of staying in hotel rooms, he specifically called for younger players to put in additional practice hours to adapt to conditions.

Though this was a big defeat, the team was to regain its focus and concentrate on the upcoming matches, as the next three matches are important to winning the series and the World Test championship.