India's streak of consecutive Test series wins over Australia ended at four, as they lost the 2024-25 Border-Gavaskar Trophy Down Under. They were the second-best side, but certainly didn't help themselves with their own decision-making.
On day two of the Sydney Test, it was shortly before noon Indian Standard Time that a country of a billion people held its collective breath.
Jasprit Bumrah has left the field. Jasprit Bumrah has left the stadium. Bumrah is injured. Will he bowl again in this match?
Broadcast cameras followed the fast bowler down into the basement of the SCG, almost WWE-style as he was packed off into a van to undergo medical scans on what was later revealed to be his back.
But if the on-field coverage looked over-the-top to anyone not following the series, it was because Bumrah was in the midst of an all-time great series. An eye-popping 32 wickets bore his name as he broke record after record. And now, with a chance to save the series on the line, he was breaking down – seemingly from putting the team on his back over and over again.
India were 2-1 down in the series by the time Bumrah went off, and he only returned on Sunday morning to bat, briefly, before India went on to lose 3-1 in an attempt to defend 162 in Australia with just two frontline pacers.
Bumrah had been run into the ground. But he wasn't the only one, and it didn't have to be this way.
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The basic requirement for a team to win a Test match is to take 20 wickets. As of January 6, 2025, only 9.7 per cent of Test match victories have ever been achieved without doing this. It is simply the way the sport has been designed.
If the purpose of team selection is to pick eleven players to give a team the best chance of winning, it follows that the best XI is one that gives them the best chance of taking 20 opposition wickets.
Unfortunately, this wasn't reflected in India's team selections in Australia. In fact, their bowling selections on this tour went almost historically wrong.
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India's opening bowlers in the series were Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammed Siraj, with Akash Deep and Prasidh Krishna taking the new ball once each. Between them, they accounted for just over half (50.7 per cent) of all deliveries bowled by their team in the series.
Extend this to the first-change bowler, and these three roles put together sent down 74.4 per cent of India's overs across five Tests. But go one step further, and the increment is miniscule. India's second-change bowler was a near non-entity, bowling just 13.2 per cent of overs.
This is the second-lowest bowling load taken up by India's fourth bowler in a series of four-plus Tests in the traditionally pace-friendly venues of Australia, England, New Zealand and South Africa.
The only time in India's history in these countries that a fourth bowler bowled less was in Australia in 1967-68; but their fifth and sixth bowlers were often their main ones at the time – spinners Erapalli Prasanna, Bapu Nadkarni, Bishan Bedi or Bhagwat Chandrasekhar. The distribution of bowling loads by position was different, but they still had four bowlers doing the heavy lifting.
In the 2024-25 series, India essentially had just three bowlers doing so.
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But why was the fourth bowler on this tour so sparingly used? Well, the answer comes back to the team selection.
In the series opener in Perth, India picked three specialist bowlers (Bumrah, Siraj, Harshit Rana), one spin all-rounder (Washington Sundar) and one pace all-rounder (Nitish Kumar Reddy). On the face of it, this simply lined up with Australia's composition of Cummins-Starc-Hazlewood, Lyon and Mitchell Marsh, an extremely successful combination for them in Australia.
But India's specialist quicks as a trio were not near the level of Australia's in terms of effectiveness, experience and familiarity with conditions. The bigger problem? It was unlikely any combination of three pacers available to them on this tour would match up, with Mohammed Shami missing.
In Perth, Bumrah put in the performance of a lifetime after India were rolled over for 150, and then got the best of the batting conditions to set up a win. India persisted with this combination in Adelaide, changing the spinner – Ashwin for Sundar.
They lost in Adelaide as Rana came in for some punishment. He was promptly replaced by Akash Deep, and Ashwin by Ravindra Jadeja as India stuck to their combination. The rain saved them from a loss in Brisbane and they responded to narrowly avoiding the follow-on by bringing an all-rounder in for a batter in Melbourne – Sundar for Shubman Gill.
Read more: Bumrah v Konstas, Boland v Kohli: The ten battles that defined the 2024/25 Border-Gavaskar Trophy
India went into the Melbourne and Sydney Tests with six bowling options in all – three specialists and three all-rounders.
The fourth, fifth and sixth bowlers that they used in this tour were Ashwin, Jadeja, Sundar and Reddy. The first three, as spinners, had limited utility in the Australian conditions, which throughout this tour, were even less conducive to spin than usual. They were largely able to keep the run-scoring in check, but rarely provided a real wicket-taking threat.
Reddy was not only very young, but his gentle, almost floaty medium pacers provided little in terms of keeping the pressure on Australia.
The net result was that India inevitably went back to one of their main three bowlers more quickly than they would have liked – usually Bumrah and/or Mohammed Siraj – likely tiring them out quicker and in turn reducing their effectiveness as the series wore on. That Bumrah remained exceptional throughout was remarkable, but he was also the first to feel the physical effects of a heavy workload on a long tour.
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If India didn't trust their bowling options, why did they pick them?
In the last two matches of the series, India batted until No.8, with the last player in that lineup having scored a Ranji Trophy 150 from No.3 barely two months ago. Three players in the lineup were all-rounders by name, but effectively played as batters.
Had India sacrificed one of them for a fourth specialist pace bowler, they would have had a readymade fourth bowler, with whom they stood a better chance of creating enough of a threat to match the Australian attack while allowing them to rest the main wicket-taking threats.
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At the start of this series, they took the punt on Reddy being this player – a fair enough call, especially off his first-class record. But it was clear early on that his bowling would not be overly threatening. India decided to stick with him, his returns with the bat especially in a flailing lineup making him undroppable.
But India never made the sacrifice of any other batter either. They chose to continue, throughout the series, with the added security of one – at best giving them 30 or 40 runs more over a bowler, which is no guarantee of getting closer to a win in Test cricket. Had they chosen the extra bowler, the deeper attack would at best have given them an extra two or three wickets, a tangible step towards the winning 20-wicket mark.
The counter-argument here is that India made the right call to shore up their batting because their batters as a whole were not performing up to scratch. But the same argument can be made in favour of a bowling lineup that is underperforming – shore up the bowling by adding another player. At least then, you gamble with the best-case scenario being a win.
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There's no guarantee that playing an extra specialist seamer over one of India's all-rounders, or batters, would have resulted in anything different from the series scoreline which actually transpired. But to not try it especially in the final match of a series where they had nothing to lose, the turnaround time from the previous Test was minimal and the payoff was an increased chance of wickets remains baffling – it was risk-averse to the very extreme.
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In many ways, India's team composition, particularly in the last two Tests, resembled an almost optimal T20-style construction – bat deep, have three solid bowlers and get through the remaining overs with all-rounders and/or part-timers. India's coach got this job largely on the basis of his T20 credentials, and their captain, Rohit Sharma, has also been highly successful in the T20 format.
It's possible they simply opted for a strategy that worked for them there, without adapting to the demands of a format which may as well be a different sport. But it is worth remembering that under India's previous coach in South Africa, the same captain had been willing to play a fourth specialist pacer, and fifth specialist bowler, in Shardul Thakur (granted, he could bat a bit).
Gautam Gambhir talked a big game, and seemed to have gotten the thinking of Test cricket right ahead of the home series against New Zealand: "Batters only set up matches. This batsman-obsessed attitude of ours needs to end. If a batter even scores 1,000 runs, it doesn't guarantee victory. But if a bowler takes 20 wickets, then there is a 99 per cent guarantee that we will win the Test match."
But that has not come across in India's actions on this tour, not even when there was nothing to lose but perhaps the pride of a heavier defeat. All the blame can never be laid at one person's feet, but the net result is for all the supposed options India had, they were barely used.
In the end, that may have cost them the series – and worse – possibly affected the fitness of one of the finest Test cricketers the country has ever produced.
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