What if India didn’t drop Bhuvneshwar Kumar for the second Test? What if Virat Kohli trusted his vice captain to find form instead of going for the more aggressive option of Rohit Sharma? What if Hardik Pandya grounded his bat at Centurion? What if India could hold on to more catches? What if the team arrived a week earlier?
What if...
As the euphoria of one of India’s more famous overseas Test wins dies down, one cannot help but hypothesise over the events of the past three weeks. It’s only natural to wonder if India ended up losing the series because of some predictable, ultimately avoidable, errors.
But don’t let that take anything away from the importance of the win at the Wanderers.
With the top two Test sides taking on each other under conditions ranging from typical South Africa, to surprisingly Indian and then extreme by any country’s standards, the cricketing world witnessed 12 days of absorbing Test cricket. The quality fluctuated between sublime and the ridiculous, but there was no shortage of drama. In the gladiatorial world of long form cricket, this was Russell Crowe bellowing out: ‘Were you not entertained?’
And we found ourselves nodding in agreement.
At the end of a hard-fought three-match series (no thanks to you for that, BCCI) it’s fair to say the better team won. Faf du Plessis, however, could not have been happy about losing the third match after all the talk of settling scores from the 3-0 defeat during their tour of India in 2015.
And that’s the point Kohli would be driving home to his team - that his team, his lads, did better at their opponents’ den than they did in India.
Ravi Shastri did make a similar point between the second and third Tests. He, in his own style, insisted that his team indeed played like the No 1 side in the first two Tests despite the scoreline and manner of defeats suggesting otherwise. He wanted to drive home the point that his team was close to avoiding those losses, but you could not blame the average fan for thinking he was talking into an echo chamber.
The mood during Kohli’s post-match conference after the defeat in Centurion was not much different either. He was cagey, he was combative, he made it clear that it was a battle of perception between the folks writing and commenting about the game and the ones playing it. He brought a ‘us vs them’ attitude that felt misplaced, even if - at some level - understandable.
Intent gives way to belief
And slowly, if ‘intent’ was the buzzword from the beginning of the series, ‘belief’ started catching up quickly. Kohli and Shastri didn’t tire of saying that they believed in this team, they believed that this team was different to their predecessors, they believed that they were good enough.
“We had to show character in this game, and step up not for anyone else but for the belief of the team,” said Kohli after ‘The Jo’burg Job’. “When no one is believing in you, no one’s backing you, it’s very important to back yourselves as individuals.”
Here’s the thing. The ‘no one’ that Kohli brought up multiple times during this series is a mythical enemy, a disbeliever conjured out of thin air. ‘No one’ wanted Rahane to play the first Test, he said. ‘No one’ was discussing Bhuvneshwar being dropped for Mohammed Shami after the latter’s 3-wicket burst in one spell at Centurion that brought India back into the match. And the same ‘no one’ made another appearance in the victory speech too, so to speak.
On the contrary, the fans and analysts, in fact, believed that this team had the capacity to live up to their captain’s expectations. Unlike their predecessors, this team was not just winning at home, they were dominating opposition. Opponents, worthy or otherwise, were ruthlessly defeated. Kohli had a squad depth that would have been the envy of many a previous captain.
But with the series at 2-0, familiar problems resurfaced. The catching felt as if it had regressed back to the 90s, the batting troubles against the moving ball seemed like it was in the DNA of the batsmen.
Big win
And this is where, the win in Johannesburg assumes significance. For Kohli’s ambitions as a Test skipper, this win was monumental in reinforcing this belief system - within the team *and* between the team and their followers. This win showed that there is substance to the ‘belief’ and the words were not bouncing off the walls. A 3-0 series defeat would have let the wounds fester and the scars might have become an obstacle with more than a couple of months to go for the next Test assignment in England.
“It could be a massive milestone for us,” Kohli said as much in his own words. “We already had the belief but now we have the result to back it up. We certainly believe that any conditions we are given we certainly have it in our abilities to think about winning Test matches. Yes, we will lose some but we will end up winning a lot as well. This day will be remembered for a long time as a team. I believe that, and the whole team believes that. The mood in the change room is amazing right now. And you know the guys are looking forward to repeating this much more in conditions that are not ours.”
In the dead rubber at the Wanderers, Kohli’s mission to succeed overseas came alive once again. His quest to succeed where other Indian captains failed was back on track. And the ball is now in Kohli’s court to make sure the lessons from the series defeat are carried forward and not glossed over by the win in the final Test.
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