Rohit Sharma says India will stick to turners even if it occasionally backfires, but which pitch suits India?

The green-top comment came back to haunt Rohit Sharma. The day before the Indore Test, he had brazenly said his team could request a seaming surface in Ahmedabad to prepare for the World Test Championship final at Oval in July. “There is definitely a possibility of that. We’ve already spoken about it,” he would say.
The day Australia handed India a thrashing on a tuner, he was asked: “Green top in Ahmedabad. Is that still on?” He choked for words, perhaps wishing that he could take his words back from the pre-match press conference, and wore a sheepish smile and produced a platitudinal answer: “Well it’s too early now, we just finished a Test match. We’ll go to Ahmedabad and see what we can do there.”
He stuttered, paused and resumed: “But yeah, we’ll see, we’ll have a chat about this game. What went wrong in this game, and what we can do well in Ahmedabad and not worry about the pitch,” he said. He then classically deflected the question, as he would when offered a leg-stump half-volley. “Honestly this pitch talk is just getting too much. Why are people not asking me about Nathan Lyon, how well he bowled, how Pujara played in the second innings, or how well Usman Khawaja played,” he would rant on.
But in the backdrop of the heavy defeat on a turner looms a question of broader relevance and significance. What is the nature of pitch that suits this Indian team the most? Which surface gives them the optimal advantage over their opposition at home? A decade or so ago, the answer went without saying. Turners and more turners. But less clear is the verdict in the present. In this milieu, they can lose on any surface and win on any as well. India have the ammo to beat England on seaming surfaces and Australia on ones with bounce, just as they could lose on turners too.
True that India has relied predominantly on turners to rack up the WTC points—‘it’s our biggest strength too,’ Sharma would ins—but they have backfired too time and again.
From the England series at home, they have won eight and lost just two of their 11 Tests at home, most of them on tracks that spun to varying degrees. Little doubt that it’s a healthy win-loss ratio, but there have been passages when they seemed vulnerable, when they seemed they would fall into the trap they themselves had carefully set, only to be rescued the superior spinners, lower-order dazzle, and Sharma himself, the lone multiple-centurion in this phase. That only four others have managed hundreds—Ravi Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, Rishabh Pant and Shreyas Iyer—encapsulates their travails.
But none of these teams had as pedigreed a spinner as Lyon, or as resourceful accomplices as Toddy Murphy and Matthew Kuhnemann. Pack proficient batsmen of spin-bowling such as Usman Khawaja, Marnus Labuschagne, Steve Smith and Peter Handscomb to the line-up, and suddenly India’s turner-devotion does not look foolproof. It could bite them back and devour them, as Australia showed, a blueprint several other teams would embrace and land in the subcontinent with the knowledge that India’s batsmen could be rattled on spinning tracks.
It has transformed into a proverbial double-edged sword. India can wield it merrily to slay their adversaries; just as their opponents could brandish it to shred India too. Much of the blame shall be apportioned on the special batsmen, whose struggles against spin in recent times are well-storied.
Virat Kohli has eked out just 400 runs in 16 innings at 25 in this span; in all five innings this series, a spinner has dismissed him. So has been his comrade Cheteshwar Pujara. Sumptuous as he was during the second-innings 60, he has found batting at home difficult in the last two years, scrapping 326 runs in 15 innings at 23. Among the top-four, only Sharma has prospered, averaging 45. His former opening partner KL Rahul has struggled, and duly benched, but his replacement Shubman Gill did not offer an immediate solution either, floundering to spinners in both outings of this Test. Shreyas Iyer has exuded comfort dealing the spinners, if a little impetuous with shot-selection, but KS Bharat, in the absence of Rishabh Pant, had looked jumpy. Pant could solve the issue, but the reality is that he is months away from getting match-fit.
Thus, it’s the struggling batsmen that makes the turner-tactic risk-fraught. But it’s a risk nonetheless, and the batsmen are in a sense casualties of this strategy. Sharma would retort, saying that the decision to use spinning tracks was taken after consulting with the batsmen too. “When the series starts we decide what kind of pitches we’ve to play on. This was everyone’s call to play on such pitches. I don’t think we are putting pressure on our own batters. When we win, everything looks good. Nobody talks about batting. When we lose, these things come out,” he said.
He then emphasised on producing result wickets. “It’s not always about making sure we’re playing on flat wickets, the results don’t come. In Pakan, there were three Test matches played, people were saying it’s become so boring. We’re making it interesting for you guys,” he quipped.
World Test Championship pressure on home pitches
The pressure to produce result-wickets has intensified inexorably after the World Test Championship cycle began, which batting coach Vikram Rathour admitted the other. In the greed for points, India have at times sought extreme turners, like the ones in Ahmedabad and Chennai against England, or this one in Indore. Those in Nagpur or Delhi were not as vicious, even though run-making was difficult.
Sharma blamed it on skills and application. But herein lies the fix—if your batsmen no longer possess the requisites to survive and score runs on these surfaces, it indeed compromises the victory prospects.
The repeated failure of the batsmen prompts the question and probably a rethink—how long before they shed their unflinching commitment to turners. How long could spinners and lower order gloss over the cracks? Bowling spin is still India’s forte, but playing spin less so.
But Sharma’s faith in turners remains undiminished: “It can come and haunt us as well, I’m very much aware of that, but so be it.” The whole belief is premised on the theory—albeit a proven one—that India’s spinners could out-bowl those of their opponents. But it could backfire, especially against teams with good spinners and good players of spinners.
In this context, the would-be Ahmedabad deck intrigues. Once bitten, would they shy away from another turner? The Lyon threat looms, so does the form of Khawaja and Co. Maybe, it could be a green-top after all. Maybe, it would be a sandpit that turns more than it did in Indore. But the risks and flaws remain, and turners could come back to haunt Sharma and his men