With international cricket, specifically the red-ball format, firmly back in focus, we shift our attention to India’s big assignment in hand — the ICC World Test Championship (WTC) final starting Wednesday. After witnessing two months of high-voltage T20 action in the Indian Premier League (IPL), it’s time for good old Test cricket to take centre-stage again with the Indian team squaring off against Australia at The Oval in London.
It hasn’t been too long since India and Australia last faced each other on the cricket field. The two rivals, after all, had fought against one another in the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, which the Rohit Sharma-led side ended up retaining with a 2-1 series scoreline, right before the IPL.
WTC Final: All you need to know
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The Indians extended their possession of the trophy by winning the first two Tests in Nagpur and Delhi by big margins. Australia managed to fight back in the third Test in Indore thanks to Steve Smith’s brilliant tactics, while the two sides played out a high-scoring draw on what was a road in Ahmedabad.
India’s performances in the 2023 BGT aside, it was Sri Lanka’s narrow defeat at the hands of New Zealand in Christchurch that ultimately sealed their place in the WTC final.
While India will no doubt seek inspiration from their victory over the Pat Cummins-led side earlier this year as well as their back-to-back series wins in Australia, the challenge is somewhat different this time around. After all, this will be the first time the two teams square off in a neutral venue in their 76-year Test history.
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Additionally, the green top that has been prepared at the Oval for the upcoming contest, together with the pronounced swing that bowlers are able to generate in this part of the world and the sheer quality in Australia’s pace department led by skipper Cummins himself makes this one contest to watch out for as well as a challenge for the ages for the Indians.
India’s troubles in ICC events
What will also be weighing in on the minds of the Indian players heading into the ‘Ultimate Test’ will be their lack of success in ICC events over the past decade.
India, after all, haven’t won an event organised by the ICC since the 2013 Champions Trophy, where they beat hosts England in the final to win their third major trophy under MS Dhoni’s leadership.
Dhoni’s India would then lose the summit clash against Sri Lanka in the 2014 World T20 and reach the semi-finals of the 2015 World Cup and the 2016 World T20. Virat Kohli would then lead India to the final of the 2017 Champions Trophy and the semi-finals of the 2019 ODI World Cup.
Kohli’s India would then finish runners-up in the final of the inaugural World Test Championship, losing to New Zealand by seven wickets in the summer of 2021. Later that year, his team would endure one of its most disappointing outings in the T20 World Cup, where they would fail to reach the semis after defeats against Pakistan and New Zealand.
Under Rohit’s leadership, India would go a step further and reach the semi-finals of the 2022 T20 World Cup in Australia, before being shown the door by a dominant English side in Adelaide.
Read: Team India’s concerns going into WTC Final against Australia
Speaking to reporters on Monday, head coach Rahul Dravid dismissed the notion of the Indian team being under extra pressure due to their relative lack of success in ICC events heading into the final. The former India captain felt reaching the final was the culmination of two years of hard work by the Indian team and while it would be nice to cap it off with a trophy at the end of the cycle, the team’s journey across those two years should be celebrated never the less.
“We don’t feel any pressure in terms of trying to win an ICC trophy. Of course, it would be nice to do it. It’s certainly nice to be able to win an ICC tournament. But also in the context of things, you look at this and you see this is the culmination of two years of work, it’s a culmination of a lot of success that gets you here.
“So there’s a lot of positives to take from that to see where you stand on the table, winning series in Australia, drawing series here, being very competitive everywhere that this team has played in the world over the last five or six years,” Dravid said during the press conference.
Why Rohit and Co can end India’s long wait this week?
Though they face numerous hurdles in their quest for ultimate glory, there are enough reasons to believe this outfit might just come out on top this Sunday or earlier. And while they might have fallen marginally short in the ODI and T20 World Cups in recent years as well as in the Champions Trophy, six summers back, there is enough potential in this unit to overcome the Aussie challenge that awaits them.
Let’s start with the batting unit. The last time the Indian team toured England for a full Test series (not counting the postponed fifth Test that took place in Birmingham last year), Virat Kohli was going through a poor run that had affected his batting since the onset of the COVID pandemic. This time around, Kohli enters the final with a century in each format in less than a year, including a 186 in Ahmedabad against this very team in March.
Rohit might have been a tad out of touch in the IPL but had scored a brilliant hundred on a tricky Nagpur surface against Australia earlier this year, and will back himself to regain his silken touch when switching to the rigours of the five-day format. He opens with Shubman Gill, who has been in the form of his life across formats this year and will hope to carry the confidence gained from an unbelievable IPL 2023 over to this contest, and comes in as the perfect replacement for the injured KL Rahul.
At one down, Cheteshwar Pujara has been scoring runs for fun while leading Sussex in the County Championship, collecting three tons in six games. India’s middle-order also happens to be in good hands with a reinvigorated Ajinkya Rahane back in the mix following a terrific domestic season, where he finished the leading run-scorer for Mumbai with 634 runs at 57.63.
The bowling unit will certainly be missing the services of Jasprit Bumrah, who has been out of action since September last year due to recurring back troubles, and was the second-highest wicket-taker in the four Tests against England that took place in 2021. The pace department, however, finds itself in the more than capable hands of Mohammed Shami — who takes over as the leader of the attack in Bumrah’s absence — and Mohammed Siraj.
The two had also wreaked plenty of havoc in that series and had also excelled against Australia in Australia, and should be able to give the Aussie batters a taste of what the likes of Cummins, Mitchell Starc and Scott Boland are expected to dish out to the Indian batters on the lush green surface.
Read | Indian pacers shouldn’t get carried away in WTC Final, says Wasim Akram
Lest we forget, senior spinners Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja are quite the match-winners themselves who excel regardless of conditions and are more than handy with the bat as well, though they are unlikely to feature together given the conditions.
India certainly can count a lot of positives heading into this week’s battle, whether it’s the form of some of their key players or their recent record against Australia, and will consider themselves to be on equal footing with their opponents even if Australia did top the WTC table and secured passage into the final before them. And even if they don’t fly back home with the trophy in their hands, they still can afford to pat themselves for a job well done in the two-year cycle, something that Dravid emphasised in the presser.
“Those are things that will never change just because you have or you don’t have an ICC trophy. That’s really the bigger picture.”
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