GUWAHATI: Four spinners. Three frontline pacers. Three spinners and one pace-bowling all-rounder. Typical sub-continental pitch. A black soil surface. A red soil deck where the clay content is higher. New captain. Another new captain. A couple of legends exiting stage left. A different coach and support staff having to learn everything about conditions. A batting debutant. A new opening partnership. A top-order with fresh faces.
It's fair to say that over the last 12 months and a bit, the Indian red-ball set-up have tried to adapt and learn on the fly while playing at home. They have experimented more than a touch as they are still trying to figure out the best method to employ to give them optimum results at home.
They haven't generally needed to experiment over the last 10 years or so because they have had a generational spin attack, a couple of gun pacers who relentlessly targeted the stumps at speed, a settled middle-order and an opener who averaged over 66 at home in a four-year period from 2019 to the end of 2022.
R Ashwin has retired. Rohit Sharma has retired. Virat Kohli has retired. Cheteshwar Pujara has retired. Rahul Dravid and the support staff under him have gone, taking with them the acquired knowledge of what works and doesn't work in these conditions. Umesh Yadav, Ishant Sharma and Mohammed Shami, three seamers who contributed an awful lot in the glory years, haven't played red-ball cricket under the new management.Between all of them, that's over 20000 runs, 1200 wickets and 200 Tests.
But that's all in the past.
How do you replace some irreplaceable legends to recreate a generational home Test record? That was basically the question Gambhir had to answer at the start of this home cycle. Three matches and one into the fourth game, this management appear to still be in the middle of framing an answer that's had a couple of strikethroughs, a few caveats and a lot of ifs and buts. When the team sheets were exchanged at the toss on Day One of the second Test, the hosts once again changed their combination. After opting for four spinners at Eden Gardens, they opted for the Nitish Reddy-shaped pace bowling all-rounder for Axar Patel, the left-arm finger-spinner who was below par in the first Test. In four Tests, the hosts have already chopped and changed their combinations multiple times. This time, they reverted to the kind of combination they fielded for the visit of West Indies — two pacers, three spinners and Reddy.
When Gambhir took charge of his maiden home Test last year, there were five specialist batters, one keeper, three pacers and two spinners. The management stuck to that template for the other Test in that series but have refused to play three frontline seamers since then.
Since then, they have played at least three spinners on surfaces where turn has been copious. But they do not have a set template or preferred tracks. They have played on tracks with wildly different characteristics; In Delhi against West Indies, the strip may have well been declared dead. Against New Zealand in Mumbai last year, the red-soil surface began biting from the first session.
In Guwahati, this pitch was vastly different to the one used in Kolkata last week. Washington Sundar and Kuldeep Yadav got a few to jump but once the moisture dried, the pitch had a settled look to it. It will take turn as the match wears on but there will be nothing alarming about it, at least not on Day Two of the Test.
From a larger perspective, wins at home are of paramount importance in the World Test Championship era. But with the support staff and players still relearning the grammar, there will be teething problems. From that perspective, India will be happy that they do not play a single Test in all of 2026 (the Afghanistan Test, even if it goes ahead, is not part of WTC). Four losses in eight is a reflection of a management having to navigate some of these challenges but if they don't identify their mistakes and course correct, those teething problems may spillover.