PUNE: Remember when Rahul Dravid sent a letter to Kevin Pietersen on how to play spin? Post that, Pietersen had an aura-changing series in India in 2012.
If Dravid was to send such letters to everybody in this current Indian team, he would probably run out of paper. Or ink. Or both.
Actually, scratch that. Dravid coached all of these batters till last year. And there still wasn't considerable improvement.
On Friday, granted on a variable-bounce, increasingly difficult-to-play black-soil Pune surface, the Indian batters played out all their greatest hits. Getting rolled over by part-time off-spinners? Check. Losing a clutch of wickets to a trier-but-not-a-world-beater? Check. Losing wickets in a heap? Check.
As with some of the other times when the team management decided to get funky with the surface, this time too it looks like it has backfired. When they ordered a raging turner to welcome Steve Smith's Australia in 2017 at this very venue, Steve O'Keefe ripped through them twice in three days. Seven years later, Mitchell Santner did the same.
Playing with the surface to double down on home advantage is an established practice and most teams do it around the world (Pakistan, admirably, have done it twice in two weeks without worrying about optics).
As the shadows lengthened after another hot day, it seemed like a metaphor for the Test team's proud home record. Coming into the first Test against New Zealand at Bengaluru last week, they had won each of the last 18 series played in India.
Any which way you look, it's a home record to be proud of, stretching back to 2013. Now, it's in serious danger of collapsing like a block of Jenga at the end of a games' night.
During the lunch break, Simon Doull, an expert as part of the host broadcaster, finally addressed the elephant in the room. "There's a misconception around the world that modern Indian batters are good against spin," he said. He went on to say that the current Indian batters are perhaps only as good as the ones in the other teams.
Doull's assessment is right. In the last four years, the Indian team has, time and again, displayed its frailties against spinners on turners. Pune in 2017 was perhaps an outlier then but the trend has been set in stone for a number of years.
Bowling coach Morne Morkel, who has only been in situ for the last few months, said he couldn't point to anything in specific.
"The conversation we have had, pre-game in terms of like I said, the intensity, the body language, looking to score on these wickets, the guys are trying that. We can't fault that. Maybe, at times, can we play the situation a little bit smarter? Can we, maybe, think a bit on this surface, what's going to be your individual way of getting off the strike? These are small little things we are missing at the moment."
In elite sport, a compendium of small mistakes from one side, coupled with a small percentage of marginal gains over multiple days by the opposition, is all it takes to build a lead in excess of 300 runs with five wickets remaining. Put it this way. No nation in the last 12 years has come this close to winning a Test series against India away from home.
How did their spinners do this while the likes of R Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja (surprisingly wicket-less on a strip seemingly tailormade for him) have struggled for control?
The Kiwis' batting coach, Luke Ronchi, kind of foretold it after Day One. "If you notice," he had said, "for the first couple of sessions, the Indians were bowling quite quick. Towards the back end, they started to slow their pace. That sort of made for variable bounce, a bit more turn and reactions off the surface, so that's something we can use in our bowling innings, knowing that changes of pace are quite significant."
Change of pace was Santner's great ally on the surface. He kept mixing it up while also playing with geometry in terms of using the crease and working out angles. It's to his credit that he did this while somebody like Jadeja was very one-dimensional.
If Santner began an over in the high 70s, he would invariably end it with a quicker delivery with lots of change-ups through the middle phase. All he focussed on doing was keeping the stumps in play - six of his seven were either bowled or leg-before - and ensuring he was varying his pace so the pitch could do its own thing.
It's what he has done in white-ball cricket for a long time. As the sun began to take full effect on Friday, he transferred his skills to shatter his previous career-best figures of 3/34.
With batting about to get a lot harder, Santner & Co will eye another famous win. For India's vaunted batting line-up, a chance to live up to their reputation as spin-bashers.
Recent history, though, favours one side in this battle. The spinners bowling to the Indian batters.
