Priority for Test cricket: can under-fire Gautam Gambhir walk the talk?

Two days after India’s pride was badly dismantled by South Africa with a sweep of the Test series, public ire has not ebbed about head coach Gautam Gambhir. Indeed, negative emotions about the current team management have been so overpowering that they have now prompted a number of TV pundits — from Sunil Gavaskar to Ravi Ashwin — to back the beleaguered coach and put the onus on the players.

There is an ODI series around the corner against the Proteas beginning with the opener at Ranchi, and no prizes for guessing that the public gaze has begun to shift towards the return of ‘Ro-Ko’ — Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli. The aura of these two is virtually impossible to match and the moment the Men in Blue turn the tide in the white-ball series, which is a distinct possibility, the trauma of the Test series will be pushed to the background.

‘’We need to start prioritising Test cricket,’’ a defiant Gambhir said after the historic 408-run rout in Guwahati on Wednesday. ‘’As I just said, we can’t put things under the carpet. Come the white ball formats, if you get runs in white ball formats, suddenly you forget about what you have done in red ball cricket. That should never happen,’’ said the former opener, a key member of two World Cup-winning teams under M.S. Dhoni.

He may be making the right noises, but the question is that after being at the helm for one-and-a-half years and enjoying unlimited immunity, has Gambhir himself placed enough of a premium on grooming Test specialists? A tag once associated with the likes of Cheteshwar Pujara, Ajinkya Rahane and even Ravi Ashwin for a greater part of his career?

The answer is an emphatic no, as the hosts went into the South Africa Tests with a fragile middle order with no fixed no. 3 and the boom-or-bust Rishabh Pant at no. 5 — a key position which was once held by the likes of V.V.S. Laxman, Sourav Ganguly and Rahane.

There is no doubt that Indian cricket will not be blessed with a generational talent like Laxman all the time, and all Gambhir and the five wise men needed to do was give another rope to the seasoned Karun Nair in home conditions and at least keep the prolific Sarfaraz Khan in the squad for any contingency in the middle order.

The only specialist batter who didn’t get a game in either of the two Tests is Devdutt Padikkal, yet another left-hander, in a squad overflowing with southpaws despite the knowledge that South Africa is armed with a quality off-spinner in Simon Harmer.

While the scanner is on Gambhir because he is in the public gaze, chief selector Ajit Agarkar should be held equally accountable for the ‘ageism’ and the allegations of personal likes and dislikes influencing their choices. An educated guess is that the Gambhir-Agarkar duo has had the mandate from the powers that be to script a transition, and their youth-first policy was being hailed only a few months ago when India returned with a 2-2 draw from England.

However, the wheels of fortune turned soon enough, with India’s aura of invincibility falling apart — and loaded questions about his future as Test coach thrown at Gambhir at the press conference in Guwahati. While the BCCI has responded to such queries saying it doesn’t take any "knee-jerk action", there is a buzz that Gambhir’s claims of success in the ICC Champions Trophy and Asia Cup along with his suggestion of a relook at the team's schedule may not have gone down well with the top brass.

Is there any way India could have prepared better to take on the World Test Championship (WTC) winners, who definitely came better prepared? ‘’Look, obviously scheduling does make a difference. Imagine three days back, three days before the start of the first Test match, we were in Australia. And suddenly you come back from there and you have to join a Test team and you have two days to plan with the Test side,’’ Gambhir had said.

Not a fool-proof argument at all, for it was totally Gambhir-Agarkar’s prerogative to rest Shubman Gill — Test captain and their batting mainstay — from the T20 bilateral ahead of a challenging series. It’s hard to see Gambhir being removed from one of his capacities — red-ball coach in this case — with the team next playing a Test series eight long months from now in Sri Lanka.

A strong performance in the upcoming T20 World Cup at home, where India stands a chance of being the first team to win it back-to-back, and all this chatter could be a thing of the past. In any case, the BCCI has never believed in the two coaches theory and even embraced the dual-captaincy theory much later after Virat Kohli stepped down from T20 leadership.

Merely removing Gambhir as red-ball coach will not solve the problem, treating Test cricket with due respect will.