🏏England tour of India 2024: 2nd Test: At Dr. Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy ACA-VDCA Cricket Stadium, Visakhapatnam from 02 - 06 Feb 2024 at 9:30AM IST🏏
Can shell-shocked India even the odds vs Bazball?
India have been in this kind of position many times before and gotten themselves out of trouble, but England will be no pushovers
It's happened before, you know? It's even happened against England; the last time they were here, in fact.
It's happened before. India have gone 1-0 down at home, and India have bounced back. This is what India will be telling themselves: 'We've been here before. We trust ourselves to find our way out of this. We trust our methods.'
It's what they should tell themselves too. Change is a fact of life, a constant that India aren't blind to - note their efforts to embrace the sweep and all its variants in the lead-up to Visakhapatnam - but there's a reason why they've been so successful in their own conditions for such a long time: their methods work, and work exceedingly well, most of the time.
Hyderabad was one of those exceptions, rare and freakish. India have experienced something very much like it too - Dinesh Chandimal, an almost stroke-for-stroke precursor to Ollie Pope - and they came back to win that series as well.
India have been there, and India have done it. They will trust that they can do it again. And for all of the shockwaves they set off in Hyderabad, England will know coming to Visakhapatam that they will most likely need to keep doing freakish things to repeat that result. Having won the first Test with a frontline spin attack with the collective experience of 36 Tests, they now go into the second with one that's played a combined three Tests. Three. It's quite likely that Joe Root will once again bowl more overs than at least one of their theoretically main spinners.
For all that, though, have England had a better chance in India than this one since their triumphant 2012-13 tour? India were a team in transition in those late-Tendulkar days, and if they aren't already in another full-blown transition now, the number of absences they're dealing with has left them in a not-too-dissimilar situation.
They've already felt the effects of losing experienced batters. Bowlers win Test matches, it's true, but batters can lose them, in ways that aren't immediately apparent. India came away from Hyderabad with the impression that they lost that Test match on day two, when their batters, one after another, fell while attempting boundary hits. Eight of their top nine got past 20, and three of them got into the 80s, but none of them got to three figures. The aggression that cost them their wickets also brought them their runs, yes, but you could easily imagine Virat Kohli, in the same conditions and against the same attack, going at a not-dissimilar clip while hitting nothing in the air, and piling up what may have seemed to him a double-hundred for the taking.
In Visakhapatnam, India will miss not just Kohli but also KL Rahul and Ravindra Jadeja, two of their three most experienced batters from the first Test.
And the loss of Jadeja, needless to say, will leave them without half of one of the greatest spin-bowling duos in history. It's a massive blow, particularly since India are already without Mohammed Shami, whose absence in Hyderabad left them without a supreme wicket-taker in Indian conditions while also - given their seeming lack of faith in Mohammed Siraj - piling extra overs onto their spinners' shoulders.
It's a reflection of how good India are that Jadeja's likely replacement is Kuldeep Yadav, a bowler who'd probably be part of England's first-choice attack in every Test match, home and away, if they could magically change his nationality. Even so, as good as they are, India are not as good as they could be, and in this lies England's greatest chance.
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