The contours of a new India in Test whites, shaped by the winds of change Premium

Indian Test squad undergoes major changes as key players retire, leaving a young team to face England.

Winds of change are sweeping through the Indian Test squad. It started like a whisper, lifting a few leaves off the jungle floor when the selectors moved beyond Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane. When it was presumed that the air had settled, there was a surprise in store when R. Ashwin retired midway through the last away series against Australia.

And now, a sudden flux in team composition is upon us like a typhoon, as, over a span of five days, skipper Rohit Sharma retired from Tests and Virat Kohli followed suit. Both said their goodbyes through Instagram. Just like M.S. Dhoni’s exit from international cricket, other Indian stars too are using social media to convey extraordinary decisions.

Cricket, like all sport, has an ageism issue and the athlete going beyond 30 summers is always subjected to intense scrutiny. Every dip in form or tear in ligament is put under an unforgiving microscope. Pujara, Rahane, Ashwin, Rohit and Kohli are past their mid-thirties, a life-milestone that nudges players towards the exit-door.

In most cases, that walk towards the twilight is final. There could be the odd exception like when the English selectors leant on veterans Graham Gooch and Mike Gatting for one last hurrah for the Ashes in Australia during the 1994-95 season. A similar instance in Indian cricket involved captain Dilip Vengsarkar pushing for the recall of Aunshuman Gaekwad in the home ODIs against the West Indies in 1987.

In the cases of Ashwin, Rohit and Kohli, they made a choice to leave, even if the last two will still play in the blue shade in ODIs. Pujara and Rahane are still pursuing domestic cricket and at times post videos of their net sessions on X, formerly Twitter. The cumulative yield of selectors’ judgements and individual choices has left India at a tipping point in Tests while the whites need to be washed and pressed ahead of the England tour.

A sojourn Down Under seems to draw the curtains on storied careers. It did to Vengsarkar in 1992, the same effect was seen on Rahul Dravid and V.V.S. Laxman in 2012, and now Ashwin, Rohit and Kohli have joined this club. Cricketers are not immune to the promise of youth and the frailty of age, and debuts, retirements and being dropped are all inevitable.

If not a doomed clash against Australia, often the last full-stop is linked to an ICC event, and the current generation has four options: the World Cups (both ODIs and T20Is), the Champions Trophy and the World Test Championship. This wasn’t the case with an earlier bunch, locked into a lone World Cup or a significant bilateral series like the Ashes. Many would recall Javed Miandad being run out in a rousing World Cup quarterfinal at Bengaluru’s M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in 1996. It was the Pakistani great’s last international outing.