Young enough for a comeback, but old enough not to be picked

Ishant must be celebrated both for who he is and what he has done; Rahane’s future too seems uncertain

The passing of a generation and the advent of a new one is a bitter-sweet experience. You miss the heroes you have grown up with, but you also look forward to where their replacements will take the team. As someone said, if transition isn’t painful, you are not making progress!

It doesn’t happen overnight. Over a few years you realise that the team has a new feel to it, a different texture. A change that was in the future is happening now. It is like watching a batsman go about his business without fuss — suddenly you look up and see he has scored 30 or 40 runs.

It happened when India’s famed middle order and world-class bowlers bowed out of the scene. Sourav Ganguly and Anil Kumble bid farewell in 2008-09, followed by Rahul Dravid, V.V.S. Laxman, Virender Sehwag, Zaheer Khan, Sachin Tendulkar and Harbhajan Singh.

That brought what is referred to as the Golden Age, or the Tendulkar Era, to a close. Many of the next lot — the Dhoni-Kohli generation, if you will — had early careers that overlapped with the erstwhile greats; that is how generational shifts happen smoothly.

And now we seem to be at the starting point of another. Surely, Dhoni’s premature retirement from Test cricket in the middle of a tour of Australia in 2014 may have been unnatural, but as India prepares to take on England in the final Test of their interrupted series in July, the contours of Indian cricket are beginning to take on a new shape.

Ishant Sharma, not yet 19 on debut, with 300-plus Test wickets and 100-plus in the ODI may be only 33 and has grown from the young, energetic colt who troubled the world’s leading batsmen through sheer pace, into the senior pro who guided a new batch of young bowlers.

Will he play for India again? Unlikely, given the country’s riches in pace bowling and the promotion of some of Ishant’s younger colleagues into mentors themselves.