ACS Overseas First-Class Annual 2017

India in 2016/17 India was the world’s busiest Test side in 2016/17 and 2017, playing as many as sixteen matches and with remarkable success, suffering only one defeat and recording no fewer than thirteen wins. Not surprisingly, by the end of the 2017 season the team’s well-deserved reward, having been in second place a whisker behind Pakistan twelve months previously, was to find itself sitting proudly atop the Test Championship table, well ahead of South Africa in second place. India’s Test commitments began with a three-match rubber against New Zealand. It was perhaps no surprise that this resulted in three very comfortable wins for the home side; but the next visitors, England, honoured with a full five Tests, were expected to offer sterner opposition. The high-scoring, evenly fought draw in the first Test suggested that this might indeed be the case; but thereafter, England simply had no answer to the sheer weight and power of the Indian batting. It was not so much that England’s batsmen failed; even at the end of a long, hard rubber they were still capable of running up scores of 400 and 477 in the last two Tests. But India replied to those totals with 631 and 759-7d and won both matches by an innings to complete an entirely convincing 4-0 demolition – and incidentally bring a downbeat end to Alastair Cook’s national record reign of 59 Tests as captain. In a high-scoring rubber India’s captain Virat Kohli stood out by himself as a run-getter with 655 at 109.16; but the victors perhaps owed an even greater debt to the spinners Ravindra Jadeja and Ravichandran Ashwin, who claimed respectively 26 wickets at 25.84 and 28 at 30.25. A predictably easy victory in Bangladesh’s first-ever Test in India meant that the side extended its unbeaten run to a national record of nineteen games. But the next and final visitors in a packed season, Australia, proved an altogether different proposition – at least to start with. In the first Test India were well and truly out-spun by the controversial slow left-armer Steve O’Keefe, who claimed exceptional match figures of 12-70, including a spell of 6-5 in 24 balls as the Indian first innings crumbled from 94-3 to 105 all out. A three-day defeat by a massive 333 runs was the result; but in the remaining three Tests O’Keefe proved less effective. Nathan Lyon took up some of the slack but not enough, as Jadeja and Ashwin asserted themselves and India claimed the second and fourth Tests to emerge as a 2-1 winners of an excellent rubber. During 2016/17 all India’s matches had been at home, an obvious advantage for a side that does not always travel well. But during the 2017 ‘off’ season the team carried its excellent form overseas and earned crushing victories – two by an innings and one by over 300 runs – in a three-Test rubber in Sri Lanka. India’s record in 2016/17 and 2017 showed beyond doubt the supremacy, at least in south Asian conditions, of a side combining high-class batting and a spin department that is superbly effective both in attack and defence. Yet there remains a nagging doubt about India’s credentials farther afield, one not really allayed by victory in the West Indies in 2016. The real examination will come with forthcoming scheduled visits to South Africa (2017/18), England (2018) and Australia (2018/19). On the home front, the Indian first-class season of 2016/17, as a whole, comprised no fewer than 142 matches, comfortably a record for any country other than England (and but for the Delhi smog it would have been 144). Apart from the Ranji and Duleep Trophies (122 and 4 matches respectively) and the Irani Cup game, there were four tours by full ICC members involving 13 Tests and one other first-class match, and, at the very end of the season, an Intercontinental Cup game between the runaway leaders Afghanistan and Ireland. In purely domestic terms, the outstanding event of this crowded season was the achievement of Gujarat in claiming the Ranji Trophy for the first time after having taken part since the inaugural tournament back in 1934/35. 91