Guwahati didn’t just host its first Test match. It held up a mirror.
On one side
of the globe, Perth wrapped up the shortest Ashes Test in more than a century.
On the other, in India’s easternmost Test venue, the game moved at its old,
meditative pace: long passages of defence, slow-burn pressure, and momentum
that shifted not with chaos, but with calculation. And yet, beneath that
traditional rhythm, Guwahati quietly told a deeply modern story about India’s
decline as an untouchable home force — and South Africa’s growing comfort in
conditions that used to belong almost exclusively to the hosts.
This wasn’t
just a match. It felt like a verdict.
A Pitch
that Exposed More than it Offered
The
Barsapara surface, by any reasonable standard, was fair. Mornings demanded
watchfulness while the moisture lingered; once that burned off, the pitch
flattened, only later offering turn and variable bounce in windows rather than
in waves. On day one, 247 runs came for six wickets. That is not a minefield.
It is a Test wicket that rewards discipline and punishes impatience.
South
Africa understood that bargain better than India.
Their top
four all passed 35 without anyone reaching fifty, a statistical quirk but a
thematic clue. This has been South Africa’s series in microcosm: collective
competence without individual dominance, paired with a ruthless understanding
of when to cash in. Where Kolkata’s pitch broke up so dramatically that wasted
starts did not cost them, Guwahati gave them no such alibi. Here, their early
wastefulness simply delayed the moment when someone would seize control.
That
someone arrived in two acts: first Tristan Stubbs and Senuran Muthusamy, then
Marco Jansen.
Stubbs
and Muthusamy: The Graft Behind The Headline
If Guwahati
is remembered as Jansen’s Test, it should also be remembered as the match where
South Africa finally answered a long-standing question about themselves: what,
exactly, is Tristan Stubbs in this format?
For years,
Stubbs has been treated like a movable chess piece, shuffled from No. 3 to No.
7, a white-ball finisher forced into red-ball hierarchies that did not quite
know what to do with him. In Guwahati he spoke plainly: No. 3 is where he wants
to bat. And he played like a man trying to make a claim rather than merely fill
a vacancy.
His 49 in
the first innings wasn’t box-office. It was an essay in restraint. He crawled
to 13 off 37, blocked the ball into the ground, and treated Kuldeep Yadav and
Jasprit Bumrah not as threats to be counterattacked but as problems to be
solved ball by ball. Against Bumrah, 25 of the 32 balls he faced were dots;
only one truly beat him. He left no gap between bat and pad, trusted his
defence, and accepted that a Test innings is allowed to go “nowhere” on the
scoreboard for long stretches.
If Stubbs
showed that South Africa could grow a No. 3 the hard way, Muthusamy showed that
they had accidentally mislabelled a cricketer.
Picked for
this tour more as a bowling allrounder than a genuine batter — with Brevis and
Hamza watching from the benches — Muthusamy did the thing no one else in the
series had managed: he made a hundred. And he did it not with frills but with a
monk’s discipline. For long periods he scored only behind square, waited for
drift, waited for width, and watched India’s bowlers grow increasingly
impatient as the old ball lost its teeth.
There were
two slices of fortune — an edge that fell short of slip on 37, an overturned
lbw on 48 thanks to the faintest of UltraEdge murmurs — but all long innings in
the subcontinent are built on a small foundation of luck and a vast
architecture of patience. Muthusamy’s technique, his willingness to play late,
and his clarity about his scoring zones exposed how few of India’s younger
batters currently possess that kind of long-haul Test temperament.
That his
improved hand-eye coordination comes from time spent with a sports vision
specialist sums up South Africa’s method: they are treating this format as a
craft, not just as a schedule.
Jansen’s
Day out, India’s 68 balls from Hell
If the
first half of South Africa’s 489 was about quiet accumulation, the last phase —
and India’s reply — were soundtracked by the thud of ball into ribcage and
glove.
Jansen’s 93
off 91 balls was the innings that cracked India’s spirit. Until he arrived, 400
looked ambitious; by the time he left, disgusted with himself on 93 after
chopping on to Kuldeep, 500 felt inevitable. He wasn’t slogging on a road; he
was manipulating length on a pitch that had gone flat. His reach destroyed
India’s sense of “good length”. Balls that would have been defended by others
were lofted over long-on, mistimed bouncers still cleared the infield, and his
presence liberated Muthusamy into his own late-innings acceleration.
Then he
swapped bat for ball and turned Guwahati into a laboratory for short-pitched
hostility.
On a
surface that had looked placid enough for Washington Sundar and Kuldeep Yadav
to bat in relative comfort for 35 overs, Jansen carved out a window of chaos.
His spell of 8-1-18-4, largely with an old ball, produced an unprecedented haul
of bouncer wickets in Indian conditions. Dhruv Jurel, Ravindra Jadeja, Nitish
Kumar Reddy, Jasprit Bumrah — all fell to chest- and shoulder-high questions
they could not answer.
This wasn’t
just physical intimidation. It was the intelligent exploitation of his unique
release point. Jansen can bowl a bouncer from a metre fuller than most quicks,
compressing decision-making time and blurring that fraction of a second between
“duck” and “hook”. On a day when the pitch still allowed defence by orthodox
means, India’s dismissal ledger reads less like a scorecard and more like a
psychological profile: panic under pressure.
No
dismissal captured that better than Rishabh Pant’s.
Pant as
symptom, not cause.
A charge
down the track. A hack across the line. An edge. A burned review. All of this
when he had faced seven balls. All of this with India 105 for 4 in reply to
489, 1–0 down in a two-Test home series they could not afford to lose.
We’ve seen
Pant do this before. He has built a career — and won India Test matches — by
transgressing what orthodoxy promotes as “good sense”. He danced down to faster
bowlers early in his innings in England on flat pitches, shifted lengths,
disrupted plans, and on his day turned conservatism into cowardice and courage
into currency.
But in
Guwahati, the equation was different. This wasn’t a rampant attack with four
quicks and a devilish pitch. This was a day-three surface still quite capable
of sustaining conventional batting, against an attack with a single quick in
god mode and two spinners whose menace grew in proportion to the scoreboard
pressure.
Pant’s shot
was not just reckless; it was symbolically misaligned. It felt, in that moment,
less like a calculated counterpunch and more like a reflex — the muscle memory
of a side that has spent the last year trying to blast its way out of
structural problems.
It would be
easy to pin this collapse on one man’s temperament. It would also be
fundamentally wrong. Those “68 balls from hell” between 95 for 1 and 122 for 7
were the combustion point of many deeper currents: selection philosophies,
tactical habits, and a long flirtation with surfaces that have insulated
India’s spinners from a fuller skill set.
The Myth
of the Invincible Indian Spinner
The most
uncomfortable truth Guwahati whispered into India’s ear was this: their
spinners are no longer automatically the best-equipped in these conditions.
They may still be the most decorated. They are not, at the moment, the most
adaptable.
Simon
Harmer’s series has been a quiet masterpiece. In Kolkata, on a pitch that
turned square and spat unpredictably, he was unplayable in the conventional
“Test in India” sense. In Guwahati, on red soil that held together for far
longer, he was something rarer: an offspinner who could slow the ball down into
the 70s and low 80s, hang it above the eyeline, and trust his overspin and
drift to do the rest.
The
comparison with India’s fingerspinners was stark. Graphics told you Harmer and
Keshav Maharaj operated with average speeds around 83kph, dipping down into the
high 70s; Jadeja and Washington spent long stretches in the low 90s, their
slowest balls still quicker than South Africa’s “stock” deliveries. Harmer
could bowl loopy offbreaks that dipped, bit, and kissed the outside of KL
Rahul’s bat, or quicker ones that hurried the cut. Jadeja, for all his
greatness, is built around a different template: high speed, attacking the
stumps, harnessing natural variation from the surface rather than manufacturing
it in the air.
Shukri
Conrad’s observation was pointed without being arrogant: South African
spinners, he suggested, are forced to learn their trade on pitches that do not
turn much. In those conditions, you either grow guile or you go missing. In
India, by contrast, finger spinners are increasingly conditioned by square
turners where air speed and relentless accuracy are enough to win most days.
The result?
On flat
surfaces that need craft rather than just control, India’s current crop looks
oddly underdeveloped.
Washington
Sundar’s fourth-morning spell in South Africa’s second innings, when he finally
dropped into the mid-80s and used heavy overspin to find Bavuma’s glove, hinted
at what is possible if they adjust. But it came too late and under the pressure
of a mountainous deficit.
Kuldeep
Yadav: The Underused Antidote
If Harmer’s
series has been a mirror, Kuldeep has been the answer that India keep walking
past.
On the
first day in Guwahati, he was everything their finger spinners were not: loop,
dip, variation through the air, spin both ways, and a natural exploitative
relationship with a pitch that offered just enough. He took three wickets and
repeatedly forced South Africa’s batters to commit early, only to find the ball
dipping under or skidding past their bats.
And then,
curiously, he was marginalised.
Pant gave
him a seven-over burst split by a change of ends, then never really let him
settle into a long spell in either innings. In a three-spinner attack, with
India already chasing the game, the fear of leaking runs seemed to trump the
hunger for wickets. Kuldeep, who thrives on rhythm and repetition, was turned
into a change-up rather than a central threat.
There is a
broader question here. Has India, in their square-turner period, drifted into
viewing wristspin as a luxury rather than a necessity? Kuldeep, Axar, Jadeja,
Washington — they don’t lack for options, but they increasingly lack for
diversity of method. On helpful pitches, Jadeja and company will still run
through sides. On a flat deck, the ability to bowl long, attacking spells with
loop and overspin suddenly looks like a vital, and missing, resource.
Selection,
structure, and the allrounder temptation
It’s
fashionable, in the aftermath of a defeat, to reverse-engineer outrage into
selection hindsight. Guwahati invites a subtler reading.
India’s XI
was not some wild experiment. It was, give or take Nitish Reddy’s selection,
close to their strongest available side within their current worldview. Jurel
is in the team on sheer weight of red-ball runs; Washington and Jadeja at 5 and
6 are not unjustified when you look at the trajectory of their batting careers;
Axar Patel lurks as yet another three-dimensional option. It just happens that
India are living through a historical moment where they have more spin-bowling
allrounders of Test quality than any other team in the world.
The
temptation to play all of them is understandable. The consequences are now
becoming visible.
Batting
orders get awkward. Genuine specialists get squeezed. Seam-bowling allrounders
like Reddy are picked with the idea of long-term development but then barely
used with the ball. And when collapses arrive, the supposed safety net of depth
feels more like an illusion than insurance.
More
importantly, this composition has shaped how India think about bowling. If
Jadeja, Washington and Axar are all in or around the squad, and all share
similar strengths — high speed, unerring accuracy, the capacity to exploit
square turn — then the system will naturally select for those traits and
under-select for slower, more flight-heavy operators. Over time, that doesn’t
just affect who gets picked; it affects what kind of spin India knows how to
bowl.
The
toss, the series, and the magnifying glass
None of
this means India have blundered their way into oblivion. It does mean they’ve
lost the right to assume that conditions at home will always cover their flaws.
The toss
has hurt them. They have lost eight of the last nine, to strong visiting sides,
on both raging turners and truer pitches. In Kolkata they effectively fielded
ten men for most of the match. In Guwahati they bowled first on a mirror-like
wicket and batted under a cloud of scoreboard pressure and dwindling daylight,
with 10 overs lost over the first two days to early sunsets.
In such
contexts, every mistake feels bigger than it might otherwise be. Pant’s rush of
blood, Jaiswal’s fatal cut shot, Sudharsan’s misjudged pull, fielders not quite
getting to chances — all are now being viewed through a magnifying glass that
enlarges blemishes and shrinks balance.
It’s
important to remember that magnifying glasses distort as much as they reveal.
India are
transitioning away from an all-time great batting generation, bedding in a new
keeper, and adjusting to life after R Ashwin. They still have pacers of
generational calibre in Bumrah and Shami (when fit), and they still have enough
depth to field two different top sevens that would walk into most Test XIs.
But
Guwahati, and this South Africa series, underline something that can no longer
be ignored: the rest of the world has caught up in India-like conditions, and
in some respects — speed variation, flight, adaptability on flatter pitches —
has surged ahead.
What
Guwahati really told us
So what, in
the end, did this debut Test in Guwahati show?
- That Test
cricket, even in 2025, can still be a slow burn, where the crucial sessions are
less about chaos and more about who better understands the long game.
- That
South Africa, for the first time in 25 years, have constructed a side capable
of not just surviving in India but controlling terms: a towering fast bowler
who can dominate on flat pitches, a trio of spinners with extensive experience
on unhelpful surfaces, and batters prepared to suffer for runs rather than
chase scoring rates.
- That
India’s year of home discomfort is not a freak accident of bad tosses and dodgy
sessions, but the logical outcome of strategic habits: over-reliance on square
turners, a spin cupboard stocked with similar tools, and a selection philosophy
that sometimes confuses having many allrounders with having the right ones for
the moment.
Barsapara
did its job. It produced a pitch worthy of a first Test, one that had
“something for everyone” in the old-fashioned sense. South Africa took that
something and turned it into a series win. India took it and saw, perhaps for
the first time in a long time, that home advantage is no longer an entitlement
but a puzzle.
The real
question after Guwahati is not why India lost this Test, or even this series.
It’s
whether they are willing to reimagine their spin strategy, their selection
balance, and their risk appetite in a way that ensures Guwahati is remembered
as a turning point — not as another entry in an expanding catalogue of home
defeats that everyone is too proud, or too nostalgic, to properly understand.
Thank You
Faisal Caesar
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