India's home invincibility gets its rudest shock

The goose has been cooked. The toughest place to win in international cricket has been conquered by a bunch of unassuming yet smart cricketers, who defeated India in their own den. New Zealand were expected to pose a stiffer challenge than Bangladesh, but no one in their wildest of imaginations would have thought that they would come to a place no one had conquered since December 2012 and whitewash India.

This was the rudest shock to India's home invincibility and it should serve as a blot in the careers of several revered cricketers. There was a lot of talk as the series wore on about how this Indian side was in a transition.

A good way to compare whether this side was transitioning or not is to go back and look at the side which lost to England in 2012. Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman had retired in the space of six months, of each other. It meant that the team had a few new faces, who needed to created a name for themselves.

Cheteshwar Pujara began brightly at number three, with a couple of hundreds raising hope that the transition there would be smooth. But the others around him showed a mortal side to them. Virender Sehwag and Sachin Tendulkar were not quite the players that they were a few years ago. Virat Kohli had showed that he could bat, both at home and overseas, but was playing in only his third series at home.

But India's greatest downfall in that series happened when they thought that dishing out square turners would be enough to knock England off and as it turned out, they got turned over in their own conditions in Mumbai where Graeme Swann and Monty Panesar produced the performances of their lives and Kevin Pietersen played a knock for the ages.

Cut to 2024 and the one thing that can be said that the presence of experienced players like Rohit Sharma, Kohli, R Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja did not make this a transitioning side.

Then how were India undone by New Zealand? How did a side with so much pedigree lose 0-3 to the Tom Latham-led side on surfaces that offered both seam and spin? The biggest factor that can be attributed to this series loss was the lack of game time against hardened opposition. Bangladesh tested India in a few phases, but the quality of the Indian players came through and it was enough to see the side through. Against New Zealand, the pressure when India batted or bowled was a lot more sustained. The visitors showed a resilience to stay in the game and also displayed a better way to play spin, which was a lot more rewarding.

Several loopholes were exposed in the series, but none was bigger than India's current ability to play spin. Barring Rishabh Pant and to an extent Yasashvi Jaiswal, none of the Indian batters showed an attacking instinct towards spin. Every other batter opted to defend for long periods of time and made the New Zealand spinners, look better than what they were.

It meant that India never found any momentum to their innings and were always behind the 8-ball. The one factor that could be attributed to India's reduced ability to play spin was because the batters do not get exposed to as many raging turners as possible, these days. However, the ability to playing spin is ingrained in every young Indian player from an young age and it seems difficult to imagine that current crop of players have forgotten to attack spin.

The 0-3 loss means that India's WTC final qualification has entered extreme danger territory and it will demand an extraordinary turnaround for India to win four matches out of five to make the cut. It could also be the one last glimpse we could get of Rohit, Kohli, Ashwin and Jadeja together in a five-match Test series overseas.

Ahead of that daunting task, all four of them have been theirs and their side's invincibility get its rudest shock.