Rahul Dravid on Indian batters’ poor test cricket returns in recent times and how all-format cricket is linked to it.
One of the main causes of Indian batters’ current difficulties in Test cricket, according to former captain and head coach Rahul Dravid, is that they don’t have enough time to practise their red-ball abilities in all three formats of the game. They have lost two of their previous three home series—3-0 to New Zealand in 2024 and 2-0 to South Africa in November 2025—after spending 12 years without losing a home series.
“One of the things I understood as a coach, especially the guys that play all three formats, they keep moving from one format to the other,” Dravid said at the launch of the book The Rise of the Hitman: The Rohit Sharma Story in Bengaluru.
“There were times when we would get to a Test match three to four days before the match, and then when we start practising for the Test match, [and] when you look back at the last time that some of these guys had actually hit a red ball, it might have been four months ago or five months ago.
“That’s become really a challenge, how do you almost find the time to be able to develop some of the skills that are hard. To play on turning tracks, or play on seaming wickets, doing that for hours and hours in a Test match is not easy. It requires skill.”
Shubman Gill, the captain of India’s Test squad, recently expressed his opinion that the players were not given enough time to prepare for Test series and asked the BCCI to take this into account when planning the team’s itinerary.
“In my generation, when there were only two formats in the game, and there wasn’t really the idea of franchise cricket, there were a lot of times where I would have a whole month of practicing for a Test series and I would be able to play with the red ball, and I would be able to develop my skills,” Dravid said. “Now, one of the things that has become a bit tougher in red-ball cricket is a lot of our guys who play all the three formats, or who play the amount of cricket that they are playing, sometimes don’t have the time to be able to practise red-ball cricket as much.
“I think Shubman has kind of alluded to it a little bit, just recently, because I think he’s one who experienced that. He’s one who actually played recently for us in all of the three formats so I think he would have realised how difficult it is for him to actually gear up for the Test format.”