The administrators, for most part, were busy firefighting but the men who mattered — the cricketers — made winning a habit with 9 triumphs out of the 12 Test matches played this year.
A 2-0 win in the Caribbean followed by 3-0 rout of New Zealand and 4-0 drubbing of England showed that Kohli’s boys never took their foot off the pedal.
The skipper’s 1215 runs with a hat-trick of double hundreds in three back-to-back series set a benchmark and the ‘Crazy Diamond’ Ashwin only took it a notch higher with 72 wickets in the season along with 612 runs.
There will be ‘Doubting Thomases’ and rightly so as they would like to wait how the team under the guidance of Anil Kumble performs when it hits road on foreign shores.
But then England looked out of sorts in India with below-par spinners in their ranks, Australia are going through a transformation having lost to South Africa, who in turn had looked clueless against India, only a year back.
The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in eating and while the jury is still out on India’s ability to win outside the sub-continent, it does not take away anything from the side’s fantastic performance during the last five months starting from the West Indies series.
There is no point in eulogising Kohli — the Match winner as it is well-known for the past five years — but what was phenomenal was the effortless ease with which he carried the burden of leading the Test team.
A team he created from scratch and it now has atleast five or six match-winners.
Ashwin’s metamorphosis from a defensive bowler to an attacker happened under Kohli. The eight five-fors and three 10-wicket hauls in this year’s Test matches placed him at the cusp of being quickest bowler to 250 Test wickets.
Sourced from agencies, feature image courtesy: indianexpress.com
