Team India's impenetrable fort has also been broken. The supremacy of Team India, which has won every Test series at home for the last 12 years, has now ended. The reign that was going on for the last 4331 days has ended. With the 113-run defeat in the Pune Test match against New Zealand, Team India also lost the series. The main reason for Team India's defeat has been the failure of the batsmen, but now another reason has also come to light, which will surprise. This is directly related to the defeat against England 12 years ago and this reason is star all-rounder Ravichandran Ashwin. Apart from this, a connection of Jasprit Bumrah has also come to light.
Since the defeat against England in 2012, Team India had won 18 consecutive Test series at home and a major reason for this was the tremendous performance of the Indian spinners, led by Ravichandran Ashwin. Along with Ravindra Jadeja, he had made the fort of Team India impenetrable but this time it was broken and Ashwin's performance has also emerged as a big reason for this. It would be wrong to say that only Ashwin is responsible for this defeat, while he did wonders in almost every Test series, but his failure in this series proved fatal for Team India.
This can be understood very well from statistics, which is shocking. In the 4 innings of this series so far, Ashwin has taken only 6 wickets and his bowling average is 43.50. That means he got one wicket after scoring 43.50 runs. This is Ashwin's second worst bowling average in all the Test series he has played on Indian soil in his career. The worst average of Ashwin's career in the home Test series has been 52.64. His performance came in the Test series against England in 2012. Coincidentally, Team India had lost against England and now the same situation has happened against New Zealand also.
These figures not only show that Ashwin's performance was not good in this series but it also shows the greatness of this legendary off-spinner that for the last 12-13 years he has consistently performed brilliantly in the home series, on the basis of which Team India was successful in winning 18 consecutive test series. Just before this series, Ashwin had done wonders with ball and bat against Bangladesh and was chosen Player of the Series. In such a situation, if Ashwin has had a bad series, the entire blame cannot be placed on him.
Not only this, such a coincidence of defeat has also been associated with star fast bowler Jasprit Bumrah, which is difficult to believe. In fact, before this series, Bumrah had played only 3 test matches against New Zealand while being in Team India. Of these, 2 matches were played on the 2020 New Zealand tour and the third in the 2021 World Test Championship final. Team India had lost all three matches. After this, Bumrah played both the test matches in this series and Team India lost in both. That means Team India has lost all the 5 tests in which Bumrah is playing against New Zealand. Not only this, when the New Zealand team came to India in 2021, Bumrah was not a part of that series and Team India won the series 1-0.
