What ails Indian batting?

What ails Indian batting? This is the question every Indian cricket fan is asking after the second test debacle against England. After all, we have been a batting powerhouse traditionally. Not so long ago we had five of the most prolific batsmen of all time in the same team - Sachin, Dravid, Laxman, Ganguly and Sehwag.

These were the greats who performed everywhere in the world - scored runs on swinging, seaming and bouncy pitches, that too against some of best and quickest bowlers like Brett Lee, Shoaib Akhtar, Glenn McGrath, Wasim Akram and Curtly Ambrose.

Now days, if you look around you won't find many great bowlers, there are only a handful like Anderson and Starc, Dale Steyn's powers are on the wane. In spite of not having great bowlers around, we are struggling.

This is not the first time these batsmen have failed in England, same thing happened in 2014. It is quite evident that problem lies with the technique and temperament as they had prior experience of the conditions. In this day and age, all of us have a lot of knowledge at our disposal and same is true for Indian team. Yes, they are aware about the technique which is needed to be successful in England.

One has to play close to the body and bide his time. You have to be tight in your defence and cannot play outside the off stump loosely. Most of the batsmen in the current series are getting out caught behind, either by keeper or in slips, which tells you they are playing away from their body. So why these highly acclaimed batsmen, barring Kohli to an extent, are not even learning from their mistakes?

Problem lies somewhere else, it lies with the muscle memory. Most of these batsmen play lot of limited overs cricket, that too mainly T-20 cricket. Recently, they played two months of IPL, where you have to slam-bang the ball from the word go.

The muscles develop a memory which tells you to go after the bowling, if you see anything outside the off stump just go after it. You get a tiny bit of room or if the ball is slightly pitched up, just go after it. It is almost habitual now, and as they say, 'old habits die hard'.

Unfortunately, the Test team selection nowadays also takes place on the basis of IPL performance, which is a literal example of an oxymoron. Hardik Pandya is a very good example of the same.

It works other way round as well, like in the case of Mayank Agarwal. He is scoring lot of runs in domestic competitions and for India-A, still he is no where close in the picture for Indian team selection.

The reason being that he has not been performing well in IPL, which according to some people, has better bowlers then what we have in domestic competitions. But the fact of the matter is that great fast bowlers of the current era hardly play in the IPL- James Anderson has never played, Starc has played just a few seasons and Broad does not play.

All our former greats also played limited overs cricket in some form or the other but their game's foundation was Test cricket. They grew up playing Test cricket, where they batted for hours and hours together.

That is where they developed the discipline which was harnessed by the experience they got later. It is time to go back to the old school of batting. A time when playing in the white uniform was considered to be respect-worthy. Probably this way India can solve its Test conundrum.