The Indians find themselves in a hole. The World No. 1 is down 1-0 after the first Test of a three-match series and, worse, does not seem to possess an attack that could enable them stage a comeback.
The journey from Galle to Colombo would have been a quiet one for Team India. Mahendra Singh Dhoni and his men took a day off from practice in the Sri Lankan capital on Friday. With the second Test beginning at the Sinhalese Sports Ground here on Monday, this is clearly the time to find solutions.
Yet, is there any way out of the mess with the ball?
The Indian debacle in the first Test at Galle was a shock to the system. If India is the World No. 1 in Tests, then it should have greater depth and balance in its attack.
Despite the reverse in the first Test, India has the quality in its batting to turn around but there are huge doubts about the side's bowling resources.
An overdose of abbreviated forms of the game, including the cash-rich Twenty20 league, has hurt the development of promising young bowlers, both pacemen and spinners, for Test cricket.
If a young bowler is exposed to Twenty20 cricket in the formative years of his career, his thought process undergoes a dramatic change. The experienced bowlers might be able to handle the switch. The youngsters will struggle.
With Zaheer Khan injured, the Indian shortcomings came to the fore at Galle. Coach Gary Kirsten made a good point when he said several pacemen — around 15 to 16 of them — had just added to the numbers in
the Indian team over the last two years; they had failed to make an impact.
Someone with genuine ability like Santhakumaran Sreesanth appears to be jumping from one problem to another. If he is not in the middle of a disciplinary controversy, he runs into fitness concerns. There have been far too many false starts in Sreesanth's career.
Even those who promised to stay long, men such as Rudra Pratap Singh, have drifted away from the centre-stage. Some of them deliver in the Indian Premier League but come up short for India.
There are a welter of pacemen in the Indian domestic scene. How many of them are really good enough? Numbers do not determine quality.
Hopefully Abhimanyu Mithun will change the trend. The zestful paceman had his moments in the first Test. Ishant Sharma picked himself up after a disastrous first day but then as a spearhead — Ishant finds himself thrust into the role — has to strike when it matters.
Leading spinner Harbhajan Singh should not have figured in the first Test if he had not recovered completely from a viral fever. It was eventually his call. The off-spinner appeared a shadow of his former self.
And Pragyan Ojha has a long way to travel in Test cricket. He lacked basic control over line and length and hardly appeared to have a plan in mind. The lack of an arm-ball undermined his chances and he failed to change his angle effectively against the left-handers.
Yet, Ojha is among the stars of the Twenty20 game. For spin bowlers, success in Test cricket is a lot about bowling long, consistent and accurate spells of immense concentration; the iconic Muttiah
Muralitharan is a prime example of someone who could bowl tirelessly for lengthy periods. Once a spinner achieves control, then he can try out the variations. But for spinners revelling in the shorter forms of the game, Test match cricket can be hard.
There is also a belief in the Indian camp that leg-spinner Amit Mishra, the other spinner in the squad, is rather slow off the pitch. In the land of the immortal spin quartet, where are the spin bowlers?
Actually, India has not found a replacement for leg-spin giant Anil Kumble — India's foremost match-winner in Tests. His absence has left a void that could be impossible to fill. When he operated with that burning intensity of his, the attack had a different look about it. He tested the batsmen with his length, spin and bounce, intimidated them mentally.
In the first Test at Galle, the Indian bowling appeared anything but threatening.
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