Former India head coach Rahul Dravid has compared Test cricket during his playing days to now. And to some people’s surprise, he’s labelled playing red-ball cricket now as more challenging. Dravid retired from Test cricket in 2012 and, after a 9-year wait, returned to it. Not as a player, but as a coach.
Challenges of being a modern batter
During his 3-year tenure as India’s head coach, Dravid realised how challenging Test cricket had become for the modern batter. In the initial phase of his career, T20 cricket didn’t even exist. Cut to now, it’s become the dominant format. The hierarchy of formats has changed. For viewers and even several players, T20 has become the main format.
Top batters like Yashasvi Jaiswal, Shubman Gill and Rishabh Pant are expected to excel in all formats. But what people don’t realise is that he often has less than one week to make the switch, in mindset and technique.
“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. There were times when we would get to a Test 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,” Dravid said at the launch of the book The Rise of the Hitman: The Rohit Sharma Story.
Dravid backs Gill’s demands
Talking about his playing days, Dravid stated that sometimes players had up to a month to prepare for an upcoming Test series. But nowadays, players hardly have a week to do so. Just like last year, India played two home Test series with just 3 and 5 days to prepare for them.
Following which, new Test captain Shubman Gill asked the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) to organise 15-day red-ball camps before every home Test series for better preparations. Dravid understands where Gill is coming from and endorses the idea himself.
“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. 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.
You look at the hitting part, and the way people are hitting today in white-ball cricket, it’s because they are able to practise it a lot more. A lot of these boys who spend two-and-a-half months in the IPL, all they are doing is practising how many sixes they can hit, so they are getting much better at it,” he added.
How WTC has changed pitches
Dravid also explained why we are seeing batting averages plummet and Test matches ending in 2-3 days. With the introduction of the World Test Championship (WTC) in 2019, teams have started to prepare more bowler-friendly surfaces to qualify for the final and win an ICC trophy (mace in this case).
This has resulted in captains and coaches going for extreme pitches. We recently saw this in the 2025-26 Ashes, where two matches ended in 2 days. The same has been happening in India throughout this decade.
“The importance of getting result-oriented wickets has become much more. In the old days, you just had to win a series against the team; you were not looking to win every Test match. Today the pressure on home teams to win all the games has increased because of the World Test Championship. That’s why I think you are seeing slightly more wickets which are favouring the bowlers too much. And not only in India, but everywhere.
“I have been only a coach when the World Test Championship is on and I have certainly seen that the pressure of those points has at times made you ask for result-oriented wickets. No one wants to go to extremes, but certainly results are important, especially in your home games.
Rahul Dravid approves of Shubman Gill’s 15-day camps for home Tests demand to BCCI Inside Sport India.
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