Historically, India is a team where batsmen are hero-worshipped and bowlers are the ones who never get enough credit. Fans are not the ones to share all the blame for it. We've had terrific bowlers throughout the years but we never had a proper set of bowlers (including bench and backup) who could be relied on. Our test cricket history is 90 years old and funnily enough, Sachin Tendulkar (although a decent bowler) features in the list of top 50 test wicket-takers for India on 44th position with just 46 wickets.
Some experts based on Geographical aspects say that, after the partition of India and Pakistan, the batting talent stayed in India while we lost our bowling talent to Pakistan. It actually makes sense, because Pakistan has produced some of the best bowlers to ever grace the game. So, back to the title, until the famous spin quartet started playing for India (and Subhash Gupte too), bowlers rarely used to change games for us. Whatever stats and articles I've read from the past, Bedi and company were the first set of bowlers who hunted in packs for India (although they played together just once, still more than 1 of them played together many times). Post their retirement, we had Kapil Dev who made and many individual and team records with both bat and ball, but he lacked a consistent partner. Jawagal Srinath was the next great Indian fast bowler who formed a brief duo with Venkatesh Prasad, but they weren't matchwinners in the true sense.
Anil Kumble is called the biggest matchwinner among his generation of players by his teammates and yes he was one, his off-spinning counterpart Harbhajan Singh made a great spin bowling duo for years. They were joined by Zaheer Khan, a fabulous fast bowler, but as it always happened, he never had a consistent bowling partner. Many bowlers showed glimpses of greatness but were either inconsistent or got hit by injuries, and thus we never had a complete set of fast bowlers and spinners who could turn matches at any given stage.
Fast forward to the current scenario. In the past few years, what cricket fans across the world have seen never happened in the past. Starting with the departure of M.S. Dhoni from tests and Virat Kohli taking the captaincy, he handed the baton of winning matches to fast bowlers, something that rarely happened in the past. Along with a number of fast bowlers we had Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja who are perhaps the best spin bowling duo at the moment. But, again the focus is on the fast bowlers. Today we have Ishant Sharma, Mohammed Shami, Jasprit Bumrah, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, and Umesh Yadav as our first choice pack of pacers. Each of them possesses different skills and has been proven effective bowling together. We never had 5 main fast bowlers to choose from in tests, this was the problem of plenty Australia was known for when they had Glenn McGrath, Jason Gillespie, Brett Lee, Nathan Bracken, Michael Kasprowicz, and a number of great bowlers to choose from. They had a selection dilemma and whoever they picked was equally effective, and now it's time for India to face this happy problem. Apart from these 5 main bowlers, we have a solid bench strength across formats who have proven themselves whenever an opportunity arises. Shardul Thakur, Dhawal Kulkarni, Deepak Chahar, and now Mohammed Siraj, Navdeep Saini are a few to name who are putting a lot of pressure on our first choice pacers to perform well else their position would be jeopardized.
Like the mighty Australia of the past few decades, India now has a huge number of players who are unlucky not to have long international careers because the first team is exceptionally strong and the first team is putting in 100% efforts because there are great players and at times better players waiting to pounce on given chances. This is perhaps the best problem Indian cricket is facing in 90 years and hopefully, we keep suffering the problem for years to come.
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