You should not bat in India

India just dismissed Australia in the same time it takes you to execute a fart. There is already talk that the team is soft, when in truth they're just not that good, and it isn't just them. No one is making runs in India.

For most of India's history, it has been an absolute dream place to bat, and then sometime around 2010 it started to get tough, and then it went well below that and it is currently absolutely awful.

Any runs made there should be celebrated like we've found a new dinosaur.

And, it has not always been this way. India was historically the easiest place to bat in Tests.

Home and away teams for generations feasted on the only pitches that allowed you to average over 35 runs per wicket.

That is considerable, especially through the 90s when the global mark dipped. India was the place it was great to bat.

And now it is not from the easiest to the 8th best.

That is an incredible change.

You can see that for a long time runs in India were easier than runs everywhere else. And when the global drop happened due to the pace playing pandemic, India also dropped off.

That is not a coincidence, everywhere bar New Zealand and Pakistan have been hit.

Now, you will not be shocked that the away batters are struggling to find a single run inside India. It has been horrible to watch teams turning up there and just playing like the wicket is made of lava.

We have all seen it. And it is clearly getting worse. Each series a new batch of victims turn up and leave with fewer runs than those from before.

But when you put the home batters in, it doesn't get bad until the last three years.

At that point it gets pretty tricky for everyone, but before that it is the away teams pulling the record down.

If you just look at the away players compared to the average. You can see that until 2017 while players struggled to make runs when visiting India, it was at a very similar mark to global average.

From 2015 onwards something massively changes.

If you look at the entire history of Indian bowlers at home, you can see that these are the glory years.

As good as Indian batting has often been, Indian bowling has never had great attacks. Individual bowlers were not a problem, but an entire attack has never existed. You put this together with traditional batting-friendly pitches and the Indian trundlers had to fight so hard.

But 2015 is the important year here. So I wonder what happened then?

Well R Ashwin and Ravi Jadeja came together. This is every home year, and how many wickets were taken.

Ashwin was already flying at home from 2011, but it's 2013 when Jadeja joins him as a frontliner it gets real. They become the greatest spin bowling duo India has ever had, and perhaps the world.

This is just them, taking absolute bags of wickets every year while also boosting the batting and the ability for India have have five bowling options at home.

They are just simply magnificent.

Obviously the generation before them had Harbhajan Singh and Anil Kumble, who have more home wickets combined than Jadeja and Jadeja so far. But they didn't start at the same time. Where Ashwin and Jadeja started taking wickets within a year of each other.

But this shows how much better they are than Harbhajan and Kumble.

Not only do they have all those wickets, but they are averaging around 20. You have to go back to find Kumble, and Harbhajan is further back still. They were both good bowlers at home. They were nothing like this.

There is just no way to look at this and not think that this is something absolutely incredible. And you can also find Mohammad Shami and Umesh Yadav up here, who are representing another golden age of Indian bowling, for their pace.

Until 1990 Indian seam bowling meant Kapil Dev. Since then there has been an explosion of bowlers taking wickets with the seam.

But having Jasprit Bumrah, Umesh Yadav, Mohammad Siraj, Ishant Sharma, and Mohammad Shami at the same time is going from riding a tricycle to flying on the space shuttle.

You might argue that India have had better bowlers than now. Maybe you'd like Anil Kumble's wrist spin in there, perhaps the romance of Bishen Bedi still does it for you over Jadeja, or you could argue that Kapil Dev's overall package is better than the modern quicks. But as a bowling unit of five players, India's current bowling is by far the best they have ever had. I mean, this looks stupid how many of their modern bowlers have incredible records compared to those of the past.

Modern Indian bowlers are playing a different sport almost.

Now part of the reason for lower averages could be the BCCI spreading Tests to so many venues. But in truth, there is a global shortage of Test runs at the exact same time India has their greatest bowling lineup. So that feels far more likely the reason than a few Test out grounds bringing the averages down.

It is with no surprise that I tell you India is the best bowling team in the world in their home conditions.

But before you start thinking, well, of course, because they doctor their wickets and the whole two best spinners in the world thing. Let me add this, they are also the best bowling attack away.

They are simply the best bowling unit in the world. And when you go up against that at home, they have to check your dog tags to identify you afterwards.

There is something else here really fun. Most of the damage has been done by the spinners, with some excellent cameos from the quicks. And it has been the spinning pitches that have actually bothered people the most by a long way. Pitch doctoring talk has become part of Indian home series.

But the two worst teams in India have been Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

The caveat here is that those two teams have not been incredible batting in that time. But this does suggest this isn't the pitches spinning a lot, as they are used to that. This is the quality of the bowling on wickets that spin a lot.

And the two best touring teams with the bat have been England and Australia. Australia. AUSTRALIA. The team we just saw lose nine wickets quicker than sneeze.

In order to get a visa to tour India, it seems you have to waive your rights to score runs.