Given the recent strike rate of the ageing Kumble-Harbhajan combine - over 40 runs per wicket - India has nothing to lose and everything to gain by replacing them with young spinners।
Anil Kumble apparently requires a cracked, powdery, hard, bouncy, rough and under-prepared pitch to make any impression these days। In all other conditions, he struggles to take wickets. This has always been the case, but it seems to have got accentuated with advancing age and creaking joints. In the last two series, one at home and the other abroad, plus the first innings of the current Test against Sri Lanka, he has given away 1,051 runs for a measly 24 wickets - that's 44 runs per wicket.
Harbhajan Singh has hardly fared any better, giving nearly 40 runs per wicket in the same period। If you take away the Kanpur Test, where the pitch was so under-prepared that even Sehwag was unplayable, Harbhajan's record is in fact poorer than Kumble's. And yet Kumble and Bhajji, or the 'KumBha duopoly' as a reader of this column helpfully dubbed the pair, continue to be India's main strike bowlers.
If bowlers go at over 40 a wicket, it means the opposition is scoring over 400 on average per innings, and India can at best hope for a draw। In the current Test, it isn't just that Kumble bowled 37 overs without taking a wicket, or that Harbhajan gave away nearly 150 runs for his two wickets, it is the disdain with which all the Sri Lankan batsmen treated them, scoring at nearly 4 an over, and accelerating at will without seeming to be in any danger which signals a change of guard is overdue.
How different the so-called dead Colombo pitch looked when it was the Indians' turn to bat. Every ball had to be ground out as pressure mounted on the batsmen from both ends. Even if the newcomer Ajantha Mendis got only one wicket - and I believe he missed a second wicket by not appealing for an LBW against Ganguly who got a pad-bat - none of the batsmen could relax or score freely against him, which probably contributed to Muralitharan's bagful of wickets.
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