Oct 18-22, 1992. Ravi Shastri bowled 17 overs in an innings against Zimbabwe — not surprising, given that Shastri has donned the all-rounder role many times before for India. But, this time was different — he was the sixth bowler. Zimbabwe brought the entire game to a halt — scoring 456 runs in a massive 212 overs. The agony of witnessing that stalemate far outweighed any sincere attempts of goodwill toward Zimbabwe for securing the draw against India. But crucially, those 17 overs that Shastri bowled as the sixth bowler were important overs that Kapil Dev or Manoj Prabhakar did not bowl.

Thirty three years after the humongous halt at Harare, Gambhir decided India needed six bowling options going into the test series against South Africa. It has not been a long time since a sixth bowler created a lot of furore — but that was Travis Head for his “finger on ice” celebration vs India at the MCG. But the Gambhir gambit — sacrificing a batter to shoehorn a bowling all-rounder — caused a lot more noise than Head’s pantomime. The optics on how the test played out did not help either. Sundar bowled a solitary over in the two innings combined in Kolkata. But that was a pitch that spun like Sri Lanka and bounced like South Africa. We investigate whether the Gambhir gambit would hold water on a more normal deck. Specifically, we look at the workloads on bowlers to determine whether a sixth frontline bowling option will be at all useful, or did India just carry a very limited batter who does not bowl much?

An era of decreasing bowler workloads

The average workload on bowlers has decreased substantially in recent times, all across the world and even more drastically in India. We look at data spanning three eras — the reverse swing era between 1980 and 2000, the great batting era between 2000 and 2015 and the batting hellhole since 2015 (caused by India spiking pitches at home and the wobble ball destroying batters everywhere else). Cumulatively, a typical test innings in India has lasted over 91 overs across the three eras. The great batting era particularly took its toll on bowlers — it took 98 overs on average for an innings to complete, well over the global average of 90 overs. The fortunes of Indian batters and bowlers would turn on its head from 2015 onwards. From being a batting paradise, a typical innings in India would last a tad below 80 overs — 2 overs fewer than the global average. It only became worse over the last five years — since 2020, the average innings has lasted 73 overs, a full 6 overs fewer than the global averages in this period. The disparities in the strengths of the Indian side and the touring units are well reflected in the average length of their respective innings: Indians have bowled 73 overs an innings since 2015, compared to a gory 88 overs by visitors. The length of the third and fourth innings of an Indian home game since 2020 has been a mere 57 overs. While the birth of the new era pooped all over Kohli’s hope of finishing with a 50+ average in test cricket, it also meant shorter stints under the baking sun for bowlers before they can put their feet up and sip on cool Gatorade (cigars and champagne if they played for Bazball England).

However, the relief provided by these reduced workloads is not distributed uniformly. The heavy-lifters — the two bowlers sending down the most overs in an innings — have seen a far more significant drop in labor than the third, fourth, or fifth options. Globally, the primary and secondary bowlers have gone from bowling 27 and 21 overs per innings in the great batting era to 25 and 20 in the current batting hellhole. By comparison, the fourth bowler’s load has barely budged, dipping from 14 overs to 13. The fifth bowler, meanwhile, has been stuck on a diet of seven overs from 1980 straight through to 2025 (Cam Green bowled exactly 13 overs across two innings in the recent Ashes Gabba test :P). This disparity is even starker in India. During the Great Batting Era, the first bowler averaged 30 overs an innings (Anil Kumble averaged 31 — respect to that man), which has since dropped by four overs to 26. The support cast seem to have only a marginal cut in screen time in comparison — the fifth bowler load drops by a single over from 7 to 6.

Ideally, as the innings shrinks, your best bowlers should shoulder pretty much the same load as before. We see the opposite: the first and second bowlers are the ones enjoying the biggest reduction in labor. You cannot merely stretch a spell to fit a spreadsheet; a fast bowler still requires a breather after five overs (unless their name is Neil Wagner), and spinners are rotated either because they bowled unchanged right from lunch to tea, or the batter grew comfortable facing them. Consequently, when an innings ends abruptly at 73 overs, it is the third or fourth spells of your first and second bowlers that vanish from the scorecard.

Could India have gotten away with only 4 bowlers?

India is just coming off a golden generation, spearheaded by the lethal triumvirate of Ashwin, Jadeja, and Bumrah. The “weakest link” in this attack was Axar Patel, who trudged around with a positively meek bowling average of 19.06 at home. While the debate is on the sixth bowling option for the current team, there is a strong case for not playing a fifth bowling option at all in the previous side. Compared to the 31 overs an innings by Kumble and 28 by Harbhajan (and remember, Harbhajan was Kumble’s second bowler more often than not) since 2000, Ashwin averages 22 overs an innings. Jadeja, Axar and Kuldeep have it even simpler — bowling 20, 15 and 14 overs each. Bumrah has bowled 29 times in India — he has bowled more than 20 overs in an innings exactly twice, once when Joe Root scored a double century in Chennai in 2021 and again in the Guwahati test against South Africa. Sharing the roughly nine overs per game usually bowled by Siraj amongst Jadeja, Axar, and Bumrah wouldn’t have blunted the attack’s edge. But it would have freed up space for a specialist batter — a resource the fragile Indian top order has desperately needed since 2020. Shami averaged about 13 overs a game when he was the second pacer; again, a workload that could have easily been absorbed by the rest of the pack. Ironically, India could have “Gautam-Gambhir”ed the fifth bowler instead of the sixth, potentially playing Hardik Pandya in tests, but using him only for four overs with the new ball and never bringing him anywhere close to the bowling crease every again.

Going into a Test match without a frontline bowler is a terrifying ordeal. Australia is currently wrestling with this exact conundrum regarding Nathan Lyon. Given how spicy the wickets Down Under have become, the temptation to move past the veteran spinner in favor of a fifth fast bowler is growing. Yet, the nightmare of a pitch flattening out and the pace attack being run into the ground has kept them from pulling the trigger. Australia has delayed this transition out of fear—and yet, we propose that India should have routinely taken the field with one fewer bowling option altogether. The workload on Indian bowlers during this golden run was remarkably consistent. Ashwin and Jadeja bowled 30 overs or more in fewer than a quarter of their home innings. Contrast that with Anil Kumble, who since 2000, was forced to deliver 30 overs every other innings. The modern pacers had it even easier: as noted, Bumrah and Siraj each crossed the 20-over mark in a home innings only twice.

Since 2020, there have been exactly four Tests where fielding a four-man attack might have blown up in India’s face: the Chennai test where Joe Root ground India for 190 overs; the stalemates at Kanpur and Ahmedabad against New Zealand and Australia respectively; and finally, the recent Test against South Africa (post-Ashwin’s retirement, of course). Crucially, however, only Root’s double-century ambush truly came out of the blue. The others were foreseeable. The draw against Australia, for instance, followed the “spitting cobra” at Indore; it was an open secret that a road awaited the teams in Ahmedabad to ensure that India could secure the series win, rather than fight it out on a lottery wicket.

For the most part, India could have selectively picked the fifth bowler for these specific anomalies, rather than letting a five-man attack become the default. The only other exception might have been the 2024 England tour, where India actively sought out better batting surfaces. But against the chaos of Bazball, having that extra cushion could make tactical sense. But for the rest? It was a question of how many cheetahs were needed to fell a deer.

The flexibility of an extra bowling option

Indeed, with Ashwin moving on, India will probably not be able to use the four bowler theory, at least until Washington Sundar fully matures as a bowler. However, it does make a strong case for the diminishing marginal utility of playing an extra bowler. That said, having extra bowling options gives quite a lot of flexibility. How the Indian bowling unit interoperates with each other is a prime example of this. Ashwin was the obvious “first bowler” of the previous generation — he was the first bowler in 48 of the 97 innings he bowled at home (over 49%), claiming 223 wickets at an average of 20.2. However, just by raw numbers, he is nowhere close to being the best first bowler for India — not even for his era. Bumrah and Axar average 9.5 and 9.6 for 18 and 27 wickets respectively as the first bowler (these are the best amongst any Indian bowler with 10 wickets as first bowler since 1980; only Jasubhai Patel averages lower at 8.8, but his last test was in 1960). While Bumrah has a very good claim to be the best pacer to ever play test cricket, this honour is purely a matter of self-selection. These two end up taking on a larger workload than Ashwin and Jadeja exactly on the days when they run through the opposition. The senior spin duo might be the ones bowling the dry overs on flat decks, thereby inflating their averages as first and second bowlers. Despite this rugged use, Jadeja averages 22.1 and 19.7 respectively as the first and second bowler, and Ashwin averages 21.6 as the second bowler.

The average workload as first and second bowlers backs the theory of selective use of Axar and Bumrah as first and second bowlers. Out of the 12741 balls Ashwin has bowled on home soil since 2015, 11685 have been as the first or second bowler spread across 81 innings — this amounts to above 24 overs an innings as the first or second bowler. In contrast, Axar bowls 20 overs an innings as the first or second bowler. The same number stands at 13 overs for Bumrah. This quite reasonably suggests that the way India used Ashwin as the first bowler is very different from how India have used Axar and Bumrah in the same role.

The Gambhir gambit

Finally, this brings us to the Gambhir gambit—and to be blunt, the numbers simply do not stack up. Historically, a sixth bowler delivers just 11 balls an innings. Washington Sundar, however, robbed us of 5 balls of pure bliss by delivering just a solitary over in the first innings of the Kolkata test (and even more heartbreakingly, none in the second).

The 11-ball statistic about the sixth bowler should be taken with a pinch of salt, as historical data is skewed heavily towards part-timers. For context, the career bowling averages of Root, Sehwag, Tendulkar, and Clarke are all superior to that of the typical sixth bowler, which hovers at a lofty 71 since 2000. A genuine all-rounder like Sundar provides better flexibility and could potentially shoulder a much heavier workload. But the Kolkata Test offered no canvas for such creative captaincy; the South African innings seemed to finish before it even started. The four Indian spinners combined for a total of 73 overs across two innings — less than 19 overs per man for the entire match. India could justify playing the four spinners if the track were an absolute road. In that scenario, you could cook the two opposition spinners in the sun for two days straight, while rotating your own quartet for 30 overs each—leaving them tired, but not burnt to the ground. But that wasn’t this match. India batted for fewer than 100 overs across both innings. Simon Harmer and Keshav Maharaj could basically bowl unchanged from either end without breaking a sweat. Ironically, India had dropped their fourth spinner in the flatter deck at Guwahati to play Nitish Kumar Reddy — whom they seemed reluctant to bowl much anyway.

While the Kolkata pitch caused the test to be entirely random, using 6 bowlers is a hard task even on normal wickets. Recall that an average innings in India has lasted for only 73 overs since 2020. This corresponds to the three Indian spinners bowling less than 20 overs each on average and the two pacers bowling below 10. Even with just 5 bowlers, their workloads are surprisingly light. At this point, it is certainly worth pondering whether India would be better served with an additional batting resource over an additional all-rounder.