Have the tables turned on Indian team?

MUMBAI: Almost a quarter of a century back a young, promising Australian leg-spinner made his international debut against India at Sydney. He was smashed around by Sachin Tendulkar and Ravi Shastri with such disdain that for a while Shane Warne reckoned he wasn't cut out for Test cricket.

Over the years, even as most of the Indian batsmen kept getting ridiculed for their inability to play fast bowling on bouncy tracks, they earned praise in equal measure for playing spin well.

Times, however, have changed as Nathan Lyon's 12-wicket haul in the Adelaide Test showed on Saturday. India's ability to play spin, let alone quality spin, can now be openly questioned.

Former India skipper Ajit Wadekar feels T20 cricket may slowly rob us of one of our greatest strengths in cricket.

"After the arrival of T20s, our batsmen are lacking 'Test match' temperament. They want to blast the spinner out of sight all the time without realizing the importance of staying out there," Wadekar told TOI on Saturday.

"Wriddhiman Saha's shot (he stepped out of the crease and was bowled on the final day) was stupid!" the former India coach and selector lamented.

Legendary off-spinner Erapalli Prasanna blames India's recent vulnerability against spin on 'faulty technique'.

"They are using the 'bat pad technique'. They are reaching out to the ball and are exposing both sides of the bat to an edge. It is a dangerous way of playing an attacking spinner. They are going forward blindly, which means you are in a 'blind spot' while playing the ball - you haven't seen the ball after it has pitched, and will therefore edge it," Prasanna pointed out.

"They are looking to jab at the ball, and not playing it with soft hands," observed former India opener Lalchand Rajput, who has spent time with most of the batsmen in the current Indian team as a coach of the 'A' side.

Prasanna recalled how the likes of Vijay Manjrekar, Sunil Gavaskar and Gundappa Vishwanath showed him the ideal template to play spin.

"They allowed the ball to come onto the bat and rolled their wrists, making sure the ball would meet the middle of their blade. Virat Kohli is similar. He uses his bat like a TT racquet and looks to play towards mid-on."

The root cause of the problem, feels Rajput, is the absence of quality off-spinners in the domestic circuit which means the batsmen aren't used to playing them."

Wadekar endorses that view. "In our times, one used to play class spinners like Padmalkar Shivalkar and Rajinder Goel, who never got to play Test cricket, in domestic matches."

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