Team India takes fresh guard at home

Captain Gill is primed for new challenge; skippering a team that looks to bury the horrors of 2024-2025 season

- SWAROOP SWAMINATHAN @Ahmedabad

IN the last week of January 2025, the Narendra Modi Stadium welcomed Coldplay, the award-winning British band.

The capacity crowd were treated to two evenings of uplifting music, marked by hope, unity and the need to stick together in an increasingly divisive world marked by fracture, conflict and war.

After an Asia Cup filled with political innuendoes and abundant war metaphors, the twomatch Test series between India and West Indies, set to begin at the same Stadium from Thursday, will look to act as a balm for a mind still filled with handshakegates, nationalistic hubris, and celebrations centred around guns going off or fighter jets falling down.

It's also perhaps apt then that the match will begin on the 156th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, whose ideals of peace continue to inspire those who believe in a just and humane world.

The Indian team, of course, will start as favourites, but the cricket itself should be intriguing for a number of reasons.

This will be the first time the hosts will be without any of R Ashwin, Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma for a home season since 2011, when the Tamil Nadu spinner made his debut.

Since then, he had been an ever-present in home Tests. It kind of marks not just the end of an era but the beginning of a new one, even though the Indian team experienced the vacuum of playing without any of them in England.