Bits and Pieces : The friendliest cricket podcast · LLLC

Ep 154: 60 overs of hell... 10 years of heaven

·1 hr 9 min·4 clips

Nitin argues India lost because its fast bowlers were nowhere near Australia’s four seamers.

Prashant TP opens with a birthday-party image. It starts out playful, but the metaphor quickly becomes a way to say India’s Test run was a real era, not a blip. The panel treats the last 10 years like one long celebration that has finally crashed. The conversation keeps circling back to the recent results, because the slump makes the earlier dominance feel even bigger. From there, the hosts move into a larger argument about what held India together across the decade. They say the batting changed around more often. They also say the bowling stayed more consistent. A set of numbers gets pulled in to show that bowling averages barely moved across the two halves of the decade. That leads to a sharper point about how ruthlessly bowling changes were handled. Ashwin comes up in the overseas-selection tension. Kuldeep Yadav is named as one of the obvious what-ifs. The panel talks over itself a bit, which fits the subject better than it should. The energy is less lecture, more shared memory. Johannesburg becomes one of the main reference points. Bhuvneshwar Kumar’s role in that Test is remembered as a real contribution, not a footnote. The hosts also dwell on a memorable opening burst from an Indian bowler. That spell is described as special, the kind of fire India had not seen for a long time. A late image of awkward, exaggerated movement underlines how vivid the bowling memory still is. The episode ends by folding the nostalgia back into thanks, asking listeners to rate, share, and keep the show moving. It leaves the sense that India’s decade of dominance is best understood through the bowlers who kept making it possible.

As heard by us

A lively look back at India's decade of Test excellence, with the bowlers often saving the side.

Bits and Pieces frames a look back at India's last 10 years of Test cricket through a long birthday-party metaphor, and the main point comes through clearly: this was a stretch of real, sustained excellence, with the bowlers often having to steady things when the batting kept…

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You want a friendly, noisy rewind of India’s decade of Test dominance.

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