3 Reasons Why India lost Border Gavaskar Trophy 2024-25

Team India could not retain the Border Gavaskar Trophy and as a result also failed to qualify for the World Test Championship in June 2025. After winning the first test match, India ended up losing the five match series 1-3 after a series of events including defeats in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney. The loss in the final test match in Sydney is hard to accept as India had a good chance of a win after taking the lead in first innings and also it was Australia who had to bat last.

Here are the reasons for India’s loss to Australia-
1. Team Selection
In the first test at Perth, Indian team included three specialist seamers and two spinners. Indian won the first test by 295 runs and continued with 3 pacers and 2 spinners for the rest of the series as well. India could have done much better had they included a specialist batter to boost batting order in place of a spinner. If not extra batsman, India could have added another pacer in place of spinner to reduce burden on other fast bowlers especially Jasprit Bumrah. It was also surprising to see that senior players like Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane who had played previous series in Australia and also had recently scored runs in domestic cricket had been ignored.

2. Batting Failure
Inconsistency and inability of the batsman to convert start into a big score proved to one of the main reasons for India’s series loss down under. Although players like Yashasvi Jaiswal and Nitish Kumar Reddy were convincing with the bat, other players could not contribute much . India were bowled out under 200 runs six times in 10 innings. Senior Players Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma failed to have an impact in the series and could hardly spend much time at the crease against the Australian bowlers.
As the series progressed, India were forced to do a lot of changes in the batting order. Rohit joined the team after missing the first Test and came on to bat in the middle order. But Rohit could not score much runs in that position. After that, they had to allow Rohit to open the innings and as a result, the top order could never settle, resulting in the loss of form for KL Rahul. It is hard to believe that Rohit scored only 31 runs in six innings with even the likes of Jasprit Bumrah and Akash Deep managing to score more runs than him.

3. Over-reliance On Jasprit Bumrah
While Jasprit Bumrah was the player of the series with a total of 32 wickets at an average of 13.06, other bowlers around him were not up to the mark. Mohammad Siraj did not live upto expectations while Akashdeep and Harshit Rana could not make the most of the opportunity provided to them in this series. Ultimately, in the fifth test, Bumrah got injured due to excess workload and his absence in the Australia second innings meant Australia chased down the target with ease.