India's top 5 Test cricketers of all time
India have been playing Test cricket since 1932. In these 86 long years, the team has come a long way.
From the pre-independence time till the end of the 1960s, India produced some excellent players - CK Nayudu, Lala Amarnath, Polly Umrigar, Vijay Merchant, to name a few. However, as a team, they were not very strong; they used to struggle against the top teams of the world viz, West Indies, England and Australia.
It was from the 1970s that the Indian Test team slowly but surely started to become a formidable unit. The teams of the 1970s had great batsmen like Sunil Gavaskar, Gundappa Viswanath, Mohinder Amarnath and Dilip Vensarkar, alongside very good spin bowlers like Bishan Singh Bedi, BS Chandrasekhar and Erapalli Prasanna.
With the arrival of Kapil Dev on the scene in the late 1970s, the Indian team became even stronger. In the 1980s, they started challenging and winning against the best teams in the world. They still lacked consistency though.
Then in the 1990s, they became one of the best teams in the world at home, even if their away record remained poor. But in the 21st century, the Indian Test teams have been among the best in the world, irrespective of venue.
They have started having more than one or two match winners in the teams. As a result, they have started winning Test matches and series both home and away.
Many great players have represented the country in the history of Indian Test cricket. The contributions of these great players have been significant in making India a powerhouse in world cricket.
In this article, we have picked the five greatest Indian Test cricketers of all time. It is a very difficult job to select just five from so many great players, but we have tried our best to justify our choices.
#5. Kapil Dev
Matches: 131; Runs: 5248; Batting Average: 31.05; Hundreds: 8
Wickets: 434; Bowling Average: 29.64; 5 wk hauls: 23; 10 wk hauls: 2
Kapil Dev is India's greatest ever all-rounder, and one of their best match-winners of all time. Before Kapil arrived on the scene, the Indian bowling lineup was totally spinner-dependent. It was he who showed the world that an Indian pacer can also win them Test matches.
Kapil was not only a great pace bowler, but also a very competent lower middle order batsman. He scored more than 5000 runs and played many match-winning knocks with the bat.
He ended his career as the highest wicket-taker in Tests, with 434 scalps to his name. He held the record for almost a decade, before Courtney Walsh crossed him.
Kapil has been one of the best Indian cricketers in the history of Test cricket for sure.