113 All Out in 39.3 Overs: India A's Old Weakness Returns on a Green Top in New Zealand

At 3:47 in the morning in Abu Dhabi, a voice note landed on my phone. It came from a night-shift worker in Ahmedabad who was checking the New Zealand scoreboard during his dinner break. He said, "Sir, five ducks already, and my shift hasn't even ended." In another folder of mine sat a message from Chennai: "There's nothing in the pitch, we batted badly." One scoreboard, two different stories. India A bowled out for 113 in 39.3 overs, five ducks, and only four batters reaching double figures all innings. The overnight fan desk taught me that fandom is a night shift of hope — and the first question that shift always asks is whether the fault lay with the pitch or with the batters.

After calling twenty matches in an empty Zayed Cricket Stadium, I built a habit: listen to the first fifteen overs before opening the numbers. In 2026, with the seats empty and piped crowd noise fixed at 65 decibels, the sound of bat on ball still told you whether the pitch was alive or flat. Absence has its own sound. For this New Zealand morning I had no video, only a scorecard and thirteen messages — but modes of dismissal do the same job a stadium's acoustics do.

This is not a full Test, and it needs saying plainly. It is the opening first-class fixture of a New Zealand tour, NZ A versus IND A, the kind of game that gets called an unofficial Test. Red ball, four or five days of structure, but second-tier squads. India A's batting card carried KL Rahul, Yashasvi Jaiswal, Sai Sudharsan, Devdutt Padikkal, Washington Sundar and captain Dhruv Jurel; the attack had Mukesh Kumar, Akash Deep, Anshul Kamboj and Nabi. On the other side, Simon Keene's 5/24 cut the innings into two halves — Sudharsan and Jurel at the top, Nabi, Akash Deep and Mukesh at the tail. By stumps New Zealand A were 135/3, built on a 132-run opening stand. India A took three wickets in seven deliveries in the last session — the only genuinely good news of the day.

Before reading this scorecard, one piece of history has to be placed on the table, because without it 113 means only half of what it means. India have played 25 Tests in New Zealand and won five — a 20 percent win rate, with 10 defeats and 10 draws. No away Test has been won there since 2026, and the last series win was also 2026. Since 2026, India's total Test wins in New Zealand number one. On the 2026 tour, not a single innings across four passed 250. So 113 is not a fresh accident; it is the next point on a very old line.

This innings did not fall slowly. It fell in the first session, against the new ball. A hundred and thirteen in 39.3 overs works out to 2.86 an over — in Test cricket that is not the signature of disciplined bowling so much as of a batting order frozen at the crease. Five ducks and only four double-figure scores tell you the wickets came in clusters, not in ones and twos. The modes of dismissal say even more: most of the top order was caught behind the wicketkeeper or in the slips. Sudharsan's duck was the exception to that pattern; nearly everything else belonged to it. Catches behind the bat mean the ball was finding the edge — seam and swing were both operating, and the batters had too little time to react.

Look at the strike-rate spread, because the real story lives there. Dhruv Jurel made 1 off 13 balls, a strike rate of 7.7. Yashasvi Jaiswal made 17 off 45, 37.8. Devdutt Padikkal made 32 off 77, 41.6. That is not slow batting. That is stuck batting — occupying the crease without scoring. When a batter faces that many balls for that few runs, it does not mean he fought hard; it means he could not tell which ball to play and which to leave. Against a moving ball, that indecision is the most expensive trade in the game, because at one end the runs dry up while at the other the bowler settles into his line.

Padikkal's 32 was the most honest innings of the lot, and its honesty is also its limit. Thirty-two off 77 is a survival knock, not a match-shaping one. When the most patient batter in the top order is operating below 45, control of the tempo passes entirely to the bowler. He did not collapse, though; he stretched the innings far enough that the last three wickets fell after him. Small thing, but Test cricket is built out of small things.

In the middle of all this, Yash Rathod's unbeaten 44 off 49 balls at a strike rate of 89.8 reads as a different kind of statement. Thirty of those 44 runs came in boundaries — three fours, three sixes, roughly 68 percent of his output — while the team was subsiding at 2.86 an over. One batter scoring at 89.8 while the side crawls at 2.86 is a deliberate attempt to break the bowler's rhythm, not an accident. When wickets are falling, there are two roads: become a wall, or attack. Rathod chose the second and it worked. One innings does not establish class, though — it is a form signal, not a verdict. His next two or three red-ball innings will tell us whether this was a considered method or a single day's risk that paid off.

Simon Keene's 5/24 is the cleanest number of the day because it has both ends in it — the Sudarshan-Jurel pair at the top and the Nabi-Akash Deep-Mukesh cluster at the bottom. A bowler who breaks the front of an order and the tail on the same day is not doing it on swing alone; he is doing it on length. One caution applies here. Five for 24 with the new ball on a green top tells us nothing about what he does on a flat deck. This is the record of a bowler whose edge rises and falls with the conditions.

India A's seamers took three wickets in seven deliveries in the final session. One reading is that the pitch came back to life as the day wore on and India's seamers know how to use that. Another reading is that New Zealand A's lower order was tired and the real story there was fatigue, not bowling. I do not have the data to separate those two, so I will treat it as a possibility, not proof.

Now the part where the most common story turns out to be the weakest. "The pitch was unplayable" is a claim this scorecard does not support. New Zealand A's openers put on 132 for the first wicket. If the surface had been one on which nobody could stand, that partnership does not happen. What is true is that the pitch offered help early — green top, new ball, moisture — and then settled. India A lost a batting contest, not a surface contest. Sharjah gave me a microphone and taught me to leave room for the crowd, because a crowd will always tell you what the pitch is doing, whether or not you agree with it. In the same way, the 132-run stand is the honest witness to that surface, not the 113 on the board.

The second thing the report left out entirely: the toss. We do not know who won it or what they chose. If New Zealand A won the toss and bowled, India A were pushed into batting first on a green top, and the "ominous" framing does them an injustice. If India A chose to bat, it becomes a decision error. That gap is not small; it is the largest unanswered question in the whole story.

The third thing, and perhaps the most important — this is not India's senior Test side. The presence of KL Rahul and Yashasvi Jaiswal in an A side tells you this tour is being used as red-ball preparation and workload management. Reading a single duck in such a match as a form verdict is a mistake, because we do not know what that player's fitness was saying, how many days earlier he had landed, or what his brief was. Treat an A-team result as a signal, not a ruling.

I know how these mornings work. Emotion arrives first and reasoning follows. The word "ominous" sells, because it connects to a thirty-year-old record. And that record genuinely is frightening — five wins in 25, one win since 2026, nothing since 2026. History is not lying. But history is not promising a repeat every morning either. What repeats is structure, and the structure here is that Indian batters make their key decisions too early and too slowly in the first ten overs of a new-ball spell. In New Zealand both happen at once, and that combination is what kills.

So what is the real measure of success on this tour? Probably not wins. Four innings in 2026 stayed under 250, which makes crossing 250 the first milestone. The second: how many of the top five are caught behind the wicketkeeper or in the slips in the first session. The third: the run rate in the first ten overs — because batting near 3.5 rather than 2.86 will tell us the plan was built on intent and not on fear.

On the morning that voice note arrived from Ahmedabad, I played it back. There was no anger in it, only tiredness. He did not ask who should be dropped; he asked what would change by the next morning. When the senior side plays the first Test in New Zealand, we should not be watching the scoreboard. We should be listening to the first fifteen overs. Because on that green pitch, one question bowls itself every year: has India come here to bat, or merely to play?