Despite spotting technical glitches in the Indian top order, Sunil Gavaskar finds it strange that neither the senior nor young players have reached out to him for assistance.
Citing his previous advice to Virender Sehwag, Gavaskar highlighted the importance of rectifying batting errors and suggests taking a different guard position.
'If the batters were making the same mistakes over and over again, you needed to ask what had happened with your technique. How had you tried to improve the batter? Had you tried to tell him, maybe take a different guard. Don't take a leg-stump guard, take a middle and off stump guard,' Gavaskar had told The Indian Express.
'I remembered once calling Virender Sehwag out of the blue. He had not been scoring too many runs. I told him, 'Viru, just try the off-stump guard'. So he asked, 'Why, Sunny bhai?' So I told him, 'Look, you aren't known for great footwork. What is happening is, sometimes when you are getting out, you are reaching out for the delivery and it makes things difficult for you. So, maybe if you take the off-stump guard, you straight away know that the ball is outside the off-stump'. That is where the coach can come in with his inputs.'
Gavaskar's comments come after India's batting collapse in the World Test Championship final against Australia.
It had been no rocket science that this abject batting had been related to lack of application and certain shortcomings in techniques, which had made Indian batters' reluctance in going up to Gavaskar for advice all the more baffling.
The last time an Indian batter had asked for Gavaskar's aid had been in November 2021 when Mayank Agarwal had picked the Little Master's brains for suggestions.
Ever since, it had been awfully quiet. Gavaskar had reiterated that he had no issues coming to the support of the batters but had restricted himself in doing so to avoid confusion.
'No, no one had come. Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, V V S Laxman regularly came to me. And they would approach me with a specific problem, and you could tell them something which you had observed.
'I didn't have an ego about this, I could go and talk to them, but since there were two coaches -- Rahul Dravid and Vikram Rathore -- so sometimes you held back since you didn't want to confuse them with too much information,' the first batter to score 10,000 Test runs added.
