113 All Out: A Green Top, Five Ducks, and India's Batting Audit in New Zealand That Has Been Running Since 2026

Two numbers in this scorecard refuse to sit together. Five India A batters fell for ducks; only four reached double figures. The innings lasted 39.3 overs and produced 113 runs — 2.86 runs per over. And inside that same innings sits Yash Rathod's 44 not out off 49 balls, a strike rate of 89.8, three fours and three sixes. A team crawling at 2.86 with a batter inside it running at 89.8.

That gap is what stopped me. In cricket it happens for one of two reasons: either two batting plans are running in the same dressing room, or the pitch is changing through the day and two batters read the change differently. The second possibility can be tested cleanly. New Zealand A closed on 135 for 3, and their opening pair put on 132. The same surface on which five Indian batters made ducks allowed two openers to add 132.

That settles a great deal. The pitch was not unplayable. It was difficult early and got easier. The innings we compress into a single headline — failure — is really two events: the ball moving in the first session, and the Indian batting order failing to survive that movement. Before I believe the story, I rebuild the ledger. The ledger here has three columns: over, wicket, mode of dismissal.

Three rules before the count

My first condition on any innings analysis is that the phase definition is fixed before the number is quoted. I wrote three things down for this innings and did not move them afterwards.

First, new-ball phase as the first fifteen overs. The whole innings was 39.3 overs, so this was never a five-session marathon requiring elaborate phase-splitting. When an innings lasts less than a session, the new-ball window is roughly forty per cent of it — and that is precisely where the damage happened.

Second, a collapse as three or more wickets inside any ten-over window. I set that definition in 2026, when logging every ball of RCB's fourteen home matches at the Chinnaswamy forced me to re-derive the death-over numbers everyone was repeating. Since then the phase definition and the sample size travel with every claim I file.

Third, and most important: this is an A-team fixture, not a senior Test. It is being called an unofficial Test and the red-ball logic applies — sessions, attrition, the pressure of a slow scoring rate. But every conclusion about the senior side is flagged here as extrapolation. The sample is small; the claim built on it is not.

What the source does not state, I will not invent. The toss result is absent. If New Zealand A won it and chose to bowl, this innings is a condition story rather than an Indian error. If India A chose to bat, it is a decision error. Those are different verdicts, and the information is missing. Weather, dew, DRS — none of it is recorded. I will not guess.

A new-ball ambush, not a slow death

Five ducks and four double-figure scores describe a pattern: this innings did not subside, it broke. Wickets fell in clusters, not in sequence.

The dismissal modes corroborate it. The top five going to the keeper and the slips means the ball was finding the outside edge. That is the cleanest available evidence of lateral movement, and it needs no pitch report to be believed. India A did not lose the batting contest in the new-ball phase; it lost the contest of reading the ball's direction.

Sai Sudharsan's duck sharpens the point, because he was not caught behind the wicket. His was a different mode of dismissal — bowled, lbw, inside edge, the record does not say. When one top order produces some batters caught off the outside edge and others dismissed another way, the ball was moving both ways. Seam and swing together leave a batter with no safe zone.

Dhruv Jurel's innings is the clearest illustration: captain, thirteen balls, one run. A strike rate of 7.7. Thirteen balls for one run is one of two things — either the bowling was so good the ball could not be scored off, or the batter was surviving without understanding it. Against a team total of 2.86 an over, the second reading carries more weight.

The strike-rate spread

• Dhruv Jurel: 1 run, 13 balls, SR 7.7
• Yashasvi Jaiswal: 17 runs, 45 balls, SR 37.8
• Devdutt Padikkal: 32 runs, 77 balls, SR 41.6
• Yash Rathod: 44 not out, 49 balls, SR 89.8

The first three point the same way. Thirty-two off 77 balls is roughly two runs an over across four overs of occupation — survival, resistance, but not an attempt to shape the game. Padikkal's 32 is the second-highest score of the innings and that is the innings' real problem: the batter who lasted longest still did not move the match.

Then Rathod. Forty-four off 49, with 30 of those runs in boundaries — about 68 per cent of his output came in fours and sixes. In an innings running at 2.86, one batter operated at more than double the team's rate. That is counter-attack, not occupation.

Here I have to be careful. One innings is not a career-level technical finding. This is a form signal, not a class signal. All that can be said is that he chose to break the bowlers' rhythm, and on that day the choice worked. Whether it was a team plan or his own instinct cannot be separated from the data available.

Keene's 5 for 24 and the question it leaves open

Simon Keene took 5 for 24. On the surface that is an excellent return and should be recorded as such. What interests me is who the five were.

Sai Sudharsan and Dhruv Jurel — front and middle order. Then Nabi, Akash Deep and Mukesh — the tail. A bowler taking wickets with the new ball and also breaking the tail with the older ball is complete in one specific sense: he is a length-and-seam bowler whose edge depends on conditions.

That matters because we are valuing Keene off a green top. His record on flat decks is not in this dataset. Anyone building a large reputation on this 5 for 24 should be told what I say at every such moment: a bowler's quality and the conditions' assistance are two separate columns, and they should not be merged.

Three wickets in seven balls, and an honest blank

India A's seamers took three wickets in seven deliveries. New Zealand A did not move past 135 for 3, and that is the reason. It is the first genuinely positive signal of the tour and it deserves recording.

I will not go further than that. Three wickets in seven balls can be three different things: a real new-ball spell, a tail-end subsidence at the end of a tiring day, or coincidence. Three wickets of which at least two belong to the tail are not proof of new-ball success. To know whether this was a genuine seam window, I need to see what the new ball does the following morning. That data does not exist yet, and I will not pretend it does.

What can be inferred — and I call it an inference — is that Indian seamers can exploit these conditions. Mukesh, Nabi, Akash Deep and Kamboj all appeared. If that group can move the ball in morning moisture, then bowling selection for the senior Tests is not a question entirely separate from the batting question.

The real finding: 113 is not new

This is where restraint matters most, and where there is most to say. One innings does not make a trend. But when an innings fits inside an already-recorded trend, it stops being coincidence and becomes confirmation.

India's Test record in New Zealand is unusual in that it is unusual for an elite side. Five wins in 25 Tests — twenty per cent. Ten defeats, ten draws. No away Test win in New Zealand since 2026; the last series win there was also 2026. The sharpest figure of all: one Test win in New Zealand since 2026.

That is the base rate against which every new collapse should be read. The 2026 tour is the freshest example: four innings, none above 250. Read against that, 113 all out is not a new accident — it is the next page of an old book, and that is exactly what makes it news.

This is my objection to the framing that treats the score as a shock. It is not shocking. It is expected. And what is expected calls for process, not alarm.

Where I agree with the crowd

My habit is to recount whatever the crowd asserts. But auditing does not mean the answer must always run the other way. Sometimes the count agrees with the crowd, and then I have to say so plainly.

The concern that Indian batting struggles against the red ball in New Zealand is sound. It runs from 2026, repeated in 2026, and has now appeared in an A-team fixture. Anyone dismissing this as one bad day is not doing the arithmetic.

Where I disagree is the compression of an A-team result into a senior-team prophecy. Those are two datasets. The A-side has a different structure and a different purpose, and some of the players in it — KL Rahul, Yashasvi Jaiswal — are part of the senior rotation, here for red-ball preparation. Whether Rahul's duck is a technical problem or an innings played inside a workload plan cannot be decided without his fitness data. I will not rule on his form until I have seen his next three red-ball scores.

The cost of building a story too early

There is a second risk that gets less attention. Rathod's 44 not out is a good innings. Indian cricket coverage has an old illness: turning one A-team innings into a star. The 44 showed he has the appetite to attack on a green top. It did not show he can build long innings against swing and spin alike. That is the distance between an innings and a batter.

The most important signal in this match is not Rathod. It is that a 132-run stand proves the surface allowed two openers to survive. So this was not a pitch problem. It was a problem of the time-window in which the Indian batters had to bat, and of the ability to recognise that window.

If I take one thing from this match: the ball moved in the first session, New Zealand A's openers absorbed it, and India's top order did not. That is technique, not intent.

What to track next

There is a hard, testable threshold for this tour. In 2026, all four Indian innings stayed under 250. Crossing that line in the senior Tests will be the first real signal that something has changed.

The second signal is strike rate plus dismissal mode. If the senior top order's first-innings strike rates sit near 30 and the dismissals again run to keeper and slips, that is a structural problem, not an innings problem. If strike rates sit between 45 and 50 and the wickets scatter, file this 113 as one bad morning and move on.

The third is the toss. If captains across the series keep choosing to bowl first, they are reading first-session moisture. India's question then shifts from batting to toss and first-session planning.

The sample is small. But it falls inside a fifty-year-old base rate, and that is why it cannot be waved away. I will wait for the next innings. If that one also begins with a catch to the keeper, I will have no hesitation in writing that this is not weather — it is a fault in the model.