Indian cricket has moved straight from the buzz of the IPL season into the far quieter, more demanding world of red-ball cricket. The Indian Test team is currently in Sri Lanka for a two-match series that forms part of the 2025-2027 World Test Championship cycle, and if the early signs from the warm-up leg are anything to go by, the batting unit looks to be in good touch heading into the series proper.
A Confidence-Building Warm-Up in Colombo
Before the Test series began, India played a three-day practice match against a Sri Lanka Cricket XI at the Nondescripts Cricket Club ground in Colombo, and it turned into exactly the kind of hit-out the team management would have wanted. Batting first, the Sri Lanka XI put up 363 for 8 before declaring, built around fifties from their openers. India’s response was where things got interesting.
Devdutt Padikkal played the standout innings of the match, batting through to an unbeaten 142 that anchored India’s first innings and gave the squad’s batting depth a real boost. Yashasvi Jaiswal, after a rocky start where he was dismissed for a duck in the first innings, bounced back well in the second innings chase. KL Rahul also got useful time in the middle before falling just short of a half-century. Chasing a target of 207 in the final innings, India got home comfortably with six wickets in hand, a scoreline that says as much about the bowlers’ discipline as it does about the batting.
For a team that’s had to reshuffle personnel ahead of this tour, that kind of warm-up performance matters. It’s not just about the runs on the board, it’s about batters finding their footing on sub-continental surfaces that behave very differently from what they’ve been used to during the IPL or in home conditions against the white ball.
Squad Changes Before a Ball Was Bowled
The lead-up to this tour wasn’t entirely smooth. Jasprit Bumrah, one of India’s most important bowlers in Test cricket, was ruled out of the series with a knee injury and replaced by uncapped pacer Auqib Nabi, a notable opportunity for someone new stepping into a squad of this profile. Then, just before the series got underway, Sai Sudharsan was also ruled out with a toe injury, with Sarfaraz Khan brought in as his replacement.
Losing your first-choice pace spearhead and a middle-order batter in the space of a week isn’t ideal preparation for any team, let alone one touring in tricky conditions. But it also opens the door for players like Nabi and Sarfaraz to make an impression at the international level, and Test tours like this one have historically been where such careers get their real start.
Shubman Gill continues to lead the side, with Gautam Gambhir in the coaching setup, and the squad blends experienced hands like Rahul and Ravindra Jadeja with a noticeably younger core built around Jaiswal, Padikkal, Rishabh Pant, and Dhruv Jurel behind the stumps.
Into the Test Series
With the warm-up fixture out of the way, the focus has now shifted to the two-Test series itself, which opened in Galle before moving on to Colombo for the second match. Conditions in Sri Lanka are known to offer plenty for spin bowlers as matches progress, which sets up an intriguing battle between India’s own spin options, led by Jadeja and Kuldeep Yadav, and Sri Lanka’s attack featuring the experienced left-arm spinner Prabath Jayasuriya.
Both these matches count toward the ongoing World Test Championship cycle, so there’s more on the line here than just bragging rights between two cricketing neighbours. Every session played in Galle and Colombo will factor into where India sits on the championship table as the cycle builds toward its next final.
A Packed Calendar Ahead
This Sri Lanka tour is really just the opening chapter of a heavily loaded second half of the year for Indian cricket. Once the red-ball assignment wraps up, the team’s attention turns to white-ball cricket, with a T20I series against Afghanistan expected in September, followed by India hosting the West Indies for a series of ODIs and T20Is later in the same window. Add in India’s participation in the Asian Games later in the year and a tour of New Zealand after that, and it becomes clear why the BCCI schedule for the rest of 2026 is being described as one of the busiest stretches in recent memory.
For now, though, the story is about Test cricket, and specifically about whether India’s batting form from that warm-up fixture in Colombo can carry through into the two matches that actually count. A young, slightly reshaped batting line-up finding runs early is a good sign, but Sri Lanka on their own turf, with conditions tailored to trouble visiting batters as a match wears on, is never a straightforward assignment.
If the Colombo warm-up is a fair indicator, India go into this series with genuine momentum. Whether that translates into results across two Tests in unfamiliar personnel combinations will say a lot about the depth this squad can call on as it heads into an unusually demanding year of cricket across every format.
