India arrive in Colombo with seven spinners, and their openers spent the week facing Mumbai’s
Four specialist spinners in the squad, three more travelling as net bowlers, and a week of spin-focused batting in Bandra for KL Rahul and Yashasvi Jaiswal before the flight out.
Aug 4, 2026
India’s Test squad landed in Colombo on Tuesday afternoon carrying a spin department that looks less like a two-Test travelling party and more like a domestic camp. Four specialist spinners sit in the 15-man squad. Three more have been added as net bowlers, and every one of them is a spinner too. Seven slow bowlers for two matches is not subtlety. It is a statement about what India expect from Galle and the SSC.
Four in the squad, three more in the nets
Ravindra Jadeja and Manav Suthar cover left-arm orthodox. Kuldeep Yadav offers the wrist-spin variation from the same side. Saransh Jain, the 33-year-old Madhya Pradesh off-spinner given a maiden call-up, is the only specialist right-arm finger spinner in the group, which is precisely why the selectors wanted him. Jain built his case over a long domestic career with Madhya Pradesh, including their Ranji Trophy title under Chandrakant Pandit, and pushed it over the line on the recent India A tour of Sri Lanka, where he took six wickets and made an unbeaten 70 down the order in the second of the two matches.
The three net bowlers confirmed on Tuesday follow the same logic. Tanush Kotian bowls off-spin for Mumbai, Harsh Dubey is Vidarbha’s left-arm spinner, and Vipraj Nigam is a leg-spinning all-rounder who spent time with the India A group in Sri Lanka. Dubey carries the loudest number of the three: 69 wickets in the 2024-25 Ranji Trophy season, which took him past Ashutosh Aman’s 68 from 2018-19 and made him the highest wicket-taker in a single Ranji season. No other bowler that year reached 45.
Net bowlers rarely get a mention beyond a squad list, but the composition matters here. India are not carrying seam back-up to Sri Lanka. They are carrying more of what they think will decide the series.
A week in Bandra before the flight
Two of the batters most exposed to that plan spent the days before departure preparing for the other side of it. KL Rahul and Yashasvi Jaiswal trained at the Wings Sports Centre in Bandra West, the Mumbai facility run by former India batter and national selector Jatin Paranjape, with the sessions built around batting against spin. Jaiswal got there first and Rahul followed a day later, and the pair eventually batted in the same session.
The choice of venue was deliberate. The surfaces at the academy turn, and it is one of the few places in Mumbai where a batter can get proper work in through the monsoon. Kotian, who trains there regularly, was among the bowlers, alongside a rotation of left-arm spinners, leg-spinners and off-spinners pulled from the local circuit. That is closer to a Galle net than anything a gym-based fitness block would offer.
What is waiting in Galle
Sri Lanka’s bowling starts with left-arm spinner Prabath Jayasuriya, who has taken the bulk of his Test wickets at Galle and rarely needs the pitch to be a minefield to be effective there. Galle tends to start assisting slow bowling long before the second new ball is due, which is why the selection debate around India’s XI is about how many spinners play rather than whether they play.
They will do it without Jasprit Bumrah, ruled out of both Tests after the back-and-forth over his fitness, and for now without Sai Sudharsan, who stayed behind in Bengaluru to keep working on his toe injury at the Centre of Excellence rather than travel with the group. Shubman Gill leads the side.
Three days at the NCC to sort it out
India’s only red-ball hit-out before Galle is the warm-up game at the Nondescripts Cricket Club ground in Colombo from 7 to 9 August, trimmed from four days to three. The first Test starts at the Galle International Stadium on 15 August and runs to the 19th, with the second at the SSC in Colombo from 23 to 27 August.
That is one short match and a handful of net sessions to settle a top order against spin, work out which two or three of the four spinners play, and decide whether the seam attack minus Bumrah is worth more than an extra slow bowler instead. India have not left themselves short of options. They have left themselves very little time to choose between them.