RAJKOT: Let’s be honest. Before the Hyderabad Test, many doubted whether England would have any success in India. And there were merits to the argument. India had lost only two home Tests in the past decade. They were and are a monster at home in Test cricket. If anyone had bet that India would lose the first Test after taking a 190-run lead, you’d have laughed them off and rightly so.
Yet, they did and two Tests on, both teams are at Rajkot and the series reads 1-1. And for the first time in 12 years, a visiting team has a chance to do something no one else could. Win two matches against India in a home Test series. And what more, they perhaps have the best venue to do it. The Saurashtra Cricket Association Stadium, which got a new name after the former cricket administrator Niranjan Shah on Thursday.
So, at the Niranjan Shah Stadium, where the pitches have been historically good for batting, England would fancy their chances. That they have brought in pacer Mark Wood in place of Shoaib Bashir says what England think of the surface. “You look down the wicket there are two cracks that sort of bummed me but again only time will tell if they actually come into it but yeah, obviously you never want to go with too many preconceived ideas around wickets but you have to sort of have some kind of idea which is obviously why you ended up picking the XI that you have done,” Stokes said about the surface at the pre-match press conference on Wednesday.
As someone who has played all his domestic first-class cricket here, Ravindra Jadeja, who’s returning from an injury, said that the nature of the surfaces varies from time to time. “Sometimes you get 36 wickets in three games. Sometimes it's different. This one looks hard. I think it will play well at the start and probably slowly start to break much later,” said the Saurashtra all-rounder.
The debate about the pitch apart, India, despite the victory in Visakhapatnam and the return of Ravindra Jadeja, have more holes in their team than the visiting side. They do not have KL Rahul or Shreyas Iyer. The middle-order is likely to be Rajat Patidar, Sarfaraz Khan and Jadeja. Throw in Dhruv Jurel in the mix, should he play in KS Bharat’s spot, that is one Test match between three middle-order players.
That is not just it. In the bowling department, they have Jadeja, R Ashwin and Jasprit Bumrah, who reached Rajkot but didn't attend the training. Apart from these three, who will be the other two? Will India go with four spinners and a lone pacer on what is expected to hard surface? Does Mohammed Siraj come back and one of Axar Patel/Kuldeep Yadav make way for Jadeja? The questions remain.
The bigger question, however, is whether India will counter England’s approach better than they did in Hyderabad. While Bumrah’s brilliance came in handy in Vizag, and he might just repeat it again in Rajkot, it is not fair to expect it from him every single time. By and large, India would want their spinners to step up and do the job — something one thought was a routine. That even Jadeja expected Ashwin to get to 500 Test wickets in the first Test itself tells what the players expect of themselves. However, it hasn’t happened yet. And despite knowing and seeing the way England have played, India had a slip up in Hyderabad, and haven’t done anything so far to surprise them.
In Rajkot, Rohit would want the spinners to not just do the job, but also try and keep a check on the run rate. Jadeja, meanwhile, believes that England just bats a little aggressively and it all comes down to how they adapt and move towards plan B and C. “Their style is such that they play aggressive cricket. Sometimes what happens is that when a batter tries different things sometimes it connects, sometimes it doesn’t. That is style and they will continue to play like that. For us, it is about what is the plan B if they continue to play like that. Based on that we would want to keep field placements and bowl accordingly. As a bowling unit, our plan is to do the opposite of theirs and ensure that they are not playing the same shots they want to and keep scoring runs,” said Jadeja. So far, Bumrah has been the only bowler who has been able to do that. Whether Jadeja, Ashwin and Co. can do that at Rajkot, only time will tell.
In the lead-up to the Test series, all the talk was about how an unstoppable force is going up against an immovable object. Over eight days of high-octane contests, England have shown that the immovable object can be pushed an inch, and India have withered down the unstoppable force. Irrespective of who gets the upper hand at Rajkot, they promise yet another intense, entertaining Test match cricket from Thursday.
India Probable XI: Rohit, Jaiswal, Gill, Patidar, Sarfaraz, Jurel, Jadeja, Ashwin, Bumrah, Siraj, Kuldeep.
England Playing XI: Crawley, Duckett, Pope, Root, Bairstow, Stokes, Foakes, Wood, Rehan, Hartley, Anderson.
