COLOMBO: It seemed a bowling faux pas. But it wasn’t. Bowling coach B Arun threw a relatively shining ball to Rohit Sharma, who was about to strap his pads. Sharma smiled wryly before he marked his run up and chugged on to bowl seam-up at Virat Kohli.
The first couple of balls hardly bounced, which the Indian skipper duly disdained. But the third delivery seamed away from Kohli to hiss past his outside edge. From the sidelines, Stuart Binny nodded approvingly. From the adjacent nets, Umesh Yadav winked looking amused before he resumed batting, with the typical tail-enders’ chutzpah — heaves, swings and swishes.
Between the two nets, demarcated by a green iron pillar, stood Cheteshwar Pujara, a little restless perhaps, shadow batting when not watching the Rohit laugh riot. The restlessness is perhaps indicative of his present mindset, not in the preferred scheme of regulars, but a reliable back-up option in times of injury. He is out of favour not only because of the recent run-rut, but because he is perceived to be not in sync with the team’s steadfast dictum of no-holds-barred aggression, as succinctly implied by Kohli when probed about Rohit’s persistence at the No 3.
“We need somebody of Rohit’s game-changing skills at the spot,” he had said at the beginning of the tour.
This typecasting is perhaps the burden of being billed the next Rahul Dravid, being seen as technician than aggressor. Yes, Pujara has an orthodox technique and has the rare capacity to bat time, but he’s definitely not a momentum-impeding crawler. After the initial circumspection, he generally accelerates, best borne out by his 153 in Johannesburg. He consumed 127balls for his 50, but he completed his hundred in 168 balls. That is, he took just 41 balls for his second 50. Even his overall strike rate is a healthy 49.25. And though his average has plummeted from stratospheric heights of mid-60s, he still has the best aggregate (47.11) among his teammates.
But even after the flopped Rohit experiment, with the public baying to bring back Pujara, the latter couldn’t be sneaked into the playing eleven. Instead Rohit was swapped with Ajinkya Rahane and Stuart Binny included to maintain the balance. Now with both openers injured, there’s no other straightforward option but prompting Pujara to open.
The 27-year-old would gleefully accept this rare opening, though incidental, but with the knowledge that irrespective of how many runs he scores, he could be pushed into the drinks-carrying routine. Once Shikhar Dhawan and Murali Vijay return, not even the impressive KL Rahul will be a guaranteed fixture in the eleven, despite Kohli showering superlatives on the youngster.
The captain, however, believes Pujara, among the senior batsmen of the squad, has the maturity to handle it. “Someone like Pujara, if he has to step in for the next game and miss the next, he will understand that it is the situation that demands him to do so,” he said. To deconstruct it, Kohli is implying that irrespective of his performance in the deciding Test, he could be relegated to bench warming once the automatics return. Now, it’s time for Pujara to deconstruct a few myths of his batting and push for that big break.