The aftershocks of India’s seismic approach to the loss of two and half days in the second Test continue to reverberate around the cricket world, which is still boggled with awe and no little amazement by how a near-certain soporific stalemate was roused spectacularly into life.
Bangladesh might have braced themselves for a day and a half of leather-chasing at Kanpur’s Green Park; they could have been forgiven for thinking so, because 235 of the scheduled 270 overs were wiped out from days one through three owing to the lack of preparedness of the staging venue. When Bangladesh were bowled out for 233, midway through the second session on day four, the popular belief was that this would be a tedious draw, a mere going through of the motions. If Bangladesh bought into that belief, as most certainly they did, it took only seven deliveries of India’s reply to rudely jolt them wide awake.
The first over, Hasan Mahmud to Yashasvi Jaiswal, was routine — as routine as a 12-run over could be, that is. The left-handed opener smashed three boundaries, but each one was out of the textbook, each played to a delivery that deserved punishment in the exact direction in which the ball was despatched. It was ‘proper’ cricket.
Then came over No. 2, and Khaled Ahmed’s first ball of the series. It was also Rohit Sharma’s first ball of the match. Rohit had never played against Khaled previously, and conventional wisdom indicated a couple of quiet balls, sizing up the bowler.
Charged atmosphere
Except that India’s captain, fantastic and fascinating, hared down the track faster than Khaled approached the bowling crease. His punishing bat came down in a scything arc, the giant sweet spot making excellent contact with the ball and sending it back in the direction from which it came, but with bountiful interest thrown in. The ball sailed way over the long-on fence and scattered the fans in the stands. For a second, there was stunned disbelief. A rubbing of the eyes to ascertain that this wasn’t Rohit in the India Blue. That this was Test cricket. Then, the studied hush gave way to a cacophony of noise, the atmosphere charged with electricity. One delivery. One Rohit slice of magic. That’s all it took to put the cricket world on notice.
Even a decade back, India, patient India, genteel India, would have settled for a draw in similar circumstances without a second thought. They would have filled their boots on a surface where run-making wasn’t extraordinarily difficult on day four and the early part of day five, at the very least. They might have bolstered their aggregate, enhanced their average, maybe increased their tally of hundreds or fifties, and no one would have complained. Indeed, they could have done the same in Kanpur earlier in the week and no one would have said a word. After all, when you lose 87% of the intended play over the first three days of a game, what else could you do?
Oh, you could score at 8.22 runs per over, you know? You could reach the team fifty in a ridiculous 19 deliveries, the hundred in a slightly more stately 62, you know? The fastest to each team milestone in the history of Test cricket. You could add to that the fastest 150, 200 and 250 in the 147-year existence of the Test format. You could destroy and decimate, you could exhilarate and electrify. You could go on the rampage, dump fours and sixes galore on an initially unsuspecting opposition that was now on a pounding to nothing. Simply put, you could score 285 (for nine declared) in 34.4 overs.
Which all is exactly what India did. They didn’t potter around, build a platform and blast off. They didn’t give the first half-hour, or even the first half-over, to the bowler. At the break between the end of Bangladesh’s innings and the start of their own, the skipper laid down the marker — no ambiguity, so scope for misinterpretation. ‘We’ll go hard at the bowling. We’ll keep going hard at the bowling. If that means we are bowled out for 100 or 150, so be it. No taking the foot off the pedal, no compromise on trying to score quickly. Very quickly.’ Rohit’s message was along these lines. If anyone in the team still wasn’t entirely sure if they had read the messaging right, those doubts were dispelled emphatically by his ferocious takedown of Khaled in the latter’s first over.
It’s one thing to lay down the law, quite another to get everyone to collectively buy into it, readily and without apprehension, without the fear of being judged and worse still, of being axed. By putting the money where his mouth was, Rohit made clear what a 1,000-word rant might not have. Once the skipper set the tone, it was remarkably easy for the others to follow suit — just like at the 50-over home World Cup last year and in the T20 World Cup in the Americas this June.
One-in-a-million captain
In that regard, Rohit is one in a million, blessed with making the early running because he is an opener and making the most of that blessing. He commands respect and reverence with his integrity and honesty in decision-making which, allied with his propensity to take the onus upon himself to announce his team’s approach, have made him an instant hit with his colleagues and the fans alike. He has, alongside Gautam Gambhir now and Rahul Dravid before him, rejigged the dynamics of Test cricket while letting the world now that while it’s fine to sometimes get carried away with fancy monikers, it’s also possible to lay down the gauntlet without a certain pigeonholing of styles and brands of play.
India moved from a sedate style in the Mahendra Singh Dhoni era to a more aggressive mien soon after Virat Kohli took control of the five-day team. Dhoni’s hands were tied to an extent because he felt he didn’t have the bowling resources, primarily, to compete on an equal footing outside the subcontinent.
With Ravi Shastri, Anil Kumble and then Shastri again, Kohli chose to make his own luck, ruling out any compromise on fitness while also identifying pace as the determining factor in overseas Tests and therefore putting together a fantastic fast bowling group in which Jasprit Bumrah quickly climbed the rungs to establish himself as the leader of the pack.
Rohit has taken India’s attitudinal shift to a different plane. He won’t risk losing while going for victory (like Kohli did in his first Test as stand-in captain in Adelaide in December 2014) but his first instinct will be to look for full points. India would, rest assured, have found ways and means to scramble with a draw if things hadn’t gone to plan in Kanpur, had they actually been rolled over for 120 and conceded a big advantage to the Bangladeshis. But when he sets out to target a victory, he will leave no stone unturned in his desire to do so.
India’s Rohit-led turbo-charged batting has taken all the Kanpur plaudits, but how can one forget the efforts of the bowling group in making these 12 World Test Championship points possible? On a pretty good batting track where Rohit might have opted to bat if there was no forecast for rain, they were stunning in getting all ten Bangladesh wickets in 74.2 and 47 overs respectively. Those efforts don’t put the conditions in their proper perspective. They do, however, exemplify the effort and the class of Bumrah and his comrades. Had they not bowled Bangladesh out for 233 and given their batters so much time despite so much time lost, not even all the pyrotechnics of the batting brigade would have made a difference.
It will be fanciful to imagine that this is the start of a golden period when India will continue to take this same high-risk approach to every Test innings. Kanpur last Monday demanded such a riposte as India chased vital WTC points; if they find themselves in a similar situation, they will again flex their not inconsiderable batting muscles, though you suspect that Kanpur is more the exception than the norm. But to merely have the audacity, the creativity and the skills to make something out of practically next to nothing – that holds a special charm if you are invested positively in Indian cricket, and a special dread if you are on the other side of the fence.
The gung-ho daredevilry has also brought to the fore the significance top teams attach to the World Test Championship. India needed five wins in their remaining ten Tests at the start of the home season towards the middle of last month to guarantee themselves a place in the WTC final for a third cycle running. They might have left themselves with a little bit more to do had Kanpur unspooled into a dreadful stalemate.
By preventing that possibility solely on the back of their aggressive mindset, they have given themselves more than a bit of breathing room. In the short term, that’s an excellent development.
The long-term ramifications of the Kanpur carnage, however, are the ones that are more exciting. Beyond Rohit and Kohli, this is a remarkably young batting group (31-year-old K.L. Rahul included) which already boasts useful experience of life in the fast lane. Just imagine what mayhem they are capable of unloading in time to come. Just…
Published – October 04, 2024 06:24 pm IST
