Before the 2010-11 domestic season, Ravindra Jadeja was sulking. The stereotypes were running loose, that he was a flashy, bit-part limited-over entity, that he was arrogant, flippant and he was not anywhere in contention for Tests. So before a training session, he went to then Saurashtra coach Debu Mitra and told him he was desperate to play Test cricket. The coach, who always recognised burning ambition in his ward, threw up a challenge: “Play out five direct maiden overs in your next match.”
Before the 2010-11 domestic season, Ravindra Jadeja was sulking. The stereotypes were running loose, that he was a flashy, bit-part limited-over entity, that he was arrogant, flippant and he was not anywhere in contention for Tests. So before a training session, he went to then Saurashtra coach Debu Mitra and told him he was desperate to play Test cricket. The coach, who always recognised burning ambition in his ward, threw up a challenge: “Play out five direct maiden overs in your next match.”
It wasn’t a case of the coach underestimating Jadeja’s red-ball potential, or wanting to mend his naturally aggressive methods, but trying to rein in that “early madness” of his. “He would look to dominate the bowlers right from the start and get out more often. There was no harm in doing that, but in first-class cricket you can’t always keep hitting. There will be times when he will have to bat according to the situation. I just wanted to teach him that aspect of the game so that he becomes a multi-dimensional batsman,” he says.
Fundamentally, he wanted to teach him the unglamorous virtue of stickability. Jadeja tried to curb his instincts, failed a few times, but gradually imbibed the wisdom of his coach’s words. He tightened up his technique too, shortened his back-lift, honed his back-foot game and curbed those wild slashes outside the off-stump.
The next season, promoted to No.4, he smoked a brace of triple hundreds, before adding another next season. Not that Jadeja inhibited his attacking instincts altogether—he can be ruthlessly attacking when he wants to—but a more tempered approach was reaping him dividends.
Then, even his triple hundreds were getting mocked, and the batting transformation drowned out in his spectacular bowling turnaround. But Friday offered the perfect excuse to drift from his bowling and focus on the aspect of the game he’d fiercely wanted to prosper.
Friday was not perhaps a day to stick around; it beggared to unpack his attacking strokes one after the other on a highway-flat strip with complaisant bowlers. To shred them was perhaps expected of him as well, what with India having steamed to 470 runs already. But Jadeja’s self-expectations were slightly different — here was perhaps the brightest of prospects to rack his first Test hundred, and what better venue to accomplish it than his home town. He later said: “I had a feeling that it would be a special day for me.”
So he began cautiously, a single here and a two there, a tickle here and a nudge there, he was accumulating runs, as if batting in the middle overs of an ODI in the 90s, before the batsmen went berserk at the death overs. More than his own impulses, he had to resist the unbearable slackness of West Indies’ bowlers.
Devendra Bishoo probed his will with deliciously-flighted deliveries that hardly turned this way or that. But Jadeja would dead-bat, both the ball and temptations, then remove his cap, wipe the sweat dripping off his brows, bristle his beard and re-focus. The scattered field — there were no fielders barring the first slip when he faced the first ball — and an equally mobile runner mobilised his accumulative bid. He was in no tearing hurry.
But hurry he did, after he began running out his partners. When Virat Kohli perished, he was 28, having just tallied the first boundary of his innings, an outside edge to third-man. Just before he completed his half-century, he lost both Ravichandran Ashwin and Kuldeep Yadav.
With only the unpredictable Umesh Yadav and Mohammad Shami left in the reserves, Jadeja had to reacquaint with the Jadeja he had long shunned. He had to helter-skelter to his hundred. He had to factor in a looming declaration as well. So the first mission was to reach a score where his skipper would feel merciful towards him and not declare. He raced to his 70s, with three hefty sixes and a boundary. But with 21 runs adrift of the hundred, he was left with Shami. The crowd began to anxiously twitch in their seats.
What followed in the next 5.5 was the most theatrical phase of this Test; a batsman in desperate pursuit of his first Test hundred batting with a no 11, who overstates his batting prowess. And moreover, his own close shaves with a Test hundred. In Mohali, against England, he tried to heave Adil Rashid out of the park at 90 and vanquished. At the Oval, in the previous Test, he was left stranded on 86 by hapless tail-enders. This time, he didn’t want to take a chance. “I was telling myself that I don’t want to play a loose shot. I was talking to Umesh and Shami as well that I need to play and score that hundred. Today I was calm, unhurried and not thinking about the runs. I was just looking to play till the last ball,” he said.
He shielded Shami for the next four overs, resisting every other single-running opportunity, but couldn’t thread a single off the last ball of the fourth. He was nearly made to rue, for Bishoo’s delivery that brushed Shami’s outside edge, narrowly eluded the slips-man. He darted for the tight single, and then couldn’t resist the single that took him to 99.
The four deliveries that Shami negotiated, neutered with every bit of the nervous uncertainty of a no 11, was a four-act drama in itself. He would lunge forward, shuffle across, try to play with soft hands, get beaten, get squared up, but by the skin of the teeth and copious amount of fortune survived. Jadeja would surely get to his hundred next over, but Shami nearly conspired a run out. A stiff silence wrapped the ground, before it erupted with Jadeja’s unbridled celebrations.
The special day, as Jadeja had felt, turned even more special as the match wore on. He affected a run-out and snapped a wicket of the first ball. But all those would blur in the afterglow of his hundred.
More than the wickets he had taken, the catches he had plucked and the run outs he had hatched, it’s the Test hundred that he had craved for the longest. He maybe yet to play out five straight maiden overs, but is finally a Test-match centurion.
It wasn’t a case of the coach underestimating Jadeja’s red-ball potential, or wanting to mend his naturally aggressive methods, but trying to rein in that “early madness” of his. “He would look to dominate the bowlers right from the start and get out more often. There was no harm in doing that, but in first-class cricket you can’t always keep hitting. There will be times when he will have to bat according to the situation. I just wanted to teach him that aspect of the game so that he becomes a multi-dimensional batsman,” he says.
Fundamentally, he wanted to teach him the unglamorous virtue of stickability. Jadeja tried to curb his instincts, failed a few times, but gradually imbibed the wisdom of his coach’s words. He tightened up his technique too, shortened his back-lift, honed his back-foot game and curbed those wild slashes outside the off-stump.
The next season, promoted to No.4, he smoked a brace of triple hundreds, before adding another next season. Not that Jadeja inhibited his attacking instincts altogether—he can be ruthlessly attacking when he wants to—but a more tempered approach was reaping him dividends.
Then, even his triple hundreds were getting mocked, and the batting transformation drowned out in his spectacular bowling turnaround. But Friday offered the perfect excuse to drift from his bowling and focus on the aspect of the game he’d fiercely wanted to prosper.
Friday was not perhaps a day to stick around; it beggared to unpack his attacking strokes one after the other on a highway-flat strip with complaisant bowlers. To shred them was perhaps expected of him as well, what with India having steamed to 470 runs already. But Jadeja’s self-expectations were slightly different — here was perhaps the brightest of prospects to rack his first Test hundred, and what better venue to accomplish it than his home town. He later said: “I had a feeling that it would be a special day for me.”
So he began cautiously, a single here and a two there, a tickle here and a nudge there, he was accumulating runs, as if batting in the middle overs of an ODI in the 90s, before the batsmen went berserk at the death overs. More than his own impulses, he had to resist the unbearable slackness of West Indies’ bowlers.
Devendra Bishoo probed his will with deliciously-flighted deliveries that hardly turned this way or that. But Jadeja would dead-bat, both the ball and temptations, then remove his cap, wipe the sweat dripping off his brows, bristle his beard and re-focus. The scattered field — there were no fielders barring the first slip when he faced the first ball — and an equally mobile runner mobilised his accumulative bid. He was in no tearing hurry.
But hurry he did, after he began running out his partners. When Virat Kohli perished, he was 28, having just tallied the first boundary of his innings, an outside edge to third-man. Just before he completed his half-century, he lost both Ravichandran Ashwin and Kuldeep Yadav.
With only the unpredictable Umesh Yadav and Mohammad Shami left in the reserves, Jadeja had to reacquaint with the Jadeja he had long shunned. He had to helter-skelter to his hundred. He had to factor in a looming declaration as well. So the first mission was to reach a score where his skipper would feel merciful towards him and not declare. He raced to his 70s, with three hefty sixes and a boundary. But with 21 runs adrift of the hundred, he was left with Shami. The crowd began to anxiously twitch in their seats.
What followed in the next 5.5 was the most theatrical phase of this Test; a batsman in desperate pursuit of his first Test hundred batting with a no 11, who overstates his batting prowess. And moreover, his own close shaves with a Test hundred. In Mohali, against England, he tried to heave Adil Rashid out of the park at 90 and vanquished. At the Oval, in the previous Test, he was left stranded on 86 by hapless tail-enders. This time, he didn’t want to take a chance. “I was telling myself that I don’t want to play a loose shot. I was talking to Umesh and Shami as well that I need to play and score that hundred. Today I was calm, unhurried and not thinking about the runs. I was just looking to play till the last ball,” he said.
He shielded Shami for the next four overs, resisting every other single-running opportunity, but couldn’t thread a single off the last ball of the fourth. He was nearly made to rue, for Bishoo’s delivery that brushed Shami’s outside edge, narrowly eluded the slips-man. He darted for the tight single, and then couldn’t resist the single that took him to 99.
The four deliveries that Shami negotiated, neutered with every bit of the nervous uncertainty of a no 11, was a four-act drama in itself. He would lunge forward, shuffle across, try to play with soft hands, get beaten, get squared up, but by the skin of the teeth and copious amount of fortune survived. Jadeja would surely get to his hundred next over, but Shami nearly conspired a run out. A stiff silence wrapped the ground, before it erupted with Jadeja’s unbridled celebrations.
The special day, as Jadeja had felt, turned even more special as the match wore on. He affected a run-out and snapped a wicket of the first ball. But all those would blur in the afterglow of his hundred.
More than the wickets he had taken, the catches he had plucked and the run outs he had hatched, it’s the Test hundred that he had craved for the longest. He maybe yet to play out five straight maiden overs, but is finally a Test-match centurion.