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Also, what is up with Royals’ powerplay struggles?

Saurabh Somani19-Oct-2020Why were MS Dhoni and Ravindra Jadeja slow during the middle overs?
The Super Kings weren’t going too well when Jadeja joined Dhoni in the middle, having slid to 56 for 4 in ten overs. The pitch was slow, and offering some grip. The Royals then got both parts of a two-pronged strategy right: tactics and execution. As soon as the powerplay was done, they had brought on legspin from both ends in Shreyas Gopal and Rahul Tewatia, and both men had already got a wicket when Jadeja joined Dhoni in the middle.The tactics involved continuing with legspin from both ends, even though Steven Smith had overs from Kartik Tyagi, Ankit Rajpoot (who ended up bowling just one over) and Ben Stokes to call on – that is without counting Jofra Archer, whom he must have wanted to save for the death overs anyway. But both Dhoni and Jadeja haven’t been at their best against legspin this IPL, particularly googlies. Dhoni’s strike rate against the legbreaks has been a reasonable 129.16, but against googlies, it’s just 86.36. Jadeja’s numbers are even worse – 63.15 against googlies and 110.00 against leg-breaks. So while it may have seemed counter-intuitive to continue with legspin from both ends when a left-hander was at the crease – one who has been in otherwise good striking form in Jadeja – the match-up was valid.The execution involved slowing it up from the bowlers. With no pace to work with off the surface, bowling it slower would mean that much more effort on the part of the batsmen to manufacture pace. When you have to do that, there is always the chance that timing goes awry, which is what happened. Both Gopal and Tewatia rarely rose above the mid-80s kph, and there was only one genuinely quicker ball bowled in their combined eight overs, when Tewatia fizzed one through at 111.7 kph. Lack of pace and accuracy, coupled with their own struggles against the type of bowling combined to keep Dhoni and Jadeja quiet. They did add 51 runs, but took up 46 balls to do so.How did Dhoni get run out?
This was only the ninth run out of Dhoni’s IPL career, having batted 179 times. He’s normally amongst the quickest between the wickets, which is why he isn’t run out very often. In the 18th over, Dhoni had just hit his second boundary, getting it only because Archer at long-off let the ball slip through his fingers. The next ball was driven firmly to Archer again, but Dhoni seemed to think there was only a single in it and wasn’t running hard for the first one. Archer mis-fielded again, and Jadeja, who was alive to the possibility of a second, urged Dhoni on, who then began sprinting back. But the delay from the first run being run meant Dhoni was an inch short when Archer recovered from the fumble and fired in a sharp throw to the keeper. Dhoni, normally a master at converting ones into twos, failed to do so this time. He was run out at 17.4 overs, and the Super Kings could get only 18 runs in the remaining 14 balls.Is the Sam Curran experiment working out for the Super Kings?
The Super Kings took the decision to promote Curran up the order because he had been striking the ball well in the middle overs, and they needed impetus at the top. However, in three games so far, Curran hasn’t managed to replicate his middle-order fireworks. What has worked against him is high pace with a new ball. He was out for 0 off 3 against Delhi Capitals, and made only 22 off 25 against the Royals, having faced eight of Archer’s first 12 balls and scored only two off them, while also getting into all kinds of tangles. Not a single ball from Archer to Curran was pitched up. Curran had relative success as an opener against Sunrisers Hyderabad, but though he ended up with 31 off 21, his start there too was slow, being 10 off 15 at one point.ESPNcricinfo LtdNot having Curran in the middle order has also contributed to the Super Kings being slow through that phase. Against the Royals, they couldn’t hit a single boundary off either Tewatia or Gopal, who combined to bowl eight overs for 32 runs, also picking a wicket each.Why did Dhoni bowl out Deepak Chahar and Josh Hazlewood at the start of the chase?
Despite having seen the Royals legspinners do well, Dhoni opted to go with his faster men at the top of the Royals’ chase. Chahar and Hazlewood bowled their full quota inside nine overs, only broken up by one over from Jadeja. The reasons were two-fold.As Dhoni explained after the game, the reason he brought Jadeja on in the seventh over was to see if the pitch was holding up, and he found that it wasn’t. The grip that the Royals slow bowlers had got, was noticeably less on offer in the second innings, with dew playing a part. That meant Dhoni’s spinners wouldn’t have the advantages that the first innings offered. Secondly, given that the Super Kings had put up only 125 for 5, the only way to win the match was to bowl the Royals out. Dhoni decided to go with his best wicket-taking options while the game was still alive. Both Chahar and Hazlewood did a good job, picking up three wickets inside the powerplay, but in the end, there wasn’t enough to defend.What is up with the Royals’ powerplay troubles?Speaking of wickets, the Royals have been losing more than any other team in the powerplay this IPL. They have now lost 20 wickets in the powerplay in the ten games they have played. The lack of a good start has contributed to their troubles with the batting. On Monday, their powerplay score was 31 for 3, but they could weather that because the target being chased was such a small one.ESPNcricinfo LtdThe trouble at the top has perhaps contributed to the Royals keeping Jos Buttler at No.5. When they lost three quick wickets, they still had the experienced pair of Buttler and Smith in the middle, who eventually put on a match-winning 98-run partnership, with Buttler hitting 70* off 48.Why did Kedar Jadhav bat so lowA couple of weeks ago, Super Kings coach Stephen Fleming reacted angrily when he was asked why Jadhav had batted above Dhoni, coming in at No.4. Fleming said then that Jadhav was the Super Kings’ designated No.4 and was merely batting in position.On Monday, Jadhav came out at No. 7 in the 18th over. His own poor form has probably contributed to the changing position, having even sat out of the XI a couple of times. Perhaps the Super Kings wanted to send a left-hander in at the fall of the fourth wicket since two legspinners were bowling, so Jadeja went in ahead of Jadhav. Then too, overall Jadeja has had a much better tournament with the bat than Jadhav, so recent form could have played a part.

Dominant position enhanced by desperate decision-making from opponents

Andrew Miller16-Jan-2021Batsman error is a curious concept. It’s what all bowlers are looking to cause when they turn at the top of their mark, by applying sufficient pressure to force the fatal misjudgement, or by setting a crafty trap and springing it on the unwitting. Because, as Jack Leach finally proved with an outstanding delivery late in the day to Kusal Mendis, it’s only a glorious handful of balls that are genuinely unplayable.So what are we to make of the batsman errors in this contest so far? Specifically the Sri Lankan ones, for England, despite an afternoon of rather harder toil than they might have envisaged after the first innings, still have the first Test at their mercy, with a hefty lead in the bank and two more days on a wearing deck to reassert their authority.But even in the midst of an otherwise valiant rearguard, the one wicket to fall in the first 59 overs of Sri Lanka’s second innings was another self-inflicted wound of the type that came in a torrent on day one. With only one man back on the rope at deep backward point, even England’s unofficial Maker of Things to Happen, Sam Curran, struggled to take the credit for a wide outswinging long-hop to a well-set Kusal Perera, and his coy puff of the cheeks as Leach completed the catch rather gave the game away.Related

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“You don’t take Test wickets for granted but, yeah, that wasn’t the way I expected,” Curran said at the close. “The way things happened for us on day one aren’t going to happen very often, but you don’t take those days for granted because when they do come you’ve got to enjoy them. In the second innings, Sri Lanka fought really hard, which we expected, but we stuck in there as a bowling group, keeping the scoring rate as low as possible in really tough conditions.”To be fair to Perera, his second-innings dismissal was not remotely as culpable a dismissal as his first-day aberration – a second-ball reverse sweep to Dom Bess that set in motion one of the most preposterous five-wicket hauls in Test history. However, it was in keeping with a contest in which England have so far claimed just three wickets out of 13 with good deliveries, and the first two of those might well have been resisted by less skittish opponents.There was Stuart Broad’s legcutter to Mendis, an outstanding piece of thinking against an opponent who at that stage had not scored a run in four innings, but it still required a nervy hard-handed thrust to seal the deal. As for Dilruwan Perera, his second-ball inside-out drive against Bess was perhaps not the ideal response to a well-flighted delivery on off stump.In mitigation for England, this match is effectively their warm-up fixture, because a low-key intra-squad warm-up in Hambantota wasn’t nearly enough of a gallop after nearly five months in mothballs for most of the squad. But with five more Tests to come in the next two months, including four against a ferociously drilled India who are currently dredging new reserves of spirit on their tour of Australia, the worry for Joe Root’s men is that they might not find the freebies quite so easy to come by from here on in.”No-one’s really played much cricket so you’d expect a bit of rustiness and a lack of rhythm, but the guys fought hard in humid, sweaty, hot conditions,” Curran said. “The build-up was what it was, we have no complaints. Rooty was very clear that we need to hit the ground running which we luckily did on day one. But day four is going to be a test for us, because we’ve got a lot of overs in our legs now, and we’ve got to come back and keep fighting.”Sam Curran celebrates his breakthrough with Dom Bess•SLCAnd for that reason, it’s hard to pick too many holes in a team who are still favourites to complete an unprecedented fourth consecutive victory in Asia – all of them in Sri Lanka, following their 3-0 clean sweep two winters ago.They’ve got some significant bench-strength to come as well – for the India leg of the winter, if not before – including James Anderson, who seemed the pick of the bowlers in Hambantota, as well as Ben Stokes and Jofra Archer, two men whose methods might prove especially effective in Asia, not to mention Moeen Ali – now finally released from his Covid quarantine.However, the likelihood of Moeen returning for the second Test is slim, given both his own lack of match practice, but also the fact that Leach and Bess are now finally getting enough overs themselves to start feeling a hint of rhythm. Leach in particular – one of the stars of that last Sri Lanka campaign – had bowled a grand total of 52 first-class overs in the 12 months leading up to this Test, through a combination of illness and life in the England bubble. It’s little wonder he has needed a session or two to locate his range.”Line, length, pace … everything really! I probably came up a little short,” Leach told Sky Sports at the close. “I’ve been short of match overs for a little bit of time. You can do as much as you want in the nets but you need that stuff in games. I found I bowled a little bit short when I tried to bowl quicker, that’s something to think about for tomorrow.”The good news for England is that their game plans, though lacking the requisite meat on the bone, do seem to be firmly in place. In particular, the use of Mark Wood in a series of two- and three-over bursts has been encouraging – and the fierce lifter that slammed into Perera’s top hand was an early example of the shock value of a raw quick, even on an unconducive deck.At the other end, Stuart Broad produced another inventive and economical display of out-of-the-box seam bowling – showing echoes of Darren Gough’s methods from his triumphant tour of 2000-01, going through the wall, round the wall, sometimes even under the wall with an attempted slow yorker to Lahiru Thirimanne late in his second spell, in a bid to prise a rare and precious opening.However, Broad was blowing by the end of his eighth over, and sixth maiden – a state of affairs that reiterated the importance of England’s spinners. It’s all very well inverting the pyramid and turning to your seamers to bowl the spinners’ holding overs, which was a secret of England’s success here two years ago, but it does increase the onus on those spinners to attack with the utmost discipline.Instead, Bess in particular found his good fortune from the first innings being rebalanced in a leaky display, while Leach’s own struggles seemed to have been summed up in his 16th over, when Mendis propped forward to a decent biting delivery and lobbed a simple chance to short leg. Sadly for England, however, that fielder only materialised one ball later – Leach’s economy rate of close to four an over had rather negated the option of being attacking.But late in the day, Leach found his fizz at last, and with a nightwatchman at the crease alongside the steadfast Thirimanne, Root remains confident that his side is on course to close out the contest.”When you come and play here, and at this ground in particular, you’ve got to remember how quickly things can change, and how difficult it can be to start your innings,” Root said at close, after establishing England’s dominance with his magnificent 228.”It’s really important as a bowling group that we remember that. You’ve got to make those first 10-15 balls count against a new batter, and remember you’re always in the game throughout, because there’s always that one ball somewhere if you get it in the right spot and fortune’s on your side.”You’ve just got to work hard and try and be as patient as possible, and keep applying as much pressure as you can for long periods.”

ESPNcricinfo experts Aakash Chopra and Tom Moody put their heads together to figure out the best spinner in T20 cricket

ESPNcricinfo staff31-Oct-20207:37

Moody: Rashid never shirks away from the workload

Aakash Chopra: What is it about Rashid that is so, so special and unique?Tom Moody: Firstly, forget about his bowling as such, (it is) his character. He is an enormously gifted character that loves the contest. He is a real fighter. And when he was selected out of the (2017) auction, that was probably something that wasn’t known. What was known was what we’re seeing quite regularly everytime we watch him bowl – and that is his genius with the ball, his ability to spin the ball sharply, more so into the right-hander and away from the left-hander, but also generate that great deal of pace off the wicket, which is his greatest asset.Chopra: Let’s dive deeper and dissect the craft of Rashid’s legspin because that is unique. A quick bowling action, fairly flat and quick in the air, off the surface as well. But it was felt that he was figured out last season (2019 IPL) when people were just playing him out: “don’t attack him, he can’t get you out”. This season we have seen a different side to Rashid Khan. He’s picking wickets even when people are defending. How has he been able to do it?Moody: As you said, last year, and I think around the world, a lot of people have decided against attacking Rashid Khan, “let’s just preserve wickets and accept that his four overs are going to go for 24, and on a good day, we might get 30 off him”. So they’ve taken that strategy. So they’ve really taken away the ability for him to take wickets with batsmen looking to be positive against him.In the early parts of his career, batsmen were trying to dance down the wicket, hit him down the ground or sweep him or reverse sweep him or give themselves room and try to hit through the off side. And on every occasion… well, certainly more often than not, they were found unstuck because he’s a very, very difficult prospect to face.Rashid Khan sets off in celebration•BCCIAnd one of the main reasons he’s so difficult is because of that speed he gets off the wicket and the fact that the batsmen aren’t reading which way it is turning. He doesn’t turn his legbreak enormously, but he turns it enough. It is mainly that wrong ‘un. And that is his main weapon.One of the reasons he probably is having more wicket-taking success this year is that batsmen, when they’ve come across Sunrisers, have found that there’s been a little bit more pressure at both ends. So, therefore, they can’t just sit on Rashid when they are not scoring as freely as they’d like at the other end. So what they’ve had to do is take a little bit more risk against him. He is obviously a year older and a year smarter. He’s come into this tournament, having played a full Caribbean Premier League. So he’s got a lot of overs under his belt. So he’s ready and prepared.Chopra: The pitches in the UAE are a lot faster off the surface, so you can’t possibly just see him out. Secondly, earlier when he used to come to play the IPL, he would have bowled 12 months of non-stop overs in T20 cricket. And over a period of time, if you have bowled a lot of overs, sometimes that fizz, that zip actually goes away. You want to be accurate, but you are not that accurate because the limbs are tired. Could that be a factor? Could just the faster nature of these pitches as compared to a lot of pitches in India in April and May could that be a factor – people who are defending now, they are not even going against him. He is now conceding like three-and-a-half runs an over in a lot of games, but he’s still picking up two or three wickets.Moody: It is a good point you make about the surfaces being a little bit quicker. And there is probably a little bit more bounce as well at a couple of the stadiums in the UAE. Spinners do relish that extra little bit of bounce. I still feel that the overs that he’s had leading into this tournament in the Caribbean were important. I don’t think anyone can come into the tournament cold and expect to hit the ground running. He’s coming in ready to go. He’s had that rest in quarantine anyway, so freshened up in quarantine.

One of the reasons he probably is having more wicket-taking success this year is that batsmen, when they’ve come across Sunrisers have found that there’s been a little bit more pressure at both ends. So, therefore, they can’t just sit on Rashid when they are not scoring as freely as they’d like at the other end. So what they’ve had to do is take a little bit more risk against himTom Moody, former Sunrrisers’ head coach

Chopra: What is his training procedure, Tom? Is he actually one of those who does sit and analyse the opposition? How does he actually prepare for a game?Moody: Rashid is someone that is very thorough with his training. I wouldn’t say he’s someone that over-analyses the game. He does keep it very simple. He’s got very simple plans, which in a way works to his advantage, because he knows that his strength is this, don’t overcomplicate it and try to bowl three or four different (types of) balls in one over just to confuse the batsman. His good ball on a repeated loop is good enough for 24 balls in a four-over stint.What he does do is he definitely bowls a lot of overs at training. He doesn’t shirk away from the workload. He’s very aware that he needs to maintain his rhythm in his bowling. Yes, he would want to bowl specifically to left- and right-handers, according to who we are playing against. So if you are playing against a side that’s got a heavyweight in their top order of left-handers, for instance, he’ll want to bowl the majority of his overs in training to the left-handed batsmen just so he could formulate his lines and these lengths.He will look at some video, particularly if he hasn’t seen a batsman. But in this day and age, the players know, you know each other inside out, they play against each other at various leagues or on the international stage often enough, they know each other’s strengths and weaknesses.Rashid Khan finished his spell with a double-wicket maiden•BCCIChopra: But that information is not always knowledge and wisdom. He does get taken for runs once in a while. I remember that one game against Kings XI Punjab in Mohali when Chris Gayle just went after him. And that was the first time I saw him getting clobbered in that fashion. How did he actually bounce back in the reverse fixture? How does he come back from fear failure, a rare one?Moody: Yeah, that was a rare one. And it was a space that he hadn’t been in. It was very interesting, actually. He was very reflective of his performance. He didn’t shirk away from analysing and reflecting on that effort. I remember sitting with him for a period of time and discussing it. It was really him that, which was the important thing, came to the conclusion that really the thing that was undoing him was his length to Chris Gayle on that day, it was just probably a foot to two too full.And the harder he tried, the harder he found it to find the right length because he was putting himself under pressure. So instead of just taking a step backwards and taking a deep breath, and just getting his rhythm and finding his right length, he was rushing himself through his overs and therefore presenting the wrong length, which proved to be the right length for Chris Gayle.Chopra: Would it be fair to say that in terms of success formula, length is the critical component: if you pitch too full you get taken for runs, if you pitch too short you don’t pick up those many wickets?Moody: That’s pretty much the formula for any spin bowler, or any bowler, period. But, particularly for Rashid, for him to be in that space where he is a nightmare to face to where he’s someone that you can actually rotate strike if not hit boundaries against, and once he gives that a little bit of freedom it is welcomed by the batsman because they are sitting and waiting for options and opportunities to score. Because, unlike a lot of spinners, when he hits his right lengths, it is very hard to change that length by using your feet because of his speed through the air.A lot of spinners you can use your feet and throw them off their length. But, with Rashid, batsmen have found it very difficult to be able to come down the wicket and put the spinner under pressure with his length. So he’s got that ace up his sleeve always.Chopra: Can people play him as an offspinner? I’m just finding ways to counter him because if you keep playing dot ball after dot ball, eventually you get dismissed trying to go for a big one? Moody: Good luck, just playing him as an offspinner!Chopra In terms of scoring areas, Tom – instead of off side, you are looking to score, say, long-on, midwicket. Robin Uthappa got the better of him one season where he decided he was going downtown and nowhere else?Moody: I remember that clearly too. Robin Uthappa was playing (Rashid) nearly like a straight sweep slog over sort of straight midwicket to midwicket, and he did it did very effectively, as you said. So he was just banking on the ball turning in, but you are talking about a player that is an established and very good player of spin.A lot of batsmen have talked about trying to cover their stumps and play Rashid Khan through mid-on, midwicket, go with the tide of what they think the spin is. And if Rashid does see batsmen look to do that, what he will look to do to counter that is just change his release position at the crease. So he’ll just change the angle of the balls coming down. He may not necessarily change the delivery, but he’ll change the arrival of the delivery. So it may come six inches or a foot wider over the crease than it would have done in the previous six balls.

Through basic control and bowling smarts, Chahal delivered a match-turning performance

Saurabh Somani26-Jul-20210:58

I backed myself before coming on this tour – Chahal

Since India turned to wristspinners in the white-ball formats in the second half of 2017, Yuzvendra Chahal had been a regular fixture in the playing XIs, in both ODIs and T20Is. However, after the 2019 World Cup, both Chahal and fellow wristspinner Kuldeep Yadav were no longer able to command a spot in the first XI. The Covid-19 pandemic meant India’s squads were split, with Chahal being a more reliable inclusion in the limited-overs side playing in Sri Lanka. It was in Sri Lanka that Chahal established himself as a regular in the playing XI, and returning there has also seen the form of old return.Chahal was full of fizz in the first two ODIs, rested in the third since India had sealed the series, and went up a notch in the opening T20I on Sunday. In the ODIs, he had been thrown the ball after good starts by Sri Lanka, and invariably offered India greater control. He did the same thing in the first T20I, only better. Brought on immediately after the powerplay with Sri Lanka 46 for 1, Chahal bamboozled Dhananjaya de Silva with a delivery of a legspinner’s dreams. A loopy delivery that was so perfect it could have represented an equation, teasing drift, hitting the perfect length on leg, and then ripping across the batter to knock out off stump.That would be Chahal’s only wicket in the game, but his figures read 4-0-19-1. The bare numbers are impressive enough, but in terms of Smart Economy – which is arrived at after taking into account the stage of the match a bowler has bowled in and the batters bowled to – Chahal’s was an astounding 2.69, easily the best in the game for any bowler that delivered more than one over.Chahal could tie Sri Lanka down not just by skill, but by smarts too. He was bowling with a shorter leg-side boundary to the right-hand batters, and therefore didn’t bowl a single googly to them. Not just that, he maintained control of his line immaculately too. According to ESPNcricinfo’s ball-by-ball data, of the 13 balls Chahal bowled to right-hand batters, three were on the stumps and 10 were outside off stump. Not a single ball down leg. Of the 11 balls bowled to left-hand batters, seven were on the stumps, not giving them room to target the off side, which was the shorter boundary.Yuzvendra Chahal provided plenty of control with figures of 4-0-19-1.•ISHARA S. KODIKARA/AFP/Getty Images”The end I was bowling from, the leg side boundary was shorter and they were looking to hit that side,” Chahal said after the match. “That’s why I didn’t bowl googlies to the right-handers. I didn’t want to give them confidence, I thought that if I can bowl a lot of dot balls, pressure will build. So even if I don’t get a wicket, my partner from the other end can bowl more freely. If I had tried to go for wickets, or tried something extra, and they had hit a six or four, the pressure would have automatically come on us, because the total wasn’t so big. So I bowled more googlies to the left-handers. I kept mixing it up.”Chahal gave up seven runs in his first two overs, and an asking rate that was 7.66 before he came on, had ballooned to 10.00, with Sri Lanka having also lost two wickets inside three overs. Just before his final over, Charith Asalanka had taken debutant Varun Chakravarthy for 14 runs, giving Sri Lanka a set-up for a final-overs charge. On came Chahal for the 15th over. He conceded just three runs, varying pace, adjusting length if the batter moved and keeping the ball out of their hitting reach. ESPNcricinfo’s Smart Stats had Sri Lanka’s win probability at 40.47% before Chahal’s last over. After he bowled, it had dropped to 22.92. He said his job was “to control the middle overs”, which is exactly what he provided to India.Getting the fizz back in his bowling was the result of spending time during the pandemic-enforced lockdown with coaches, and with Haryana team-mate Jayant Yadav, whom Chahal bounced ideas off.”When I was not playing, I was working with my bowling coach, about where I should bowl, why I was not able to perform in a couple of matches. During the lockdown, I did single-wicket bowling, practiced with my friends,” Chahal said.Yuzvendra Chahal’s only wicket in the first T20I was of Dhananjaya de Silva with a ripping legbreak•SLC”I didn’t want to make too many changes. I thought about which lines I should focus on, whether to go wider or go stump to stump. I sat with (Bharat) Arun sir, there is Paras (Mhambrey) sir here and Rahul (Dravid) sir, so I sat with them, saw videos to see what am I missing? I have been doing well, but it was not happening in a couple of matches. During the lockdown, before this tour, I couldn’t really go much to cricket grounds due to Covid-19 restrictions. But the three-four sessions I got in my hometown, I went and practiced. Jayant Yadav was there, I’ve been playing with him since childhood, so we practiced together. I spoke to him also, and things started from there. The main thing was that the more confident I can be while bowling, the better I will be able to bowl.”Related

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• Bhuvneshwar, Chahar, Chahal help India defend below-par 164

For Chahal, it was important to do well in this series, given the depth of options India have to choose from. In this squad alone, among pure spinners, Rahul Chahar is on the sidelines as another promising legspinner, while Kuldeep and Chakravarthy are around too.”Definitely when your bench strength is so good that you have a pool of 30 players overall, it is a boost, and you get quality there,” Chahal said. “All spinners are doing well. You know that for your spot, there are already two people ready, who have already performed in the IPL, here. My focus when I play is that I should perform whenever I play. If you perform (well), then you get to play. You can stay in the team only with performance. When I bowl, I keep my mind clear, I don’t think of ‘this guy has done this, that guy has done that’. My mind is on the fact that I have the ball, and what I need to do now.”Chahal is likely to face sterner challenges after the current T20I series, with the twin behemoths of IPL and the T20 World Cup later this year. If he can continue to employ the skill and nous he has regained in Sri Lanka, there will be more happy days ahead for him and his team.

If Shreyas Iyer is to be retained after an excellent debut, a tough call will have to be made for the Mumbai Test

Sidharth Monga01-Dec-20212:12

Agarwal or Rahane: Who will sit out when Kohli is back?

Everybody knows about Rahul Dravid’s second Test as captain. That’s when he declared on a certain somebody. Let’s talk about his third then. It was also the third Test for a batter who had made his name as in ODIs already. Yuvraj Singh would get to play, and Dravid would be the captain, only when Sourav Ganguly was missing. In his third Test, just before Ganguly was fit again, Yuvraj scored a superb century from 95 for 4 on a green seamer in Lahore. Back then, Dravid didn’t have to decide whose place the full-time captain would take without denying the promising youngster, who looked ready to transition from white ball to red ball at the international level.

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In his second Test as coach of India, Dravid has to make that call. Or, at least, help make it. Virat Kohli, who gave himself a one-Test break to just get off the treadmill for a week and work on his game, will be back as captain for the Mumbai Test against New Zealand, and he has to decide who makes way for him. Shreyas Iyer rescued India twice with innings of 105 and 65 on debut, making it nigh impossible to leave him out, especially when the other three middle-order batters have a combined average of 27.3 over the last two years.It leaves Dravid and Kohli a tricky selection to make. These are their options.Kohli replaces Rahane

If you just look at cold numbers, Ajinkya Rahane, who captained in Kohli’s absence, has to go.Rahane averages 24.39 over his last 16 Tests, including one century in the Boxing Day Test nearly a year ago. With scores of 35 and 4 in the last Test, his career average has now dipped below 40.2:57

Vettori: Would probably leave out Rahane for Kohli in Mumbai

At home he averages 35.73, which has come down to 30.08 over the last five years.It is a fairly large sample size, and it is the easiest switch to make because Kohli will come in and reclaim the No. 4 spot, leaving Iyer at No. 5, where he scored the runs in Kanpur.This is one of the peculiar things about Test selections, though. Bowlers get rotated depending on the conditions. Why not batters? Part of the reason is that batters have the least say in the runs they get; conditions and bowlers initiate a play, batters react. In that sense, they are not the horses that are changed with courses.It is a thought, though: Rahane’s record at home is not good, so why not play him only in away Tests?Kohli replaces Pujara

Cheteshwar Pujara has been dropped for much less in the past. He helped save the Melbourne Test in 2014-15 but found himself out of Sydney. He scored a match-winning century on a green seamer in Sri Lanka in 2015, and found himself out in the West Indies after one home series in India without a century.Now it has been close to three years without a century. That’s 23 matches for an average of 28.61. He has played the odd good innings in between, but they have been support acts. He has tired the bowlers down with grit and will, but eventually he has needed an assertive batter with him for those contributions to count.It is interesting how the experts read it. Pujara’s returns have been marginally better, but Rahane has looked better and more organised at the wicket before finding ways to get out. Pujara bats in the more difficult No. 3 position. Both are the same age, 33.Kohli trained at the Brabourne Stadium during his break from the Test team•AFP/Getty ImagesKohli replaces Agarwal

If this happens, it will seem unfair on the young opener, who has not got a proper run in Test cricket yet.Mayank Agarwal averages 43.28 after 15 Tests, but he dominates attacks at home: he has double-centuries against South Africa and Bangladesh. On the away leg, he played both the Tests in New Zealand last year, but made way for Rohit Sharma midway in the Australia series and then missed England with injury. It would seem unfair to drop him after just one Test back just to retain two veterans.As in the unfortunate case of Hanuma Vihari, who has got to play just one Test at home and gets to play away only when the conditions are difficult enough to ask for a sixth batter, selections at Test level are not about what is fair to an individual but what is best for the team. If the team management genuinely believes that Pujara and Rahane can turn it around, and that they are of more value than Agarwal – who will be the back-up opener once Rohit and KL Rahul are back – they could take this call.