Out for a duck in his first innings, he showed he can make quick adjustments to turn things around
Alagappan Muthu24-Nov-2024What is the most fun a batter can have on a cricket field?Scoring hundreds? Yashasvi Jaiswal is 15 Tests and 16 months into his Test career and he has four of those now.Hitting sixes? He has 35 of them this year which is a world record. Brendon McCullum has been bumped off.Related
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Doing well away from home? He made his debut in the West Indies and scored 171. He now has the highest score by an Indian batter in Perth. And this place is special. It might still be home to Sachin Tendulkar’s best Test innings.For the players themselves, a job well done is about putting the team in a winning position. Jaiswal left the field having contributed over 50% of the 313 runs that India had scored. A lot of them were hard-earned. He absorbed Australia’s new ball pressure. He withstood their temptation, which took many forms. Sixty two leaves in total, with Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood probing away in the off-stump corridor. Another new high point in his career, beating the restraint he showed on debut in Roseau. Nathan Lyon was brought in early to try and sucker him into going hard at the ball. Four balls in, he did charge the Australia offspinner but seeing the ball was a bit flatter and a bit wider with the potential to turn past his outside edge if he weren’t careful, he switched from an attacking shot to a defensive shot.With time, those immense reserves of talent, and the concentration levels that he was demanding of himself, Jaiswal was discovering pleasures that do not make it onto the scorecards. He had the Australian bowlers sticking their heads in their hands. He goaded them and all they could do in response was offer a wry smile. This is not like the old Australian teams of the past, the ones who saw being aggro as a tactic. But still, a 22-year old on his first tour here telling their all-time great left-arm spearhead that he was “coming on too slow” and him having nothing to say in return was all kinds of cool. Especially when it took precious little effort to get rid of him in the first innings.Jaiswal threw his wicket away trying to hit himself out of trouble in the third over of an away tour. At the next available opportunity, he fixed it. That doesn’t happen too often. There have been – in the entire history of Test cricket – only 81 instances where a batter who scored a duck in the first innings turned it around to score a century in the second. And Jaiswal finds a pretty special place even among these guys. His 161 is the eighth-highest score on this list.2:50
Jaiswal: ‘I back myself to take brave decisions’
The fab four’s legend contains so many stories about combating difficult conditions and making off-the-cuff changes to their technique. Steven Smith’s shuffle across off stump. Virat Kohli ditching a practice of tapping his bat down at the point the bowler is about to deliver and instead waiting in like a coiled-spring position, with the bat up high, poised over middle and off stump. Jaiswal isn’t that stature of batter yet and the adjustments he made here weren’t really as drastic. He just willed himself to play closer to the body and get his runs squarer of the wicket when the ball was new. But showing a capacity to do so, along with the cricket sense to then capitalise on his good work as the bowlers tired does suggest the high ceiling he had already come on this tour with has gone even higher.These kinds of batters are able to exist outside the constraints of a Test match. This one, for example, was being played on a terribly slow outfield. A vast majority of the 27 threes so far in this game should’ve been fours. But there was this one time when the ball just flew off the turf. It happened when Jaiswal combined two shots – an off-drive powered by a flick of his wrists – and it looked so vicious the highlights should slap a warning on it. Seconds after this bit of genius, though, he was gone. He couldn’t believe, after all the ability he’d shown and the shots he’d played, he ended up cutting a short and wide delivery from Mitchell Marsh’s medium pace straight into the hands of backward point.Perth Stadium needed a little time to reconcile with that too but eventually silence was given the boot. The ovation they gave him was beautiful. There was something about it that said the crowd wanted more of him; that even after 161 runs, 397 balls, and 18 boundaries, they hadn’t had their fill; that they’d found someone worth the cost of a ticket; someone that would dominate pub conversations; someone that they could copy looking in the mirror; someone they could set as their phone wallpaper; someone to be a part of their lives for a long time to come.What is the most fun a batter can have on a cricket field? Ask Yashasvi Jaiswal about his time in Perth.
