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In simpler words, KL Rahul.
India’s batting fails, and fans' first thoughts often gravitate towards Rahul’s place in the Indian side. Wouldn’t India be a better side with Rohit Sharma and Yashasvi Jaiswal as the opener? That was the sentiment from a few quarters.
Luckily, that was only a sentiment from a few quarters and not the management, who trusted the 32-year-old with perhaps the toughest job in Australia: to open the innings. In that sense, Rahul is more like a handyman or a jack of all trades.
India need an opener? Rahul is there.
India need a middle-order batter? Rahul is there.
How about when you need a back-up wicketkeeper? Rahul.
Not to forget that at one point in his Test career, Rahul was also on standby as India’s captain. He’s almost like modern-day cricket’s Rahul Dravid, a utility player on his worst day and one of the best in the business on his best days.
And, like Dravid, he’s best at doing something that current crop of cricketers seldom do: leave balls. As an opener in Australia, at least in the current climate, where runs have been almost impossible, there aren’t too many amenities as valuable in cricket as a ‘leave’.
The conditions were set up for a top-order failure when India walked out to bat at the Gabba in their first innings. It was overcast, the new ball was in the hands of Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood, and the conditions were quite perfect for bowlers.
That’s exactly where Rahul walked out and delivered a masterclass to the entire Indian team. Unlike Virat Kohli, who was on the move, trying to tackle the Australian bowlers on the front foot or Rohit Sharma, who was holding fort at the 2m length, Rahul batted from deep inside the crease.
Screenshot: Hotstar
It allowed the right-hander to make the right call, whether to play the ball late or leave it alone. It also gave him that fraction of a second extra to play the short delivery, which blindsided him in the second innings of the Adelaide Test, especially when Starc and Hazlewood were running ragged during his first spell.
Unlike other Indian batters, Rahul knew the power of abandoning ‘temptation’ for grit and valued leave as one of the most important shots here in Australia. He lay there like a monk but yet, at the same time, very much switched on to withdraw his bat at the last moment whenever a delivery probed outside the off-stump.
“He is very still at the crease. There is a little trigger movement, but his head is upright, and that's the reason why he can judge where the off-stump is and leave those deliveries. And that is so essential,” Sunil Gavaskar couldn’t stop praising the right-hander.
It also proved why the cricketing cliche of ‘watch the ball close’ is very important in conditions tough for the batters. Rahul has already faced the most deliveries in the series for any batter (463), taking a page out of the Australian openers in standing erect like a wall. That was Rahul’s task: soak the pressure.
177 of those 463 deliveries were either front-foot defence or back-foot defence. Combined with his 77 leaves, he has been as potent as Murali Vijay from the 2014 tour Down Under. But that isn’t the only thing he has done. The right-handed batter, who has soaked in 92.6 deliveries at the crease on average, has also pierced gaps with some succinct drives and cuts through the series.
That’s a pattern throughout the series. Rahul’s patience at the crease has often resulted in him and the other Indian batters getting a fair advantage of playing the older ball. It was evident in the second innings of the Perth Test when Rahul soaked all the pressure, which allowed for both Yashasvi Jaiswal (161) and Virat Kohli (100*) to tee off when the time came.
While he had no company at the other end, Rahul took it all upon himself at the Gabba.
For the first 30 deliveries, Rahul barely made the first move, with just 14 runs from 30 balls. With wickets falling from the other end, the next 30 deliveries followed a similar pattern, and the Indian opener put up 18 runs.
After leaving multiple deliveries on day three early in the innings, the right-hander made the fullest use of the full balls to drive them through the vacant cover region. It was only possible because he forced the Australian bowlers to bowl fuller by proactively leaving the deliveries from a back-of-a-length region.
Once the reprieve came early on day four, Rahul quickly realised that there could be his ‘name written on the ball’ and started playing more proactively, scoring 24 runs in 30 deliveries, taking the attack to the Australian bowlers.
“The partnership between KL and Jadeja was the standout partnership of this innings and now things are looking a lot better,” Pujara praised Rahul on Star Sports.
“And KL has showed that if you apply yourself, if you bat well, it’s a good pitch where you can score runs. It’s not a very difficult pitch where you can’t survive or where you can’t bat.
Since 2020, it has been a trademark of Rahul’s Test career, especially in SENA countries, where he has repeatedly played to the merit of the ball and grafted a gritty innings at the crease, forcing the opposition to rethink their plans.
India missed Pujara? They have got Rahul, who has adopted a similar approach, with eight innings of absolute batting time (100+ balls) in SENA countries since 2020. While Rahul’s brave innings in Brisbane might have come to a premature end on 84, his 139-ball stay was a complete masterclass of how you can ace the toughest of conditions with the basics of the sport.
Unsurprisingly, the masterclass is coming from Rahul, India’s SENA specialist.
(Cover image courtesy: Delhi Capitals)
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