After New Zealand finished practice, the groundsmen uncovered the pitch and began to scrub the surface with wire brushes. The smattering of live grass the Kiwis had spotted in the morning was now shaved, the debris wiped and tied into big brown sacks. By the time head coach Gautam Gambhir and his aides inspected the pitch, the sun blazing over their heads, the track’s visage was dry and abrasive.
Predicting pitch behaviour two days before the match is more speculative than scientific, however there were ample signs that conditions in Pune could be starkly different from those in Bengaluru. The barely-watered 22 yards were unprotected from an unrelenting sun, as though left open to bake it a bit more. The pitch would turn — the only suspense is when — as India looked to bounce back from the first Test shock.
But there have been home games where the ‘turning track’ ploy has backfired. Indian batsmen have made it a habit of making nondescript overseas spinners seem world-class. Tom Hartley, Matthew Kuhnemann, Shoaib Bashir, Ajaz Patel being a few examples. The last four of India’s five home defeats have arrived on tracks where the ball has spun alarmingly. In a series-defining match, the turner-ploy is not without risk.
But India would be emboldened that they hold three uninhibited destructors of spin bowling in Yashasvi Jaiswal, Sarfaraz Khan and Rishabh Pant, each with their methods in chastening the turning ball.
In all eras, India has possessed exemplary players of spin, but three counter-attackers is an alignment of rare stars. The snake-hipped Jaiswal is a throwback in his adherence to the classical methods of disrupting spinners. He uses his long reach to sweep and slog them, forcing them to pull their length back, whereupon he scythes them backward of point.
A shrewd judge of length, Jaiswal steps out and hits them over their heads too. In 15 innings against spinners, he averages 100.12 and boasts a strike rate of 79.73. The left-hander was the bedrock of India’s Bazball-dismembering series win. England’s Bashir explained the difficulties of bowling against him: “He knows a lot of ways to hurt, can pick the same ball to different parts of the ground. He plays the ball late and reads through our plans.”
In the nets, Jaiswal swept Kuldeep Yadav into submission with a flurry of sweeps. The wrist-spinner pulled his length back at first, but the Jaiswal still reached the pitch of the ball. He bowled fuller, and Yashasvi unfurled the paddle. A distraught Kuldeep resorted to a flatter length, but with little relief as Jaiswal continued his merry ways. Raised on bouncing, turning and raging red soil-heavy surfaces of Mumbai, he is the latest inheritor of Mumbai’s spin-shredders’ mantle.
Middle-order marauders
So is his teammate Sarfaraz. He is different in that he traces more unorthodox areas. Aided by delectable wrists, he cuts so fine that even a finely-placed third man can’t prevent boundaries. He almost pickpockets the ball from the keeper’s gloves, without extravagant flourishes, neither in his pre-delivery routines nor the follow-through. For a heavy-set man, he has quick reflexes as he hunkers down to sweep, which again travels finer than usual. He has nimble feet too that whirr into balletic patterns when he sashays down the track.
When Sarfaraz steps out, he doesn’t go full-throttle but just enough to swing his arms through the line. A clean, crisp bat-swing is the essence of his batting. He flaunts a strike rate of 80 and an average of 76.6 against spinners in his Test career. It’s still just six innings old, but it takes only a few knocks to define the characteristics of a batsman. Dominating spin is certainly one of his strengths. He can be both brutal and sophisticated against them, slog-sweeping one ball, and late- cutting the next.
“I have seen Sarfaraz maidaan ke dhool-matti khaate (toil hard in the dust and mud of maidans),” his Mumbai teammate Suryakumar Yadav wrote for this daily. To finesse his spin game during the pandemic, he travelled to Azamgarh and Kanpur, where he trained extensively with Kuldeep, who Jaiswal put through the wringer in the nets.
Among them, Pant is perhaps the strongest through the off-side, especially in front of square. He might slog-sweep or reverse-scoop the spinners, but he flat-bats them through cover and drives them through extra-cover. Turners don’t fluster him. His second-innings hundred against England in Ahmedabad, more famous for the reverse-lapped four of James Anderson, was a manual on attacking spinners on square-turners. Destroying spinners is his natural instinct, an expression of joyfulness. Ill-advised captains have tried to bait him with spinners, but to little reward. He strikes them at 88 runs per hundred balls, maintaining an average of 58.08. Every eighth ball he faces off a spinner ends up as a six or four. Ask Nathan Lyon or Jack Leach, two of the pre-eminent Test spinners of this era.
Hence, India wouldn’t fear a turner’s backlash as much as they have in recent times. For, at their disposal are three natural destroyers of spin bowling.
