So early in his Test career, Yashasvi Jaiswal has already shown incredible and effortless range in his batting – a product of the Bombay school of batting but also the IPL
Karthik Krishnaswamy19-Feb-2024A belief pervades many cultures that showering someone with praise summons the evil eye.Rohit Sharma seemed to be in the grip of just such a belief on Sunday evening, when he was asked about Yashasvi Jaiswal’s run-scoring feats in this series against England. He was asked first at the presentation ceremony in Rajkot.”I’ve spoken a lot about him,” he said. “I’m sure people outside the changing room have also been talking about him. I want to be calm about him, not talk a lot about him.”Related
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He was asked again at his post-match press conference.”I won’t say anything on Jaiswal. Everyone is talking about him. Let him play. He is playing well, it’s good for us and he is in good form. I am not going to say much more than that. [this is enough for now].”At these moments Rohit seemed not so much the captain of a cricket team as the anxious parent of a gifted child fretting about the inadvertent curse of excessive praise. You could imagine him nailing a string of chillies and lime to India’s dressing-room doorframe, and getting a member of the coaching staff to circle Jaiswal’s head three times clockwise and three times anticlockwise with a fistful of rock salt.You could empathise with Rohit, because Jaiswal is that kind of player. So good, so early in his career, that it seems wrong to talk about him. Let the boy be. Let him get on with it. Just watch and enjoy, no?This feeling – no doubt shared by many others apart from Rohit – is perhaps also a product of the names Jaiswal’s recent achievements have twinned him with, Don Bradman and Vinod Kambli: a career so productive that no one will ever be expected to match it, and a sad and curiously truncated career of whys and what-ifs. Kambli, of course, is a Mumbai left-hander who came from humble beginnings and brought to Test cricket both a precocious appetite for runs and a love for hitting sixes.Bradman and Kambli. A bright start, then, is just a start.The Indian camp rises as one to welcome Yashasvi Jaiswal back after his Visakhapatnam epic•BCCIBut what a start Jaiswal has had. He has played seven Tests now, and scored 861 runs at an average of 71.75. He’s already made three hundreds, each of them big, each bigger than the previous one – 171, 209, 214* – and each different to the other too.The debut effort in Dominica was remarkable for how unremarkable it appeared on the surface. On a slow Dominica pitch where India’s batters struggled for timing though not for survival against a limited West Indies attack, he batted time, with only as much fluency as the conditions would allow, and checked off one milestone after another, each appearing more inevitable than the last one. It was an innings you might have expected from Virat Kohli – who, to put the conditions in perspective, took 80 balls to hit his first boundary – but perhaps not from a 21-year-old debutant.Then, over the last two weeks, he’s made two double-hundreds: one that held together a first innings that could have otherwise fallen apart – he made just under 53% of India’s total of 396 – and one that set the tone for a jubilant third-innings surge.Perhaps nothing illustrates how different these two double-hundreds were than the methods he adopted against England’s fast bowlers in both innings. In Visakhapatnam, he faced 67 balls from James Anderson, England’s only quick, and scored 17 runs. In Rajkot, he faced 39 balls from Anderson and Mark Wood and scored 61. In strike-rate terms, he went from 25.37 in one innings to 156.41 in the other.
You could imagine Pant leaving five balls in a row if he really, really had to, but by the fourth leave you’d be off your chair and pacing the floor. When Jaiswal left five in a row from Jason Holder in his debut innings, you were probably fixing yourself a snack while the cricket played in the background.
The shots Jaiswal unleashed on the fourth day in Rajkot were always present in his kitbag: the falling scoop, the bent-knee slap over the massed off-side field, the club down the ground off the good-length ball. But where even the most subdued innings from Rishabh Pant – to take the example of the previous extravagantly gifted India left-hander to treat Anderson with cheerful disrespect in a home Test – is likely to include one or two shots of that type, it feels like Jaiswal could comfortably get through a full series without needing to demonstrate his full range.You could imagine Pant leaving five balls in a row if he really, really to, but by the fourth leave you’d be off your chair and pacing the floor. When Jaiswal left five in a row from Jason Holder in his debut innings, you were probably fixing yourself a snack while the cricket played in the background.Some players are so good that you can’t take your eyes off them. Some are so good that you frequently do, with the certainty that they’ll still be batting when you’ve returned from your fridge-foraging.Jaiswal can be both kinds of batter, but he’s more often the second kind. He’s a product of the Bombay school the Rajasthan Royals school, and while that education has given him a vast skillset, it has seemingly spared him the effects of its inherent contradictions. At this stage, it feels like you could send him out in any situation and expect that he’d make sound choices without having to think too hard about it.That clarity and certainty, of course, is partly a product of the form he’s in, and the fact that he hasn’t yet met a real setback as a batter at the highest level. That will come in its course. Watching him, it’s hard to think he wouldn’t find a way to overcome it.For now, though, it’s perhaps wisest to just let him be. Watch and enjoy. And keep your amulets and rabbit’s feet handy, just in case.
