Shamik Chakrabarty, Mumbai
India tweaked. As the team’s bowling coach Morne Morkel had said ahead of the first ODI against Afghanistan in Dharamsala, this series was about rotation. Yashasvi Jaiswal came in as an opener, as skipper Shubman Gill gave up his place to bat at No. 3 in the second ODI in Lucknow on Wednesday. As strange as it may sound, Jaiswal and Rohit Sharma were opening in an ODI for the first time. They have done it on several occasions in Tests — the master and the protégé.
Mohammad Saleem gave a freebie to Jaiswal in his first over — short and wide outside off stump. The southpaw gleefully accepted the gift and slashed it to the backward point boundary. The next ball was pretty similar, but it had extra bounce. Yaiswal couldn’t control the cut and was taken at backward point. Only a handful of spectators turned up at Ekana in the mid-summer heat. Any possibility of a Rohit-Jaiswal jugalbandi was nipped in the bud.
Rohit was looking comfortable at the other end. A square cut off Saleem to get off the mark was controlled. In his next over, Saleem banged one short and outside off. Rohit pivoted nicely and pulled it off the front over the deep mid-wicket boundary for a six. Elegance oozed. Saleem bowled another short ball, just that this time it rose chest high. Rohit swivelled, and pulled it over deep square leg for another six. He completed 14,000 List A runs in the process.
‘Rohit is struggling with his touch’ — nonsense. ‘At 39 years of age his fitness is under the scanner’ — the way he was pivoting, that assumption goes out of the window. He is still the best puller in world cricket. And when on song, he still can make batting feel like music with the lightness of touch.
At the other end, Gill was putting in an exhibition of cover drives. The current captain and his predecessor were matching each other shot-for-shot. The batting was beautiful.
Bilal Sami bowled a leg-cutter. The idea ostensibly was to square up Rohit. But he erred in his line, and a gorgeous flick dispatched the ball to the square leg boundary. The bowler over-corrected and bowled wide outside off. Rohit used the wrists and sent it to the backward point fence.
A half-century looked pretty much on the cards, when Rashid Khan came up with a ripper. A googly from short-of-a-length made Rohit unsure about his footwork before breaching his defense. Rashid had lost his googly for a while. It’s working fine again. It needed something special to dismiss Rohit the way he was batting today. The delivery could have gotten any batsman out.
Rohit departed for 48 off 39 balls, rebutting any suggestions of him living on borrowed time. “I think him (Rohit) being in the side is definitely very, very important,” India’s spin-bowling coach Sairaj Bahutule had said at the pre-match press conference yesterday.
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