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Indian team formed a huddle at the end of the day’s play in Visakhapatnam. (Source: PTI)
Someone had a sense of humour. “Jaddu thoda aur flight de saktha hai – MSD.” It was a fan message — you text using an app and it’s flashed on the big screen at the stadium. Someone who knew his cricket had recalled the famous urging from Dhoni.
Ravindra Jadeja was bowling when the advice came through though it’s unlikely he or his team-mates saw it in the middle of the over. As it turned out, Jadeja did flight the next few deliveries, and Alastair Cook even edged couple past the close-in fielders. It wasn’t that Jadeja didn’t flight or rip, or R Ashwin and Jayant Yadav weren’t at the top of their game — the England batsmen were just bloody determined.
After switching partners like an unfaithful lover in the recent past, Cook senses he can have something going with Haseeb Hameed, and two openers made hard graft look sexy.
It took a low-slithering snake of a delivery, a grubber, to roll out the immoveable Hameed. The ball from Ashwin turned and shot through real low and the teenager, who at 7 decided he would play cricket after meeting Sachin Tendulkar, pressed back and collapsed just like the Indian superstar would have done. The knees sunk, the body hunched down, but the ball had rolled past the bat by then and struck him on the shin. Kohli punched the air, so did Ashwin — understandable reactions as the boy had thwarted them for 144 deliveries, 50 overs, 188 minutes and kept a Test win at bay. Neutrals would have perhaps fallen silent, a more apt reaction to the moment and the mode of dismissal.
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Cook too fell in the dying moments of the day. Perhaps, it was a loss in focus, as he tried to turn a flighted Jadeja delivery from outside off to the on side. Mistake. The bat-face shut, and there was no way the wood would have met the leather, and he was trapped lbw.
“Bore kiya, lekin kaam toh hua na,” Shitanshu Kotak, a stonewaller from Saurashtra, once said after a Ranji knock against Mumbai. These 188 minutes of Hameed and Cook wasn’t boring, though; there was enough drama, fight, class, and intensity that would linger on for quite a while. The ball occasionally kept low, turned in from the odd crack, the Indian spinners tried different speeds and trajectories, squeezed in the pressure by accuracy, but Cook and Hameed refused to budge.
Hameed has already turned into the English story of this tour. A confident kid – one can’t imagine many teenage debutants tell their captain not to opt for DRS after a lbw verdict as he did in Rajkot, and he has grown in stature in just four innings in India. The son of an Indian immigrant from Bharuch in Gujarat – the family moved from a place known for its over-sized peanuts to a cold Bolton in the 60’s, he has come a long way.
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There is this story in Sunday Times told by John Hutchinson, a coach at a cricket club in Bolton. He is at the balcony staring at the park that is sheeted with snow when he sees two figures walk in, clear away the snow. He recognises the boy with the bat as Hameed. The older man is his cricket-mad father Ismail, who proceeds to give throwdowns to the son. It was a bewildering moment for the Englishman, just another day for the migrant family who were obsessed with cricket.
You could see that obsession at Vizag. The settings was a far cry from the Bolton snow-flakes, the pitch he stood on was beginning to look like a parched desert.
The cracks were opening up right in front of him, the Indians had crowded him all around, the spinners were gunning for the patchy marks, the man who is the second quickest in history to race to 200 Test wickets was ripping it, the occasional one was keeping low, the odd one jumping, an eager crowd were shouting themselves hoarse – and this is his second Test.
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Bat raised, head tilted forward, body leaning ahead, he would stretch forward to defend. Tuk tuk tuk … on and on it went in a relentless loop. The pacers too came on. The tuk-tuk continued.
Every now and then, Umesh Yadav would get one to hit a crack at back of length outside off and jag back at him. Hameed would double up in half almost, and would get hit on the thigh pad. Once, as he walked away rubbing his thigh furiously, Cook began to walk across. He needn’t have bothered. Hameed was smashing his bat on his thigh pad, jamming it back in position.
Unlike some, he looks 19. He bats as if he is 30, and has come on numerous tours of India. It’s tempting to put his batting against spin to his Indian genes but it’s wise to credit his hard work and talent.
There was this moment in Rajkot, in the first Test, when he suddenly leaned forward to a Jadeja delivery and just wafted through the line. Up and over long-off for a jaw-dropping six. He seems to know when to turn it on, when to curb those urges.
Just before he got out, there were couple of instances when it seemed he wanted to amp-up the strokeplay. Twice, he tried to drive Ashwin hard, and once, he even scooped one aerially between the bowler and mid-off. Soon, a ball arrived with his name on it; it would be churlish to suggest he could have perhaps gone forward or stayed low when he pressed back.
But by then, the quiet small guy had shown a big heart.
Cook’s method
His captain Cook knows how to get the job done in these conditions, and more you see him, it becomes clear how he does it. He is a busy defensive player — wait, let’s expand on that imagery. Jadeja ripped a quite a few from outside off, and whenever it was fractionally short, Cook would open up, allow more than a fair glimpse of the stumps, and use the cut shot as a defensive tool. Sure, he doled out quite a few forward-presses to block; you would be an idiot if you didn’t on this track. Even there, there would be tiny foot movements, as the ball is released, that would get him into a good position, allow him to cover the line, before he would go forward to defend. A busy defensive player.
Ashwin has this delivery that he gets the ball to straighten even on turners. The close-ups reveal that only the thumb and the index-finger have any real hold on the ball when released and there isn’t much wrist in the action to prevent spin.
Cook had some troubles against it, especially early on. He would prod forward, threaten to push inside or outside the line but managed to get some bat on it.
Slowly, as the innings wore on, he began to wait on the front foot, and not push out too far forward, and managed to see-out those deliveries. If only he had pushed out that Jadeja delivery back down the track but that’s how it rolls sometimes.
But he can be proud with himself, and his team on this tour. Barring an hour and half of meekness and soft cricket on the third afternoon, they have shown a steely resolve and have fought real hard.
Two Tests have gone the full distance – they hustled the Indians on the final evening at Rajkot, and they have forced Indians to sweat it out real hard if they want to win this one.
Number Plate: Of the Cook-Hameed stand and what lies ahead
17.36 : Hameed’s strike-rate of 17.36 is the slowest for any teenaged batsman in Test cricket who’s faced more than 100 balls. Incidentally, the only slower innings by a teenager was Mohammad Amir’s 117-ball 16 at Edgbaston in 2010.
37.1 : The number of overs England took to reach 50 in the second innings. It was the most number of balls consumed to reach a half-century total since 2000. They’d taken 34.1 overs at Centurion in 2004-05.
143.1 : If England bat out the whole of Day 5 of the second Test at Vizag, they will break the record for most number of overs faced by a team in the fourth innings of a Test in Asia by at least 6 overs. The record presently stands with South Africa who lasted 143.1 overs last year in Delhi.
297: It might be a big ask for the attack-minded English middle-order to be expected to play possum like their openers but they could take a cue from AB de Villiers who ate up 297 balls for his 43 and Hashim Amla who made 25 off 244.
171: No. of deliveries Cook took to reach his half century in England’s second innings. It was his slowest ever. His previous slowest took 164 balls — against Australia at Trent Bridge in 2013, and against Lanka in Colombo in 2012.
248: In 248 opening stands that Cook has featured in, already 2 out of 4 times he’s opened with Haseeb Hameed feature in the 13 longest partnerships during his time.
50 : 2 out of the 7 overall occasions that visiting openers have batted together for more than 50 overs in their team’s second innings have come in this series between Alastair Cook and Haseeb Hameed.
