How’s the pitch playing?” Gagandeep Singh asked Ashish Nehra. “You’ll know by evening,” Nehra replied with a smile. It was an interesting conversation between two fast bowlers in the backdrop of an old-school featherbed. From morning to afternoon, the left-arm seamer had toiled hard, trying to curtail the growing Punjab total. Towards sunset, Gagan was doing the same, but faring rather worse, given the urgency Delhi openers Aakash Chopra and Shikhar Dhawan showed in their march towards a first innings lead. On face value, Punjab’s score of 391 looked imposing, but compared to Delhi’s score of 142 for no loss at stumps on Day Two, the figure shrinks into insignificance. Chopra was unbeaten on 67 from 115 balls while Dhawan was rock solid in his 87-ball 64. Together, the left-hand right-hand combination had shared 19 sweetly-timed boundaries inside 33.2 overs possible before poor light forced players inside six overs before schedule. Opening optionsBoth Chopra and Dhawan have been making strong cases for themselves despite the air-tight look about the Indian team at the top of the order. On Tuesday, aided by the true bounce of the Roshanara pitch and encouraged by the increasing numbers of famous cricketing personalities sitting by the ropes, Chopra and Dhawan — who were both overlooked in favour of M Vijay as a replacement for the banned Gautam Gambhir later in the day — adopted a confident and increasingly audacious approach against the new ball. Chopra lagged behind a bit in the initial stages even as Dhawan got off the blocks in aggressive fashion but the former Indian opener matched his younger partner as far as quality of strokes went. Dhawan’s leaning cover drive off seamer Siddharth Kaul was front-runner for the shot of the day, but Chopra’s extra-cover drive off Gagandeep came close. The Delhi skipper’s half-flick towards mid-on, struck on the rise made the short-list, as did Dhawan’s front-foot punch that hit the sightscreen. Batting with a borrowed pair of pads from Karan Goel, his friend in the Punjab ranks, Dhawan hardly allowed the ball hit the soft rexin, using the willow instead to great effect, reaching his half-century off just 68 balls with eight boundaries. Chopra took 30 extra deliveries to reach that mark. Meanwhile, bowling on the surface has been all about optimism on a pitch that’s offered nothing. That Delhi can’t relax yet as they canter towards a first-innings lead is largely because of their generosity in the field — Punjab batsman Ankur Kakkar was dropped on 52 by Punit Bisht off Nehra, and the sixth-wicket pair added 102 runs to swell the total. The wicket-keeper erred on another occasion, this time off Amit Bhandari, to hand out a reprieve to Uday Kaul off the second ball after lunch. Uday and younger brother Siddharth Kaul frustrated Delhi bowlers further to take Punjab past 300. The tail wagged more than the home side would’ve liked, before the innings was cut on the brink of the psychological 400-run mark.The Delhi seamers had bowled with a lot of purpose: Nehra was relentless, Bhandari proved tricky with subtle movement off the deck, but it was Pradeep Sangwan who walked away with the bulk of the wickets. But overall, Delhi’s overuse of the short ball to disguise fuller-length deliveries didn’t camouflage the lack of variations.Punjab’s bowling has lacked the bite to penetrate or the discipline to contain so far — and with an entire range of strokemakers waiting in the dressing room, the visitors have to come up with ideas to boost their purchasing power to bargain for wickets.
