Nottingham to Nagpur has taken 5 years for Jaffer

If first impression is the best impression, it explains why Wasim Jaffer hasn’t stayed long in the Test stable. His Test debut against South Africa was disastrous, to say the least, struggling against the pace of Allan Donald and falling to Shaun Pollock’s swing. Not many matches later — he remembers — it was Nottingham, little more than five years back, when he last played Test cricket. Matthew Hoggard rattled his stumps in the first innings and Flintoff hit his pads in front of stumps in the next innings.

Jaffer will once again square up to the English pace duo in Nagpur and he’s determined to make this one count in his favour; the Mumbai opening bat says he is ‘‘better prepared this time around.’’ But Jaffer believes it will be Simon Jones and Steve Harmison he has to watch out for. ‘‘I have got a great opportunity to do well and will look forward to giving my best,’’ he says.

Opportunities seldom comes a second time in Indian cricket. After Gautam Gambhir failed to latch on to the opening slot, Jaffer forced selectors to look towards him through sheer weight of his performance, including two double hundreds in the current Ranji season. Jaffer’s weak link was found to be his inability to play deliveries that moved off the seam. In South Africa and again in England, swing constantly troubled him.

However, he has made a conscious attempt to put those memories behind — dismiss it like deliveries played with ‘‘bad timing’’ and concentrate on the next ball. His new-found confidence comes from the fact that he has done exceptionally well ‘‘for India ‘A’ team on the tour of England in 2003.’’