Taking the world in his stride, Dinesh

Kaarthick took the one-hour drive from the team hotel in Bhubaneshwar to the stadium an hour ahead of the entire team along with Raina and Ian Frazer. He practised the long shots at the nets, clearing them by quite a distance. Team India wanted to use him as a wild card, possibly at No. 3, but when he did walk in at No. 5 Kaarthick kept his head down and eyes open for the slower stuff. He played with soft hands against the West Indian bowling attack, buoyed by Darren Powell’s best ever ODI spell, that looked pace-oriented on paper but sprinkled generous off-cutters and slower ones on a wicket with varied bounce.

Faced with the extinction of being a wicketkeeper-bat in the same age as Dhoni, the genial Tamil Nadu player made a conscious effort to make himself flexible. Before making it to the squad, he requested his state/zone to promote him up the order to work his image as a batsman. From October last, when he bashed up Ashish Nehra-Balaji combine in a Challenger match — an innings that he admits refuelled his career — to this day, a rejuvenated Kaarthick has showed quite a few different images of himself: a match-winning Twenty20 player, a reliable Test match opener and a specialist bat.

Very slowly, but surely it could be a happy problem for Team India. Kaarthick admits he’s “still unsure of a place in the middle order and expects a tough fight alongside Yuvraj, Kaif and Raina” when the pool of 30 is pruned for the World Cup. After a long wait with pads on at Nagpur, he had to pad up too quickly here. And when he walked in at the fall of Tendulkar’s wicket, he knew he was playing to salvage his ODI career around the same time when the selectors sit down to pick the side for the next two ODIs.

Today, he hit shots all around — the pick of his seven boundaries being the flick with a wristy elegance over mid-wicket off Bravo’s slower one. Kaarthick planted his front foot firmly against the seamers, read the wicket nicely and resisted from playing on the rise.

He didn’t get sucked to the lollypops thrown at him and chose the right deliveries, like the one from Bravo, to hit through the covers or over mid-wicket. He reached his 50 in 72 balls, with five hits to the fence, and raised his bat for the second time after a leg-bye signal had messed up his earlier wave of the bat.

Kaarthick may have given Team India something to cheer about today, but he seemed a more hassled man after his match-winning konck! The next match is at his home town Chennai and there are already 40 match-ticket requests pending with him!