India vs West Indies: Curbing instincts, reading situation help Ajinkya Rahane break century jinx

Read | Ajinkya Rahane explains why India did not play Ravichandran Ashwin, Rohit Sharma

The same philosophy, his batting seems to imbue, grinding out backs-to-the-wall runs in adversity. As it was in the first innings, his 81 forming the edifice of India’s building. Valuable a knock that was, he was unhappy that he couldn’t kick on and compile a big score, playing a percentage but moderately risky stroke, the slap through point off the rising ball. But he ended up chopping back onto the stumps. The knock made him happy, though the elusive hundred hurt him.

This time around, nothing would come between him and his hundred, which he hadn’t crossed in 32 innings. Not the slow pitch. Not the persistence menace of Kemar Roach. Not misjudgement. Not flashes of self-destruction. Pure abstinence. Nothing flashy. Nothing silly. Nothing over-ambitious. A batting-treatise on slow wickets, where stroke-making poses its own problems, especially for Rahane who likes playing his strokes freely and not sequester into a shell of abstinence. So he just waited and waited, a tuck here, a nudge there, eschewed everything that posed a semblance of risk. Instructive, as much as illustrative, was his run-making pattern. He found the ropes just five times, relying more on singles and twos to complete his slowest hundred. He ran as many as 58 singles and 11 doubles to reach the three figures. The sturdiness of his technique manifested as much as the steeliness of his will.

It wasn’t always the case. He was perceptibly impatient. Since the stroke of 2018, he seemed to be like a reader in tearing hurry, as if he wanted to read all the books ever published at one go. He was not necessarily in bad touch or riding a slump, he did chime in with crucial knocks in India’s Test victories in Johannesburg, Nottingham, and Adelaide, but his batting seemed plateauing, if not slowly dipping. Whereas his contemporaries such as Virat Kohli and Cheteshwar Pujara had taken their game into an elevated level, he somehow lagged

He had his skipper’s support, who before the match had remarked that the team wouldn’t “jump the gun on Rahane”.

He was too valuable to be dispensed with—neither his batting nor his sharp cricketing brain. He’s one of Kohli’s chief consultant. His ideas are valued, his suggestions precious, and his experience indispensable as India embark on world conquest. But first, his batting needed to pick up. The numbers were so evident that he had to nowhere to hide. Before 2018, he averaged in the mid-40s, but in the last 14, it plunged to 35. Some speculated that the exclusion in the first two Tests of the South Africa series battered him, for he had never looked the same game-changer he had been in the past. Rahane himself had rubbished the claims, but he seemed genuinely tormented in the middle. If he tried to put on a brave face, he was often reminded of his slump. Like during the practice game, when he was walking back to the pavilion, an Indian supporter screamed at him: “Jinks, will you get a hundred this match?” Uncharacteristically, he seemed a trifle perturbed.

It was clearly hurting him, both the lack of runs and hundreds. In the then and now between his last hundred, Kohli made eight more entries to his centuries column; Pujara four. At times, he seemed to be a forgotten man, as India’s batting became two-men axis, revolving around Kohli and Pujara. It didn’t help that his lacklustre days coincided with even more dramatic plummeting of bulwarks like Murali Vijay and KL Rahul, and to a lesser degree Shekhar Dhawan. His drought became pronounced, and his fate seemed drifting closer to their narrative than Kohli’s and Pujara’s.

But Rahane didn’t flinch—he has inner steel beneath the soft-spoken, wiry exterior, conditioned and battle-hardened by his early years. Hopping into congested Mumbai trains, fighting for space, clinging to rails nears the doors, then nuancing his batting in the congested spaces of the city’s maidans, then striving to get into the most decorated team in the country’s domestic circuit, then waiting for an eternity to get into the national team, and spending several months on bench before he made his Test debut. He is made of such stuff as counter-punchers in boxing are made of—he’s a karate black belt himself—and wouldn’t stop fighting before he went down. The World Cup omission was another setback, but he sensed in the snub an opportunity to experience county cricket. He joined Hampshire, didn’t score too many runs, just a solitary hundred against Notts, though against a potent attack helmed by Stuart Broad. He acquainted himself with the vagaries of English weather. He tightened up his game, started playing closer to the body, a conscious effort that paid off in this Test, wherein he batted with the patience of a good reader, reading every ball carefully and not flipping through the pages of his innings.

Brief Scores (At tea): India: 297 and 343/7 dec (A Rahane 102, H Vihari 93; R Chase 4/132, K Roach 1/29) vs West Indies 1st innings: 222 and 15 for 5 (J Bumrah 3/6, I Sharma 2/8)