During the Test series in England where Shubman Gill was skipper, KL Rahul had said he was relieved that his captaincy days were behind him and was happy as a specialist batsman. As it turned out, now he is leading India in the ODIs against South African, just days after the disastrous Test series.
“I look forward to enjoying that responsibility. I have always enjoyed responsibility, making the right decisions for the team. That’s about it. I don’t think too much about it. I obviously have Rohit, Virat, Jaddu, all the senior players around me who will help out. Just a day before the (squad) announcement, I was told that the opportunity might come and I might have to lead,” Rahul said.
He was the most experienced batsman in the Test team, but had a disappointing series. It was a failure of not just skill but of temperament too. Rahul loves to charge down the track to spinners in white-ball cricket. He uses the lofted shot often and at times, whips through midwicket or drives down the ground to long-on.
But that approach was not visible in the Test series against the Proteas as Rahul stayed in the crease, lunging forward to his own detriment in both innings of the second Test in Guwahati.
Was it a case of self-doubt, wondering what if he missed the ball? But Rahul said he didn’t have any regrets about his approach. “It is the Test format. At the stage that I was playing, it was the last few overs of the day. I don’t think that’s the right time for me to try and step down and hit the bowler for a boundary.”
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He was referring to his second innings dismissal to Simon Harmer, playing a puzzling waft to a big off-break from outside off-stump that threaded the bat-and-pad gap to bowl him.
It’s that ‘it is a Test format’ theory that’s interesting to dive into. It’s the pressure of the red-ball format that possibly handcuffs Rahul mentally. It was put to him that one wasn’t talking about the big lofted hits necessarily, but the use of feet to counter spin like Cheteshwar Pujara would. That has been absent in the current team. Not many go down the track, and when a couple like Rishabh Pant or Ravindra Jadeja do, it’s more to play the lofted hits. Nullifying spin with whips, pushes and nudges after getting to the pitch of the ball is missing.
Rahul talked about the monologue that runs in his mind in Test cricket where he tussles with that going-down-the-track option.
“If I had stepped down and gotten out, maybe that would have been a question mark in my own head as to whether that was right or wrong,” he said. “Looking back, maybe I would have but it was only the second ball of the over. At that point in time, I think defending was the right option, which I didn’t do well enough.”
The option of defending by using the feet doesn’t seem to arise as naturally to modern-day Indian batsmen. The footwork just to kill the spin, and not necessarily hit a big shot, seems a lost art.
Another questioner brought up the ailing art of playing spin, raising comparison with how “Sunil Gavaskar used to play spin”.
Rahul listened patiently and said the right things. “We can learn from Mr. Gavaskar. We are already trying to find ways to play spinners better. It won’t happen overnight. What are the technical changes we need to make? We will individually try to seek answers and do better.”
A few minutes later, while batting in the open nets adjacent to the centre pitch, Rahul went down the track to a spinner and smashed a flat six that hit the boundary rope.
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