The worlds of Prithvi Shaw and Ruturaj Gaikwad did not converge on Wednesday. When Prithvi Shaw emerged from the dressing room after a four-ball duck and strode into the dug-out, Gaikwad was already in the middle, waging a rear-guard after finding his team two wickets down without a run on the board. The rest of Shaw’s day was reduced to cheering Gaikwad’s 91, an innings of graceful resoluteness, the spine of Maharashtra’s 179/7, and consoling him when he slumped to a chair on the dug out after getting out.
Their worlds had seldom met before. Shaw was the prodigy, the marathon run-maker in Mumbai, cricket’s mecca. Gaikwad was the diligent unknown from Maharashtra, the outlier, whose last Ranji title happened before the independence. Shaw made his Test debut when he was 19, belted a century before lunch and then decided to be the lost boy of Indian cricket. Five years later, he was no longer a Mumbai boy; he no longer had an IPL contract. The slump of Shaw coincided with the rise of Gaikwad, but in different worlds. Gaikwad made the hard runs in the domestic grind, caught the eye of IPL scouts, rose gradually through the ranks of the league and became the Chennai Super Kings captain last season. It is a cricketing version of the hare and tortoise story– the spectacular fall of a talent and the steady rise of another.
The rise of Gaikwad and the fall of Shaw continued to be the theme on a largely sunny day at the Greenfield Stadium. The heavy overnight showers, though, had infused adequate moisture into the surface to abet movement for seamers. Under such conditions, Shaw becomes an easy prey for worldly-wise seamers. The sinewy MD Nidheesh, with a frictionless action, is slippery, extracts seam movement and bounce with his height. He worked over Shaw with ridiculous simplicity; the classic inswing-outswing double bluff. In the pre-season, Nidheesh said, he was polishing his in-swinger. Four balls into his new balls, he slipped one to Shaw, with a hypnotic inward curve. Shaw swiped across, missed the ball altogether, the ball crashed onto his front pad and was made to look like a novice.
The same flaws persist. He stabs at the ball with leaden hands, he swipes across which cost him the wicket, and seems hasty to reclaim his lost ground. “It was a dismissal I had conceived when doing the home work for the game. And the plan worked out perfectly,” he said. He got considerable help from Shaw too, from his incapacity to not learn from the past failings.
The inscrutable Gaikwad was not to be lured into such fundamental follies. The movement on offer was precocious, he was beaten neck and crop a few times too. But he adjusted adeptly. The hands were soft, close to the body, and pliant to make late adjustments. The pressure mounted; Maharashtra were once 0 for three and then 18 for 5. But nothing fazed him. He was not seized into a boundary-hitting frenzy, or a counterpunching mood. He blocked and left, and only when the ball was too full and into his body that he drove, conscious to contact the ball as late and close to the body as possible. The first boundary was an extended forward defensive down the ground.
The arrival of Jalaj Saxena raised the run-scoring tempo. He slashed and drove, as NP Basil and Eden Apple Tom couldn’t match the precision of Nidheesh. The caning also meant that the new ball lost its shine and the pitch eased out to bat. The last 30 minutes of the first session saw a flurry of runs, and the theme continued in the second session. Gaikwad grew more assertive, sweeping the spinners off their lengths and driving the seamers with elan, aware that the ball was no longer moving deviously. A couple of Nidheesh’s balls kept low, but he vigilantly dead-batted those to safety. A century seemed certain, but for him reacting a trifle slow to Eden’s nip-backer. Gaikwad was convinced the ball was going down, and trudged off reluctantly. He would know the significance of three-figure marks and a mega-season that could parachute him to Test reckoning, with India transitioning and his flexibility to bat anywhere in the line-up a definite virtue. He could open, bat at one drop or beneath. Nidheesh would shower compliments on him. “Our aim was to make him play at every delivery. We executed our plans but he and Jalaj really batted well,” he said.
The red-ball career of Gaikwad is curious. A game founded on classical ideals, his first-class outings seemed an audition to an eventual Test career. While the red-ball returns were impressive, it never hit the high notes that could swing the Test match doors open. He never enjoyed a blockbuster season. The best was the haul of 592 runs at 53.81 in the 2022-23 season. In three of his seven seasons, he has scored between 500 and 600. But barging into the India dressing rooms commands loftier numbers. But the new season has brought happy tidings. Three innings ago, he compiled 184 against Australia A, and now 91 in an unfriendly clime. Perhaps, this could be that defining season of his. It could define Shaw’s career too; it could revive his career or plunge him deeper into the abyss.
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