Image Credit- BCCI
The essence of
cricket’s allure, if you’ve played the game at all, is the sensation of
middling the ball and seeing it soar. When Rajat Patidar got on his toes to a
perfectly good ball from Mark Wood on the opening morning of the Rajkot Test,
the ball was likely on the fifth-stump channel and reached the batter just
above stump height. With a punch of crisp minimalism, all timing and no
movements wasted, Patidar sent it racing to the cover boundary.
If you’ve ever
played cricket, you’ve undoubtedly also experienced the melancholy that comes
with batting. No matter how good you are or how hard you work, it’s always out
of your control and may be both the best and the worst thing in the world. It’s
a thing of beauty and fragility. Every now and then you get a dirty long-hop
that gets stuck in the pitch and becomes completely vindictive.
Shortly after his moment of transcendence against Wood, Patidar got a ball like
that from Tom Hartley and was out for five.
sixty-three runs
with a 10.5 average. In addition to getting out to nice balls, Patidar has also
been out twice to long hops and middled a defensive shot that rolled back onto
his stumps. If they play for a long enough time, all hitters have periods similar
to this in their careers. It was something Patidar encountered in his first
series.
When a batter goes through an initiation like this, opinions about their
technique, attitude, and body language might fly from all directions. In
Patidar’s situation, there’s also the factor that his first-class average in
the 40s came into Test cricket. If he had made runs, it might have been
considered an example of selectorial genius; as it stands, you can beat him and
these professors with the stick.
With one Test
remaining and the series already won, the selectors have decided to keep
Patidar in the Indian team despite the absence of KL Rahul and Virat Kohli.
It’s easy to understand why. When India selected Patidar to replace Kohli on
January 24, they noticed traits in him that they thought would help him succeed
at the Test level. After five weeks, they likely still perceive the same traits
in him—the ones that helped him score hundreds of runs in back-to-back red-ball
matches for India A against the England Lions before this series.
Patidar might yet
not make the starting eleven in Dharamsala. In first-class and List A cricket,
Devdutt Padikkal has built an outstanding case for himself to be selected with
six hundreds and an undefeated 93 in his last 14 innings. It is possible that in
the nets prior to the Test match, Padikkal performs better than Patidar.
However, India will decide whether to play Patidar or not based on factors
other than his recent poor performance. They are aware that underlying those
stats lies a remarkably talented cricket player.