Cheteshwar Pujara.....a well deserved break

We  had been hearing about Cheteshwar Pujara since time immemorial, or so it seems.

Finally, we got to see him in action during the recently concluded Bangalore Test. Well, to be honest, I was quite curious about this young lad from Saurastra Ranji team. And by the sheer volume of runs that he had been scoring over the past four seasons, he was attracting head lines in all sports columns. But I had my doubts, I always wondered if Pujara was good enough for international cricket. I have followed domestic cricket from close quarters and have seen many a cricketers of legendary status in the domestic circuit coming croppers in the international scene. Ajay Sharma, Vijay Bharadwaj, Dinesh Mongia, Jacob Martin and Hemang Badani come to my mind whose international careers were cut short for whatever reason and there are a few like Amol Mazumdar and Jitender Singh, whose career never took off. All these players are heavy scorers in domestic cricket, but could never do well in the international platform.

A few years back, when I was a student, I had bumped into Jitender Singh, who used to open with Ajay Jadeja for Haryana. He was in Chennai to play a match here against Tamilnadu. Being the cricket fan that I was, I ended up inviting Jitender for dinner at my place and he obliged.

That one night of conversation with him over dinner provided me quite a bit of insight of what goes through in a domestic cricketer's mind at different phases of his career. He said that the first thing that strikes you hard when you play somebody like Andy Bishop or Glenn Mcgrath as against a domestic bowler is the amount of bounce these guys generate. You always end up playing above your waist and sometimes in front of your chest. This, more than the pace, creates a lot of inconvenience for Indian batsmen, as invariably they grow up playing deliveries below their knee level. And if you wait for loose deliveries to score your runs, you just keep waitiing, they never come your way. Which essentially means, batsmen who can adjust to this change can prosper, others will fade away like the few names mentioned  above.

Coming back to Cheteshwar Pujara, he had scored over four thousand runs in four seasons with fourteen hundreds and fifteen fifties. But as I had mentioned earlier, I never judge a batsman by the number of runs, but the manner in which he scores them. I had seen Pujara briefly during the IPL, where he turned up for the Kolkata Knight Riders. What he proved there was, his game was not cut out for the T20s, not for that season at least. And I was breathlessly waitng to see if Pujara is able to make that required adjustment for international cricket.

Could not get to see much of him in the first inning of the Bangalore test as he got a shooter of a delivery early in his knock, but when he took guard in the second innings at number three, under the most trying circumstances, he looked a different player all together. I closely watched the replay and was kind of satisfied with what I saw. I didn't see any silken grace there, but a tremendus amount of grit and determination was on display. At one end Vijay was his usual self, driving and punching with lyrical smoothness and at the other end, this twenty two year old debutant was courageously attacking world class bowlers like Mitchell Johnson and Nathan Hauritz.

Pujara has got an upright stance, he looks comfortable both on his back and front foot, he is quite a natural driver on either side of the wicket and hee did look good against short stuff, though only a few short balls were bowled to him. You have got to say that he has a good technique, but he doesn't look as copy-book-like as Rahul Dravid. As Sunil Gavaskar rightly pointed out, his body language has some similarity with yester year batsman Navjot Singh Sidhu. He plays like a work-man. His huges scores indicates that he has got that penchant for playing long innings. So overall, a pretty satisfactory candidate for test cricket, you could say at this moment. He has a bright future no doubt, but still I would like to see him on a bouncy wicket against quality fast bowling.

All said and done, something tells me that Pujara will succeed in the international level. As they say, its not the most talented man who comes good, it is the one who belives he is good.

And Pujara certainly believes he is good enough for the big stage.