A New Era Dons

CHEEK BY JOWL they stood at the presentation ceremony in Ran­chi, on a Test match field, in their country’s whites, having not only participated in a series victory but also having essayed lead roles in this most enthralling and seesawing set of Tests to have unfolded on Indian soil in several years. Before February began, Dhruv Jurel, Sarfaraz Khan, Rajat Patidar and Akash Deep were best known as periph­eral IPL players and were wholly nameless when it came to Test cricket, some of them perhaps never expecting to pull on India’s white shirt. Less than a month on, these Test debutants have become household names, their faces now recognised by the country’s adoring millions, all of them smashing out their heroic, satisfied smiles at the cameras near the Ranchi outfield.

In the complete unavailability of Virat Kohli and Mohammed Shami, and also the partial absences of KL Rahul, Shreyas Iyer and Jasprit Bumrah during the five-match series against England, four of which have now been completed, the Indian think-tank of coach Rahul Dravid and captain Rohit Sharma could well have recalled the likes of Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane—old war-horses now put out to pasture. Especially so after losing the first Test in Hyderabad to England’s ‘Bazball’, a move-fast-break-things sort of approach implemented by their coach Brendon ‘Baz’ McCullum and captain Ben Stokes. England, incidentally, had nev­er lost a Test series in their Bazball era and India seemingly did not have the personnel to stop the haemorrhage, already 0-1 down.

But they did, in the lesser-knowns. In came Patidar, Khan, Jurel and Akash at vari­ous points of the series and tag-teamed with the little-better-known Yashasvi Jaiswal, whose Test career is still just eight months old, as successful as he already may be. To­gether, some more than others, the new faces not only turned around the Hyder­abad deficit and kicked away the gauntlet in Ranchi, they handed India a record sev­enteenth straight home series win in Test cricket, for which Dravid and Sharma will be most grateful. But just as incredibly, Baz­ball was stopped in its tracks by a team that had played just a few more combined Tests than England’s James Anderson. To reduce it to its blunt essence, Bazball was stopped by Jurel and Jaiswal, boys who have turned into men in the course of this series.

It is perhaps most apt that Jurel’s star rose under the shadow cast by the tower­ing MS Dhoni Pavilion in Ranchi, for in this 23-year-old India has unearthed a wicketkeeper-batsman who has shown a great penchant to excel in pressure situ­ations of the ridiculous kind. With ice and not adrenaline flowing through his veins, Jurel the batsman proved time and again in this series that he is equally proficient at rebuilding a broken innings as he is at ironing out a mangled chase and yanking his team over the finish line. Who else does that remind you of? Yes, even the ever-reserved Sunil Gavaskar thinks so. He said as much on-air: “Jurel is the next Dhoni in the making.”

Even after the England series began, uncapped Jurel was, if at all, India’s fourth choice wicketkeeper for Test matches, and this is not counting Rishabh Pant, who hasn’t played professional cricket since his near-fatal car accident in December 2022. It took Ishan Kishan’s mental fatigue and subsequent withdrawal from the Test se­ries in South Africa, Rahul’s injury at the end of the first Test, and KS Bharat’s inabil­ity to add batting depth by the end of the second Test in Visakhapatnam for the selec­tors to give Jurel a look-in for the third Test in Rajkot in the first place. And he grabbed his opportunity with both mittens. But be­cause Jurel made his Test debut alongside Sarfaraz Khan, we must digress, for Khan too had an immediate impact on a series that was then precariously hinged at 1-1.

Quite easily the most emotional vi­sual from this series was Khan receiving his Test cap from Anil Kumble, only to dart across to the Rajkot boundary and hand the cap over to his weeping father, Naushad. Ostensibly cricket’s version of Richard Williams, father of Venus and Serena, Naushad left no stone unturned in getting his boys Sarfaraz and Musheer to buy into his dream of becoming India-level cricketers and pushing them every step of the way to achieve what was now their collective vision. Just days after teen­ager Musheer featured in the Under-19 World Cup in South Africa, Naushad was in the stands to experience his older son Sarfaraz finally play for the senior team in Tests. And if the 26-year-old wasn’t run out on 62 in the first innings and had the second innings not been declared while he was unbeaten on 68, Sarfaraz would in all probability have rung in his debut with a hundred in each innings.

ALTHOUGH DEBUTANT JUREL, too, nearly got to a half-century (46) in what can best be described as the siege of Rajkot—for India won by an unprec­edented 434 runs—his greatest contribu­tion then was to demonstrate that a bats­man with such assurance in mind and stroke-play deserved to bat higher than No 8. So, Jurel walked in at No 7 in Ranchi and, in the land of Dhoni, he promptly man­aged to establish himself as India’s new crisis-man. Immediately after his entry, R Ashwin was dismissed and left India reel­ing at 177/7, halfway adrift of England’s first innings total of 353. Rohit’s side was certain to concede a three-digit lead, given newcomer Jurel was left with the tail of Kuldeep Yadav, debutant Akash Deep, and the non-batsman in Mohammed Siraj.

But Jurel pushed them hard, pushed himself harder, farmed the strike, spoke sense between balls when Akash looked to mindlessly slog, showed how to hit sixes (four of them) without slogging, all of this on a low-bouncing track that also spat the ball square. When he clawed his way to a maiden Test half-century, he paid tribute to his father, a Kargil War veteran, with a salute. There must have been tears back home in Agra and there were some in the stands in Ranchi too, where eventu­ally Jurel’s innings ended after 90 runs, that knock greater than the sum of all missed landmarks as it reduced England’s lead to a meagre 46 runs. This innings alone would have made for a stellar origins story, but Ranchi would present him with the chance to make the entire Test match a tale of his excellence. And Jurel obliged.

After 99/1 suddenly regressed to 120/5 during India’s chase, Stokes would have be­lieved for a second time in Ranchi that a win was possible to take this remarkable series to the shootout it deserves in Dharamshala. But once again Jurel entered the scene and made it his own, giving Shubman Gill (al­ready a veteran of Indian cricket at just 24) ample support before finding a couple of boundaries to release the pressure. Then, he wrapped up the show by hitting the win­ning runs, having scored 39 of the remain­ing 62 runs to give India the series win. Of course, he was named Player of the Match.

Meanwhile, the Player of the Series award, although not handed out yet, can be shipped over to Jaiswal, such has been the 22-year-old’s mastery over the spinning tracks and the opposition’s bowlers thus far, in what is only the third Test series of his bud­ding career. He has already scored 655 runs in this series, with two hundreds, both dou­ble hundreds scored in back-to-back Tests no less, making him the third-youngest in the history of Test cricket to have notched two doubles after Vinod Kambli and Sir Donald Bradman. These knocks, 209 in Visakhapatnam and an un­beaten 214 in Rajkot, were whirl­winds, the latter knock also equalling Wasim Akram’s long standing world record for most sixes (12) in a Test innings. With two more innings to go in Dharamshala, Jaiswal will likely become the first Indian not named Gavaskar to score over 700 runs in a single Test series.

Such early success has led to big heads and eventual ruin in the past. But Jaiswal has his feet firmly on the ground. Not too long ago, when he was 12, Jaiswal sold paani puri and stayed with a groundsman in a tent outside Azad Maidan in Mumbai to make his ambition of playing cricket for India— which he nurtured back in his childhood home of Suriyawan, Uttar Pradesh—come true. Which is why, after the second double hundred, he said in an interview: “In India, when you grow up, you work really hard for each and everything. Even when getting the bus… you have to work really hard to get the bus. You have to work really hard to get to the train, autorickshaw… I have done that since my childhood.”

Since then, he has only had to work hard at scoring runs, which he seems to have an insatiable appetite for. On Test de­but against the West Indies in Dominica last year, he opened the innings (Gill was generous enough to move to one-drop to accommodate Jaiswal) and banged out an innings of 171 runs. Never since has he scored a hundred worth less, proving that when he goes big, he likes to go really big and not throw his wicket away after having achieved a tiring landmark.

All of this bodes really well for the coun­try’s Test future, given that the still-playing legends of Indian cricket—Kohli, Rohit, Ashwin, and Ravindra Jadeja—are all in their mid-to-late thirties and in the evening of their careers. But in Jaiswal, Jurel, and even the relatively well-established Gill, all in their early twenties, there is a bright new morning that has already begun to dawn.

Akash DeepDhruv JurelIndian Test CricketMohammed ShamiRajat PatidarSarfaraz KhanVirat KohliYashasvi Jaiswal