The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
Bankable Ashwin pulls things back after Jennings-ali stand
AS FIELDING positions go, this wasn’t one you’re likely to find in the manual. Maybe even the couple of the MCC cricket committee members, who were in attendance at Wankhede, were left scratching their heads. Cheteshwar Pujara wasn’t quite at ‘gully’ nor was he at backward silly point. He was also a tad deeper than where you would generally find a catching fielder for an off-spinner. The angle was rather odd too, somewhere between 30-35 degrees.
The move worked like clockwork and instantaneously with Keaton Jennings getting an outside-edge to the very next delivery-an off-break that he didn’t reach the pitch of and as a result jabbed at slightly harder than he had all innings-which carried to Pujara, who acrobatically stretch forward to grab it.
As R Ashwin would tell The Indian Express later in the day, it was really the ‘angle’ of Pujara’s position that mattered while revealing to have been the brains behind the unique position. “I was the one who asked for it. I saw that he was pushing at the ball and the edge was carrying. So I moved the silly-point to that position,” he would say later in the day before adding, “It wasn’t so much about what position it was. But the angle at which I wanted him.”
At that point, Jennings was batting on 112 in his debut Test innings. For the second straight Test at the Wankhede, a South African-born English-qualified batsman was holding the Indians hostage in Mumbai. It wasn’t a belligerent world-class batsman of the elite category who was pinning them down on this occasion though.
Four years on from Kevin Pietersen’s epoch-defining knock, it was a fresh-faced youngster who was wearing them down. Jennings was putting on a display accentuated by an awe-inspiring mixture of defiant defence — the kind his opening partner and captain Alastair Cook would be proud of — and a flair for the outré typical of Pietersen —considering he became probably the first debutant to bring up a Test ton with a reversesweep.itwasalsoaknockthathelpedengland put up a strong showing on the opening day, finishingon288/5,evenifalateflurryofwickets did allow India to edge the scenario closer to parity than they would have expected.
The biggest tribute to Jennings’ would be that India had been pushed to employ an ingenious ploy to get rid of him. They had tried everything else till that point, including knocking out umpire Paul Reiffel - who was hit on the back of his head with a rogue throw from Bhuvaneshwar Kumar and had to leave the field - maybe with the hope that a replacement umpire might be slightly more generous with their lbw appeals. But Jennings had thwarted them. There was the one nervous moment at the start of course when a short ball from Umesh Yadav caught the top of his bat and agonizingly spooned over Karun Nair at gully-a conventional one-before he had scored a run. But from that point on he was providing the Indians with a de ja vu of what Cook had done a decade earlier in his first outing in Test cricket after having landed only 48 hours from an England Lions tour to answer an SOS call. For at least a major part of the first session, he was doing so in the company of Cook himself.
Cook stumped
With his nemesis Mohammed Shami not around, Cook was looking at his assured best against the new-ball. Neither Kumar nor Yadav seemed to pose any serious threat. And as he moved into his twenties, the England captain had even got the ‘flamingo’ going in his stance-where he starts raising his bat behind slightly higher than usual with an exaggerated flourish-which is usually a sign that he’s checking in for the long haul. There had been talk in the lead-up to the Wankhede Test about the English camp, coach Trevor Bayliss in particular, calling for his batsmen to show a lot more intent and aggression-though it was Cook who used this particular term-at the crease.
The captain seemed keen on showing the way, using his feet to the spinners, and at one point striking three boundaries in four balls. The third was the most striking with Cook jumping out his crease and punching Jayant Yadav against the turn past mid-on for four. But two balls later Cook was gone, a dismissal neither befitting his general disposition as a batsman or his usual penchant to never waste a good start. For, the opener seemed to suddenly get caught between his natural instinct and the team’s intent, that too at the worst moment, when he was nearly halfway down the pitch. The result was an ugly swish across the line with the ball sneaking past his inside-edge and leaving Parthiv Patel to knock off the bails behind him. And Cook carried the ‘what did I just do?’ expression right back to the dressing-room.
Losing Cook though hardly seemed to faze Jennings,whohadalreadybroughtuphishalfcentury and struck six fours. The Wankhede pitch of 2016 did seem to have a lot in common to the Wankhede pitch of 2012. The seamers didn’t seem to have much of a say on it. But there was turn on offer from rather early on, with Ashwin getting an off-break that pitched outside leg to rip past Jennings within the first hour of play. And the turn remained consistent throughout the day, and not just when the spinners were prepared to give it air. When Ashwin bowled slower in the air, the ball gripped and turn big, but it did so even when he and Jayant fired it in a little quicker, which led to a number of plays-and-misses throughout the day. Jadeja might have been the least effective overall, but even he did get a couple of balls to jump off the surface.
Dual strike
And if the first half of the day was highlighted by Jennings, Ashwin inevitably took over once he finally saw the back of the debutant with his ingenuity. Moeen Ali to his credit did play the perfect second fiddle to his young partner, surviving a number of close shaves, but still being his usual plucky self in terms of manipulating the field. But he undid his good work with an unwanted sweep, which only went as far as Karun Nair at midwicket. It not only broke a valuable partnership but also provided the muchneeded fillip to Ashwin that two balls later resulted in the fall of Jennings.
Not long after it was Jonny Bairstow’s turn to show off the ill-effects of playing a halfhearted sweep, though this top-edge went as far as deep midwicket. That left Ben Stokes and Jos Buttler to deny the Indians to foil what had otherwise been a rather satisfactory outing for the English, which they did admirably despite the ball beginning to turn at sharper angles and more menacingly as stumps drew nearer.