Root ready to take on Kohli in battle of the batsmen
Rajkot, venue for first Test, has a rich batting heritage Five-match programme hands advantage to India
England’s tour of India starts on Wednesday in Rajkot, a most fitting stage for the rivalry between two batsmen bidding to become their country’s finest – England’s Joe Root and the India captain, Virat Kohli.
Neither England nor India have played a Test before in Rajkot, which lies in the centre of the Kathiawar Peninsula, that ear which sticks out from the head of western India. Yet the region has produced some of the world’s finest cricketers for three countries.
The first batsman to score a hundred runs before lunch in a Test went to school in Rajkot, having been born down the road in Jamnagar. From Rajkumar College, Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji went to Cambridge University, and was too brilliant – as the inventor of the leg glance and arguably the sweep – not to be selected for England in the 1896 Ashes. On the third morning of the Old Trafford Test, Ranji hit 113 runs.
If Ben Duckett opens on a batting pitch and stays in for the first session of a Test, he could be the first England batsman to score a century before lunch on day one.
India’s finest spin-bowling all-rounder, Vinoo Mankad, was also born in Jamnagar – although he will not be the finest for much longer if Ravi Ashwin has another stellar series, his fifth in a row. Pakistan’s first great batsman, Hanif Mohammad, who died earlier this year, came from another part of this Peninsula, Junagadh, along with his three brothers, who also played Lying around 1,500 nautical miles from any land mass, Point Nemo – or the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility to give it its proper name – is the most remote point in the ocean; a desolate spot in the south eastern Pacific named for the captain in Jules Vernes’ classic novel
They say that if you pass it at the right time of day you will be closer to the astronauts on the International Space Station than any other humans on Earth.
All being well, Alex Thomson should be passing that way in a few weeks’ time, on his way to Cape Horn and the final “left-hander” before he can point his boat northwards again. That is, assuming he has safely negotiated his initial descent of the Atlantic and large swathes of the forbidding Southern Ocean first.
These are some of the least Test cricket, before they had to flee westwards at Partition.
This region has long been friendly to batsmen, and as England fly today from Mumbai, after a couple of net practices and a dispute about hotel costs engineered by the Indian board, they will be wondering if this trend continues. England have played high-scoring oneday internationals at the former ground in Rajkot, which has had various names, the last of them in 2008, and at the new ground, the Saurashtra Cricket Association ground, in 2013.
Alastair Cook, England’s one-day captain at the time, is the only member of the current England party to have batted there. Joe Root played in the 2013 ODI as a bowler, as did Steve Finn in the days when he had exceptional pace. Finn was selected for the second Test in Dhaka, a rather expensive mistake: 11 fruitless overs for 48 runs in a low-scoring match. Stuart Broad will return for his 100th Test, which James Anderson is due to watch as he rehabilitates from his shoulder injury.
It will be a happy series for England if, in spite of being outspun, they win a couple of Tests, or even one. It will be an unhappy series, which could end in the resignation of Cook, if their top order keeps failing in their first innings. Only when Root scored his 254 at Old Trafford against Pakistan have England reached 330 in their first innings since hosting Sri Lanka: hence three defeats in their last six Tests, including the historic one by Bangladesh.
That double century was the only occasion Root has reached 80 since his promotion to No3. Cook has made a single century in the last year.
The batting around them has become ever flimsier: Alex Hales, Nick Compton, James Vince and now Gary Ballance have all been tried and dropped. Haseeb Hameed, who could have been given a debut in Bangladesh, will be Cook’s latest partner if he is the one to replace Ballance. hospitable seas on Earth. Out here there is no one to rescue you if you get into trouble. You are well out of helicopter range. Aeroplanes cannot pick you up if your boat breaks or you get ill or injured.
Your only hope is your fellow competitors, and they have their own problems. Storms out here can be sudden and merciless, while the waves, particularly in the Southern Ocean, get so big they can swallow 20metre boats whole.
“The problem is, down there, there is no land,” explains Thomson, the 42-year-old skipper of Hugo Boss, one of 29 boats in this year’s Vendée Globe, the quadrennial solo, unassisted, round-the-world yacht race which begins from the small seaside town of Les Sables-d’Olonne in France today. “Waves which start in South America can literally go all the way around the world and reach South America again. It’s relentless. It’s isolated. It’s grey. So grey …”
Thomson may sound gloomy at the prospect of what is about to come, but nothing could be further from the truth. This is what he lives for.
Having become the youngest skipper to win a round the world race, the 1998-99 Clipper, Thomson set his sights on the Vendée Globe. It has, he admits, become his “life’s obsession”.
This is his fourth crack at the race and, having garnered a reputation as something of a maverick in his youth (“It used to annoy me,” he says. “Now I
Kohli has his concerns, too, about his side’s batting after the loss of Rohit Sharma: he is left with only five proven batsmen. But Ashwin batted cannily at No 6 on India’s recent tour of the West Indies, so India could play three spinners and two seamers.
Under a new board president, Test cricket has been made India’s priority, to the extent that they are playing 13 Tests this home season. Six new venues are being inaugurated: England will be playing the second Test at another of them, Visakhapatnam, as the series begins with a strenuous schedule: three days between the first and second, then four between the second and third, with a long domestic flight each time. play up to it, telling the French that I’m going to drive it like I stole it”) he reckons he has become a more rounded, mature sailor. He has the experience. He finished on the podium last time. And he has the boat.
All 29 skippers are competing in an IMOCA 60, but seven of them, including Thomson’s, have hydrofoils which lift the hull of the boat out of the water when conditions are right, significantly reducing drag. Thomson is confident that one of these seven boats will win, possibly breaking the record of 78 days in the process. Although on the flip side – at least according to some pundits – the new designs are generally considered to be
This is the first time England have undertaken a tour consisting solely of five Tests: needless to say it was devised by former England and Wales Cricket Board administrators who had never played a first-class match between them, and it has left England with an even harder task than touring India would otherwise be.
This schedule is sustainable for batsmen making runs and spinners, but not pace bowlers, wicketkeepers and batsmen out of nick. Hence home advantage is even more advantageous: India can bring in players who have just performed in their domestic competition, named after Rajkot’s most famous son, the Ranji Trophy. a bit ‘racier’, a bit less robust than the older spec boats.
Get round in one piece, though, and Thomson believes he has a great chance of becoming not only the first Briton to win the Vendée Globe but the first non-Frenchman to do so; Ellen MacArthur’s wondrous second place in 2000-01 remains the current benchmark for British sailors.
What would it mean if he could do it? “It wouldn’t quite be Sir Bradley Wiggins winning the Tour,” says Thomson. “Cycling is so much more accessible than sailing. Everyone was out in their Lycra after that. But beating the French at their own game … I think it would be a pretty big deal for sailing in the UK.”
You only had to witness the build-up in Les Sables-d’Olonne last week to realise the truth of that