Once you get set, make it count: coach Dravid’s advice to Agarwal
KOLKATA: “A hundred is just a figure. But what if the target is 150?”
Over a video call from Bengaluru, two days after following up a massive first-innings 150 with 62 in the Mumbai Test against New Zealand, Mayank Agarwal is decoding consistency beyond the clichéd realm of centuries. For someone who has converted four out of 10 fifties into centuries—two of them double hundreds—Agarwal gets more psyched by the empirical value of an innings than its numerical relevance. Hence his counter-question.
“You are not going to achieve that ‘number’ as such,” Agarwal continued, “but it is that 60 not out or a 70 not out in a winning cause that gives the most amount of satisfaction. You give it your best and whatever comes your way, you take it.”
That “not out” part he added to the score was not done casually. That’s how Agarwal is wired as a batter—bat long, bat big and be there till the end if possible.
“If it’s your day, you gotta make it big,” he said. When he gets to a landmark, Agarwal said, he doesn’t want to stop. “I want to start from zero again.”
Despite his heroics in the Mumbai Test, Agarwal’s “day” may not come anytime soon. Against New Zealand, he was in the team because India were playing that series without a bunch of first-team regulars, including Rohit Sharma and KL Rahul. Now that both openers are back, Agarwal, who will be travelling to South Africa for India’s next Test series (three Tests, starting December 26), may not find a place in the playing XI.
But his philosophy will stand him in good stead if he does get an unexpected opportunity to build on the big one he got in Mumbai. It’s this very mentality that has been central to his daddy hundreds—be it the 160 versus Australia in his U-19 days, the 304 against Maharashtra in 2017 or the 215 during the 2019 home tour of South Africa. Apart from not letting up on the momentum, Agarwal’s zest for big scores is not just about his own appetite, but about the needs of the team and his teammates.
“There are going to be times you are not going to get runs. So if you are having a good game, make sure you cover up for people who are not having the best of games as well.” Agarwal said. “You have to ask yourself ‘are you being an asset or are you looking after yourself?’ It’s hard to put it across but you can’t think only about yourself. It’s after all a team sport. Whatever you achieve, you do it as a team. So as a batter, it’s not you alone but a partnership going along.”
Cricket, despite being a team game, is fiercely individualistic at its core. And there aren’t many who understand that more than Agarwal. Right now, Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma are unlikely to be dropped unless they are injured. Cheteshwar Pujara is the ‘old school’ batting pillar you always hesitate to do away with despite flagging form. And only now does Ajinkya Rahane’s position seem threatened by Shreyas Iyer who at Kanpur became the first Indian to score a hundred and a fifty in his debut Test.
It’s a ruthless game of elimination-by-form for the other opener’s position, involving KL Rahul, Shubman Gill, Prithvi Shaw and Agarwal. Get injured and you are at the back of the line again, no matter how much you have scored in ‘A’ games or in domestic cricket. And for this position, form being temporary isn’t a good enough justification to give someone a long rope.
Agarwal knows the drill. With Rahul and Sharma unavailable, Gill gunning from the other end and quite a few caveats at work, nothing less than a big hundred could have kept him in the mix. Rahul Dravid told him exactly that. “When I was picked here, Rahul bhai came and spoke to me,” Agarwal said. He told me, ‘just control what is in your hands. You have this opportunity, go out there, give your best, and that’s all we ask of you. And when you get set, make it big.’ I am happy. I am happy that when I got set, I could capitalise.”
Capitalise he did. And by taking a risky route of going after Ajaz Patel who had dismissed three batters with India’s score stuck on 80, Agarwal showed he wasn’t averse to taking calculated risks too. This wasn’t the first time though Agarwal had attacked Patel when India weren’t quite out of the woods. In Wellington, just before the pandemic, India were shovelling their way out of a 183-run first innings lead piled up by New Zealand, with Agarwal showing the best application in unfavourable conditions. When Patel was finally thrown the ball, Agarwal skipped down the pitch to lift him over the head for the only six of the innings. “I’m not big on comparison but that innings was in tough conditions,” he said. “The ball was moving around. New Zealand had got a big lead. That innings was a lot about discipline, sticking to a particular plan and leaving the ball well. Playing out the fast bowlers, that was the time I felt I should cash in. That’s when I thought I should score off Ajaz Patel.”
Underpinning Agarwal’s aggression is his will to grind out tough sessions, a trait imbibed partly from Dravid. “He was different,” said Agarwal. “You always admire his determination, grit, how he is aggressive yet not going hammer and tongs, very different. He found his own way of battling.” Agarwal strives to tread a similar path by not adhering to any particular template.
“People talk about process and all of that. Or what is a good session. I look at it differently,” he said. “The ideal situation would be to score runs. But for an opening batsman it’s not about a particular way of playing. It’s about finding ways to succeed or overcome situations. If that means you want to take the attack to the bowler, by all means, go for it. If you think that your game plan is to play very tight, well within yourself and tire out the bowlers, then do that. That thought process hasn’t changed. It’s about being effective, be it by scoring 100 runs, 100/2 maybe, in the session or it could also mean 30-35 for no loss. It’s about going one up on the opponent.”
Like so many, if not all, of the younger players in the mix for the Indian national team now, Agarwal’s cricket too has been shaped by Dravid, who was the Under-19 and India A coach for four years and the head of the National Cricket Academy for two before taking over as India’s head coach earlier this month.