‘LET JAISWAL PLAY’
India’s new star has shown incredible and effortless range in his batting
Rajkot, India - A belief pervades many cultures that showering someone with praise summons the evil eye.
Rohit Sharma seemed to be in the grip of just such a belief on Sunday evening, when he was asked about Yashasvi Jaiswal's run-scoring feats in this series against England. He was asked first at the presentation ceremony in Rajkot.
"I've spoken a lot about him," he said. "I'm sure people outside the changing room have also been talking about him. I want to be calm about him, not talk a lot about him."
He was asked again at his post-match press conference.
"I won't say anything on Jaiswal. Everyone is talking about him. Let him play. He is playing well, it's good for us and he is in good form. I am not going to say much more than that. Itna bas hai abhi ke liye [this is enough for now]."
At these moments Rohit seemed not so much the captain of a cricket team as the anxious parent of a gifted child fretting about the inadvertent curse of excessive praise. You could imagine him nailing a string of chillies and lime to India's dressing-room doorframe, and getting a member of the coaching staff to circle Jaiswal's head three times clockwise and three times anticlockwise with a fistful of rock salt.
You could empathise with Rohit, because Jaiswal is that kind of player. So good, so early in his career, that it seems wrong to talk about him. Let the boy be. Let him get on with it. Just watch and enjoy, no?
This feeling - no doubt shared by many others apart from Rohit - is perhaps also a product of the names Jaiswal's recent achievements have twinned him with, Don Bradman and Vinod Kambli: a career so productive that no one will ever be expected to match it, and a sad and curiously truncated career of whys and what-ifs. Kambli, of course, is a Mumbai left-hander who came from humble beginnings and brought to Test cricket both a precocious appetite for runs and a love for hitting sixes.
Bradman and Kambli. A bright start, then, is just a start.
But what a start Jaiswal has had. He has played seven Tests now, and scored 861 runs at an average of 71.75. He's already made three hundreds, each of them big, each bigger than the previous one - 171, 209, 214* - and each different to the other too.
The debut effort in Dominica was remarkable for how unremarkable it appeared on the surface. On a slow Dominica pitch where India's batters struggled for timing though not for survival against a limited West Indies attack, he batted time, with only as much fluency as the conditions would allow, and checked off one milestone after another, each appearing more inevitable than the last one. It was an innings you might have expected from Virat Kohli - who, to put the conditions in perspective, took 80 balls to hit his first boundary - but perhaps not from a 21-year-old debutant.
Then, over the last two weeks, he's made two double-hundreds: one that held together a first innings that could have otherwise fallen apart - he made just under 53% of India's total of 396 - and one that set the tone for a jubilant third-innings surge.
Perhaps nothing illustrates how different these two doublehundreds were than the methods he adopted against England's fast bowlers in both innings. In Visakhapatnam, he faced 67 balls from James Anderson and scored 17 runs. In Rajkot, he faced 39 balls from Anderson and Mark Wood and scored 61. In strikerate terms, he went from 25.37 in one innings to 156.41 in the other.
The shots Jaiswal unleashed on the fourth day in Rajkot were always present in his kitbag: the falling scoop, the bent-knee slap over the massed off-side field, the club down the ground off the good-length ball.
You could empathise with Rohit, because Jaiswal is that kind of player. So good, so early in his career, that it seems wrong to talk about him. Let the boy be. Let him get on with it. Just watch and enjoy, no?