Leaving Tristan Stubbs one short of a milestone would have satisfied Kuldeep Yadav the most on Saturday. The sheer deviousness of his craft, that can nearly make all the debate about the pitch redundant with a classical turnaround, will be encouraging too.
The Stubbs dismissal occurred on a Guwahati track that India assistant coach Ryan ten Doeschate described as “lifeless”. It was a tough bowling day, indeed, but the Barsapara surface wasn’t necessarily turning its back on cricket smarts. That Kuldeep snared three of the six South African wickets on an opening day of parity continues to raise his stature as India’s second-leading all-weather threat, almost at par with Jasprit Bumrah.
When the Saffers proactively pushed Stubbs up the order to No. 3, the think tank had shown faith in his ability for nimble and nifty runs on harder wickets over the grafter Wiaan Mulder.
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Within three innings last year, Stubbs had belted a century against Bangladesh on the notoriously spin-friendly strip in Chattogram and a solid ton at number four against Sri Lanka. The Asian affinity was extended last month when he struck a crucial 70 in Rawalpindi, helping the world Test champions level the series in Pakistan 1-1.
In the here and now, Stubbs was contending with the most aggressive spin bowler of the time. Kuldeep, his ziddi Delhi Capitals teammate. While Washington Sundar discovered turn before noon and Ravindra Jadeja’s typical stump-to-stump lines flattened out on a firmer pitch, India could not force regular breakthroughs in the second session even though Stubbs and captain Temba Bavuma didn’t take the game too far forward with their attritional strokeplay.
India’s Kuldeep Yadav congratulates Jasprit Bumrah after the pacer took a South African wicket on Day 1 of the Kolkata Test at Eden Gardens. (Express Photo by Partha Paul)
Batting on 49, Stubbs’s feet movement wilted for the first time after 112 deliveries. He had earlier clubbed Kuldeep with dancing feet over the long-on boundary. As the offerings from the pitch weren’t generous enough for him, the leg-breaks and googlies weren’t enough to constrict Stubbs, it needed the deceiving charm in the air, which Kuldeep began to employ in abundance.
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It is unwise to bracket all of Kuldeep’s away-shaping deliveries to the right-hander as wily wrong’uns. Crouching low from his sturdy build, it isn’t why Stubbs poked at a delivery well wide of off-stump, his hands almost involuntarily walking straying into a fatal edge.
Resorting to the simple unpredictability that can arise from flight, the drifter that is devoid of any turn, Kuldeep one-upped Stubbs in the battle.
“From my angle, it sort of beat me in the drift. That’s why my hands got away. I think that’s how he got me out, more [to do with] just the drift and my hands following it,” Stubbs told reporters after stumps.
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It is a product of Kuldeep’s angular smarts and renewed confidence in bowling at sub-80 kph speeds, an old habit that reduced the 31-year-old to the India fringes for a prolonged period between 2019 and 2024.
Stubbs had faced the wrist-spinner a lot in the DC nets since last year, but it didn’t help him on Saturday.
“We’ve always chirped each other [during IPL] that he hasn’t often bowled to me, and then today he walked past me and said, ‘You can’t say I don’t bowl to you anymore,’” the South African batter said.
Spinners flighting the ball to earn wickets on a Day 1 red-soil pitch would have pleased old-school India batting coach Sitanshu Kotak, who noted how it was a rare sight in the modern game.
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“Because of T20 and one-day cricket, spinners don’t seem to be flighting the ball as much as they used to. And if they do, batters seem to be playing it very aggressively,” Kotak had said on Thursday.
Flatter lines have also, in due course, restricted batters, like Stubbs, from attempting the step-outs in whites, nullifying the pitfalls that came along.
The courage to toss up the ball also handed Kuldeep his third scalp, removing a misfiring Wiaan Mulder due to a faltering slog to mid-off in the 68th over.
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“It looks like a normal ball on TV. But when you play that as a batter, you feel it’s a flighted delivery, and you can hit it over the top, but it wasn’t successful. It’s a game of the mind. It’s called forced errors. He forced the batters to do something different,” Kuldeep’s former India teammate Cheteshwar Pujara told the broadcasters shortly after.
