“Koi left-arm pacer hai wahaan (Are there any left-arm pacers available)?” India’s batting coach Sitanshu Kotak had to plaster a wry smile when the Assam net bowlers stood staring at each other before his request. Two days out from the Guwahati Test, Yashasvi Jaiswal’s batting at nets was taking an interesting turn. He had opened his session with a sustained probe from India’s left-arm throwdown specialist, Nuwan Seneviratne. Since Kotak couldn’t find any left-armer from the local bunch, Jaiswal batted on against the wide deliveries of his teammates, Jasprit Bumrah and Nitish Reddy.
Jaiswal the Test opener has a weakness (finally). The left-arm pacers are troubling him of late, targeting his itch to cut balls regardless of line and length. In Kolkata last week, the left-hander’s cut profiled two wickets against the left-arm pacer Marco Jansen, growing into a nagging sub-set of eight dismissals (averaging 21.75) already.
On Thursday, the tempters from Bumrah and Reddy would still beat him clean, but Jaiswal was making amends. Planting his left foot forward, he repeatedly tracked the line of those bewitching deliveries hard, the ones he’d be crunching so hard to the off-side boundary in his head, all day.
The emphasis, clearly, was laid on controlling his emotions with the stroke in and outside the channel. The combative set-up at the crease, even in whites, almost always puts him in overdrive even before his supple wrist-engines have really revved up. And when width, even by the faintest margin, presents itself through shortish deliveries, Jaiswal breaks into the cut shot and its many siblings with abandon.
The tour of England, in part, framed Jaiswal’s impetuous movements this summer. His early dismissals were jotted by short, wide deliveries off burly right-arm seamers.
A cut playlist can range from the regular steer down third, the pressure-releasing dab to deep backward point, a smite that zaps past point, and the stupefying uppercut that freezes the slip cordon. Two of these are riskier than the others against the harder ball. Naturally, the two catch Jaiswal’s attention.
Jaiswal, it seems, cannot ideate an innings without his diet of fierce shots meeting the off-side boundary, as yet. The cut shot contributes 16 per cent of all Test runs. For his first 20 runs in an innings, the square cut stands as his second-most productive shot, providing 72 runs in 53 deliveries to date. As per Cricket-21, no batter has recorded more runs with the cut than Jaiswal (390) since his debut, even as the dismissal count (six) is firmly building up.
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Jaiswal’s attraction to risk has also unsurprisingly caught Jansen’s attention. Jansen’s seven-footer left-arm release doesn’t come down Jaiswal’s palatable ways. His compatriot, Nandre Burger, was the first to pester Jaiswal with a barrage outside the off-stump and render him ineffective against the width and left-arm angle combine. That was two years ago, on the lively Cape Town and Centurion strips.
Then came Mitchell Starc. First, the eight-ball blob in Perth, a late drive on the up, flying to the gully fielder. Starc and the world turned “too slow” in the sequel. But everything soon began to hit like a blur again.
In Adelaide, Jaiswal’s bid to overcompensate for wanton off-side behaviour was devoured by Starc’s late inswinger on the leg-stump line, trapping him for a golden duck with the pink ball.
In the season-opening Test in Ahmedabad, Jaiswal fell caught behind to West Indies pacer Jayden Seales on 36 when three of his teammates racked up tons. His immediate response to the right-armer’s good length delivery across the angle was a cut, from a position of in-betweens at the crease – neither forward nor pressed completely on the back-foot – edged to the keeper.
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In Kolkata last week, room or the lack thereof and the towering left-arm angle crammed in two of Jaiswal’s varying fragilities together. It is precisely what love-struck attachments do.
When the stroke becomes so deeply inevitable, Jaiswal loses sight of the favourable line to the cut. The off-stump clattered when he attempted a slash off Jansen from within the crease in the first innings; no discernible feet movement, his stance recoiling to an upright position milliseconds late. The second-innings duck was more to do with the left-arm angle from over the stumps. Jansen opened him up with a gentle wafter on length, taking the outside edge to the keeper for a four-ball duck.
Perhaps, in all this adrenalin rush, he has forgotten that there is another option to the shot. And attacking at that, which should satiate his instinct. A shot from the books of Kumar Sangakkara, Matthew Hayden and to an extent Michael Hussey. To the balls closer to the body, kicking up from a length or back of length, Sangakkara would unreel his on-the-up punches, sending the ball plummeting through cover or cover point. That bat-arc from its zenith to the finish is certainly devoid of the risks that Jaiswal takes. Since the line is close, Jaiswal is unable to even get the full horizontal version of the cut going, instead settling in for an awkward-angled forcing shot that invariably magnetises his inner edge to the ball. To balls closer, perhaps, the Sanga-way will suit Jaiswal better. For that, self-reflection needs to kick in. And if the scenes in the nets on a wintery day in Guwahati are anything to go by, that process seems to have started.
