The slow, lazy rhythms of Test cricket feel an unfamiliar music now, when most innings unravel so fast and batsmen are so frantic. But Friday played out the old way. Cheteshwar Pujara, India’s throwback batsman, batted five hours for his first Test century in England. When he finally got it, as the sun was beginning to dip, the crowd rose in a standing ovation. It was not just the score they were clapping but the manner of it. Pujara had done the one thing so few batsmen have seemed able to in this series. He had persisted.
There was only the one lone, loud complaint. “Well,” came a broad Yorkshire accent, “he didn’t bloody bat like this when he was playing for us.” Pujara batted through morning and afternoon, against testing spells of spin and swing and seam, from England’s seven bowlers. He had been working a long time over this score, longer than the hours he was at the crease. Before this series he had played 29 first-class games in England since he came here on India’s last Test tour in 2014, the last six pretty dismally, for Yorkshire earlier in the summer.
He has played more championship cricket in that time than most of the English batsmen in this match. He has not actually made all that many runs along the way – he averaged 14 for Yorkshire this year – but he has learned a lot about how to bat in these conditions. The key, he said, was: “You need to accept one thing: the pitches will be challenging. There might be times when you will get out. You need to make adjustments in your technique, in your temperament, whatever needs to be done to be even more successful.”
In this innings Pujara allowed himself to play more attacking shots than he typically might, as if he had decided he needed to seize on the scoring opportunities that England allowed him between the good balls. He played a lot of flick shots, up over the slips, when England’s quicks bounced him. Which was something they did so often that he was hit twice, once by Ben Stokes, then again by Jimmy Anderson. But otherwise the fundamentals of his innings were the same ones that have served him since he first picked up a bat.
Pujara’s father, Arvind, has a photo of his boy swiping at a rubber ball with a toy bat. He says that he first realised his kid could bat when the snap came back from the developers, because in it he was watching the ball so closely. Arvind played six first-class matches himself, for Saurashtra, before he started work as a railway clerk, and it seemed to him that, if that one skill came to Che so easily, then everything else would follow. The first thing to learn, he said, was to play straight. So that is what they drilled, 50 balls every morning, 50 more every night.
Soon enough Arvind had started him on a hard ball. He even had to cut his boy a pair of pads out of an old foam mattress, because he was still so young they could not find any that fitted. So Pujara learned those two essentials, watch the ball and play straight, early and he has stuck with them ever since. They are still serving him well now. He has become a patient, punctilious batsman, a tortoise running with the hares. They are not qualities that many people prize in this era. The reason he has been able to play all that county cricket, after all, is the Indian Premier League teams do not want him.
Once India even dropped him from the Test team because he was scoring so slowly. They felt they could do without him in the first Test of this series too because, their assistant coach, Sanjay Bangar, said, he was working on a couple of technical issues to do with his balance and footwork. But as the summer has worn on, he has finally come into form. Now he looks invaluable. On Friday he carried the team up to England’s score and then beyond it all on his own. It was not a pretty innings, because Pujara is not a batsman who makes the game look easy. He sweats at it.
The last few runs in his hundred were especially hard to watch. He was batting with the No 11, Jasprit Bumrah, and had to shepherd him while he was steering his way to that hundred. England thought they had him lbw, too, when Moeen Ali hit him in front as he tried to pad away a ball that hit him outside off stump, but he survived the review. He was on 99 at the time and got his hundred off the very next ball. He had earned it. Pujara’s game may be old-fashioned but that does not mean it is obsolete.
