Published: Jul 30, 2011, 01:58 PM (IST)
Edited: Aug 21, 2014, 08:14 PM (IST)
By Nishad Pai Vaidya
The area around the off stump is exciting but, nonetheless, fraught with peril. It’s in this area that fast bowlers prowl like a temptress on the streets, waiting for weak minds to succumb to temptations. Quality fast bowlers bowl a nagging off stump line and, for good measure, move it tantalizingly away from the bat. Unless a batsman, especially an opener, is discerning enough to know which balls to play and which to leave, he is in perennial danger of succumbing to the temptation.
As master opener Sunil Gavaskar opined: “If you are an opening batsman, you must know where your off stump is.”
Not everybody is outrageously blessed as Virender Sehwag to flout every convention and get away with it. Lesser mortals would necessarily have to abide by conventional methods tested over long periods of time. And even someone like Gavaskar, acknowledged as one of the greatest batsman the game has seen, was an unflinching loyalist to the coaching manuals.
It’s the Indian team’s good fortune that Gavaskar — now in the role of mediaperson – is there at almost every place where India play their internationals. And if there is one batsman who needs to get a protracted discourse from the cricketing pontiff, it is 21-year-old Abhinav Mukund. In the five Tests that Mukund has played so far, including the ongoing Test at Trent Bridge, the callow Tamil Nadu opener has shown an unmistakable looseness outside the off stump.
In the ongoing England-India series, Mukund has been dismissed three times, and on all three occasions he has been guilty of playing away from his body. At Lord’s he was bowled off the inside edge in both the innings. In the first innings he was on 49 and was anxious to get to his fifty. Playing in the 2000th Test match at the Mecca of cricket, the inexperienced Mukund must have been a touch too anxious to get to the half-century, but that cannot excuse him for the way he was dismissed to an over-pitched delivery pitched way outside off-stump. As he made contact with the ball, his bat face closed and, as a result, the ball took the inside edge and went on to the stumps.
In his fledgling international career he has been bowled three times. In the second innings at Lord’s, he tried to defend a ball with minimal footwork to a ball pitched outside the off-stump. The bat face was a bit closed as the ball took his inside edge and crashed on to the stumps. This was very similar to his first dismissal in Test cricket. In his first Test, against West Indies at Kingston, Mukund tried to play through the covers but only dragged it on to his leg-stump. The commonality with all these dismissals has been the daylight gap between bat and the body. As a result, he is prone to inside edges which can often be fatal.
His latest dismissal at Trent Bridge showed that he is pushing at balls away from his body. Although the ball took the outside edge, it was clear that the England team had spotted his weakness of playing away from his body.
Modern international cricket is played under the scrutiny of all-probing computers and technical analysts. A player’s weakness is quickly spotted and plans devised by the think-tank. Unless weaknesses are quickly addressed and eliminated, a player could kiss his career goodbye in a hurry. Once an opposition spots a flaw, the word spreads quickly. Cricket in the age of technology is way different from what it was in pre-technology era.
Opening an innings is about discipline. Mukund has age on his side as well as team-mates like Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman to counsel him. But how far Mukund goes in his international cricket depends on how quickly he irons out the wrinkles in his technique and emerges as a force to reckon with in international cricket. The potential is unmistakable, but what needs to be seen is the consistency in performance.
(Nishad Pai Vaidya, a 20-year-old law student, is a club and college-level cricketer. His teachers always complain, “He knows the stats and facts of cricket more than the subjects we teach him.”)
