A proud batting nation, India reacted strongly to the Test series loss in South Africa. In the aftermath of what would be a tour remembered as an opportunity missed, the selectors finally relieved Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane of their misery. Had India won 2-1, they might have still dropped Rahane but persisted with Pujara, […]
A proud batting nation, India reacted strongly to the Test series loss in South Africa. In the aftermath of what would be a tour remembered as an opportunity missed, the selectors finally relieved Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane of their misery.
Had India won 2-1, they might have still dropped Rahane but persisted with Pujara, whose contributions to the preceding wins in Australia and England reflected a batter in greater health with his Test match game. That the selectors dropped both only reinforced how much value India assign to their Test results overseas.
The moment Virat Kohli gave away Test captaincy, Pujara and Rahane’s sacking based on a prolonged drought of runs and inconsistency was imminent. Nobody backed the duo more than Kohli, whose persistence with the two reflected unwavering confidence and understanding of the bowling era their extended dips coincided with. Facing lengthy attacks on extreme surfaces, day in day out, only made it tougher for Pujara and Rahane to revive their careers. Kohli himself averages 28.75 since the start of 2020.
But if the tour of South Africa is where India lost patience on two players they wholeheartedly backed, it was also the cut-off point where opening batter Mayank Agarwal’s home and away split should’ve been put under heavier scrutiny.
Mayank Agarwal looked woefully short on the technical front in South Africa.
A great deal of focus was attached to Pujara-Rahane’s struggles, while an imbalanced unit missing its premier allrounder Ravindra Jadeja and a weak tail caught the eyeballs as well. But look closely, the series played against Rabada & co on tough pitches also exposed India’s soft underbelly on the opening front.
An in-form Rohit Sharma’s absence put the spotlight directly on Agarwal to fill in at the top with a resurging KL Rahul. But outside his fifty in Centurion, when a nervy debutant in Marco Jansen provided India some breathing space for his initial spells, Agarwal made scores of 4, 26, 23, 15, and 7 and averaged a horrible 22.50 for the series.
His troubles only piled on the issues for India’s underfiring middle-order and their weak tail, as the visitors had to then counter fresh seamers with a Kookaburra ball that was still relatively new on arguably the most pacer-friendly tracks in memory. And this, mind you, was not a one-off for Mayank Agarwal.
Move aside his pair of seventies on two flat decks in Melbourne and Sydney in the back half of the 2018-19 tour Down Under, Agarwal has an away average of 19.75 over 10 Test matches, played in West Indies, New Zealand, Australia the previous winter and now South Africa.
The timeframe includes 20 innings, either side of being ousted after Melbourne 2020, with as many as 17 scores below the 50-run mark. With a sample size of 850 deliveries, Agarwal has lasted an average of just above 7 overs at the crease in this phase. Regardless of the difficulty of conditions, that is simply not good enough for a top-tier opening batter.
It seems unsustainable for India to carry Mayank Agarwal overseas.
At a time when Rahul is still settling back into the mix after an encouraging comeback last year, being in a position where they are one Rohit injury away from leaving an end open at the top is the last thing India would want building towards the next overseas cycle in 2024-26. With a Shubman Gill set to transition down the order, it is time to throw open the net and look for robust backup openers.
The series against Sri Lanka could well have been seen as a perfect opportunity to trial a Priyank Panchal. In home conditions, properly assessing a batter’s overseas prospects has always been tough. But separating the wheat from the chaff with a cricketing eye designed to catch flaws is also integral to the selectors’ job.
In Mayank Agarwal’s case, there is a huge gap in how he has managed to overcome those flaws at home than overseas. He has a dip of over 64 runs per innings in his career home and away split after 20 Tests – a large enough sample size that deserves scrutiny. This alarming dip is a direct byproduct of a couple of major technical chinks, of which one is more of a consequence of the other.
Agarwal has had a curious obsession with maintaining an abnormally high gap between his frontfoot and the backfoot. Over the years, he has tried to close this gap and balance things up but without a great deal of triumph. Because his front foot gets stuck to the crease for a split-second extra owing to this excessive stride, Agarwal takes time to backtrack it to a normal position and finds himself in awkward angles to balls at high speeds coming in and going out.
These awkward angles include getting squared up completely to the balls coming into his body. In foreign conditions where the Dukes or the Kookaburra take lateral movement in the air and off the pitch, this is a dangerous position to find yourself in, for it opens up wicket possibilities on both edges of the bat. Much more manageable phenomena at home, this problem gets brutally exposed overseas.
The MCG Test in 2020 is a telling example. It was the first time India showed signs of lost trust in Mayank Agarwal the overseas batter. Reason? On both occasions, the batter got his downswing incorrect for the respective angles of the two Mitchell Starc deliveries. He was out LBW missing an inswinger in the first half and edged one that held its line across him in the second essay. In South Africa, he was out twice on the inside edge and four times on the outside edge.
In tough conditions, especially in a bowling era, it is okay to get out to fast bowling. But to carry a major chink in your armoury over a large sample size of failures makes you a liability. And a top-tier Test team like India can’t afford to carry on with a liability. For all their problems over the last two years, even Pujara and Rahane weren’t found as wanting on the technical front.
All this might sound harsh on an earnest player like Mayank Agarwal, who has always come across as a trier and whose explosive home record leads to calls from certain corners for conditions-based batting plans in the WTC era (this writer has been guilty of thinking along those lines, too). He is also someone, who has to do navigate through stiff competition for one slot at the top.
But it is clear, and has been for a while actually, that Agarwal doesn’t fit into India’s long-term overseas plans. The aftermath of loss in South Africa was a time to act upon that with vision and honesty.
