Cheteshwar Pujara & the Baggage of Being a Poor Traveller
Cheteshwar Pujara has averaged 117 balls per dismissal since 2015, only behind Steven Smith and Azhar Ali.
Prior to 2017, he faced public omission from his team, supposedly for a sluggish scoring rate. In 2017, he plundered 1200 runs at an average of 67. Be it the declaration innings against New Zealand, a gritty rearguard against Australia in Bangalore, or a 500-ball ton in Ranchi, Cheteshwar Pujara came back with a characteristic understated brilliance, cloaked in classic Test match batsmanship.
Cut to 2018: he’s no longer in India, where visiting pacemen have been blunted into impotence, where foreign spinners have failed to zero in on the right areas to use the turning conditions. He is abroad, where his average is half of that at home. He is in South Africa, where bounce is plentiful, and the ball darts around like an adulterer. He is pivotal in the batting order and hence it is crucial for him to shed the baggage of being a poor traveller.
Facing him is the most potent bowling team recent history has seen: Steyn, Rabada, Morkel, Philander and Maharaj. Facing him is a parade of falling top-order partners on the first evening of their African sojourn. In the midst of this battle, Pujara is an oasis of fortitude.
There is a typical trap for batsmen in South Africa: balls inviting flirtation on the fifth stump. The monk-like Murali Vijay, and the in-form Virat Kohli have fallen for them. For Pujara, they don’t exist. He leaves them be, and has scored only two runs in front of the square on the offside. His patience transcends the passage of time. He can do this, metronome-like, forever.
To go with that, the tall Morne Morkel is barraging him with short balls. He rides the bounce and deflates it with soft hands. The bad ball comes once in a blue moon, and he duly dispatches it.
The ball curls, but Pujara quells the fire with a boring solid defense. Again and again, he meets the ball right underneath his eyes, right beside his body. The arc of his bat is as late as possible, letting the ball do its own thing before ending its journey.
The in-swinging ball has been his nemesis. He gauges the line early and gets his pad out of harm’s way. At the same time, he plonks his bat adjacent, leaving no gate open. He parries the ball with the softest hands, ensuring that the edges will die out. If his average when away is low, it seems like a vague memory from a long-lost past.
Nuanced, even-tempered and persevering, his demeanour when his team is in tatters is absorbing to watch. More than that, the subtle changes in his technique are remarkable. Getting bowled out once in every three innings does not do justice to a batsman of his calibre, and you can see how the method has been noticeably tightened to glue his bat to his pad. His stint at Nottinghamshire made him better at countering lateral movement.
In an era of slam-bang cricket, Pujara is a keen student and a dedicated learner, forever looking to improve. After his woeful tour around the world, he has averaged 117 balls per dismissal since 2015, only behind Steven Smith and Azhar Ali.
After the tea break in Cape Town, however, he swerved his bat at a wide one, walking back, out of nowhere. His next two innings were needless run-outs, products of dodgy knees and misjudged singles. In the third Test, he consumed 180-odd balls, but failed to convert an important fifty into a higher score.
An analysis of his overseas innings reveals no common pattern of dismissal but reproduces that frustrating pattern: he absorbs more deliveries than most, but fails to convert that into runs. For this practitioner of concentration, what is going wrong in faster conditions?
Pujara has scored a measly 172 runs in 12 innings for Yorkshire this season. While his team has played on treacherous pitches, collapsing often, such a form leading up to a five-Test foray in England does not bode well for him. He looks well-settled, he leaves well and defends solidly, before suddenly getting out. His slow starts mean he doesn’t trouble the scorers much, even though he spends some time on the crease.
The issue, in my opinion, is the organisation of his batting. In India, he seeks to see out the pacers, defending and leaving until they’re tired, and then uses his feet imperiously against the spinners, increasing his scoring rate late in the innings. This strategy works because in slower conditions, pace is hardly a threat. Balls don't misbehave, they don’t come with wickets written on them. You can let them be without giving the bowler the advantage: it’s a stalemate.
In conditions that help pace and movement, you cannot block: it lets bowlers dictate terms in an environment that enable them. You can defend 30 balls perfectly, but by allowing the bowler to settle, you leave yourself open to that one ball that does something extra.
For all your investment, your score is curtailed to 15 runs off 80 balls, where another batsman might have had 45, albeit less often. The pitfalls of this strategy are clear: Pujara has a high frequency of 20s (17 out of 33), but converts very few 20s into 50s (5 out of 17). He gets to a start from 80-100 balls, but then loses his wicket somehow.
The same is glaringly visible in his hazard curves, which simply plot the chance of getting out at a score, once a player reaches that score. The peak suggests getting a start and throwing it away.
To be successful overseas, Pujara has to do to pacers what he does to spinners on the subcontinent: take the initiative and prohibit them from bowling to him. His technique, although not perfect still, keeps improving, but it’s his method of innings construction, so successful in India, that needs a rejig. He yields the ascendancy to the bowler, allowing himself to be set up. His strategy in India succeeds due to the conditions thwarting the incisiveness of pace, and the subsequent inevitable introduction of spinners, but that may never happen in an innings in South Africa, England, New Zealand and Australia.
Aggression was once said to be found in the eyes of Rahul Dravid. Not just at one-down, some say Pujara is truly his successor, a union of softness and fortitude. Underneath the unassuming exterior of the demure and monotonous Pujara, lies a true embodiment of Test cricket: cerebral, intense, complex and anachronistic. To truly emulate the man he is billed to fill the shoes of, he needs to marry all this with evolution in the face of challenges, which is a hallmark of true legends.
(The author is a graduate student in physics from Delhi. He enjoys reading Ghalib, discovering his city and singing, when he's not simulating models of the universe.)
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