“We are not selling jeans here”, said Billy Beane in Michael Lewis’s seminal movie Moneyball, while shooting down talent scouts who wanted to pick young baseball players in the draft who gave a lot of weightage to how they looked.
Traditionalists in baseball believed that numbers were not needed to judge the calibre of a young player. According to them, you needed to look at the guy and envision what he could become. Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, and a former baseball player who had the “looks” of a star early on in his career, but never made it big, did not want anything to do with older men looking at young guys and imagining what they may become. Billy Beane went on to revolutionise statistical analysis (known as sabermetrics) as a way to judge potential superstars in sports.
A seasoned rookie
Cheteshwar Pujara earned his first international cap in the 2010-‘11 season on the basis of some solid numbers, the kind Billy Beane would have approved of. He had already made a habit of scoring daddy-hundreds at the first class level, including a triple and two doubles in preceding seasons, the last of which was scored as India A captain on an England tour.
In his first Test for India, Pujara earned a promotion to the No. 3 spot while chasing a tricky target of 207 against Australia in Bangalore, replacing none other than his idol Rahul Dravid. He fully repaid the faith shown in him with a stroke-filled 72 off 89 balls leading India to a win. By the end of 2013, the Saurashtra batsman was well established as an accomplished Test batsman after he scored the most runs in the two-Test series in South Africa.
But after giving glimpses of his skills and promises for future, Pujara had a disastrous 2014, with a series of low scores in New Zealand, England and Australia. During this period, he perfected the art of getting off to a start, looking set, and not failing to capitalise. He scored a lot of promising 20s, 30s and a few 50s without scoring those hundreds he was famous for at the first class level.
Critics started pointing out technical flaws in his batting. He became susceptible to the ball coming into him and would get out bowled on many occasions. His lack of scoring shots made it easy for opposition teams to tie him down and then dismiss him. Team management finally lost faith him in the fourth Test against Australia in Sydney during the 2014-‘15 tour with the newly appointed Test skipper Virat Kohli replacing him with Rohit Sharma at number three.
Pujara, it seemed, did not have what it took to be a modern Test batsman. He was not compatible with the 21st century Test cricket version 2.0 that others around him were playing.
Style vs substance
With the bat, Rohit Sharma is grace personified. His deflections seem to clear the boundary rope by a mile. He is often batting on a different plane from others, dismissing deliveries to different corners of the ground with his sheer aura. Sharma had already owned the One-Day International format with his reality-defying double centuries.
Like Pujara, Sharma had an impressive first-class record too. Team India was eager to slot this “talented” young batsman at the No. 3 slot and make him a permanent fixture in the team even though Sharma, after scoring two centuries early on in his career, was struggling for form at the Test level as much as Pujara.
At one point, it did seem that, like Billy Beane’s talent scouts, the wise old men who selected the Indian team could not help “imagining” what Sharma was capable of in the Test team. It was almost as if every run he scored with his lazy elegance had more value than Pujara’s runs accumulated with his ungainly technique. In cricket, just like in other sports, style does sell slightly better than substance.
Unglamorous performers are valued by teams when they are performing but get less fanfare from the fans. It is easy to forget or underestimate their worth and show them the door when they go through a lean patch. Hard consistent numbers do not demand as much attention as a flamboyant persona capable of performing breathtaking feats on the ground.
The second coming
Pujara spent most of 2015 on the team bench and seemed destined to the life of a journeyman when out of the blue, an opportunity arrived. India’s preferred openers, Murali Vijay and Shikhar Dhawan both sustained injuries and Pujara was selected to open the batting on a Colombo pitch that had a lot of assistance for the seamers.
They say if you are coming into the team as a replacement, make sure you make it impossible for them to drop you again. In a knock full of character, Pujara carried his bat in the first innings scoring 145 out of India’s total of 312 in the first innings. India went on to win the match and Pujara was declared the man of the match.
The innings bought him a new lease of life but there were still question marks hanging over his ability to score quickly enough to win Test matches. Ironically, this was happening at a time when most matches India played at home were not going beyond the fourth day.
A season of highs
Pujara started the 2016-‘17 season in style, scoring 166, 31 and an unbeaten 256 in the Duleep Trophy. An advantage of being a Test specialist like Pujara is the chance to iron out the flaws in your game while playing domestic games before the international season. In a recent interview, Pujara said he got a lot of confidence in his Duleep Trophy double hundred and it set him up for a stellar season that saw him scoring 1605 first class runs at an average of 89.16 breaking an Indian record that dates as far back as 1964-‘65.
The Saurashtra batsman was the highest scorer for India during the series against New Zealand and the second highest against England and Bangladesh. His consistency stood out this season where he hardly had a failed outing. Throughout the season, across three series, his solid foundations allowed India’s middle and lower order batsmen to play with freedom. And yet, Pujara remains India’s “invisible wall” that no one talks about.
Perhaps it suits Pujara to stay unsung. Perhaps he enjoys going out there and quietly doing his job. See him celebrating a landmark and he would just remove his helmet and give a shy smile for the cameras and a raised bat for the dressing room. No fist pumps, no moustache twirls, no trademark leaps asking the world to take notice of “How good I am”. He is just happy to be there, satisfied at his contribution and eager to play a role for his team. He may not be sexy, but he is reliable. He is worth celebrating for he is the last of his kind, a pure Test cricket technician.