India vs England: India practise in quest to be perfect
Virat Kohli-Kedar Jadhav stand gave India a 1-0 series lead against England but team is leaving no stone unturned in improving as a unit.
Written by Bharat Sundaresan
| Pune |
Updated: January 18, 2017 11:49 am
Probably it had to do with the fact that Jadhav was back at the MCA Stadium less than two days after his career-defining knock. He wasn’t alone though. The entire Indian team was in attendance on Tuesday. Ideally, they would have been in Cuttack — but rooms were overbooked because of the wedding season — the venue for the second ODI, in front of a bevy of media presence and dealing with an anticipatory buzz in the air. But here they were still in Pune, going through their paces away from the glare, at a venue where they orchestrated one of the more memorable run-chases in ODI history.
While Jadhav seemed content with just knocking few balls around, the rest of his teammates preferred to spend their time either ironing out blemishes – Shikhar Dhawan and Yuvraj Singh for example -or working on their strengths like Virat Kohli and MS Dhoni. Dhawan was the most active member of the contingent.
Coach Anil Kumble had decided to turn the centre-wicket, which witnessed India’s great win into the fast-bowling net, and the left-handed opener was first in to face Umesh Yadav and Bhuvneshwar Kumar along with a few well-built net bowlers.
It was only Kumar who seemed to have the edge over him as he looked at ease against the rest. He even flicked one leg-side delivery into the parking-lot behind the East Stand. He then switched places with opening partner KL Rahul to face the spinners. Dhawan somehow didn’t seem to have had enough even once he was done with close to 30 minutes of batting. He then put his gloves on and got a net bowler to toss a few balls underarm and overarm on the periphery of the nets. That was followed by an intense throwdown session with Sridhar.
The two had plenty of conversations, which looked to focus around getting Dhawan’s head into a neutral position right above his right shoulder and his body almost alongside the ball at the point of delivery. Sridhar even on occasions stopped short of releasing the ball to see whether Dhawan was getting into the right alignment.
He did seem pleased by the end of their session but Dhawan did shadow-practice his set-up a few more times before walking off. After a failure here, Dhawan only has two innings left in his series to cement his spot as the second opener behind Rohit Sharma for the Champions Trophy after all. Rahul, who’s competing with Dhawan for that same spot, also had a few additional stints in the nets, including one facing Sridhar.
Yadav and Kumar seemed to be having their own audition meanwhile. Yadav, India’s highest wicket-taker in this format over the last two years, was expensive and erratic on Sunday. Even here it was Kumar who looked the more incisive of the two with Yadav struggling to not stray down the pads regularly.
Yuvraj Singh didn’t have a great comeback match either. And while the rest were busy bowling or batting in the nets, he chose to take a few high catches. He held on to most but did grunt and cuss himself after dropping a couple. There were few grunts of self-critique from him even while batting.
Bumrah was easily the quickest of the pacers, and rattled quite a few of his colleagues. Captain Virat Kohli even tried to fire up his tearaway by intentionally cheering for Manish Pandey even though the bouncer had smashed into his gloves while he took evasive action. Bumrah was understandably bemused at his captain’s reaction and argued vehemently that it was he who got the better of the exchange, which led to laughter all around.
Kohli was the energizer bunny of the practice session. He spent half-hour knocking balls while facing Raghu and Sridhar. He got both to bowl short deliveries at him-the left-handed Sridhar from around the wicket-and kept practicing the pull shot. Not that this necessarily had anything to do with it, but incidentally Jake Ball had spoken about England’s plan of using the short ball to unsettle the Indian captain a bit earlier. Once done with his stint, he sat around holding court. On one occasion he shouted, “catch hai yaar” to one of the local boys after he snared a steepler near the boundary. And he let out a loud “kya baat hai” when Yadav managed to hit one of the seamers nearly into the second tier of the grand-stand.
He also handed Pandey one of his own bats to check out, having seen that Pandey wasn’t getting enough distance with some of his big shots despite seemingly connecting with the middle of his bat.
