It will be no exaggeration to classify the Indian batting into two eras – Before Gavaskar (BG) and After Gavaskar (AG). True, there were several stalwarts before Sunil Gavaskar made a stirring debut in the Caribbean in 1971 with 774 runs from four Tests, notably the three Vijays — Merchant, Manjrekar and Hazare – and Dilip Sardesai, among others. But it wasn’t until the little man from Mumbai started to consistently defy and master the fastest, meanest, best bowlers in the world that the Indian batting started to come into global focus.
There were many things that worked for Gavaskar – extraordinary patience, excellent technique, tremendous understanding of his game, the ability to problem-solve long before it was considered fashionable, immense powers of concentration, the unfathomable equilibrium to embrace self-denial, and a range of strokes that he didn’t always showcase because he felt he couldn’t owing to the risks that came with them – but these were all elements that didn’t come about by accident. A conscious effort to keep raising the bar and keep the flag of Indian batting flying high drove him to such unprecedented heights that by the time he called it quits from the game in 1987, he had both the most Test runs (10,122) and centuries (34).
Those marks have been surpassed, as they inevitability will, though he takes no little pride in the fact that both are now held by the man viewed as his natural successor, the peerless Sachin Tendulkar.
Gavaskar’s association with international cricket is now into its 54th year; apart from being a vital part of several monumental highs in Indian cricket, he has also seen the best and worst from close quarters in his capacity as analyst and commentator in the 37 years since his retirement and is perfectly positioned to call things as they are, without fear or favour. There is no one more qualified to reflect on the state of the Indian batting on this tour of Australia, where the top order has been a massive letdown in all but one of five completed innings so far – the second innings in Perth.
India have only two individual hundreds and three half-centuries in a series where batting has been a huge problem for both teams, apart from the outrageously Travis Head. Australia have nosed ahead because they have a crack pace attack; India have been largely about Jasprit Bumrah, with Mohammed Siraj a game trier but the lack of experience evident in both Harshit Rana and, to a lesser extent, Akash Deep.
Why is India’s top-order struggling in Australia?
“I just get the feeling that there is a certain urgency, a certain rush that the Indian batters are showing, which on Australian surfaces when the ball is new and the bounce is something that you are not used to, is causing them problems,” Gavaskar tells Hindustan Times as he dissects India’s problems. “That is probably the main reason why we haven’t seen the top order score as much with the half-push, half-drive kind of strokes they are attempting.
“Sometimes, it is about what the team decides and what the team wants. If the team says that this is the approach we are going to have, then even if that approach is not something you are used to or you are comfortable with, it is something you have got to follow. Whether that is what the team is saying, that we are going to be aggressive batters, I wouldn’t know because I am not in the change room. But these are all five-day Test matches and very few matches last all five days,” he points out. “There is plenty of time to be able to play the shots once you’ve got the hang of what the pitch is doing. The bowlers can be tired out after maybe an hour’s batting. I don’t know if it is a team approach to go straight at the bowlers from the beginning.”
The channel outside off is generally every batter’s bugbear, and it has been since the inception of the game. Ask him how he approached that challenge, and pat comes the reply, “See, even I’ve got out multiple times, caught behind. It is a very regular form of dismissal for every batter. There is no batter who can say that he has not been caught behind the stumps pushing, because that is the skill of the bowler — to get you to push and reach for deliveries which you think are drivable and then you end up getting caught behind or caught in the slips (when they are not there for the drive). When we played, our main aim really — as we were coached and taught — was to play in the ‘V’. It was very much like playing from the right side of extra-cover, to, say, the left side of mid-wicket. That was a good starting point because you were going to be showing the full face of the bat.
“As you settled in, automatically that ‘V’ would expand and could cover the area from square leg to backward point. And then if you played off the back foot, even from the left of backward point to the right of square leg, all those areas opened up. That was what we were told. I played for sessions. For me, I didn’t have any individual scoring targets. I just wanted to play one session, then focus on the next session, get to the next session and then maybe to the end (of the day). That was what was my approach. I didn’t look at the scoreboard — I know a lot of people find it odd — because I seriously wasn’t interested in how many runs I’d made, I was only interested in knowing how many runs I had scored after I got out. Till then for me, batting was just staying at the crease and letting the runs come.”
It wasn’t just defence all the time, though, or mere occupation of the crease. There were occasions when a concerted push to score runs did occur, but even that was with caution and due diligence. “You took on the bowler, particularly spin bowlers, those who flighted the ball — you went down the pitch, didn’t allow them to get on top,” he remarks, with a proviso. “Driving them along the ground was the thing, because the boundaries were bigger maybe, the bats were not as good as they are now. Today, what has happened is, that you can hit a six with the power you have. Today’s guys are definitely much, much stronger, no question about it. The bats are much, much better and therefore you know once you hit a couple of sixes, you start thinking you can do that (all the time).
“The thing with the difference between a six and a four is the safety angle; the risk percentage goes up considerably higher for just two runs because if the ball hits the inside part of the bat or the outside part of the bat and not the middle, then it goes up in the air and you’re caught. That risk element is something we were aware of; we didn’t do it because we didn’t have the bats nor the power to hit the sixes. We had the Kapils (Dev) and Sandeep Patil who could hit sixes anywhere, but some of us like say maybe Vishy (Gundappa Vishwanath), myself, Dilip Vengsarkar, Yashpal Sharma, Mohinder Amarnath, we were more looking at fours, and singles and twos.”
Just as not hitting the ball in the quest for sixes is an exercise in self-denial, so was Tendulkar cutting off the drive on the up in the Sydney Test in 2004, a stroke that had brought him plenty of grief in the three preceding Tests. Tendulkar almost completely ignored the off-side and went on to make an unbeaten 241, hailed as one of the great knocks for the strokes he did not play. Not many might be aware that Gavaskar was a compulsive hooker and puller when he made his Test debut, but deliberately and studiedly put those strokes away within a couple of years of his maiden outing in the Caribbean.
“You look at the percentage of success, like I just now talked about the percentage between a four and a six,” he explains, patiently. “The risk percentage almost doubles or triples from hitting a boundary along the ground to hitting a six in the air. Similarly, the risk percentage for me was the factor (in stopping himself from playing the hook and the pull). Also, the truth, if I might use the word, is that within a couple of years after I made my debut, we had the cream of the Indian batting line-up then, retiring. That put a load on the shoulders of Vishy and myself to a great extent. Not that there were no other batters, but clearly, we suddenly became senior players. And we suddenly became senior players even before we were 24 or 25. That meant you had to play in a responsible way. You could not play the hook shot — I could not. The hook shot was something I hit in the air most times. I took upon it as a challenge and a scoring opportunity. You know, on my first trip, I can’t recall ducking under any bouncer. I was going for it, maybe playing and missing it, but I went for just about every bouncer. I was a baby in the team. For me, the responsibility factor, the responsibility of the entire batting, was not on me.
“Then I said look, this is a shot that can get me into trouble because I cannot keep it on the ground all the time. I hit it up in the air. That’s one. And with the extra pace coming in, with the square cut also, it used to be one of my favourite shots. But it was a shot that was likely to get me into trouble because if the ball bounced a little higher, then I could be caught behind. Those two shots were just put in cold storage.”
How, is all escapes one’s lips when he comes back with, “I just said to myself, even if there was a short ball, when the bouncer started to come along, I started to sway away from it or duck under it. When the shortish, short of length ball came along for the square cut, I would shoulder arms and not play the square cut.”
When you have recovered from the simplicity of that idea, you manage to verbalise the thought that you weren’t referring to the physicality of not playing those strokes, but where the mental discipline came from.
He chuckles, knowingly, “That’s it. I had made up my mind that these are the shots that I will not play, at least till I’m well set. It’s not that I totally avoided them. I won’t say that I completely eradicated those shots from my book. But I was very choosy when I played them – only when I was 100% certain that these shots would get me runs and would not get me out.”
Gavaskar explains how Rohit and Kohli can get back amongst runs
The conversation shifts to Virat Kohli and his travails outside the off-stump. Kohli has been dismissed all four times flirting at balls in the corridor, some of which he could well have desisted from having a go at. “Look, he’s scored thousands of runs through that extra-cover drive,” Gavaskar insists. “It’s something that is probably the best shot in the world today, the Virat Kohli extra-cover drive. Not so much the cover-drive, but the one that goes between mid-off and extra-cover. That’s a wonderful shot to see. That’s a full-face-of-the-bat shot. And because he gets so many runs from that shot, he’s tempted to go for that because that’s a very productive shot for him. Maybe that is the reason why he is looking to play over there and gets out. If you see, it’s not that he has opened the face of the bat. It’s not that he is looking to play to the covers. If that was happening, then you could say, hey, don’t play towards cover. But it’s a shot that has got him thousands of runs. Only this time, maybe the late movement is getting him out.”
A hearty laugh emanates when you ask him how Kohli gets out of that rut. “That’s up to him. It is really up to him, what he does,” he manages, once he has got his infectious laugh under control. “But you don’t score X thousand runs in international cricket and get that many hundreds unless you know how to approach and build a Test innings. I am sure this one week will give him a lot of time to look at his dismissals. More than the dismissals, I would like him and even Rohit (Sharma, the captain) to look at all the innings where they have scored brilliant centuries. That is what is going to make them start believing. I want that positivity to come into their thinking rather than them thinking only about getting out to deliveries that are on the off-stump.”
Rohit has had even worse time than Kohli in the last three months, with a solitary score of more than 50 in 13 innings and a multitude of single-digit outs. “I think it’s just a bad patch,” Gavaskar says. “Everybody goes through a bad patch and that’s what’s happened to him. Again, like I said, he should look at all the videos where he’s scored century after century. Those are the videos that start giving you positive thoughts. Sometimes, when you have not scored runs in 2-3 matches, you start to doubt yourself. But seeing these videos where they have scored runs is the best way to get positive thoughts and energy before the next Test.
“Both Virat and Rohit have the ability; they’ve been playing international cricket for so long, they certainly have the ability. Both these players are so good, I feel they’re just one good innings away from coming back to form. Just one innings. And that, all Indians are praying, happens in the Boxing Day Test.”
As the evening draws to a close, you can’t help but ask what words of advice he has for the young duo of Shubman Gill and Yashasvi Jaiswal, neither of whom has a great overseas record even though the latter unleashed a giant 161 in the second innings in Perth. “Take your time,” he remarks, without drama. “Don’t start looking for boundaries straightaway. Pushing for twos and threes with a straight bat, a vertical bat, will reward you a lot more than looking to score the boundaries at the start of the innings. Those boundaries will come the longer you stay at the crease, and come very easily.”
Free advice, on a platter. Worth 10,122 runs, 34 centuries and a lifetime of cricketing wisdom.
