BETWEEN WICKETS
There’s a line in Wrist Assured, Gundappa Vishwanath’s recent autobiography, that says it well: “A good defensive shot holds the same value as a crunching cut or a cracking drive…” This is clearly a team man speaking, a team man aware that no Test side can afford to focus exclusively on aggressive, flashy batting alone.
Batting is also about defending, tiring out the bowlers and striking when the time is right. No one does this better than Cheteshwar Pujara, India’s most under-rated batsman of the past decade. Despite his record (95 Tests, 18 centuries, an average of nearly 44), and his value to the team as a player around whom the flashier batsmen can strut their stuff, Pujara seems destined to wait for posterity to give him his due. Sometimes value is recognised only in retrospect.
