Rohit’s early agression didn’t come off, again. Kohli fell to left-arm spin, again. And India stumbled to the most unimaginable of scorelines

Alagappan Muthu03-Nov-20241:57

Manjrekar: First six wickets were painful to watch

Rohit Sharma walks across his home turf with his head bowed. There was a weight dragging him down. He had no more defence against it.At the same time, over his left shoulder, the New Zealand players had all piled in together. They looked like they’d worked out the secret to human flight – which three weeks ago seemed a more amenable task than what they were setting out to do and now had done.The contrast was powerful. A team together. A man lost.Related

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At 9.59am, there was hope.Rohit felt the ball on the middle of his bat. He walked off to the side and mimed the way it had reacted off the pitch. Just the slightest little nip away. And he had accounted for it. Getting in line behind it and blocking it with soft hands.Rohit has shots and he plays them in a way that makes you wonder why other batters don’t play them too. It looks so easy when he does it. Maybe that’s why it took him a while to acquire a taste for defending. For a while it worked. In September 2021, two years after making a comeback into the Test team, he scored his first century away from home.This was a brief sight of that Rohit. At 10.00am, that Rohit was gone. Replaced by one who miscued a pull off a ball not short enough. This has been his way of late, and it hasn’t been coming off.Rohit Sharma has tallied 133 in ten Test innings this home season•AFP/Getty Images”As you grow, you try and evolve and I’m trying to evolve as a batter as well to try and see what else I can do,” this Rohit said. “So in that, there is a chance that you can fall on the other side of it, which clearly I have. So I will re-look at my game and see what best I can do.”But I don’t see that I have lost faith in my defence. It’s just that I need to spend more time to defend balls, which I haven’t done in this series and I accept that I haven’t batted well in this series.”On Sunday, this Rohit was dismissed by the 11th ball he faced. He had got to 20 balls in just one of his last 10 innings.

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At 10.06am, there was joy.Virat Kohli was coming down the Wankhede stairs. When he was fielding in the slips, and the crowd was roaring his name, he had turned to them, raised a hand up high, and brought it to his chest. They have never lost faith in him.Just before play, he had had a line of net bowlers all preparing him for the threat of Ajaz Patel. He launched a series of inside-out drives against them. He used to eat up left-arm fingerspin. Averaged 123.80 against them in all home Tests till the end of 2019. In the years since then, he’s gone at 23.08.Shubman Gill walks out, Virat Kohli walks in. He eventually lasts seven balls•AFP/Getty ImagesThe fans don’t really see these numbers. But they remember how he’s made them feel. And so they believed. New Zealand had probably seen these numbers. Their lead spinner was a left-armer and he had two others for company on this tour. It’s not like they had other options queueing up, so this might just be coincidence but, barring the first innings in Bengaluru, every time Kohli has come out to bat, he’s had to start against a left-arm fingerspinner.Now there’s this thing he does to feel good at the crease. He likes to get forward. And these aren’t small strides. They’re gung-ho with a capital G, U, N and so on. It works really well enough on flat pitches. Or when he’s got his eye in on a not-so-flat pitch. Mumbai ticked neither of those boxes. New Zealand definitely played a hand here. Having often used in-out fields for other batters, they had short cover, backward point, mid-on, midwicket and square leg up for Kohli. They were blocking his other great strength – stealing singles to get himself going.Now it was all up to Ajaz. When he looped one up, made sure it wasn’t a half-volley, and found turn off the straight, there was only one outcome. At 10.13am, one of India’s greatest batters fell to one of the most basic traps, and all around the stadium there was silence.

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At 11.10am, a fightback began.Rishabh Pant defended Glenn Phillips but he wasn’t to the pitch of the ball. Mindful of that, he played the original line, softened his hands and opened the face ever so slightly. So now if there was turn, he would have it covered. If there wasn’t, he’d plonked his bat in front of the pad so he was unlikely to be out lbw.The crowd roared their approval. A forward defence sent the Wankhede into raptures.Pant made 64 off 57 because he found a way to put pressure back on the spinners. He was brave enough step down the pitch when he saw a ball that was tossed up. It forced the bowlers off their length. Both Ajaz and Phillips went shorter on more than one occasion because they were worried about being whacked down the ground, except they were coming off worse now because the shots Pant could now play – cuts and pulls – were riskless.1:16

Manjrekar: ‘With Pant, the word genius came to mind’

It was a high-wire act. On day two, Rachin Ravindra had tried stepping down to a spinner in order to mitigate the threat they posed on this surface and ended up looking desperately out of place. Pant might be one of the few players in world cricket capable of pulling something like this off. Taking a team that was 29 for 5 in conditions that nobody could trust and keeping them alive, because he has this innate and outrageous understanding of how to play attacking shots. He sacrifices his body to achieve this objective. That’s why he ends up in all those weird shapes when he’s at the crease.New Zealand were getting desperate. They’d missed out on Pant’s wicket when India were 59 for 5 because they failed to review an lbw appeal. So in the 22nd over, they were prepared to burn the two they had left if it meant they could get rid of him. It worked, though there are people still wondering if the umpires had made a terrible mistake.At 12.24pm, the big screen flashed the letters O-U-T and it prompted a chant of “Cheater! Cheater! Cheater!”

****

India going down to New Zealand at home was an improbable outcome. But being swept 3-0? On pitches they had asked for? With the batters they had? Kohli has 10 times the runs that Will Young does in Test cricket. The bowlers they could unleash? R Ashwin has taken twice as many wickets as Glenn Phillips has bowled overs. The first session in Bengaluru caught them off-guard but everything that’s happened from there on has been on their own terms, in conditions loaded in favour of their strengths. And yet there they were, brushed aside at 1.03pm on the third day. An invincible aura, built over 18 series spanning nearly 12 years, had come apart in less than nine days of cricket.This can’t be wished away now. This can’t be set right with perspective. This will have to be dealt with. And the fall-out could be far-reaching.

SL’s last-wicket stand of 78 to chase down 304, or an 18-year-old’s heroics? Which Test was better? Vote now!

ESPNcricinfo staff14-May-2025Update: This poll has ended. The SA-SL 2019 Durban Test moves to the round of 16.The Perera miracle in Durban, 2019
Sri Lanka were enduring a tough time heading into this series. They were coming off a 2-0 pummeling in Australia, their captain had been sacked, and an inexperienced team, led by Dimuth Karunaratne, was put on the plane to South Africa. The perfect lead-up to a heroic comeback story?In what was a seesawing Test in Durban, Sri Lanka emerged victorious, chasing down 304 with one wicket to spare. They had lost their ninth wicket while still 78 runs off their target. Kusal Perera then scored 67 of them all by himself. Perera gave Sri Lanka an incredible finale on the fourth afternoon along with the No. 11 Vishwa Fernando, as they put on a record-breaking tenth-wicket stand to see their team home in a tense finish.At lunch on the day, Sri Lanka were 166 for 5, still 138 runs away from a win, after which Keshav Maharaj scythed through the Sri Lankan lower-middle order, leaving them at 226 for 9. That brought Fernando to the middle, and from the moment he got there, he was entirely focused on survival. He faced 22 balls before he got off the mark.It looked like victory was assured for South Africa, but as Fernando clung on at one end, Perera defended with unreal calm and even took several blows to his body on his way to the target. Batting for 309 minutes, he farmed the strike superbly, and picked his opportunities to attack and push the score forward. Along the way, he also made his career-best Test score of 153, sealing the famous win with a boundary.Debutant Cummins’ heroics in Johannesburg, 2011Trust Pat Cummins to do something heroic. But to do such a thing on his Test debut? As an 18-year-old?Australia had a lot to prove entering this Test. They had been bowled out for 47 in the first Test of the series in Cape Town, their lowest total in 109 years. They had lost that match before lunch on the third day.In seaming conditions at the Wanderers, Australia took a 30-run lead in reply to South Africa’s 266. Having been brought in as Ryan Harris’ replacement for the second Test in Johannesburg, Cummins came to Australia’s rescue in the second innings as he outbowled his more senior colleagues.He gave Australia a fighting chance of victory in a match that, 24 hours earlier, appeared to have slipped from their grasp after superb batting from Hashim Amla and AB de Villiers. Cummins was responsible for breaking the Amla-de Villiers stand, as he went on to bag six wickets to set up a target of 310 runs for his team.Openers Shane Watson and Phil Hughes failed to repeat their first-innings displays. They were both out to Vernon Philander as Australia were 19 for 2, but Ricky Ponting and Usman Khawaja brought down the home side’s advantage. Morne Morkel and Dale Steyn’s strikes, though, left Australia six down with another 95 runs to get.Brad Haddin and Mitchell Johnson then forged a partnership of 72 to erase the bulk of the deficit, but with his team eight down with 12 runs required, it was Cummins who kept his calm and scored two boundaries in the 15 balls he faced to seal the close win for Australia. It was the highest fourth-innings total at the Wanderers.

Between them, KL Rahul, B Sai Sudharsan and Shubman Gill scored 313 runs in the DC vs GT game – the 318 between the four openers is an IPL record

Sampath Bandarupalli18-May-20251:21

Moody: Gill, Sai Sudharsan now have five gears

200 – Target chased down by Gujarat Titans (GT) against Delhi Capitals (DC) in IPL 2025 on Sunday, the highest without losing a wicket in the IPL. The previous highest was 184 by Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) against Gujarat Lions in 2017.GT also became only the second team to successfully chase a 200 (or more) target without losing a wicket in T20s. Pakistan had done the same against England in 2022 in Karachi.2 – This was the second game between the two this season, and on both occasions, GT had a 200 (or more) target, which they chased successfully. This is the first instance of a team chasing 200 (or more) targets twice against an opponent in one IPL season.Only one team before GT had multiple 200-plus chases against an opponent in a T20 tournament (or series) – Bulgaria against Serbia in 2022.2 – DC’s two defeats against GT in IPL 2025 are the only instances of them failing to defend 200 (or more) target in the IPL. Before this season, they had a 13-0 record on that front in the IPL. GT had also never chased a 200 (or more) target before their two wins against DC this season.205* – Partnership between B Sai Sudharsan and Shubman Gill for the first wicket on Sunday night, the highest by a pair in an IPL chase. The previous highest was David Warner and Naman Ojha of Delhi Daredevils (now DC) scoring an unbroken 189 for the second wicket against Deccan Chargers in 2012.ESPNcricinfo Ltd3 – Number of double-century partnerships for the opening wicket in the IPL. Two are by Sai Sudharsan and Gill, who previously added 210 against Chennai Super Kings (CSK) in IPL 2024. Quinton de Kock and KL Rahul also had an unbroken 210-run opening stand for Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) against KKR in 2022.1 – Sai Sudharsan and Gill are the first opening pair with two 200-plus stands in men’s T20s. Virat Kohli and AB de Villiers are the only other pair with multiple partnerships of 200-plus runs in men’s T20s.7 – Century partnerships between Sai Sudharsan and Gill in 30 innings in the IPL. Only two pairs have had more such stands – ten by Kohli and de Villiers and nine by Kohli and Chris Gayle.1 – Rahul became the first player to score a hundred for three different franchises in the IPL. Rahul had four hundreds in the IPL before his maiden ton for DC on Sunday – two for Kings XI Punjab (now Punjab Kings) and two for LSG.318 – Runs scored by opening batters on Sunday in Delhi. It is the highest aggregate by openers in an IPL match; 313 of those came from Rahul (112*), Sudharsan (108*) and Gill (93*).Only once before have three batters scored 90-plus runs in a men’s T20 match – Tamim Iqbal (95), Shai Hope (91*) and Johnson Charles (107*) in a BPL game in 2023.

They used one of their three trump cards and had almost everything with their four experienced batters go right for them

Sidharth Monga24-Jun-20254:09

Gambhir: We had opportunities on all five days

India’s big guns have all fired. Rishabh Pant has scored two creative centuries, the openers have each hit a classy one in each innings, the captain has notched up a regal one, their gun bowler has exhausted one of the three Tests he is going to play and has delivered a five-for. And yet they are down 1-0. They have lost the unlosable Test.Let’s get the obvious out of the way. Their last four aggregated nine runs in both innings put together, becoming parts of collapses of 7 for 41 and 6 for 31 in pretty flat conditions. They dropped more catches than any team in a Test in England in the last 20 years. Their third and fourth fast bowlers provided them neither control nor penetration. They could have batted England out on the second day; they didn’t. They could have secured a huge lead had they held their catches; they didn’t. They could have batted England out again on the fourth day; they didn’t.It was a proper baptism by fire for captain Shubman Gill, having to lead a transitioning bowling unit on one of the more idiosyncratic grounds of the world against a side that might not have the quality of some of India’s recent opponents but are intimidating frontrunners. A new slips cordon had to come to terms with fielding about a foot or two below the pitch level, bowlers needed to quickly adjust to running in up and down the slope, and their mistakes with the bat forced them to defend more than they could attack on a notoriously difficult-to-defend ground with pitches running all the way to the boundary. He also has to deal with his lead bowler playing only three Tests.Related

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However, Gill will need to lay down the law here. It wasn’t long ago that the India tail used to dig in and fight for whatever runs they could claw out. On their last trip to England, India got the lead because of the runs the lower order scored. It’s not that Nos. 8 to 11 aggregated only nine runs in two innings. Dismissals can happen. Even to specialist batters. It was more the nature of the dismissals. They batted like millionaires without getting a feel for the conditions despite having a proper batter at the other end. They played Shardul Thakur precisely to provide them batting depth, but he was out playing expansive drives eighth ball and 12th balls.Gill just needs to imagine what would have happened if the tail had displayed such a casual attitude when Virat Kohli or Rohit Sharma was captain. Once, leave alone twice, in the same match. Gill will soon learn it is nice to have a great atmosphere and respect in the dressing room, but there needs to be some fear of the leaders as well.The lower-order flop is not the only reason why India lost the unlosable Test but it was a symptom of general drops in intensity that a captain needs to watch out against. Test cricket is more about playing good cricket for longer periods of time than flashes of brilliance. This is why an attack of four good fast bowlers is better than one world-beater, one good bowler and two bowling ordinarily. You need fitness, intensity, and ruthlessness to be up six hours a day, each day for five days, or however long it takes.3:26

Harmison: Not sure India believed they could get Duckett out

On the final day, when finally none of the big guns fired, India didn’t seem to have a plan on how to put together a consistent set of overs. Jasprit Bumrah should be allowed to have a day on which he is not bowling an unplayable delivery every over. The bowling choices need to be made based not just on numbers that day. Mohammed Siraj, the best bowler on display on the final day, wasn’t bowled from overs 42 to 80, a period of not just 39 overs but also two rain breaks. Ravindra Jadeja took a little too long to shift his line wider, into the rough, to challenge Ben Duckett’s reverse-sweeps. At one point Ben Duckett punched Jadeja towards mid-off, and he looked up to see there wasn’t one. Not short, not wide, not deep. Just no mid-off at all.In a Test that you make only one or two such mistakes, they can have only a trivial impact on the eventual outcome, but all these things add up.This was also collectively India’s worst fielding performance in a long time. Thakur misfielded because he slipped, but took forever to get back up and retrieve the ball. As Rishabh Pant could be heard saying on the stumps mic, “It is okay to misfield, but you need to recover.” It should have come from Gill. If you zoomed-out a little and looked at the whole field as events unfolded during the final day, it was hard to tell if Gill was in charge. At various times, Pant and KL Rahul set the fields and talked to the bowlers.1:59

Why were Indian seamers ineffective on day 5?

The most important job for Gill and Gautam Gambhir will be to lift the team after they have lost a Test in which they used one of the three trump cards given to them and had almost everything with their four experienced batters go right for them. As has been said in this space before, Gill’s real test will be if he plays Thakur as the bowling allrounder and it doesn’t work out. The ideal response will be to double down on the need to take 20 wickets and bring in a proper bowler – possibly Kuldeep Yadav – but their collapses have given them every reason to be conservative.A captaincy debut which started like a dream for Gill has ended up being a nightmare. This was only his sixth first-class match as captain. He needs to be cut some slack, but this is a job that comes with a lot of prestige and also responsibility. He has no option but to learn quickly on the job. There is no magic potion that can maintain the love and care but still instil fear and accountability.This is not to say the players are not hurting for this loss. They are hurting more than anyone on the outside can. They will all have to dust themselves off and do the good things again but also make sure their intensity doesn’t drop. The England bowling attack can be taken down. They just need their bowlers to be in the good areas more often than at Headingley, and then be switched on in the field.If there is any consolation, it has been done before. Kohli’s first Test as captain is remembered for his brilliant twin hundreds, but even that game featured ordinary selections and lower-order disasters. In his first series as the full-time captain, Kohli lost what seemed like the unlosable Test in Galle to start off with. You can quibble with other things, but it is hard to remember drops in intensity in the side after that.

The SRH batter smashed 105 not out off 39 balls against Kolkata Knight Riders in Delhi

ESPNcricinfo staff25-May-2025

Chris Gayle – 30 balls

175* vs Pune Warriors, Bengaluru, 2013
It was the day on which Gayle rewrote T20 record books at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium. His unbeaten 175 remains the highest individual score in the format, and his 30-ball century is the fastest in IPL history even after 12 years. After a watchful first over, Gayle took 21 off Ishwar Pandey and 28 off Mitchell Marsh to bring up a 17-ball fifty. Aaron Finch’s 29-run over only added to the charge and Gayle brought up his century in the ninth over. Of his first 103 runs, 98 came in boundaries. He finished unbeaten on 175 and later returned to pick up two wickets, capping off a surreal day.

Vaibhav Suryavanshi

– 35 balls
101 vs Gujarat Titans, Jaipur, 2025Walking out to open with Yashasvi Jaiswal in Rajasthan Royals’ (RR) chase of 210, Suryavanshi made history as he hammered a bowling attack comprising Rashid Khan, Ishant Sharma, Mohammed Siraj and Prasidh Krishna to bring up the second-fastest century in the IPL. By the time Prasidh dislodged him with a yorker, he had hit 11 sixes and seven fours and left RR needing 44 off 49 deliveries. In a phenomenal display of hitting, Suryavanshi took 26 off an Ishant over on the way to a 17-ball half-century, and then hit three sixes and three fours off Karim Janat’s first over in the IPL. He reached his century with a six off Rashid, no less.

Heinrich Klaasen – 37 balls

105* vs Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR), Delhi, 2025
In Sunrisers Hyderabad’s final league match of IPL 2025, a dead rubber against Kolkata Knight Riders with both teams out of the playoffs, Heinrich Klaasen played the sort of innings his team had missed from him. He came into bat at No. 3 in the seventh over and smashed nine sixes and seven fours on a flat surface in Delhi. He took down KKR’s spin threat, hitting Sunil Narine for 24 runs off 10 balls and Varun Chakravarthy for 36 off 12. He finished unbeaten on 105 off 39 balls, having taken SRH to 278 for 3, the fourth-highest total in IPL history.

Yusuf Pathan – 37 balls

100 vs Mumbai Indians (MI), Brabourne, 2010
Pathan teed off when Rajasthan Royals (RR) needed 143 off 57 balls to chase down MI’s 212. He hit 54 off his next 11 deliveries, including three successive sixes off Ali Murtaza and 24 in the following over from R Sathish. The carnage continued as he brought up what was then the fastest century in the IPL with a towering six. He was run out the very next ball, leaving RR with 40 to get from 17 balls – a bridge too far in the end. However, his captain, Shane Warne, described it as the best innings he had ever seen.

David Miller – 38 balls

101* vs Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB), Mohali, 2013Miller’s 38-ball century rescued Kings XI Punjab (now PBKS) from 64 for 4 and powered them in a jaw-dropping chase of 191, with 99 runs coming in the last five overs. It began with a flurry of boundaries off Vinay Kumar before he tore into RP Singh for 26 in a single over. With three runs needed and Miller on 95, he launched a length ball straight over the sightscreen to bring up his century in style. After the match, Miller shared his father’s advice: “If it’s in the V, it’s in the tree. If it’s in the arc, it’s out of the park.”

Travis Head – 39 balls

102 vs RCB, Bengaluru, 2024Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) and Head had already signaled their intent with a 277-run blitz earlier in the season. In Bengaluru, they went one better. Head had set the tone with a powerplay assault that saw SRH race to 76 for 0, bringing up his fifty along the way. By the time he was dismissed in the 13th over for a 41-ball 102, SRH had rocketed to 165. They eventually finished on 287 – the highest total in IPL history.

Priyansh Arya – 39 balls

103 vs Chennai Super Kings (CSK), Mullanpur, 2025PBKS picked 24-year-old Delhi opener Arya for INR 3.8 crore after a bidding war at the auction and he’s already showing why. After a 23-ball 47 on debut, Arya delivered on his potential against CSK. He began the innings with a first-ball six and didn’t let the fall of wickets at the other end disrupt his intent. He later smacked Matheesha Pathirana for three consecutive sixes and a four to bring up a stunning maiden IPL century in just the 13th over of the innings.

One of the greats of Indian cricket played the game his own way and left lasting memories

Karthik Krishnaswamy24-Aug-2025January 2019. Earlier that month, Cheteshwar Pujara had been the toast of the nation, scoring centuries in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney as India won a Test series in Australia for the very first time. Now he was the villain of all of Karnataka, or at least the few hundred despondent diehards at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium who watched him seal their team’s fate with an unbeaten fourth-innings hundred that steered Saurashtra into the final of the 2018-19 Ranji Trophy.The bulk of Pujara’s innings came against the backdrop of chants from these diehards. “Cheater! Cheater! Cheater!” Once in each innings, he had been reprieved by the umpire when he seemed to have edged behind. Both times, he stood his ground and batted on.If you watched this match, you may have remembered it when you read Pujara’s retirement announcement on Sunday. One word in particular.”As a little boy from the small town of Rajkot, along with my parents, I set out to aim for the stars; and dreamt to be a part of the Indian cricket team,” he wrote on his social media feeds. “Little did I know then that this game would give me so much – invaluable opportunities, experiences, purpose, love, and above all a chance to represent my state and this great nation.”Related

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State and nation. Pujara belonged equally to both. He played nearly as many first-class matches for his state team (90) as he did Test matches (103), and more than half his Saurashtra games (58) came after his international debut. And this is before we count white-ball cricket, of which he only had a fleeting international taste. Pujara’s father Arvind and uncle Bipin played for Saurashtra too, 43 times between them.Australia’s scourge, Karnataka’s cheater. The competitor in Pujara may have enjoyed both roles equally.In being as much of Saurashtra as of India, Pujara was almost unique for an Indian cricketer of his generation. This, of course, was a matter largely of circumstance. He was a red-ball cricketer of the highest rank, and a red-ball cricketer almost to the exclusion of anything else. The gaps this left in his international schedule allowed him to build a significant body of work in domestic cricket.And as he did this, he became a reminder of a bygone age when batters dreamed of scoring 100 first-class hundreds. For Geoffrey Boycott, getting to that landmark – in an Ashes Test, no less, and in front of his home crowd – was “the most magical moment of my life”.ESPNcricinfo LtdPujara, the most Boycottian batter of his age, didn’t get quite as far, but he went two-thirds of the way, scoring 66, ten of them during a productive late-career county stint at Sussex. In the span of his career, only one batter, Alastair Cook (68), made more first-class hundreds. It’s a momentous achievement, and one, appropriately enough, entirely out of step with the zeitgeist.But as out of step as he may have seemed, Pujara was a formidable cricketer who at his peak ranked just below the four great Test batters of his age. Quite a peak it was too; at the end of that 2018-19 Australia tour, he averaged 51.18 and had scored 18 hundreds in 68 TestsHis numbers declined in the pandemic and post-pandemic years, but he was hardly alone in suffering that fate, with Virat Kohli and Ajinkya Rahane going through similarly prolonged slumps as India played Test match after Test match, home and away, in treacherous batting conditions.And all of that, and perhaps the effects of age on his game, have left many of us with a somewhat diminished image of Pujara the batter. In the tributes from team-mates and former players that have flowed since his retirement announcement, the most frequently used word, by far, is “grit”, and the most frequently evoked image is of the body blows he took during his 211-ball, fourth-innings 56 in the Gabba fairytale of 2021.Cheteshwar Pujara cops a blow from Josh Hazlewood•AFPPujara had plenty of grit, of course, but you need a whole lot more than that to play 103 Test matches. You need those magic, uncoachable qualities that are commonly clubbed together under the banner of talent.One common definition of batting talent prizes the ability to hit a wide range of attacking shots, with bonus points for hitting good balls and/or in unusual directions. Pujara’s gifts didn’t lean in this direction, but he nonetheless gave a sense that he was born to bat.”Every great batsman,” CLR James suggested in his chapter on George Headley in , “is a special organism.” Whether Pujara was a great batter is a debate for elsewhere, but he was undoubtedly a special organism, a batter who could go on and on and score prodigious quantities of runs. In October 2008, for instance, he scored 386 and 309 for Saurashtra’s Under-22s, and in November he followed up with a 302* in the Ranji Trophy.This appetite for runs was well-known long before Pujara played for India, so while it was remarkable that he scored six hundreds – two of them doubles – in his first 16 Tests, with his average hovering in the 60s, it wasn’t that much of a surprise. It takes an uncommonly good eye and technique to be able to score like that, and also the mind of a special organism, capable of an uncommon level of focus. In the first half of his career, Pujara often seemed to bat in a state of trance-like absorption that was palpable to the viewer.He would start watchfully, even glacially, and you’d wonder if his low, choking grip was inhibiting his power and range of strokes, but if he batted long enough he would flick a switch and start hitting shots to all parts, leaping off his toes to cut the fast bowlers without needing width, sashaying out of his crease to drive spinners inside-out or whip them outside-in.ESPNcricinfo LtdThis way of batting came with a remarkably high ceiling, of course, but also a high floor. He often looked in control even when he wasn’t making a lot of runs, as in England in 2014, and by the end of that 2018-19 Australia tour, he had faced at least 50 balls in 73 of his 114 Test innings, and carried on to the 100-ball mark and beyond on 42 occasions.The limits of Pujara’s game only really became evident on extreme pitches, particularly against bowling attacks of uncommon depth, where the proverbial ball with the batter’s name on it was always around the corner. India just happened to play a lot of their cricket on those kinds of pitches, against those kinds of attacks, during the second half of his career. Other batters may have tried to bat differently; Pujara’s faith in his way never wavered.And while this meant he stopped scoring hundreds – he only made one in his last 35 Tests – he still made significant contributions to India’s results: two half-centuries spanning 381 balls in the 2021 SCG draw, that aforementioned 56 at the Gabba, a 206-ball 45 in a slow-burning, match-turning century stand with Rahane at Lord’s in 2021, and a second-innings 61 at The Oval in the same series.None of this was enough to ward off time, of course, and the surge of batting talent pounding at India’s door. But let’s put the job Pujara did in perspective. Since his last Test match, the six batters India have tried at No. 3 have collectively averaged 31.95 across 24 Tests. A fading Pujara, over his last 24 Tests, averaged 31.51.The end came with a second defeat in a second World Test Championship final in 2023, but it wasn’t really the end. The Pujara of Saurashtra, Sussex and West Zone would score a further 2057 first-class runs, at an average of 51.42, with seven hundreds. A fitting finish, on Pujara’s own terms, leaving you wondering if he couldn’t have gone on just a little longer.