Ranji Trophy: Rohit Sharma, Shubman Gill, Rishabh Pant disappoint in rare domestic First-Class outing | Cricket News
The return of India’s incumbent Test batsmen to the Ranji Trophy turned out to be a calamitous affair. Between Rohit Sharma, Yashasvi Jaiswal, Rishabh Pant and Shubman Gill, they lasted only 45 balls and logged in merely 12 runs. Virat Kohli and KL Rahul skipped the penultimate round, while Washington Sundar and Nitish Kumar Reddy are with India’s T20I squad. Worryingly, it’s not only the lack of runs that would haunt them, but the methods of their dismissals too. Only Ravindra Jadeja remained anomalous, nabbing five wickets and belting a 36-ball 38.
Rohit Sharma: c Paras Dogra b Umar Nazir 3 (19)
The Rohit Sharma pull was once a stroke of utter beauty, both majestic and emphatic. The swivel of the upper body, the left leg raised in level with his torso, the backwardly arching body when the bat made contact with the ball, the hands sending the ball into the stands or the unattended expanses of the ground, and the content grin on his face. But these days, the stroke that defined him undoes him. In the Test series against New Zealand (at home) and Australia (away), the shot, or the cluttered execution of it, had brought about his downfall. So it turned out to be at the Bandra BKC ground on Thursday. It was not the case of the ball hurrying him, rather the opposite of it. There was too much time to induce a dilemma, whether to sway away from the line, pull it, or just roll his wrs over it. The three-way confusion scrambled Sharma’s wisdom and the alignment of his body. He ended up trying to flick the ball off his hips, the bat caught in a diagonal position to the ground, neither fully horizontal nor vertical, and fashioned a leading edge to mid-off.
Yashasvi Jaiswal: lbw b Auqib Nabi 4 (8)
The memory of his muscles and the signals of his brain seemed to be stuck in Australia. The ball from Auqib landed a few centimetres short of what would have been the perfect good length. It lulled the batsman on to the backfoot. For a moment, he thought he could leave it on length, as a ball of similar length in Australia would have flown over the stumps. When the realisation dawned that it was the BKC, Jaiswal was too late to readjust. He looked to defend, relying on his hands to bail him out of trouble. But the extra inward movement with the new ball stunned his reflexes. Until then, though, he had looked largely untroubled.
Shubman Gill: c Krishnan Shrijith b Abhilash Shetty 4 (8)
Gill is an off-side paradox. He has a gorgeous array of drives, aesthetics accentuated his languid frame and angular stance, stork-like from a dance. But his front foot sometimes betrays him, especially early in his innings. It freezes after the initial stride and just his hands move towards the ball. He ends up playing away from the body, and hence manages little control. On a surface that allied sufficient but not alarming movement, he pushed at left-arm seamer Abhilash. The ball, at a dance where he could have shouldered arms, shaped a touch back, kissed the inside edge of his bat on its way to the wicketkeeper. The ball was so far away from the stumps that ‘keeper Shrijith had already made up his mind to move towards his right. The ball’s edgy reroute wrong-footed him, but still he clung onto the offering. Tightening up his off-side game and imbibing discretion would define Gill’s English summer.
Rishabh Pant: c Prerak Mankad b D Jadeja 1 (10)
He perished playing one of his staple strokes — the slog-sweep off a left-arm spinner. He tried to fetch Dharmendrasinh Jadeja into the Jamnagar Highway outside the stadium, but holed out to Prerak Mankad at deep midwicket. Usually ruthless against spinners, Pant has been prone to miscue as well as misjudge them after his comeback. In the first innings in the Pune Test against New Zealand, he tried a similar shot against off-spinner Glenn Phillips, missed it altogether and was bowled, deceived the bounce of the good-length ball. In the next Test in Mumbai, he twice misread the length, resulting in an lbw and a bat-pad dismissal. Perhaps, his knees have not found their old strength after the accident, and hence his base, when slog-sweeping, is not as robust as it used to be. At the heart of his recent struggles against spinners, though, is the dilemma whether to fully attack or defend.
Ravindra Jadeja: 5 for 66 & 38 (36)
Whenever he has been short of runs or wickets, Jadeja has returned to his home ground to turn his fortunes around. After two unremarkable series, he celebrated his homecoming with a five-wicket haul and a breezy 38, punctuated with three sixes.
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