Reputations ii: Rohit through the dark...
Following last week's Part i on Kohli’s Edgbaston epic, a send-off for Rohit Sharma from a murky day at Lord’s…
It was 2021, Lord’s, second Test match, day one. The first game at Nottingham had spluttered to an end, the final day’s play washed out with India requiring 157 to win and nine wickets in hand.
Rohit was supposed to be opening with Mayank Agarwal but Agarwal suffered a concussion before the Trent Bridge Test. Then Shubman Gill flew home with an unspecified ailment. Covid 19 had run through the camp so there had been some upheaval, and KL Rahul, Agarwal’s childhood friend, was unexpectedly back at the top of the order.
Now, in August at Lord’s, the weather was sub-optimal for batting and batters. Deep-bellied rainclouds blew up from behind the pavilion. I remember Mick Hunt, the groundsman, saying that the Middlesex players called them “beer clouds” when they came from that direction, because they knew they’d soon be off the field and in the bar. That was in the old days, though, before the floodlights and the sub-air drainage system under the outfield that had turned Lord’s in Mick’s words, into “a giant putting green.”
I had been there in 2018 when India got the wrong side of the beer clouds and were bowled out for 107 inbetween rain breaks that left lakes of water on the outfield but that were somehow gone an hour or so later, swallowed by the sub-air. Now, it looked like they might get fooled again, especially when Jimmy Anderson passed a fitness Test on the morning of the game. Lord’s was Jimmy’s most fertile hunting ground. He’d taken more than 100 wickets there, a whole career for some bowlers. The other seamers were Ollie Robinson and Sam Curran, with Mark Wood to provide the shock value.
The toss was delayed by twenty minutes. England won and the crowd cheered when Joe Root put India in. Kohli, who had now somehow lost nine tosses in a row, said, “it’s a chance to put a good total on the board,” but he didn’t sound convinced. Then he said that he would have bowled first too, given the chance. The lights were on. England came out, followed by Rohit and KL, but before Anderson could begin his run up, the rain started and they all trooped off again.
A few bits of blue sky appeared between banking cloud and the game began, lights still on, the ball dark and hard to see from a hundred yards away in the stand, Anderson, as ever, far quicker in the flesh than he ever looked on TV, a spring that coiled and then uncoiled and sent the cherry flying down.
Every delivery seemed like it would bring a wicket. It was one of those sessions where cricket felt unfairly weighted. You could bat superbly well, display perfect judgement for an hour and then get out to a great delivery, still with just a few runs to your name. To not fold mentally seemed like the hardest thing.
Rohit knew that. In the second over he left a ball from Ollie Robinson on length. It fizzed just over off stump and England oo-ed and ahh-ed theatrically. Rohit tapped the pitch and nodded at KL. It wasn’t until the final ball of the fifth over that either batter was beaten on the outside edge, and that was KL, who, a couple of overs later, nicked one from Robinson just short of second slip. It took them an hour to score eleven runs. India’s first boundary, a flick to fine leg by Rohit from Sam Curran, came at the end of the twelfth over. The Cricinfo commentary wondered idly what the lowest ever score at lunchtime was.
It was almost as though Rohit heard them. Curran’s next over went: four, four, dot, four, four, dot. England began to chivvy the umpires into possibly changing the ball. It rained again and they went off for lunch.
During the interval Mark Wood came onto the outfield and began to warm up. For various reasons he’d not bowled for more than a month, a precarious situation for someone who seemed as rapid and delicate as a racehorse, the speed he produced at odds with his slender physique and generally sunny nature.
If there was a day you didn’t want to be facing Mark Wood, it was this one, still strangely low key and low-lit, the outer strips of the pitch ringed with green grass that had, along with the weather, led Root to bowl first. There was a sense of something not-yet happened as play began again. Wood bowled first to Rahul, his speeds shown on the scoreboard after each delivery: 89mph, 90, 92, 90, 92, 90. He wasn’t quite there with his line, but the pace was immediate, from nowhere. And this was in the dark.
The first ball Rohit receives from Mark Wood comes in Wood’s second over and it’s clocked at 94mph. So is the second, and, almost unbelievably, so is the third. He plays them all with plenty of time, unbothered by the wild energy screaming down at him.
Virat Kohli credits D Raghavendra with the India’s batters’ ability against high pace. Since 2013, Raghavendra has been the team’s throw-down specialist. “I believe the improvements the team has shown while playing fast bowling has been because of Raghu,” he’d said in a podcast interview. “After playing Raghu in the nets, when you go into a match, you feel there is a lot of time.”
Kohli, as always, had put his money where his mouth was, producing electrifying knocks against Dale Steyn and Mitchell Johnson at their quickest. Now it is Rohit’s turn, against Mark Wood, here through the dark.
Wood only has a couple more overs in the tank, and he has yet to bowl short. The fifty stand comes up. Rohit has 40 of them. The third ball of Wood’s third over is, finally, a bouncer, impossible to see from the boundary. Rohit swing around on his back foot and the ball streaks through fine leg to the rope. He looks up and pats the pitch.
Wood’s waits until the fourth delivery of his fourth over to go short again. Rohit swings around and this time the ball is travelling upwards towards the far side of the ground. It flies way over Sam Curran and lands in the crowd. It’s unclear whether Rohit meant to hit the ball in the air or not, but as batters like to say, there are no pictures in the scorebook.
Wood gets one more over, one more chance. His first delivery clocks 94 mph. Rohit gets the inside half of the bat on it, and it goes to the boundary at fine leg. Wood is giving it absolutely everything. His second delivery catapults him off his feet and onto the wicket a few feet from Rohit. The next is 94mph too.
Rohit must be guessing now, as Wood runs in, that this one will be short. It’s some kind of anticipatory process because when the speed gun comes up it says 93mph, and that is for a delivery that registers as slower on the radar than those that go fuller and fly through the air for longer before pitching.
I’ll never forget the sound that ball makes as it leaves Rohit’s bat. It’s a pure, bright crack, so sharp it seems to echo. Somehow he is fast enough to hit this 93mph dot in front of square, where it crosses the boundary before he’s completed the stroke.
Wood is done for now. He comes off and Sam Curran replaces him. Moeen bowls spin from the other end. India are 86-0, Rohit on 64 and KL Rahul 16. The opening phase of the game is over, and India, with everything against them, have won it. Rohit Sharma has won it for them.
They would win the Test, too, England letting a good position slip by bowling short at India’s tail in the second innings before Bumrah, Siraj and Shami showed them how it was done.
Rohit made 83 before he was bowled by Jimmy Anderson. KL ended the first day unbeaten on 127 and was voted player of the match.
Rohit’s Test career is done now, his figures both irrefutable and far from the truth of the player he was.
He was a man who could bat through the dark.
NB: The quote from Virat on D Raghavendra comes from Jarrod Kimber’s new book, The Art Of Batting. There’s some great stuff in there from Dravid and Kohli on India’s evolution against pace. Check it out.