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To break into the Indian cricket squad in a cricket-crazed nation of 1.4 billion people, you must be the finest in the game for an extended period of time. Given the neck-and-neck competition for every single place, breaking into the final XI becomes 10 times more difficult. And by the time a player makes his debut, he has already become a household name in India. However, the degree of renown or the extent to which a player is appreciated among enthusiastic followers is not always the same. Some players become celebrities in India, including Sunil Gavaskar, Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid of yesteryear, and Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma of today.
Veteran Indian off-spinner Ravichandran Ashwin on Tuesday emphasised the names of two India greats who “aren’t celebrated enough,” one of whom he refers to as “the beast” and who is set to make his 100th Test appearance for India. Cheteshwar Pujara will play his 100th Test for India when the Rohit Sharma-led Indian team takes on Australia in the second match of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy series. He will be the 12th Indian to achieve the record, and just the second active Indian player to do so after Kohli (105 Tests). In his ESPNCricinfo piece, Ashwin believes Pujara, like former India cricketer Murali Vijay, is underappreciated.
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“M Vijay, according to me the greatest opener for India outside of Sunil Gavaskar and Virender Sehwag, and Puji are quite similar in that they haven’t been celebrated enough. They also had some of the most hilarious arguments. They used to do the most difficult job in Test cricket – play out the new ball in testing conditions, as we tend to need to do whenever we go abroad – so it is par for the course to have a few eccentricities emerge from that kind of partnership.
Ashwin praised Pujara’s’stubbornness,’ a character trait he believes allowed him to shatter one of the hardest and fiercest bowling assaults, as he illustrated with Pat Cummins his stint against India’s No.3 in the 2018/19 series Down Under. “Pat Cummins bowls good ball after good ball, changing the angles, trying a bouncer, trying a sucker ball, but all he gets from Puji is the leave or the dead defence. Actually, I don’t recall thinking Puji had a great defence when I first saw him, but his stubbornness is such that he has broken down the best of the attacks with his defence”, Ashwin wrote.
“Most batters add to their game when they are successful or cut out some elements when they are failing, but Puji keeps trusting his method. You can’t convince him to change. I used to use a Tamil nickname for him with Shankar Basu, our previous trainer: Mirugam, the beast. Just like a beast focuses single-mindedly on its prey, Puji focuses on batting,” he added.
