Eye on India: Cheteshwar Pujara a one-format batsman proving his worth to Test team

In this week's column, Dileep Premachandran focuses on Cheteshwar Pujara and his growing importance to the India Test team.

Cheteshwar Pujara will resume Day 4 of the Ranchi Test against Australia on 130. Adnan Abidi / Reuters

In a little over two weeks, as young men who have barely played cricket at the highest level ready themselves for six weeks of Indian Premier League (IPL) and multi-million-dollar paydays, Cheteshwar Pujara will be back home in Rajkot.

He will put his feet up for a few days, after a marathon home season, and then head to the nets, watched by Arvind, his father who has also been his coach.

When the India one-day international (ODI) squad then heads to England for the defence of the Champions Trophy, Pujara will once again stay behind, unless some English county is astute enough to acquire his services for a few Championship games.

Even before he made his debut for India, against Australia in 2010, Pujara was often compared to the man he would eventually replace at No 3 — Rahul Dravid.

To put it simply, that’s utter nonsense. Dravid was an integral part of the Indian ODI side for over a decade, and ended up playing 340 games in the sky-blue kit. Leading run-scorer at the 1999 World Cup, he was also a cornerstone of the side that reached the final in 2003.

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Read more

■ Day 3: Cummins puts brakes on reply despite Pujara's century

■ Day 2: Lokesh Rahul leads reply after Australia post big total

■ Day 1: Steve Smith lets his batting do the talking

■ More cricket: For the latest local and international news

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Pujara has played five ODIs for 54 runs, and the chances are that he will never get another white-ball game for India.

From the end of March till August or September, when red-ball cricket resumes, he will be just another onlooker, a man whose skills appeared to be uniquely suited to the toughest format of the sport.

They were in full view on an attritional third day in Ranchi on Saturday.

With the series on the line and captain Virat Kohli injured and off the boil, Pujara summoned up one of the best of his 11 Test hundreds to keep India in the match.

His unbeaten 130 has spanned 328 balls and nearly seven hours, and helped India whittle the Australian lead down to 91 by stumps on Saturday ahead of Sunday’s fourth day.

At lunch, Pujara was on 40 off 139 balls, and some in the commentary box were already talking of how the approach did not square with Kohli’s commitment to attacking cricket.

The next 60 runs took just 75 balls, as Pujara drove, flicked and cut with aplomb on a pitch that was far from being the snakepit that the Australian media had predicted.

Attacking intent is fine in theory, but Test cricket has always been about choosing the right moments.

Few do that as well as Pujara. With Kohli, peerless against England earlier in the season, going through a horror run of 46 runs in five innings, his contribution has become all the more important.

But for Pujara’s 92 in Bangalore, Australia would surely have gone 2-0 up in the series, and the century in Ranchi — his fourth of a home season in which he has scored 1187 runs at 65.94 — gives the Indian spinners a chance to put pressure on Australia’s line-up on a fourth-day surface.

Pujara played the last of his 30 IPL games in 2014, and once again elicited next to no interest at the auction in February.

His Test colleagues, however, value him far more than the millions the franchises offer those with no resumes to speak of.

Administrators give lip service to the primacy of Test cricket, but Pujara’s story — especially when contrasted with those who have barely played anything more than tennis-ball tournaments — is proof that that is just nonsense.

At 29, and with surgeries on both knees behind him, Pujara is getting used to the idea that he will be a one-format player.

And an Indian team that was supposed to win this series at a canter instead of being engaged in a dogfight is exceedingly grateful that that realisation seems to have brought the best out of him after a couple of lean seasons.

Paes at the mercy of old foe Bhupathi

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Optional caption goes here. Sang Tan / AP Photo

Between February 1997, when they beat Petr Korda and Martin Damm of the Czech Republic in straight sets, and September 2010, when they routed Brazil’s Marcelo Melo and Bruno Soares to inspire a stunning comeback from 2-0 down in the tie, Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi won 24 straight Davis Cup doubles matches, the longest such streak in the competition’s history.

Between 1999, when they won the French Open and Wimbledon, and 2011, when they were runners up in Australia, the duo also appeared in six grand slam doubles finals, winning three of them. Nicknamed Indian Express, they accumulated a 303-103 win-loss record, and were a match for the greatest pairs of the era.

They also couldn’t stand each other a lot of the time. Now, the 42-year-old Bhupathi has been appointed India’s Davis Cup captain. His first task is a tricky Asia/Oceania Group 1 second-round tie against Uzbekistan in Bangalore (April 7-9). The Uzbeks can call on Denis Istomin, ranked No 69 in the world, who shocked Novak Djokovic at the Australian Open in January.

None of the four singles players chosen by the All India Tennis Association (AITA) – Ramkumar Ramanathan, Yuki Bhambri, Prajnesh Gunneswaran and Sriram Balaji – are in the top 200. The doubles specialists, Rohan Bopanna (No 23) and Paes (No 56) fare slightly better, but Bopanna is 37, and Paes will be 44 in June.

Bopanna’s relationship with Paes is non-existent, and their forced pairing at the Rio Olympics resulted in a predictable first-round exit. Bhupathi has already hinted that he may pick only one doubles specialist, and it will be interesting to see if the man with whom he shared his greatest moments on a tennis court gets the nod.

Paes, who won singles bronze at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, has been one of the great Davis Cup warriors, a player with no great physical attributes who becomes Superman when in the shadow of the Indian flag. In a Davis Cup career that goes back 27 years to 1990, he has built a 48-22 singles record. In the doubles, he’s now level with the legendary Italian, Nicola Pietrangeli, on 42 wins (13 losses).

With Father Time poised to tap him on the shoulder, this could be Paes’s last chance to get that all-time record. Whether he gets an opportunity to do so, however, depends on a man with whom he has had the most tumultuous of relationships, on and off the court.

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