A little over a week ago, Karun Nair might have wondered if he had blown his second shot at Test cricket. Brought back after eight heartbreaking, frustrating, doubt-ridden years, he had scores of 0, 20, 31, 26, 40 and 14 in the first three Tests in England – a horror return, then a bouquet of false starts.
Karun batted at No. 6 in the first Test, and replaced Sai Sudharsan at No. 3 in the next two. Not necessarily his preferred positions, each coming with uniquely different challenges, but when you have been thrown a lifeline, how could you pick and choose?
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He didn’t have too much cause to moan the axe at Old Trafford because while he hadn’t done a whole lot wrong, he hadn’t helped his cause either. Karun might have reconciled himself to another stint on the sidelines, potentially permanently, until India were greeted with a veritable green-top at The Oval, historically a batter’s paradise.
No Rishabh Pant meant India couldn’t hedge their bets any longer and rely on Shardul Thakur’s breezy aggression down the order. They needed a specialist batter as insurance, and thus Karun got another chance to showcase his mettle. His character and hunger, his technique and his skills.
{{/usCountry}}No Rishabh Pant meant India couldn’t hedge their bets any longer and rely on Shardul Thakur’s breezy aggression down the order. They needed a specialist batter as insurance, and thus Karun got another chance to showcase his mettle. His character and hunger, his technique and his skills.
{{/usCountry}}The 33-year-old has done that and more in domestic cricket over the last two years, specifically, but this was different. Team in trouble, in-form batter, also the captain, having just run himself out. The ball doing crazy things that seemed to have gone out of fashion over the preceding six weeks. A skittish young tyro at the other end, wondering if he was culpable in any way in Shubman’s Gill run out. Eighty-three for three, decent but hardly imposing. Karun Nair had his work cut out. More than he would have liked, possibly, but whoever said Test cricket was easy?
Karun saw Sudharsan dismissed by a peach from Josh Tongue, the now-wayward, occasionally-unplayable right-arm quick. And then Ravindra Jadeja, one of three centurions from Manchester, a carbon-copy of the Sudarshan exit. At 123 for five, India were in a tailspin, visions of a series-levelling victory distant and hazy, a tiny speck of light at the end of a dark, foreboding, endless tunnel.
This was his chance. To come riding to his team’s rescue, to convince himself more than anyone else that the unforgiving cauldron of Test cricket wasn’t an uncrackable riddle. To repay the faith placed in him, to deliver with the chips down, with the ball swinging and seaming as if a marionette worked by strings.
He had to take care of himself, his own batting, which was an immense task in itself, but he also had to shepherd Dhruv Jurel, shovelled into the Pant-vacated hot seat. As the vastly more seasoned hand, it was incumbent upon him to carry the younger resources around him. Perhaps in a way, it helped because otherwise, he might have been weighed down by the enormity of what lay ahead, he might have allowed himself to be shackled mentally, which in turn could have led to a frozen mind, leaden feet and heavy, hard, uncontrollable hands. He might have tried to overreach when the situation and the conditions called out for playing close to the body, playing the line of the ball instead of following it.
County experience helping Nair
This is what Karun might have expected when he came to England. What he might have prepared for. Swinging ball, seaming ball. Sometimes bouncing ball. He fell back on muscle memory developed through two seasons with Northamptonshire in the English County Championship. He summoned the spirit of the man with two first-class triple-centuries, he dug deep into his vast volume of luminous work to come up with solutions to the numerous and demanding answers the conditions and the English bowling posed.
And he didn’t do that with timidity or hesitancy. When he committed to attack, he did so whole-heartedly, jettisoning self-doubt. Mostly, he met the ball with the middle of the bat, with the sweetest of sweet spots. It takes courage to get one’s left foot out and essay a drive when the ball is swinging, because the slightest error in judgement could be decisive. But Karun wasn’t around to merely survive; he was also on the lookout for runs, because he knew that time spent in the middle had to be balanced by runs on the board.
As the clock ticked over to 7.20 pm local time, Karun glanced left-arm spinner Jacob Bethell’s first ball for a brace, bringing up what is currently his only Test fifty. The last time he reached that milestone, he ended up getting six times more. Even a third of that on Friday, and Karun’s redemption song will become that much even more euphonious, that much richer in substance.