Two of India’s brightest young talents are wading through a gorge of darkness. Both Shreyas Iyer and Shubman Gill batted on Friday as though clutched with doubts and fears, fighting imagined demons on the pitch and in their mind, every passing ball firming up the belief that they would better take some time off the game, fix their flaws and begin anew.
Every step they take seem to push them further down the slope, every supposed stride to redemption makes them look sillier. Shreyas’s latest jailbreak attempt at liberation was shuffling to the leg-side and attempting to flat-bat James Anderson, whose medium-paced bouncers were enough to induce doubts and chart alternative paths.
It was all the more baffling because Shreyas was dealing his bouncers, the slow pitch sapping much of its heat, with reasonable comfort. A couple of them he got under and played them aerially, a few others, he got on top and played along the ground with a fair amount of authority.
But the fear of the bouncer might have been stewing in his head, and he embraced the white-ball gimmick. He almost under-edged one onto his stumps and missed another entirely.
All that was fine had he not reprised the same ploy against a two-Test old spinner on a benign surface. Bafflingly, he reproduced the same when he faced the left-arm spinner Tom Hartley, only that instead of trying to slap with a flat-bat hewould defend or meekly push away. Here was the supposed destroyer of spin bowling batting with a broken heart.