India vs England: Flailing front-leg, trailing back-leg spell doom for Shubman Gill, Shreyas Iyer

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 he would defend or meekly push away. Here was the supposed destroyer of spin bowling batting with a broken heart.

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The manoeuvre incensed Kevin Pietersen, who himself used to generously move around in the crease, but only when the situation demanded so. Like if the ball was spitting off the surface, or hooping around. There were no such devils on the pitch. “When he is facing up to the bowler, he is jogging his leg out to leg side and then comes back to just defend the ball. You go to show some more intent than leg out there,” he fumed.

Not that he doesn’t possess the required tools to dominate spinners on turners, but he has been uncharacteristically jumpy. He usually uses his feet dexterously, makes good use of his long reach, cuts and sweeps them too. But here, he batted with a cluttered mind, unsure whether to attack, defend or milk singles. Perhaps, the recent fallow spell of runs had drained his confidence, perhaps the weight of responsibility was crushing him.

Whatever be, he was not the same commanding Shreyas that had leapt off the blocks with a hundred on debut on a similarly slow-spinning surface in Kanpur. He seemed an imposter, his 47 balls against spinners mustering only 20 runs and two fours. His dismissal too was unusual, under-edging when cutting. Usually, his hands go really low and rise with the bounce, but here he froze when the ball bounced lower than he had judged.

It was the third time in this series that a spinner had consumed him. None of the three balls were unplayable, but they reflected his mental state, the chaos and confusion raging inside it. Gill could relate to his plight. Spin was supposedly his kryptonite, but here he showed he could be easy prey to fast bowling too, with his chained front-foot that seldom stretches out fully.

Working him over seemed a procedure too mundane James Anderson. It was just a business of probing the channel and subtly altering the lengths. His first ball leapt off from length, hitting the bat-sticker. Ensued a cat-and-mouse game where he tempted Gill to drive or defend with his hard hands. His fifth ball to him almost devoured him, only for the outside edge to die and dribble past the second slip. Three balls later, he edged past a lunging Joe Root at slip.

Anderson persisted with the lengths and Gill persisted with the edges. Four balls later, in the same over, he drew another edge, this time to Ben Foakes. It was lucid deception. He had bowled mostly on the fourth stump or off-stump, but this one landed on the fifth and Gill lunged instinctively, his bat pointing to the covers, his feet snapped in a semi-stride. When he sees the replay, he would rue not shouldering arms. But he is less certain of where his off-stump is these days. Like Shreyas, he too would waste a start after looking the most composed he had in the series.

If the flailing front-leg embodied the misery of Gill, the trailing back-leg captured the travails of Shreyas on Friday. Their woes are different, but both are clutching at the straws for a spot in the side. Their former coach Ravi Shastri filed a warning: “Don’t forget, Pujara is waiting. He is grinding it out at the Ranji Trophy and is always on the radar.” Add the rather composed debut of Rajat Patidar, the imminent return of Virat Kohli and KL Rahul, the brightest young batting talents of Indian cricket, could see darkness swallowing their careers.

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