Cheteshwar Pujara is trying to sidle out on the sly – but we ain’t gonna let him, are we?

7 minute read

“It’s going to be hot. It’s going to be flat. Who’s going to break first? Is it going to be us, or is it going to be them?” That’s what Justin Langer asked his team midway through the Boxing Day Test during the 2018/19 Border-Gavaskar Trophy. The answer was unequivocal, but it didn’t reveal itself quickly.

Sometimes, you’re at a party. This is a dreadful thing obviously, but from time to time it happens to the best of us. In these situations, with all sorts of people milling around all over the place, it’s easy to overlook one person’s exit if they don’t choose to make a big song and dance out of it. It feels a little like Cheteshwar Pujara went to get a drink two hours ago and you’ve only just realised he never came back.

Finality

Pujara played the 2023 World Test Championship final and scored 14 and 27. He was dropped for the following series, much to the bafflement of Sunil Gavaskar, but nevertheless carried on scoring first-class hundreds for Saurashtra and Sussex. His name therefore semi-regularly cropped up in connection to the India Test team until it gradually became apparent that a recall definitely wasn’t going to happen. It wasn’t until this week that he actually called it a day.

This is not an unusual way to bow out, but in Pujara’s case the effect was exacerbated by the years that preceded it. Pujara averaged in the 20s in 2020, 2021 and 2023 and it took an unbeaten hundred against Bangladesh to drag his 2022 average into the 40s. Some of this was dwindling form; a fair bit of it was that India played on a lot of pitches that offered serious assistance to spinners. Either way, this period rather knackered up both his overall record and also our memories of his capabilities.

Long play record

But take a look at that record and what do you think? It’s more substantial than you perhaps imagine. A fella who scored 19 hundreds in 103 Tests at an average of 43.60 is keeping some very respectable company. Remember as well that this is including the shit bit at the end. Karthik Krishnaswamy points out that at the end of the 2018-19 Australia tour, Pujara was averaging 51.18 from 68 Tests with 18 hundreds. That’s really, really, really good.

That one last ton in Chattogram moved Pujara ahead of players like David Gower and Desmond Haynes in the all-time list and up alongside Len Hutton, Clive Lloyd, Gordon Greenidge and Mark Taylor. (Mike Hussey and Azhar Ali are also on 19, but that only makes the feat seem less impressive, so we’ll not talk about them. Ross Taylor rounds out the list, but it doesn’t feel like Ross pushes perceptions either way – 19 Test hundreds seems about right for him – so he also fails to earn a non-parenthetical mention.)

Another reference point is that Pujara finished two hundreds ahead of VVS Laxman – a man whose nickname was Very Very Special. Laxman was sort of famous for not scoring too many hundreds because he tended to bat at five or six, but even so, if you’d asked us before we started this article which of the two men hit more hundreds, we’d have gone for VVS.

Laxman’s reputation was of course massively bolstered by The Innings. ‘Bolstered’ probably isn’t the word. It was more of a vast steel structure that provided the framework for everything else. That 281 was incredible because India had been down and out; and torn and tattered; and battered and bruised and beaten. It was incredible because of the way he played. And it was incredible because he managed to play that way for so, so long.

But it’s not like Pujara drifted through his career featlessly.

Light on his feats

Pujara’s first Test hundred was 159 against New Zealand in 2012. That one innings accounted for 20 per cent of the runs scored in the match.

His second hundred, two Tests later, against England, was an unbeaten double that made us exclaim: “The Wall is gone! Long live this broad, robust replacement structure made out of bricks and mortar!” India actually lost that series, but didn’t lose at home again until 2024 – the year after Pujara’s final Test.

The peak was that 2018/19 victory in Australia though when he scored over twice as many runs as Australia’s top scorer, Marcus Harris, and made three hundreds in four Tests.

Australia had already had a preview of this kind of thing via a sprawling 525-ball 202 in Ranchi in 2017 that had spread like an oil slick, extinguishing all life. At the Gabba, in the first innings of the first Test, Pujara walked out and made 123 – near enough half of India’s first innings runs – and then followed it up with 71 in the second innings.

India won, but twin Pujara failures in Perth saw Australia level the series. Our man responded with an eight-hour 106 in his next innings in Melbourne and India won again. There’s a lovely little bit about that innings in Amazon’s documentary series, The Test, where they show him blocking a load of deliveries to the soundtrack of nothing but a ticking clock – then finally he hits one and the music starts up. A finer synopsis of his strengths and approach, you’d struggle to find. “He was happy to bat for five days, if he had to,” was the assessment of scarred victim, Pat Cummins.

But Pujara wasn’t finished. In the fourth and final Test, he ground Australia’s bowlers to nanoparticles with a nine-hour 193 that snuffed out any chance of the home team levelling the series.

Two years later and he (kinda) did it again. While three players outscored him in the 2020/21 Border-Gavaskar Trophy, no-one faced more balls and the impact of that contribution is what enabled India’s heist.

At one point in the famous Gabba chase, he’d made 8 off 94 balls. At this point, he was more battered than batter; little more than a punchbag for Cummins, Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood. He forced them to keep running and punching for over five hours though, at the end of which they just fundamentally had a lot less running and punching left in them.

Satisfaction

It is however the nature of these knocks that shapes perceptions. You’d think a player who averaged 43.60 with 19 Test hundreds would for the most part have passed his career to a soundtrack of joyous approval – but that wasn’t really the case.

If you were to ignorantly read a random sample of comments about Cheteshwar Pujara’s batting, taken from various points in his career, you wouldn’t mistake the tone of them for being about Sanath Jayasuriya or Michael Vaughan, say – both of whom made fewer runs, at a lower average, with fewer hundreds. You’d more likely go for someone like Dom Sibley, such was the naggingly irrepressible dissatisfaction with Pujara’s approach.

There was of course that time in 2021 when one of his more stultifying innings made the same sort of impact as a rain delay, but overall the hectoring tone of the criticism made it seem like he was some junior cricketer still making his way.

We think in particular of Virat Kohli’s 2016 comments.

“There comes a time when the team needs runs,” said India’s then captain about a player who was, at the time, averaging more than him in Test cricket. “We want Pujara to bat to his potential.”

Who knows, maybe it was said with an assumption everyone in the world would already understand the bottomlessly deep well of respect he felt for his team-mate. It seems unlikely though as this kind of bubbling discontent with Pujara’s way of going about things was pretty much the bassline to his whole career. Kohli’s comments therefore only encouraged more of the same and so contributed to this weird sense of a batter who just couldn’t quite work things out.

But that view overlooks what he could do. If fans and pundits didn’t always see it, opposition bowlers were only too aware.

“Well how was that?” Justin Langer asked his team after day one of the 2019 Sydney Test. The response he got was a deafeningly haunted silence.

Then the next day Cheteshwar Pujara went out and did it to them all over again.

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