Sarfaraz Khan is hard to miss. He is wearing the reddest of all red socks. Quick, somebody head over to Sesame Street and check on Elmo and see if he's missing any bits.
India's training session in Visakhapatnam on Wednesday looked like mandatory attendance for everyone. But the eye kept going to the new kid on the block. Even the BCCI's content creators kept following him.
Sarfaraz was among the last to arrive at the nets and he spent much of the afternoon with the man who has the power to make all his dreams come true. Rohit Sharma.
The conversation is long and animated. There's hand waving and head tilting. There's thoughtful pauses and breaks for laughter. Everybody else is busy batting or bowling but these two just keep chatting away like a couple of school kids on the back bench.
Eventually it comes time for Sarfaraz to show his wares. He goes to unpack his kit and pull out his bat. The sun catches the flourescent orange and yellow stickers on it and for a second it just gleams. Even Bollywood doesn't do a better hero intro scene. Since 2020, he's been averaging 84.42 in first-class cricket. The tap on the shoulder has finally come.
While all this was happening on the side, Rajat Patidar is well into his work. He began with a hit against the spinners. Four of his first six deliveries were various kinds of sweeps. The odd ones out were a couple of forward pushes because Mohammed Siraj wasn't really in the mood to encourage any extravagant strokeplay.
India are working to avoid a repeat of Hyderabad, where they kept waiting for the spinner to bowl a bad ball and it just never came. All through the afternoon, every single batter, including Kuldeep Yadav, got the broom out. Patidar, in particular. He was called into the squad ahead of Sarfaraz and this management does buy into the idea of first come, first serve. They believe in the sanctity of an incumbent, just like the previous regime did.
And based on the session he was having, where he seemed to be able to get himself in positions to attempt more shots than end up stuck playing the forward defensive, the people who are deciding the pecking order have got it right. Patidar is nimble at the crease, moving forward or back decisively and he makes it a point to meet the ball under his eyes. That is of course when he isn't reaching out to mess with the spinners by nailing those sweeps. He reverses R Ashwin. It makes sense that he averages nearly 50 in first-class cricket. He is as compact as the day is long.
Sarfaraz is in the adjacent net. He's been made to push out in front of his body. The ball had dipped and, all of a sudden, he is out of position. Then comes a whirl of his wrists. Even though he had been suckered in, he keeps the ball down because of how quickly his hands were able to adjust. And then from there his greatest asset took over. Power. Just raw power. It feels only natural to imagine heat coming up off the red leather after he hits it. Off in South Africa, his little brother Musheer is having a grand old time at the Under-19 World Cup. If that long awaited debut does come this week, it might be one of the best adverts for serendipity. Though it has to be said, Patidar is making that less of a straightforward decision. He actually looks favourite to take the vacant middle-order spot.
And Kuldeep seems set to take over for Ravindra Jadeja. He was the first at the nets so he had the honour of playing the first reverse sweep of the afternoon. Later, all of his focus was on preventing others from using it. And he had a fair bit of success. Wristspinners can at times get the ball to drop on a batter more than fingerspinners and that was on show here where more than once Kuldeep made a batter bail out of an aggressive shot.
There was a lot of information sharing as well. It began right at the start of the session where Rohit went out to sweep Ashwin but the ball came off the bottom of the bat. The two came together to figure out why that had happened and on and on it went. The batting coach Vikram Rathour got around Shubman Gill and Shreyas Iyer. The head coach Rahul Dravid was teaching Jasprit Bumrah the nuances of what happens when you hold the bat a particular way, which really should be illegal. It just isn't right if that guy gets any better at doing what he does.
Ashwin made it a point to tell the batters he was paired with the fields he was using and at the start it was almost like a lot of them were just feeding balls to enable the sweep and reverse sweep; to enable the finding of gaps and the scoring of runs and the feeling of good. Eventually though, Ashwin got sick of being hit around and started fiddling with his lengths. He began to make it awkward for the guys down on one knee, expecting the ball to arrive at a certain point and at a certain pace, and it didn't.
Barely 20 minutes before all of this, Rathour was sat in a press conference saying India will trust their method of playing spin, which is to try and come down the track, or use the depth of the crease and largely present a straight bat. That's how they trained in the nets in Hyderabad. But this was different. Gill actually swept Axar Patel so hard the ball burst through the nets and travelled the 20 or so yards out into the viewing area. Rohit batted only for about 10 minutes or so but that was enough for him to try a lap, a reverse and one superbly timed, hit-in-front-of-square slog sweep.
It is true that the best of the best don't just randomly change things up, but they also hate losing. Something had to give and it has.