I had posted on this interesting piece of statistics in Oct 2018– Indian openers have made a solitary 100 opening stand while on tours of England, South Africa, Australia &New Zealand (between 2009 – 2018) [England 28 innings – high 63; SA 16 innings – high 137; Australia 16 – 56 highest; New Zealand 10 – 73) – and we say – players succeed in teams, in tandem with partners.At Chepauk I was thrilled to see Sunil Gavaskar walking out with Krishnamachari Srikkanth – and there was this pair -Gavaskar and Chetan Chauhan !
Back in 1983, when WI visited immediately after their loss in WC 1983 – it was unbeatable, fearsome team – the little master very strong in defence sunil Gavaskar was threatening not to open, having had various partners including Eknath Solkar, Farokh Engineer, Parthasarathi Sharma, Anshuman Gaekwad, Chetan Chauhan, Pranab Roy, Krish Srikkanth,Arun Lal, Ghulam Parker – to name a few.Indian selectors were seriously searching for good openers – and Rajan Bala wrote – ‘who is to partner CS Sureshkumar’ – underlining that the TN Opener had the correct technique and in the absence for Sunil, Selectors should find someone who would open with CS Suraishkumar, who had many tons in Ranji.~and today at Melbourne, India has an interesting combination of debutant Mayank Agarwal and .. .. Hanuma Vihari.
To his credit, the makeshift opener Vihari scratched around for 66 balls made 8 and was out on 18.5 with score on 40. Sadly, that is the longest tenure for Indian opening pair since July 2011 in England / Australia / New Zealand / South Africa.Today asluggish surface in the first hour quickened up just enough in the second to allow Pat Cummins to bounce out Hanuma Vihari, but the early use of Nathan Lyon and the posting of only one Australian slips fielder for much of the morning suggested that attritional cricket would again be the order of the day at the MCG.Patience was required of both batsmen and bowlers, and intriguingly it was the allrounder Mitchell Marsh who gained the most challenging sideways movement for the debutant Mayank Agarwal and Cheteshwar Pujara.In the luncheon interval, Harsha Bhogle was to ask, how many ‘aaa’s to put between this pitch description as ‘ f l a t’.Poor M Vijay and KL Rahul, must be looking at this pitch and wondering why they never get such gifts. There have been many a successful opening pairs like Hayden/Langer; Greenidge/Haynes; Cook/Strauss; Gibbs/Greame Smith; Imrul Kayes/ Tamil Iqbal !; Chetan Chauhan / Sunil Gavaskar and more .. India need to patiently wait for a decent pair – could it be Mayank Agarwal / Prithvi Shaw.