When he walked in to bat today, KL Rahul might as well have put a pilot’s uniform on, grabbed a headset, and announced – “Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your captain from the flight deck, our flight has run into some unexpected and slightly severe turbulence, I urge you to remain calm, fasten your seatbelts and sit back. We have this under control, all we need to do are some minor adjustments and we should be stabilising soon.”
It is the opening game of the host team’s World Cup campaign, and India were reeling at 2/3, their openers and no. 4 gone for ducks, a bird hit of unprecedented proportions to the engine of smooth sailing of a modest chase of 200 in 50 overs on a slow and crumbling pitch. Virat Kohli had walked in a ball before, and now the two faced the task of taming the tempest that threatened to engulf the optimism attached with India’s prospects. You could sense a hush around the normally chirpy and buzzy Chepauk crowd, the legendarily knowledgeable hive mind that is the Chennai cricket crowd seemed to be twitching, grabbing on to their proverbial seat armrest, as the plane they were cruising in suddenly lurched. I am a nervous flyer and turbulence often messes my mind even when it is mild. To tackle it, I deploy a simple trick – I close my eyes and think of the plane as a whole and how it is moving through the air. The moment I do, I can make sense of the rocking movement, spread as it is over the entire span of the flying machine rather than being stuck with that Chicken Little feeling that the sky is falling down.
Today, Rahul & Virat did something similar, or more specifically reminded us, in the most unspectacular yet memorable fashion, that keeping calm in a storm most of the time does not require panicked jostling, or untested leaps of faith; it sometimes just requires little adjustments and narrowing everything down into the moment. Rahul walked in with Hazlewood having taken two, but he calmly watched the first few balls, let some go past without bothering to offer a shot (both Shreyas Iyer and Ishan Kishan had done the opposite), and others he let the middle of his blade meet, sizing up the pace and nature of the wicket, as he did so. Both he and Kohli knew nothing spectacular was required with the asking rate barely at four an over. The onus was on stabilisation. In an airplane, the captain does not make frantic adjustments during turbulence, usually the best plan is to fly through them, while making minor adjustments (to wing flaps, speed etc) to keep things as stable as possible. Today’s chase was the same. They played shots that minimised the risks, adjusted angles ever so slightly to run deliveries down to pick up singles and then finally when the bad deliveries were offered (when Zampa was brought on) took full toll. It is not easy to not panic, but in terms of a fight or flight response, panicking solves very little. That is why this 97* tonight is valuable.
Rahul often stands zen like blocking out the noise, by way of celebration, when he reaches a milestone; today was a chanceless demonstration of that concept in practice. He barely put a foot wrong, despite walking in at a moment that is doubly triggering for Indian fans – down early in a chase against Australia at a world cup, and 3 top order wickets gone for basically nothing, which is what had happened in India’s last game at a men’s World Cup in 2019, and incidentally Rahul was one of the victims then. Today, he turned steerer of the ship, showing the remarkable and refreshing ability to make peace with the unspectacular. When it is about delivering results coupled with entertainment, trusting the training and the manual is perceived as being boring and staid, but on a humid evening at the Chepauk, we saw exactly that from someone who has had his fair share of criticism for forgetting to do so.
Calming a rocky ship may seem a lost art in this day and age of ever more high entropy cricket, but some days, it is not about the style points; somedays, victory is just getting the job done.
Get Sporty 