India vs South Africa: Mayank Agarwal partially solves hosts' opening problem and guarantees spot with consistent displays

As the teams took to the field for the opening act of the Freedom Trophy, the two men leading the line for the hosts were a picture in contrast. One of them was striding out for the first time in a game at home, having been capped four times previously after making his debut in December 2018. The other, now into his 13th year in international cricket, had played 343 matches for the country across formats. Yet, it was the former – Mayank Agarwal – who took both the strike, and the mantle of seniority. By the time he was finally breached, more than halfway into the second day’s play at Vizag, Agarwal had come within 60 runs of doubling his career tally of runs. More vitally, having earlier proven that he belonged, the ‘newbie’ had now staked his claim for permanence – a highly impermanent virtue in recent years for the not-so-merry-go-round that is the Indian opening slot in Test cricket. [caption id=“attachment_7448011” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] Indian cricketer Mayank Agarwal walks back to the pavilion during the second day’s play of the first Test match between India and South Africa. AFP[/caption] It’s quite fitting, in a sense, considering how long-drawn a path he had to take before breaking into the Indian team, but Agarwal has been accustomed to long-winding routes. If you know Bengaluru roads, you know that a trip from Electronic City to Whitefield is the magnum opus to the painstaking drama that is commuting in the IT city. If you don’t, well, here’s the simplest breakdown: 25 to 30 kilometres, one way, in a city that has a reputation for being the slowest of slow-burners on the road. Now guess what? Agarwal has been making that trip twice-a-day, every day, during his off-season, for the past five years now, to visit his personal coach and mentor R Muralidhar. So patience wasn’t going to be an issue. And it clearly wasn’t. From the beginning of 2014 till the end of the tour to England last year, India’s opening pair had averaged 33.57, and managed a sorry sum of five century partnerships in 90 innings. The global average, during the same period, was 33.78. Through this time period, as an assembly line of India Test openers faltered and/or frittered – think Gautam Gambhir, think Murali Vijay, think Shikhar Dhawan, think KL Rahul, think Patel – Agarwal also had ‘that’ phase of his own. You remember, surely, 2017? When Mayank Agarwal became the Indian domestic circuit’s brief representation of Bradman, sleep-walking runs for fun – more than a thousand of them in one month alone? And yet, he couldn’t break into the national setup. Now, all of that lies changed. Now, in the pecking order for India’s Test match openers, there is Mayank Agarwal, and then there are the rest (let’s not sway dangerously after one Rohit Sharma hundred, he has bigger fish to fry). It’s only been five Tests – not even, at this juncture – and already, the fate of the top of the Indian pack doesn’t seem quite as badly in doldrums as it did prior to the Boxing Day Test of 2018 at Melbourne. KL Rahul, Murali Vijay and Parthiv Patel were all in the setup at the point when Prithvi Shaw was deemed unfit for the entire tour, having already missed the first two Tests owing to an ankle injury sustained during a warm-up game. But it would be as a replacement for a man nearly a decade his junior that Agarwal, nearly 28 at that point, would get his first crack at the big stage. The fortunes of the Indian openers turned around almost instantly. The debutant hit tone-setting 70s in the first innings of both the Melbourne and Sydney Tests – two of the more important ones in Indian Test history – to finish with 195 runs in three innings. At the MCG, his opening day association with makeshift-opener Hanuma Vihari lasted 18.5 overs – the longest for an Indian opening combine outside Asia in eight years. In his first bow in more favourable conditions at home, Agarwal has now stitched with Rohit Sharma the highest opening stand in Test cricket in over a decade; from not having had a century stand for the first wicket in 24 innings, India have now become the first team to register a triple-hundred opening stand against the South Africans since their readmission in 1991. The two days of batting at Vizag were a bit of a microcosm of all that we’ve just mentioned about India’s new man for the top. He took stance as the more reputed opener on the back of what he’d done so far on the international stage, yet had to play second fiddle – on the scoreboard, as well as in terms of spotlight – because this was always going to be known as the game where Rohit Sharma became Test opener. There was a stern passage to get through in the opening hour, in the face of Kagiso Rabada and Vernon Philander, not much unlike the by-lanes he would have taken on a daily basis on those arduous trips from Electronic City to Whitefield. The early threats navigated past, there came the temptation of a seemingly open stretch – it can’t be the easiest job in the world to resist the bait seeing your partner swat the ball to different parts of the ground without breaking into much of a sweat. And despite having a penchant for shot-making of his own, Agarwal was complementary enough to the latest of his new partners; he took 204 balls to get to three figures, at which point Rohit was already on 136, bludgeoned at a strike rate in excess of 65. But from there, he had set himself for take-off – quite like he did, in the toughest climes Down Under, last year – and he did just that, moving from 112 off 230 balls to 137 off 250 at the point when the Proteas finally found a breakthrough, before adding a further 78 from his last 121 balls after Rohit’s dismissal. In doing so, Agarwal had become only the fourth Indian to convert his maiden Test ton into a double or better. The last entry on this quite ‘exclusive’ list prior to Agarwal was his state-mate, and partner of many a domestic run-fest, Karun Nair. The future, as we’ve seen, wasn’t too kind on Nair – only India’s second-ever Test match triple-centurion. That’s what Agarwal now has to guard against. Given his years, given his story, given his backdrop, given all his waiting, you wouldn’t want to be betting against Mayank Agarwal. You shouldn’t be.