Cricket
Mehidy Hasan Miraz and Litton Das are on their way to becoming Bangladesh’s next generation of match-winners.
R Ashwin smashed Mehidy Hasan Miraz for a six and two fours, leaving him frustrated. Those were the final hits of the Dhaka Test, and he was visibly disappointed as he collected his cap from the umpire.
Mehidy was the one who turned this game into a contest, taking 5 for 63, but for the first time in his career, this combative Bangladesh off spinner was defeated after picking up a five-for in the fourth inning.
He had bowled 18 overs in two days and was only taken out of the attack when Shakib Al Hasan realized he needed to be more creative in order to break the eight-wicket stand between Ashwin and Shreyas Iyer. Instead of creating another opportunity, Mehidy was on the receiving end of the boundary that signaled India’s narrowest win over Bangladesh in Test history.
Mehidy was distraught. Shreyas, with whom he had sparred throughout the series, noticed this and tapped the bowler on the chest, as if to say, ‘don’t feel so bad, man. You gave it everything you had.’ It was a nice addition. Mehidy also received a long hug from Rishabh Pant, whom he defeated three times in two matches. And a gift from the man he defeated on the third evening, Virat Kohli, who presented the offspinner with an autographed ODI jersey.
Litton Das said on the third evening that Mehidy was at the best of his abilities in both white- and red-ball formats, proving himself to be a key player in Bangladesh’s setup.
“He was always good at bowling, and now he’s getting better at batting,” Litton said. “He got a hundred points ahead of me in this series, so we have to applaud him. In our team, he is an excellent all-around player. We had a difficult first match because we had to switch from white to red ball in two [four] days. It was difficult for them as well. The same is true for bowlers who must bowl for extended periods of time. I, too, had difficulty switching between the two. Miraz is always a key player in my opinion.”
Litton, who led Bangladesh in ODIs in the absence of the injured Tamim Iqbal, had an interesting time as well. Litton’s innings against India in the T20 World Cup displayed his progress as a batter. He had a rough patch in the ODIs, but his captaincy continued to stand out in that he refused to go it alone. Given the Bangladesh dressing room culture, where the senior-junior divide is strong, it was a small but significant gesture.
On the third afternoon in Dhaka, Litton’s 73 kept Bangladesh in the game. When his team was still trailing by 17 runs in the second innings, he chose to counterattack, but that is the type of bold decision-making that Bangladesh needs from this generation of cricketers. Litton and Mehidy have demonstrated that they are proactive when the chips are down, particularly against larger teams like India, and the example they’ve set is inspiring their teammates to do the same.
Zakir Hasan made an impressive transition from the A team, scoring a Test century on debut in Chattogram and a gritty half-century in Dhaka. Zakir had a taste of international cricket in 2018 before being sent back into the wilderness. The 24-year-old has built a substantial career in first-class cricket without ever catching the attention of selectors – that is, until last month, when he made 173 against a very strong India A team.
Shakib was impressed by Zakir’s demeanor during the two Tests. “He is extremely mature. Excellent temperament for Test cricket. This was the type of mixture we were looking for. He is capable of filling a critical role. It’s only the beginning, but I hope he has more good innings for Bangladesh.
“Zakir has been around for quite a while. He has played 70 [71] first-class matches, as evidenced by his cricket. It is not the same as someone who is 19 or 20. I’d like to see more players like him who can provide better service in the next 7 to 10 years.”
Bangladesh has another talented opener waiting for a second chance, and Shakib made it a point to remind Mahmudul Hasan Joy of what he needed to do to get back in. “Joy is present in the system. He needs to score runs in the A team to get more opportunities. I want him to seize those opportunities and play 100 Tests for Bangladesh.”
Shakib also believes that Bangladesh’s pace attack is developing into a formidable force across all formats. “We’re getting better, but we’re not playing consistently well. The disappointing aspect of both Tests was our first-inning batting. Among the three spinners, we have more than 500 wickets. We’ll soon have fast bowlers with 70-80 wickets. We’ll have five strong bowlers who can shut down any team.”
With the pace attack in place, enough quality spinners in the system, and young players performing well, the Bangladesh cricket team is in good shape. Shakib, Tamim, and Mushfiqur Rahim are all nearing the end of their international careers, so the next generation needed to step up. Litton and Mehidy have certainly done that this year, and while things didn’t go exactly as planned for either, there’s no denying they’re in it for the long haul.
Tony de Zorzi returned to the Wanderers eight years after he was captain of King Edwards VII, one of Johannesburg’s best schools, and seven years after he led South Africa’s Under-19 team to a World Cup where they were the defending champions but finished in 11th place. He found friends he didn’t know he had.
There were a few of my friends here, and it’s always nice to have my mum watching,” de Zorzi said. “Some people said they were my friends, but I’ve never met them.”
Natasha raised de Zorzi on her own, and he has always wanted to be the best he could be for her. She doesn’t watch him play much anymore because he took the long way to become an international cricket player. He went to the same school as Neil McKenzie and Graeme Smith, then to Pretoria, and finally to Cape Town, which is 1400 kilometres away from where he grew up. In a way, it was good for de Zorzi to play his first Test match on the Highveld and get his first fifty while Natasha was watching.
He said, “She always sits in the same spot, so I knew where she was.” “Since I’m in Cape Town, she hasn’t been able to watch many games. I hope I can get three figures the next time she comes.”
De Zorzi has set high goals for himself. In the last two years, only one of his teammates has scored a hundred at home, and only two others (Sarel Erwee and Kyle Verreynne, neither of whom is playing in this series) have reached 100. But because he has let people down in the past, he knows this is his chance to step up.
“My life has changed a lot since I played for SA under-19,” de Zorzi said. “I was captain, but I wasn’t the star of that side,” he said.
Because Wiaan Mulder did it. When De Zorzi came back from the World Cup for his age group, he had to go back to club cricket and “start over.” He played for the University of Pretoria team, which was led by Kruger van Wyk, who is now the fielding coach. Then he got a job with Northerns, where he kept getting better and better and averaged almost 80 for the second-tier provincial team in the summer of 2016–17. In the summer of 2020, he moved to Western Province, where Ashwell Prince was the head coach. Since then, he has been made captain.
This summer, he is averaging over 100, mostly because of his unbeaten 304 against the Knights, when Gerald Coetzee was part of his attack (though admittedly not many other big names).
“It’s been a long process, and I’m glad it’s come to this,” said de Zorzi. “It also reminds me of where I came from and to not get too far ahead of myself because I had to do a lot of dirty work to get there. Some guys start getting it a little bit earlier. Mine is starting to come true right now.”
After averaging over 48 in three of the last four seasons, de Zorzi was hard to ignore in this Test squad, but it took a change in leadership for that to happen. He got his chance because the new red-ball coach, Shukri Conrad, also acts as a selector when there isn’t a panel. “We knew it would be a new start when the coaches changed,” de Zorzi said. “If everyone took a chance and did well, you knew there would be a new set of eyes and maybe even more chances. That was a lot of fun. Dean Elgar, who was captain at the time, used to say that the number of runs you scored would get you into the team. Guys knew that they had to have a good season if they wanted to move up. There was nothing else to do.”
But now that it has, players like de Zorzi need to take control of their space. He showed West Indies’ attack what he was made of in the first Test, and Kyle Mayers saw it. “This guy seems to have everything together,” he said. “He is square of the wicket and strong.”
De Zorzi is very good at the cut shot. In this innings, he got almost a third of his runs with the cut shot. However, the West Indies had already figured him out from the first Test. At the SuperSport Park, they tried to give him less space. De Zorzi said, “They stick to the basics a little bit longer.” “You might get a few less bad balls, but international cricketers who do their homework are going to do it. I could tell they had different plans based on how they bowled to me today compared to how they did it at SuperSport Park. They can make it harder for you to score. And, of course, the intensity is a little bit higher. When I got out, I was really tired. It is not easy.”
But so was de Zorzi. During the free-flowing afternoon session in South Africa, he played well. Natasha sat still in the Memorial Stand the whole time. De Zorzi made his first sign to her when he hit Alzarri Joseph out of the ground with the 82nd ball he faced. She would have been incredibly proud, no doubt. As the pitch got faster and West Indies made a comeback, De Zorzi faced 73 more balls and scored 35 more runs.
They lost five wickets for 64 runs after tea, so the game is now tied. If South Africa can’t score more than 350, West Indies might be able to fight back. If you give up on that, on a pitch that is already starting to turn, the game might be over. Either way, it’s set up to bring in people who didn’t know they liked cricket, especially during a mid-week Test match when only a small part of the stadium is filled. But it’s important. And de Zorzi knows that better than anyone else.
The skies are gray and heavy, like a wet blanket that will soon be thrown over the whole series. The field is so full of plants that animals that live in the woods have moved in. The outfield is wet, and sometimes a cold drizzle falls on biting winds. And while the local bowlers, who are all big and tall, are nimble and strong in their warm-up overs on the practice pitches, the Sri Lankan batters, who are covered in wool sweaters, face throwdowns and look like they are about to be sacrificed on an altar of seam bowling.
Get the coin. Put Sri Lanka in. Watch the ball jump gleefully off the edges of the bats and into the hands of the slip cordon as batter after batter falls like marionettes, the scoreboard showing 45-3, then 67-5, and a few swipes at the end pushing the total just over 100. Here are the usual parts of Sri Lanka’s day one story on a ground like Hagley Oval.
When they were here before, they didn’t have to bat first, but they were still out after 138 runs. The last time, they had players like Kumar Sangakkara on their team, but they still lost by 104 runs. Unless Sri Lanka pulls off a near-miracle in the second innings, which they do from time to time, these are game-changing messes. (Then New Zealand will go up to bat and put on half a million for six while smiling politely, which will only show how bad they were before.)
Then this happened. Four years after the last time they played a Test in New Zealand, where they were beaten by 423 runs at this same site, they had an amazing day of batting. Of defensive play that was mostly okay and technique that was pretty good. Had Sri Lanka’s batters done the work to figure out where their off stump was before they started a Test on foreign soil? Any Sri Lanka fan should feel a tear of pure pride just thinking about it.
Kusal Mendis, who may have been the best player in the XI, took the lead. The most important part of his 87 out of 83 was how he judged length on a surface that was a bit bumpy. When it was on a good length, he defended close to his body, almost always with soft hands, so that when the ball came in and took the edge, it bounced short of the slips. Most of the time, though, he defended inside the line, mostly using his bat to block balls that could hit him in front of the wickets or get past him to the wickets.
When New Zealand’s bowlers bowled fuller and tried hard to get an edge that could be caught, Mendis gave his all to his front-foot strokes, sometimes driving it with authority, other times sending it squirting off the face of the bat through backward point, and other times flicking it deliciously off his pads.
He got 50 runs off of 40 balls, but New Zealand’s bowlers didn’t have a great morning. 44 of those runs came from fours. He and Dimuth Karunaratne, who was just as steady but less aggressive against balls that could be hit, put together a 137-run partnership at the second wicket that was the key to Sri Lanka’s progress on day one. They would get out in consecutive overs, but when they did, they were often replaced by better batsmen.
Angelo Mathews waited for the shorter balls and scored 38 of his 47 runs through the leg side. He also hit a couple of fours off his pads when the ball was close to him. Dinesh Chandimal liked to hit the ball to the off side, and he did so six times. As Dhananjaya de Silva batted with Kasun Rajitha near the end of the day, he made boundaries whenever he could.
Their scoring areas were different, but almost all of Sri Lanka’s top seven batters covered the stumps, didn’t rush at balls until they were set, didn’t mind when deliveries beat their bats, and didn’t chase seaming balls outside their stumps. Even when bowled at (mostly by Tim Southee and Matt Henry), they didn’t give up, which is something they often do when the ball is turning.
Given Sri Lanka’s long tail and lack of experience in the field, which New Zealand can easily take advantage of, 305 for 6 is not a great first-day score. It is possible that New Zealand will win the match. But given the situation, Sri Lanka were good enough. And it’s not often that you can say that about Sri Lanka on the first day of a match in New Zealand.
Sometimes almost everything that makes up a Test match is found in a single ball. One of those balls was the one that knocked Pat Cummins out of the game on the third morning in Delhi. It had the blunt precision of the Indian spinners, the deadly glide that made this pitch so hard to play on, and the sweep, a high-risk, high-reward shot so controversial that a thousand autopsies were written about it.
And there was one more thing. After the ball slipped under Cummins‘ bat, it hit the inside edge of the outside stump, bounced off the side of the middle stump and landed in KS Bharat’s gloves.
The ball didn’t spin sharply, but it didn’t go all the way with the arm either. After it was thrown, it straightened just a little. It also stayed low before bouncing off the stumps twice. Bharat had followed the ball all the way, even as Cummins took a wild swing, and he had collected it cleanly.
It didn’t matter because the ball was dead by the time he reached it, but he did a good job with his glove.
Later that day, when India had lost four wickets and were 27 runs away from their target, Bharat was moved up the order and scored a brilliant unbeaten 23 off 22 balls, including three perfectly timed fours to cover and a solid knock with a slog-swept six.
In his first two Test innings, Bharat had scored 8 and 6 in the first two games of this series. He must have felt much better after that start because he played on Sunday. Some watching from the outside might have even thought he was trying to save his career with that performance.
But India probably wouldn’t have seriously considered taking Bharat out of the game after Delhi, even if he had done nothing in the second innings. They probably know that anyone can score a number of low scores on difficult pitches, and they may have seen glimpses of Bharat’s counter-attacking potential during his brief stint with the Indian national team
It took a long time for these things to happen.
In May 2018, Indian senior team officials selected Bharat as the goalkeeper for the four-day tour and Rishabh Pant as the goalkeeper for the 50-over tour. The Indian senior team was also touring England that summer, so the A tour was a shadow tour. At the time, officials felt that Bharat was India’s best pure goalkeeper and Pant was an exciting batsman whose glovework needed work.
When Wriddhiman Saha got injured and could not join the England tour, India included Pant in its Test team in place of Bharat. The genius is going in his own direction.
But Bharat remained an important player in India’s second team. Since the beginning of 2018, he has played 19 first-class matches for the India A team, which is more than any other player except Abhimanyu Easwaran, who bats first. In those India A matches, he has scored 971 runs at a rate of 48.55, including three hundreds.
Last year, when India took Saha out of its test team, Bharat took his place. So it made sense that Bharat made his debut when Pant was injured. The Indian team management may have been tempted by Ishan Kishan’s competing claims, but they chose Bharat at the start of this Border-Gavaskar series.
At the start of the 2019-20 home season, India dropped Pant from the Test programme XI and brought back Saha for a series against South Africa. Virat Kohli described Saha as the best goalkeeper in the world and they felt his good glove work was important on India’s winding tracks. They felt that Pant still needed to work on his goalkeeping. Pant worked on it and became a world-class goalkeeper when India played England in early 2021. Until then, however, Saha was still the first choice for home games.
At the start of this series between India and Australia, the same idea was in play. India appreciates how good Bharat is with the bat, but they know he is their best goalkeeper when Pant is not around.
De Zorzi now has a chance to become the star he has always wanted to be.
The collapse that never came at Hagley Oval involving Sri Lanka
India’s trust is rewarded by Bharat’s skill behind the stumps.
South Africa’s World Cup dreams have taken a major hit.
In a comfortable fashion, England completed their best run chase in England vs India Tests to tie India’s Test series at 2-2.
