Nitish Kumar Reddy turned his head back in disbelief. He thought he had executed the textbook forward defensive to a gentle nipbacker from George Hill. His head was still, hands close to the body and the front foot reasonably forward. But the ball had just enough mischief, and precision, to sneak through a microscopic gap between the pad and ball to hit the stumps. A few overs later, Shardul Thakur saw Hill disarray his set of furniture too, keeping the race for the seam-bowling slot for the first Test on a knife’s edge. Kumar had stuttered to 42, surviving a dropped catch and looking vulnerable to Hill’s military medium offerings; Thakur had freewheeled to 34, before his misjudgment.
Both rued the squandered opportunity to stake their claims, as they watched Tanush Kotian stroke an unconquered 91 and Anshul Kamboj compose his first-class best of 51 not out, enabling India to declare on 417/7. By then England Lions had resigned to the remoteness of surmounting the target of 439 in only 38 overs. Dim was the prospect of India’s bowlers wrapping up the Lions in a session. And so it ended, in a tame draw.
Stakes remained only for Thakur and Reddy to pluck a few wickets to push up the queue. But they barely got a sniff in the second innings, even as Kamboj continued to leave sizeable footprints on the tour. In the imminent future, both Thakur and Reddy could face sterner competition from the Haryana seamer.
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But as it is, neither Reddy nor Thakur would feel they are certainties for the Leeds Test. Reddy, predominantly a batting all-rounder, is the frontrunner after his comeuppance in the Australia tour. Whereas his benign pace on hard tracks where the ball barely moved consigned him to irrelevance, his bowling would be of immense significance in England.
On moisture-laden England surfaces, he could interrogate batsmen more tellingly. But in both games, he struggled with his lines, not so much his lengths. He regularly plugged the fuller lengths, maintained a delicious inward shape into both left and right-handed batsman, coaxed subtle swing in the air and seam movement off the surface. But he fluffed his direction indiscriminately, leading to leg-side trash.
With the bat, he has looked comfortable when the sun was out and the ball traversed straight lines. But when the skies turned gloomy, so did he. In the morning session, the late swing of Hill and the bustle of Josh Tongue concerned him. The latter beat both the edges and fluffed him into poking at a ball that exploded from length. Tom Haines, who had just moved to first slip, dropped the straightforward offering. Thereafter, he slashed anything marginally short through the third-man fence, before he slog-swept Farhan ahmed over deep midwicket. Just when he seemed utterly unbeatable came the nip-backer that would leave him repenting another missed opportunity (134 runs in four) to nail the all-rounder’s seat.
For Thakur to upend him in the line and claim the prize, he required a pile of runs, as much as the wickets. So far, despite fairly pleasant circumstances, he could muster only 80 runs in three innings. Monday presented the best chance, with the surface docile and bowlers blunted. He smoked Alam for a brace of sixes either side of the sight-screen, after caressing Eddie Jack through sweeper cover. But he, like Reddy, floundered when it seemed that he had at least a half-century for the taking.
More worryingly, his bowling was not penetrative enough to trouble batsmen in both games. He stitched economical spells, an attribute teams wish from a third-fourth seamer, but he required the power of the wickets to barge into the Test line-up. Neither Thakur nor Reddy, thus, have so far made a compelling case for inclusion in Leeds.
