Ahead of an important home Test series, a World Cup semi-finalist and contender for the World Test Championship that hasn’t had a settled opening partnership since the decline and retirement of an all-time great roll the dice once more. They select a world-class white ball opener who doesn’t open in first-class cricket to bat at the top of the order against a flawed but talented opponent with an excellent bowling attack. But enough about England.
Rohit Sharma has played 137 first-class innings in a career going back to 2006. He has only opened in 3 of them, all in the second innings of Ranji Trophy games where Mumbai needed quick runs, and the last even of these was in December 2012 - ironically, 6 months before he became first a successful experiment, then a fixture, then a legend at the top of India’s ODI batting order.
Compared to Rohit, even Jason Roy’s 25 first-class innings opening the batting before his Test debut looks like a wealth of experience. But Roy too had been moved into the middle order in first-class cricket before even beginning, let alone dominating, in ODIs; Roy’s last County Championship game as an opener was in May 2013, almost exactly 2 years before his ODI debut. In those 25 innings, mostly in Division 2, Roy averaged 28.29 with 3 fifties and 1 hundred.
When the case for converting white-ball openers to the longer format is made, the defence’s star witnesses are invariably Virender Sehwag and David Warner. Quite apart from the fact that you shouldn’t be able to count every case in your favour on, forget the fingers of both hands, the hands of both arms, Warner had enough of a portfolio of success as a first-class opener to give the selectors something to go on, and Sehwag…well, Sehwag was a freak.
Though Warner is famed for having played international cricket for Australia before his first-class debut, and had only opened 11 times in first-class cricket before playing his first Test against New Zealand at the Gabba in 2011, to say he had impressed would be putting it mildly. He had a first-class average as an opener of 75 before his Test debut, with 3 hundreds (including a double ton) and 5 fifties - the latest of which was against that very same New Zealand attack of Tim Southee, Chris Martin and Doug Bracewell (plus Trent Boult who did not play the Gabba Test) for Australia A in a pre-Test tour game.
Sehwag, meanwhile, is a more interesting case. While he had a fine first-class record before making his Test debut — 2,744 runs in 46 innings, averaging 59.65 with 9 hundreds (including a double ton and three scores of 150+) and 13 fifties — not once did he open, rarely batting even as high as number 3. And while he’d played 20 ODI innings, achieving moderate success with an average of 27, a strike rate pushing a run a ball (heady stuff for the late 1990s and early 2000s), 1 hundred and 3 fifties, only six of these were as an opener.
The story of Test opener Virender Sehwag doesn’t even begin with his debut Test hundred in Bloemfontein, where he batted at no.6 behind the Fab Four of Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, VVS Laxman and Sourav Ganguly (and SS Das, more of whom in the next sentence). It wasn’t until four Tests later, on India’s 2002 tour of England and after Das had been discarded for the final time, that captain Ganguly and coach John Wright decided to try the clearly talented Sehwag at the top of the order where so many others had failed. After a trial run in the tour game against Hampshire, 84 in the Lord’s Test was followed by 106 at Trent Bridge, and for most of the next 11 years, the position was his. To underline just how freakish Sehwag’s glittering career was, that Hampshire game was his first time opening in first-class cricket.
In some ways, this was a more extreme version of the same bet that India are about to make against South Africa. Like Sehwag, Rohit is the beneficiary of others’ poor performances: in 24 innings since the start of India’s 2018 tour of England, India have had 6 different openers in as many combinations, averaging 26.07 - 7th out of the 12 Test nations, and below the global average for the first wicket even in these perilous times for openers. 11 out of those 24 partnerships have been single figures, and only 6 reached 50.
2 of those 6 had the unifying factor of the young man widely regarded as India’s opener elect. But since putting on 61 in the first innings and an unbeaten 75 in the second with KL Rahul to seal a facile chase in the 2nd Test of West Indies’ 2018 tour of India, Prithvi Shaw has not been seen again in Indian Test colours. An injury ruled him out of the historic series victory in Australia, and in July of this year he received a backdated 8-month ban for inadvertently taking a banned substance that was present in an over-the-counter cough syrup.
While Shaw still has a glittering future ahead of him, the expiration of his ban comes too late for him to take any part in the South Africa series. Rahul has been discarded for the second time. Murali Vijay and Shikhar Dhawan’s Test careers appear to be over. And Dehradun-born Bengal run machine Abhimanyu Easwaran has been banging loudly on the selectors’ door but has yet to gain entry.
So India’s 7th opening partnership in 14 months will be Mayank Agarwal, who has made a promising start to his Test career and like Easwaran is a specialist opener with a formidable record at Ranji Trophy and India A level, and Rohit Sharma, who has vanishingly rarely in his professional career even attempted the task that is about to be asked of him.
Warner and the ultimate outlier Sehwag made it work; but timing, conditions, opposition and experience all lead to Rohit’s promotion going the same way as Roy’s. If Philander and Rabada surgically dissect Rohit’s game like Hazlewood and Cummins did Roy's, India may have taken and missed their final shot at getting the most out of a potentially sublime talent.