10 Indian players who opened the batting as a jugaad

9. Ravi Shastri

If we talk about experiments then Ravi Shastri has to be the Chemistry lab. Starting out at number 10, he moved to the top of the order having batted at every number in the batting line up apart from 11 on his way up. He got a fifty in only his 2nd match as an opener and followed it up with a hundred in his 4th.

However, he never got a consistent run at the top till 1990, after which he opened till his last Test and went on to garner great numbers for himself. More than a thousand runs, career best score of 206, four hundreds, three fifties and a healthy average of 44.04 makes him one of the most successful opening experiments for India.

10. Virender Sehwag

He is the ‘baap of all jugaads.’ He got off to a flying start with a hundred on debut and two fifties in his first 5 matches batting at number 6 and 7. However, it was one of the strange calls of the then skipper Sourav Ganguly to push him to the opening slot that defined Sehwag’s career. 84 in the first match and a hundred in the next match as opener looked good but what made it better was the way in which he scored these runs.

Sehwag revolutionised opening in Test matches with his flamboyance and incredible hand-eye coordination. An opener’s job is to take the shine off the new ball by seeing it off. Sehwag took the shine off the ball by hammering it to all parts of the ground. They said he is unfit for test cricket, they questioned his technique but 2 triple hundreds, 22 hundreds and 9780 runs later, Sehwag ended up as one of the world’s best Test openers ever, so much so, that he can walk into any Test eleven, probably humming some Bollywood song before hitting the ball out of the park in his nineties.

Special Mention

A lot of people might ask why are people like Rahul Dravid and Navjot Singh Sidhu not in the list. Well that is because Sidhu was always a top order batsman and never batted below number three in his career. And as far as Dravid is concerned, he too batted in the top three for 90% of his career and the number of times he has had to come out to bat very early in the innings was as good as opening the innings.

Having talked about these players, there is a temptation to say that probably Rohit Sharma should have been the one opening the innings instead of Hanuma Vihari in the Boxing Day Test. If you track his career, there are a lot of similarities that Rohit Sharma has with Sehwag. He too started out as a middle order white ball specialist who was sent out to open in ODIs out of the blue. He too has a debut hundred in tests batting in the middle order.

There are doubts about his ability to handle the new red ball. However, the fact that he was brought back into the squad and was picked over Vihari in the first test and was immediately brought into the eleven after he recovered from the injury, clearly shows that India has long term plans for him in Tests. This coupled with the ability and hunger to get daddy hundreds once he has his eye in, definitely calls for an opportunity at the top. Who knows, this experiment might go the Sehwag way?

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