The way Ravindra Jadeja is batting, he definitely is in the same bracket as Ben Stokes: Deep Dasgupta

The former Indian cricketer and renowned commentator Deep Dasgupta hailed the spin all-rounder Ravindra Jadeja as one of the best all-rounders of the modern era after his spectacular performance with both bat and ball in the Boxing Day Test against Australia at Melbourne Cricket Ground, where India registered a victory by 8 wickets. Deep believes that looking at the past few years, Jadeja has entered in the same league as England’s Ben Stokes.

The Indian cricket fans were in for a surprise when the management had named Jadeja as the replacement for Indian skipper Virat Kohli, who is on paternity leave, ahead of the second Test. However, Deep Dasgupta was already in favour of this decision as he feels that over the past few years, Jadeja has established himself as a batsman across all the formats.

“Jadeja replacing Virat Kohli in the 2nd Test was one of the things in my mind because of the way he has batted in the last couple of years. Generally people think about Jadeja that he is a bowler who can bat, someone who hasn’t capitalized much in Test cricket. But I always thought he has actually done better than a lot of batsmen in the last couple of years. He’s getting runs across all formats, and also as recently as last year he was the world’s top-ranked Test bowler,” Deep Dasgupta told Sports Today.

Even during the IPL, why not Ravindra Jadeja at No. 4 for CSK: Deep Dasgupta

In the second game against Australia at MCG, Jadeja had played a sublime knock of 57 runs to help India post a massive total of 326 on the board in the first innings. Along with that, the all-rounder had scalped three, including 2 in the second innings as India beat Australia by 8 wickets.

Seeing Ravindra Jadeja’s performance, Dasgupta believes that the cricketer has started taking batting seriously and would have been a perfect option for his IPL franchise Chennai Super Kings (CSK) to bat at Number 4. Also, according to the veteran wicketkeeper, the all-rounder started taking his batting seriously after 2017 when he got dropped from the team.

“As of now the way he’s batting he definitely is (in the same bracket as Ben Stokes). Even during the IPL I actually said why not him at No. 4 for CSK. He’s got a couple of triple hundreds in domestic cricket, getting runs there is not easy.

“For Saurashtra he bats at No. 4 but for India he comes in at 7 or 8. Somehow I felt that he never took his batting seriously enough. In 2017 he was dropped from the side but and I think what kind of prompted him was the fact that he wanted to make himself more useful to the team, not just with the ball but with the bat as well. Because Jadeja, I know for a fact, always wanted to be a batsman,” Deep Dasgupta concluded.