India preach patience and ponder combination

Towards the end of India’s practice session at Sir Vivian Richards Stadium on Monday, Rohit Sharma ignored a teasing legbreak outside his off stump. Cheteshwar Pujara, the deliverer of that legbreak, grinned. Someone behind him – possibly R Ashwin – yelled out: “Bowled, Yasir!”

In the first half of 2015, Pujara versus Rohit was a batsman-against-batsman contest, a selection headache for India’s Test-match team management. Now, things were a little different. Pujara was bowling to Rohit. No matter what Rohit did, Pujara was yelping excitedly, whether it was a defensive push into the off side – “caught at silly point!” – or a leg-side slog – “caught at midwicket!”

Pujara had already finished a long batting stint, as had M Vijay, Shikhar Dhawan, KL Rahul, Virat Kohli and Ajinkya Rahane. In pairs, they had rotated through three different nets – seamers, spinners and throwdowns.

Rohit had not batted with that group. He was now batting against Pujara, Ashwin – who continued bowling despite a long spell against the first set of batsmen – and a pair of net bowlers. At the other two nets were Wriddhiman Saha and Stuart Binny.

Binny, by then, had bowled a lengthy spell, and had looked particularly sharp against Dhawan, swerving the ball past the left-hander’s outside edge on a couple of occasions. Ishant Sharma and Mohammed Shami had bowled alongside Binny at the seamers’ net, and had both looked to hit fullish lengths, with Ishant sending down the odd bouncer for variety.

Concurrently, Ashwin, Jadeja and Amit Mishra had been in operation at the spinners’ net. When the first set of batsmen had …

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