Pujara: A hero India didn’t always know they needed

He was Indian Test cricket's sturdiest defence in the last decade. Cheteshwar Pujara, among the most classical modern batters who enriched batting with gritand technique while refusing to yield to the lure of strike rate and hundred conversion rate, has retired from all cricket.

- Somshuvra Laha

Pujara was India's last Test specialist, an outlier at a time when cricket had moved irreversibly into the fast lane. He never played aT20I, and the last of his only five ODIs came in 2014. However, most of India's finest Test wins for over a decade have the Pujara stamp.

His cricket lessons honed under his diligent father Arvind, a firstclass player, Pujara rose from the dusty, flat pitches of Rajkot to become a batter who bowlers around the world found tough to dislodge. One of the first casualties of India’s Test transition, Pujara’s Test career ended with 7,195 runs and 19 hundreds ata solid average of 43.60. Don't read too much into the average though, for Pujara’s legacy runs deeper.

He was India’s first and last line of defence on pitches as varied as they could get Since his Test debut in October 2010, only six batters have faced more deliveries than Pujara’s 15,797 in Tests — Joe Root, Steve Smith, Kane Williamson, Alastair Cook, Virat Kohli and Azhar Ali. This, despite Pujara not playing international cricket in over two years.

His defiance was often dull, yet effective. Grind out the bowling, leave the deliveries outside offstump, play out time till it started playing to his strength —Pujara was all about the process that makes Test batting unique. If that meant taking blows on his body as India’s anchor in the Gabba victory, Pujara did that happily.