da dobrowin： Rohit’s early agression didn’t come off, again. Kohli fell to left-arm spin, again. And India stumbled to the most unimaginable of scorelines

da casino： Alagappan Muthu03-Nov-20241:57

Manjrekar: First six wickets were painful to watch

Rohit Sharma walks across his home turf with his head bowed. There was a weight dragging him down. He had no more defence against it.At the same time, over his left shoulder, the New Zealand players had all piled in together. They looked like they’d worked out the secret to human flight – which three weeks ago seemed a more amenable task than what they were setting out to do and now had done.The contrast was powerful. A team together. A man lost.Related

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At 9.59am, there was hope.Rohit felt the ball on the middle of his bat. He walked off to the side and mimed the way it had reacted off the pitch. Just the slightest little nip away. And he had accounted for it. Getting in line behind it and blocking it with soft hands.Rohit has shots and he plays them in a way that makes you wonder why other batters don’t play them too. It looks so easy when he does it. Maybe that’s why it took him a while to acquire a taste for defending. For a while it worked. In September 2021, two years after making a comeback into the Test team, he scored his first century away from home.This was a brief sight of that Rohit. At 10.00am, that Rohit was gone. Replaced by one who miscued a pull off a ball not short enough. This has been his way of late, and it hasn’t been coming off.Rohit Sharma has tallied 133 in ten Test innings this home season•AFP/Getty Images”As you grow, you try and evolve and I’m trying to evolve as a batter as well to try and see what else I can do,” this Rohit said. “So in that, there is a chance that you can fall on the other side of it, which clearly I have. So I will re-look at my game and see what best I can do.”But I don’t see that I have lost faith in my defence. It’s just that I need to spend more time to defend balls, which I haven’t done in this series and I accept that I haven’t batted well in this series.”On Sunday, this Rohit was dismissed by the 11th ball he faced. He had got to 20 balls in just one of his last 10 innings.

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At 10.06am, there was joy.Virat Kohli was coming down the Wankhede stairs. When he was fielding in the slips, and the crowd was roaring his name, he had turned to them, raised a hand up high, and brought it to his chest. They have never lost faith in him.Just before play, he had had a line of net bowlers all preparing him for the threat of Ajaz Patel. He launched a series of inside-out drives against them. He used to eat up left-arm fingerspin. Averaged 123.80 against them in all home Tests till the end of 2019. In the years since then, he’s gone at 23.08.Shubman Gill walks out, Virat Kohli walks in. He eventually lasts seven balls•AFP/Getty ImagesThe fans don’t really see these numbers. But they remember how he’s made them feel. And so they believed. New Zealand had probably seen these numbers. Their lead spinner was a left-armer and he had two others for company on this tour. It’s not like they had other options queueing up, so this might just be coincidence but, barring the first innings in Bengaluru, every time Kohli has come out to bat, he’s had to start against a left-arm fingerspinner.Now there’s this thing he does to feel good at the crease. He likes to get forward. And these aren’t small strides. They’re gung-ho with a capital G, U, N and so on. It works really well enough on flat pitches. Or when he’s got his eye in on a not-so-flat pitch. Mumbai ticked neither of those boxes. New Zealand definitely played a hand here. Having often used in-out fields for other batters, they had short cover, backward point, mid-on, midwicket and square leg up for Kohli. They were blocking his other great strength – stealing singles to get himself going.Now it was all up to Ajaz. When he looped one up, made sure it wasn’t a half-volley, and found turn off the straight, there was only one outcome. At 10.13am, one of India’s greatest batters fell to one of the most basic traps, and all around the stadium there was silence.

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At 11.10am, a fightback began.Rishabh Pant defended Glenn Phillips but he wasn’t to the pitch of the ball. Mindful of that, he played the original line, softened his hands and opened the face ever so slightly. So now if there was turn, he would have it covered. If there wasn’t, he’d plonked his bat in front of the pad so he was unlikely to be out lbw.The crowd roared their approval. A forward defence sent the Wankhede into raptures.Pant made 64 off 57 because he found a way to put pressure back on the spinners. He was brave enough step down the pitch when he saw a ball that was tossed up. It forced the bowlers off their length. Both Ajaz and Phillips went shorter on more than one occasion because they were worried about being whacked down the ground, except they were coming off worse now because the shots Pant could now play – cuts and pulls – were riskless.1:16

Manjrekar: ‘With Pant, the word genius came to mind’

It was a high-wire act. On day two, Rachin Ravindra had tried stepping down to a spinner in order to mitigate the threat they posed on this surface and ended up looking desperately out of place. Pant might be one of the few players in world cricket capable of pulling something like this off. Taking a team that was 29 for 5 in conditions that nobody could trust and keeping them alive, because he has this innate and outrageous understanding of how to play attacking shots. He sacrifices his body to achieve this objective. That’s why he ends up in all those weird shapes when he’s at the crease.New Zealand were getting desperate. They’d missed out on Pant’s wicket when India were 59 for 5 because they failed to review an lbw appeal. So in the 22nd over, they were prepared to burn the two they had left if it meant they could get rid of him. It worked, though there are people still wondering if the umpires had made a terrible mistake.At 12.24pm, the big screen flashed the letters O-U-T and it prompted a chant of “Cheater! Cheater! Cheater!”

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India going down to New Zealand at home was an improbable outcome. But being swept 3-0? On pitches they had asked for? With the batters they had? Kohli has 10 times the runs that Will Young does in Test cricket. The bowlers they could unleash? R Ashwin has taken twice as many wickets as Glenn Phillips has bowled overs. The first session in Bengaluru caught them off-guard but everything that’s happened from there on has been on their own terms, in conditions loaded in favour of their strengths. And yet there they were, brushed aside at 1.03pm on the third day. An invincible aura, built over 18 series spanning nearly 12 years, had come apart in less than nine days of cricket.This can’t be wished away now. This can’t be set right with perspective. This will have to be dealt with. And the fall-out could be far-reaching.