Eye on India: The rise of ‘Sir’ Ravindra Jadeja from ridicule to cricket royalty

In this week's column, Dileep Premachandran charts the rise of India's Man of the Series from the Test triumph against Australia.

Ravindra Jadeja was named Man of the Series following India's Test series victory against Australia. Tsering Topgyal / AP Photo

These days, he is the most popular player in India’s Test XI — after Virat Kohli, of course, but for Ravindra Jadeja, it was not always that way.

Imagine you are 20 years old, and playing for your country in a global tournament at Lord’s. No matter where you come from, it is likely to be a dream come true. For Jadeja though, it became a nightmare.

It was his first game of the 2009 World Twenty20, and only his fourth in all. It started well enough, with the wickets of Ravi Bopara and Kevin Pietersen punctuating an impressive spell of 2-26.

Then, with India losing two quick wickets in their pursuit of 154, the team management — MS Dhoni was captain, and Gary Kirsten the coach — decided to promote the young man Shane Warne had called a rock star after playing the first season of the Indian Premier League (IPL) alongside him for Rajasthan Royals.

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Dhoni watched from the pavilion viewing area, as did Yuvraj Singh and Yusuf Pathan. Jadeja, exposed to such conditions for the first time and up against an attack that included James Anderson, Stuart Broad, Graeme Swann and Ryan Sidebottom, could neither finesse the ball nor wallop it. By the time a skier to long-on ended his misery, he had eaten up 35 balls for 25.

India needed a further 69 from just 39 balls. They fell three short, and were knocked out of the tournament they had won in such dramatic circumstances two years earlier.

The vitriol directed at Jadeja in the days that followed was nearly unprecedented, even by the effigy-burning standards Indian cricket has sometimes set.

Every Amar, Akbar and Anthony had an opinion, and in the years that followed, the ‘Sir Ravindra Jadeja’ jokes became default cricket humour. Most were not even funny.

A lesser man would have hidden beneath the parapet, especially once a botched attempted transfer to Mumbai Indians saw him banned for the IPL season in 2010.

Adnan Abidi / Reuters

But Jadeja is no ordinary bloke. He grew up in a one-room tenement and lost his mother, a nurse who encouraged the boy to play, to third-degree burns after a kitchen accident when he was 16.

Playing all day in near-50-degree heat in Rajkot, it was not uncommon for his childhood coach to slap him, sometimes out in the middle. After such hardships, barbs on social media were not the end of the world, especially since he hardly ever logged in or answered calls.

That same object of ridicule was recently named Man of the Series after India came from behind to regain the Border-Gavaskar Trophy. It was an engrossing series from Day 1 in Pune, with India severely hamstrung by the misfires from their two biggest guns.

Kohli’s lack of runs, even before the injury that ruled him out of the Dharamshala Test and the opening weeks of the IPL, was the most acute problem, but as worrying was Ravichandran Ashwin’s loss of bite.

Sajjad Hussain / AFP

The numbers told a very tiring story. Across 13 home Tests starting in late September, Ashwin and Jadeja had become the first to bowl more 4,000 deliveries in a season.

But that 13-Test figure itself was a misleading one. India’s season actually began eight months ago, in late July, with four Tests in the Caribbean.

For Ashwin, there were 17 Tests in eight months, and his relative lack of effectiveness after he helped India clinch the series against England in Mumbai was instructive.

In his first 11 Tests of this marathon stretch, Ashwin took an incredible 71 wickets at 21.32, and a mind-boggling strike-rate of 43.5. In that time, Jadeja played eight games. His returns — 33 wickets at 27.33 — were more steady than spectacular.

But since Mumbai, Ashwin — whose groin injury has ruled him out of the IPL — took 28 wickets in six Tests at nearly 34. The strike-rate ballooned to 75.7.

That India still won was largely due to Jadeja stepping up. He took 41 wickets at 18.68 in those six matches. On the Day 2 in Dharamshala, he became only the third man — after Kapil Dev in 1979/80 and Mitchell Johnson in 2008/09 — to complete the double of 500 runs and 50 wickets in a season.

One of the things Warne often said to anyone who cared to listen was how much Jadeja loved the crunch situations. Nearly a decade after that darkest of Lord’s dusks, the joke is on Jadeja’s tormentors.

Sanity prevails to protect India’s cricketers

Virat Kohli, centre, will miss the first two games of the IPL with a shoulder injury. Tsering Topgyal / AP Photo

It was the final indignity that broke the back of a champion side. Between May 2010 and April 2, 2011, India’s cricketers had played 11 Tests, 33 ODIs and eight T20Is. They sat atop the Test rankings, and had won the World Cup for the second time after an emotional six-week campaign on home soil.

After five days — no, that isn’t a typo — of down time, they were asked to report back for IPL duty, in a competition that had become bloated with the addition of two new teams. Four of the World Cup winners asked for time off from their franchises, for a breather after the relentless grind of the previous few months.

They were refused. When the Test side arrived in England in July, Zaheer Khan lasted a day of the Lord’s Test. Virender Sehwag and Gautam Gambhir played two games apiece. India lost 4-0, a result that would be reprised in Australia a few months later.

Fortunately, many of the vultures that put profits and TV ratings above player welfare have been drummed out of cricket administration now, as a result of the recommendations made by the Supreme Court-appointed Lodha Committee. And the new reality was apparent when a media release announced that certain key players would miss the entire IPL, or parts of it.

Ashwin, who bowled more than 900 overs for India across formats since July, will miss the tournament with a sports hernia. Murali Vijay needs surgery on his wrist and treatment on his shoulder. KL Rahul, who starred against Australia, also requires shoulder surgery.

Kohli (shoulder) will skip at least two games, as will Jadeja (spinning finger) and Umesh Yadav (hip). That the board’s medical team has signed off on this means that there’s no scope for mischief-makers to try and coerce the players back into action early.

The class of 2011 must be wishing that such sanity had prevailed back then.

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