Dhruv Jurel has had an almost unfair task playing Test cricket. Initially he had to compete for a place in the India side with someone on his way to becoming the greatest wicketkeeper-batter of all time if not already there. He couldn't win. Stepping in whenever Rishabh Pant was unavailable, he made a good enough fist of it to be kept in the squad on his own merit.
The thing with Pant is, what makes him so good also leaves him susceptible to injuries. Some of it is part of his game and the kind of creative shots he plays, some his refusal to wear an arm guard. He has retired-hurt at least three times in Test cricket, and on each occasion he has come back to add valuable runs.
Pant continued his maverick ways in the second Test against Sri Lanka in Colombo. That included playing the exact same shot - the pull - that got him injured on the first day. Still without an arm guard on. And hit it for a six. At the other end, having done enough to play as a specialist batter alongside Pant, Jurel scored his second Test century.
He played a game as old as the slogan on his bicep tattoo that he revealed upon reaching the hundred. "Jai jawan jai kisan" or "hail the solider, hail the farmer" was a war cry given by former India prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri during the 1965 war against Pakistan. Most soldiers anyway are farmers in India. In Jurel's case, his grandfather was a farmer and his father a soldier. Those are roots he said he doesn't want to forget.
Jurel, or anyone for that matter, will not mind accumulating runs as Pant flummoxes the opposition. "It makes my batting approach easy," Jurel said, "because when you're getting runs from one end like Pant is playing and playing all the shots, the bowlers might think that I don't want to give runs to him, so he just tends to make a mistake [against me] and I get runs, so it's easy to bat with him."
In this series Jurel has scored 173 of the most unobtrusive runs you can imagine. His two most memorable shots this series have been the straight drives that brought him no runs because he hit the middle stump at the non-striker's end. Otherwise, you just look up at the scorecard and you see he has added another 20 without anyone noticing.
It was only when he was left with Nos. 10 and 11, still 21 away from a hundred, that you started noticing Jurel. Until then he operated in his box, and operated so efficiently that he had a 91% control rate and a strike rate of 60. He never looks like he is forcing a shot: forward to a full ball, back to the shorter ones, hitting boundaries off bad balls, defending or working singles off the good ones.
Now Jurel started farming the strike, he reverse-swept a four, and then got stuck on 99. This is what happened for 13 balls after he reached 99. "So actually, I don't know, when I was on 99… before that, he [Asitha Fernando] was bowling like decently, and I was getting runs. I got to 99, and he started bowling good lengths and line, and good fields. I don't know. So when I played that shot, it was going over the head of the bowler. I thought I have hit a gap. Since he [Kamil Mishara, the fielder at mid-off] grabbed that ball, I'm like, oh god, please save me."
That misjudgment of his own shot on 99 combined with a good bounce for Mishara resulted in desperate scrambling and an almighty dive. He was lucky Mishara missed. Mohammed Siraj, who had so far curbed his newfound six-hitting completely, celebrated as much as Jurel did. A popular member of the side digging in for the sake of a batter suggests said batter might be well-liked himself.
In the studios, KS Bharat, who lost out to both Pant and Jurel because of their superior batting skills, reckoned Jurel was the better pure gloveman. However, Pant has dibs on the big gloves. Wicketkeepers tend to want to keep the keeping gloves when two of them play in the same XI. It is not a competition between these two anyway; perhaps Jurel understands he will be the better fielder of the two. And as long as he can keep accumulating the inconspicuous runs, Jurel has no reason to be insecure.