Test cricket offers a player the luxury to carve out a batting niche whose predominant feature isn’t run-scoring. Repeating an attritional routine of leaving the ball, making bowlers come back over after over, spell after spell, session after session, and eventually forcing them into physical exhaustion is very much a legitimate way to compete in Test matches. The risk-reward dynamic is treated with an extremely conservative lens by players who swear by this brand of batting.

It’s not the easiest style of batting to like. It’s certainly not the most television-friendly. It doesn’t likely suit modern tastes either. But the game has for the longest time had a place for this variety of cricketers and a very important one. Cheteshwar Pujara never quite liked boasting too loudly about being the final poster-boy of this old-school, mechanical, repetitious genre of cricket that he played but then these narratives seldom are shaped to one’s will.

Right from his debut Test against Australia in 2010 though, Pujara had made it painfully obvious that he was going to be an acquired taste. A match-winning 72 in a difficult 4th innings chase had earned him the validation that he belonged but not necessarily the adulation. Not just yet. The hung-back posture, a hesitant-looking forward lunge, a bottom-handed grip unconducive to generate a smooth flow through the drive, and an overall uncharismatic presence in the middle weren’t quite the attributes of a player destined to become the main character, the big dog of the roster.

Even those who claimed to be admirers of his ‘grit’ and ‘mettle’ didn’t quite know what they were talking about. But they knew the right things to say to keep up the act of being seen as Test match purists – something that elevated them from the average guy on the street whose taste was too primitive and unserious. Liking Pujara became something you’d have to say to be perceived among the sport’s legacy circles; a virtue signalling and a flex. It had very little to do with any real admiration for the player or his game.

Reducing Pujara’s entire batting repertoire to a few tritely thrown adjectives has been a great disservice to what has been a highly distinguished career of one of India’s greatest batsmen. But it’s been a convenient cop-out for too long because appraising Pujara’s cricketing merit requires nuance – an exercise most would find too tedious to undertake, especially when platitudes are all too happily embraced.

Pujara belonged to a generation of Test batters who have had their wings significantly clipped by the times they played through. It was a generation that suddenly had to deal with the changing nature of pitches all around the world. Suddenly, the priority was to eliminate the possibility of draws and the pitches started being made accordingly. Life became considerably harder for batsmen and eventually it did begin showing in their plummeting averages – a piece of stat they’re taught to take great pride in.

The final career stats for Pujara therefore, like many of his contemporaries, do not read as flatteringly as of the generation whose legacy they inherited. Pujara from the very beginning had been designated as Rahul Dravid’s spiritual successor. The gulf between their career records in plain sight would question them even being placed in the same league. But the varying difficulty levels of run-production in the two eras are important to factor in before juxtaposing raw numbers.

Pujara learned to bat against spin a certain way. And it showed immediately in his initial burst at the Test level. Quick to read length, proactive in using his feet, adept at playing inside the line and holding the bat correctly adjacent to the pads while lunging forward – every attribute a batsman emerging out of the famed Indian domestic pipeline would have mastered. But the very art of playing spin changed at a fundamental level pretty much in the middle of his international career.

The introduction of Decision Review System (DRS) made batters more vulnerable to spin on the front-foot than they ever were. Umpires were bolder now in ruling an LBW call and spinners began attacking stumps more than they ever did. The traditional use of feet to negate the dip and smother the turn was no longer an insurance against bowlers testing both your edges on pitches that were seldom flat.

Extremely rudimentary level of insincere analysis presents this as Indian batters’ depleting ability to play spin in comparison to the generations that preceded them. Maybe it has some truth to it. But it fails to recognise the impact these very real-time changes have had on players still figuring out the best way to counter them.

It's not like Pujara forgot the methods to play spin overnight. He just happened to play in a time that elevated the threat of left-arm spin by manifolds and every team employed it to its fullest. The likes of Ravindra Jadeja, Axar Patel, Jack Leach, Keshav Maharaj, Prabath Jayasuriya, Ajaz Patel, Matt Kuhnemann, Noman Ali, Taijul Islam and a dozen others have managed to wreak havoc all over the subcontinent in recent years and few seem to have had any answer.

It can be stated very definitively that barring Steve Smith and Joe Root, none of Pujara’s contemporaries have played spin better. And nothing illustrates this more effectively than revisiting some of the most riveting battles he’s had over the years against Australia’s second-most prolific spinner Nathan Lyon.

Among the last exponents of traditional off-spin, Lyon prefers sticking to dip and bounce with relentless accuracy. His pronounced overspin makes it tougher for batters to make a judgement of lengths and it shows in their lack of trust in using feet. Pujara’s individual battles against Lyon were uniquely fascinating for neither rushed into it. Both were content playing on each other’s patience and wait for either an error in length or in footwork.

Pujara however wasn’t too desperate to ‘dominate’ Lyon in a way a Sehwag or a Lara would think of pulverising a spinner out of their sights. His stepping out against Lyon would rarely result in a lofted drive down the ground or over the mid-wicket. He’d be entirely happy merely negating the dip with his pads and wait for Lyon to change his length. 

Lyon would change angles, vary his pace, bank on a bit of natural variation off the pitch and quite often succeed too. Pujara particularly struggled in their final duel in India in 2023. But this is one bit of individual contest that evolved with every iteration and produced spellbinding cricket without ever too much happening.

But while being an absolute giant in the conditions he’d cracked from the beginning, Pujara struggled to seamlessly master the unfamiliar ones. Pace and bounce were never his biggest allies. Lack of a strong back-foot game put limitations on his scoring options on pitches that assisted fast bowlers. He could take body-blows, survive longer than many would but runs still proved to be hard to come by. Edging at a wide one with the bat hanging away from body became a painfully familiar sight after a point.

There are of course the Johannesburgs, the Adelaides, and the Southamptons to prove it wasn’t always all that grim. There’s also a legacy-defining Australian tour of 2018-19 where he showcased unmatched forbearance with three hundreds leading the team to a famous series win. 

But perhaps owing the lack of higher gears in his batting, Pujara primarily remained a grafter in these conditions rather than a run-accumulator. But the importance of the former is impossible to overstate. Wearing out opposition attacks and making batting much easier for more natural strokeplayers down the order is a job Pujara executed countless times with distinction. 

The biggest endorsement for this feature of his batting came when after India’s iconic win at Lord’s in 2014, former England captain Michael Atherton specifically highlighted Pujara’s batting contribution in the 1st innings while interviewing the Indian captain MS Dhoni. It would’ve left many – including most in the Indian media contingent – perplexed whether Atherton had confused Pujara for the centurion Ajinkya Rahane. 

The scorecard had listed Pujara’s contribution as 28 off 117 balls. Few have the eye to recognise the importance of eating up 117 balls on a Day 1 pitch that couldn’t be told from the outfield. On most days, the effort would go unacknowledged. Thankfully for Pujara, Atherton did have the eye for it.

But at the end of the day, professional athletes too are essentially performers and are therefore suckers for validation from their fans. And validation is won through the public opinion on streets; not based on what a complex statistical metric reveals.

And the streets in India are won by white-ball exploits – donning those blues, under the lights and in front of packed houses. The legacies are forged from performances in those proverbial big games. Pujara never had a shot at any of it. It’s not like he never sought it. He just didn’t have the game for it, much as it may have become unfashionable among the purist circles to be truthful about it.

Certain technical intransigencies set in too early in his game for Pujara to truly explore the more dynamic side of batting. He may have had a decent career as a middle order mainstay in India’s ODI lineup, were he to be from a couple generations earlier. But the modern game simply had no place for him. 

This reputation every now and then slipped in and affected the conversation around his place in the Test side too. But every time the team management considered veering towards a brand of cricket Pujara would prove to be a misfit in, they somehow fell back and decided to rather stick with him. Call it inertia. Call it conservative thinking. But Pujara’s pedigree and body of work time and again proved to be too much to move on from.

And that choice stood vindicated each time as it was that very inflexibility and obstinance in Pujara’s batting that proved to be the difference on many minefields India encountered in his time; most notably so in his invaluable contributions like Mohali (2015) and Bangalore (2017). Neither was a hundred and thus harder to sell off as a classic. The BCCI isn’t particularly interested either in making these footages available for the general public to be able to truly tell the batting clinics that they were.

But perhaps in not really being able to tell his greatness lay the essence of Pujara’s cricket. Nothing enamoured you about him really, nothing mesmerised either. You just had to get used to the idea of him being around – unwaveringly, uncompromisingly, often annoyingly, but there. It was about training your eyes to find in those laborious drives and tiring prods a special quirk of Test cricket that cared little for aesthetics.

Pujara had during his own time become a relic of an era long gone and forgotten and not fondly yearned for. The sport may not have the room or even willingness to accommodate another one of his kind. 

It’ll thus be for the connoisseurs, the pundits, and the custodians of the sport to pontificate whether Test cricket will even miss Pujara. What was it that he added? Certainly not colour, certainly not flavour. Perhaps only a hushed, unexciting, inaudible presence occupying for too long an unattended corner that few had any real liking for. And the game was richer for that.   

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