BGT Aus vs Ind – Yashasvi Jaiswal came to Australia with a high ceiling. He just raised it higher

What’s the most fun a batter can have on a cricket pitch?

For the players themselves, a good job is about putting the team in a winning position. Jaiswal left the field having contributed over 50% of the 313 runs scored by India. Many of them were hard earned. He absorbed Australia’s new ball pressure. He resisted their temptations, which took many forms. 62 runs in total, with Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood probing away in the off-stump corridor. Another new highlight in his career, beating the reticence he showed on debut in Roseau. Nathan Lyon was brought in early to try and coax him into going hard to the ball. Four balls in he took the Australian offspinner but seeing the ball was a bit flatter and a bit wider with the potential to turn past his outside edge if he wasn’t careful, he switched from an attacking shot to a defensive shot.

With time, the vast reserves of talent and the levels of concentration that he demanded of himself, Jaiswal discovered pleasures that don’t make it onto the scorecards. He made the Australian bowlers put their heads in their hands. He pouted at them and all they could do in response was give a wry smile. This is not like the old Aussie teams of the past, the ones who saw being aggro as a tactic. But still, a 22-year-old on his first tour here telling their huge left-arm spearhead that he was “coming too slow” and that he had nothing to say in return was way too cool. Especially since it took a little effort to get rid of him in the first place.

Jaiswal threw away his wicket trying to beat himself out of trouble in the third over of an away tour. At the next available opportunity, he got it fixed. It doesn’t happen too often. There have been – in the entire history of Test cricket – only 81 instances where a batter who scored a duck in the first innings turned it around and scored a century in the second. And Jaiswal finds a pretty special place even among these guys. His 161 is the eighth highest score on this list.

The legend of the fab four contains so many stories of fighting difficult conditions and making direct changes to their technique. Steven Smith’s shuffle across the stumps. Virat Kohli ditches a practice of tapping his bat down at the point the bowler is about to deliver and instead waits in a coiled spring position, with the bat high up, positioned over middle and off stump. Jaiswal isn’t that big of a batter yet, and the adjustments he made here weren’t really that drastic. He just willed himself to play closer to the body and get his runs squarer off the wicket when the ball was new. But showing an ability to do that, along with the cricketing sense to then capitalize on his good work when the bowlers tired, suggests that the high ceiling he had already come into this tour with has gone even higher.

These kinds of batters are able to exist outside the constraints of a Test match. This one, for example, was played on a terribly slow away pitch. A large majority of the 27 threes so far in this game should have been fours. But there was this one time when the ball just flew off the green. It happened when Jaiswal combined two shots – an off-drive powered by a flick of his wrist – and it looked so vicious that the highlights should issue a warning. Seconds after this bit of genius, however, he was gone. He couldn’t believe that after all the skill he had shown and the shots he had played, he ended up cutting a short and wide delivery from Mitchell Marsh’s medium-pacer straight into the hands of the backward.

Perth Stadium also needed some time to come to terms with it, but eventually the silence was put into play. The ovation they gave him was beautiful. There was something about it that said the crowd wanted more of him; that even after 161 runs, 397 balls and 18 boundaries, they had not had their fill; that they had found someone worth paying for a ticket; someone who would dominate pub conversations; someone they could copy and look in the mirror; someone they could set as their phone wallpaper; someone to be a part of their lives for a long time to come.

What’s the most fun a batter can have on a cricket pitch? Ask Yashasvi Jaiswal about his time in Perth.