Stats - India were at their best when Pujara was in the middle

With an aggregate of 7195 runs in his 103 Tests, Cheteshwar Pujara ranks eighth in the list of top run-getters in the format for India. Only Rahul Dravid has more runs for India from No. 3 than Pujara's 6529, which is a testament to his quality at the top of the order.

However, with Pujara, the runs he scored only told part of the story. His true value was in the number of balls he consumed at the crease, ensuring that the batters who followed had the luxury of facing a ball and a bowling attack considerably less fresh than at the start of the innings.

Over the duration of Pujara's Test career - from October 2009 to June 2023 - only four batters faced more deliveries than his 16,217 in the format: Joe Root, Alastair Cook, Steven Smith and Azhar Ali. That, in a nutshell, illustrates Pujara's value to the India team for almost 14 years. In terms of batting averages, Pujara sits at a modest 11th position among the 19 players who scored at least 5000 runs during his career span, but with him, just the runs scored doesn't paint the complete picture.

In the 103 Tests, Pujara was dismissed once every 98.3 deliveries. That puts him in fifth position among those 19 batters mentioned above, which is significantly better than his rank based on averages. In an age when aggression and taking the attack to the bowlers is increasingly seen as the best approach, Pujara belonged to a dwindling tribe that believed in grinding down an attack. It is an approach that attracted a fair share of detractors, but it also fetched him over 7000 Test runs and 19 hundreds.

Among India batters, Pujara was clearly tougher to dismiss than the two others who made the 5000-run cut-off: Virat Kohli (8479 runs at 48.72 in that period) faced 88 deliveries per dismissal, while Ajinkya Rahane (5066 runs at 38.96) lasted only 78.5 deliveries per dismissal, almost 20 fewer than Pujara.

Some of his most impressive stonewalling efforts came in Australia, where he scored 993 runs in 11 Tests at 47.28. Even more impressively, he faced an astounding 2657 deliveries to score those 993 runs, that's a strike rate of 37.37. That means he faced 126.5 deliveries per dismissal in Australia, which is easily the best among the 66 overseas batters who have played at least 15 innings in Australia since 1990. Pujara's is almost 15 balls clear of the next-best, Gary Kirsten.

Of those 993 runs, 521 came in one series - by far the greatest of his career - in 2018-19, when he faced a monumental 1258 deliveries in seven innings. In fact, two of his six Player-of-the-Match awards in Tests came in that series.

As with all batters whose strength is to bat time, Pujara's value is gleaned not only by the runs he scored but also by the runs scored at the other end while he was at the crease, holding his end up. Pujara himself scored 7195 runs in 103 Tests, but while he was at the crease, India scored 16,258 partnership runs. As a percentage of total runs scored by India in those innings, Pujara's contribution stands at a healthy 30.4. That means 30.4% of India's total runs were scored while Pujara was at the crease (in the innings in which he batted).

Among the 28 India batters who have batted in at least 100 Test innings, only two have a higher percentage: Dravid (36.1%) and Sunil Gavaskar (34.9%). Following Pujara's 30.4 are two other all-time greats of Indian batting, Sachin Tendulkar (29.7%) and Kohli (29.1%). Both Tendulkar and Kohli have strike rates in the mid-50s compared to Pujara's mid-40s, which explains why the percentage is higher for Pujara. In the overall list for all teams with the same cut-off, Len Hutton is on top with 36.9%, followed by Dravid and then Steven Smith, at 35.5).

Doing the same exercise with balls-faced data instead of runs scored, and comparing with his contemporaries instead of overall, Pujara is in sixth place among 42 players who have batted at least 100 times since his debut in October 2010. While Pujara faced 16,217 deliveries in his Test career, he was around at the crease when the opposition bowlers bowled 32,148 balls, which is 33.2% of the total deliveries faced by India in the innings he batted in. Only five batters have been around for a higher percentage of team deliveries faced in these last 15 years.

However, while it's true that his long stays at the crease were worth more than just the runs he scored, it's also indisputable that the last five years of his international career were less than prolific. The 2018-19 series in Australia - where he scored 521 runs in seven innings - stood out, but it was one of only two series out of his last 13, where he batted at least three times, when his average touched 40. The other such series was against Bangladesh. In this period, since the start of 2018, Pujara averaged only 34.13 in 49 Tests, and scored only five hundreds from 86 innings. It's a huge drop from an average of nearly 53 in his first 54 Tests (90 innings). The rate of scoring hundreds also fell away dramatically, from one every 6.4 innings to one every 17.2 innings.

Because of this huge drop in numbers, Pujara's career average fell by more than nine runs, from the high of 52.96 at the end of 2017 to 43.6 at the end of his career. It isn't quite the 50-plus career average he would have hoped for when he was at the peak of his powers, but it's hardly a number to be scoffed at. The proof of that is in the numbers of No. 3 batters who have played for India since Pujara's last Test: in 24 matches (45 innings), they have collectively averaged 31.95, which was only marginally better than what Pujara managed in his last 24 - 31.51 - despite his form dwindling. Even in that phase, he faced 81.2 deliveries per dismissal, compared with 56.3 by the No. 3s since then. As always, with Pujara, the runs only tell half the story.