The many moods and tempos of Jaiswal and Gill

A little under an hour of the Delhi Test had elapsed when Yashasvi Jaiswal decided he had had enough of letting Anderson Phillip bowl on his terms. Phillip, at that point, had bowled 5.3 overs and conceded just ten runs.

Jaiswal had mostly been away from the strike when Phillip had bowled. He had faced only four balls from him, and shouldered arms to all of them. He had batted watchfully against the other two West Indies seamers as well, and was on 10 off 36 balls. He had left alone 12 of those balls.

Now, he decided he was done with all that. Phillip bowled this one full, angled a fair way away from off stump, and may have perhaps expected another leave. Instead, out of seemingly nowhere, came a straight wallop of fearsome wind-up and flat, lethal trajectory. This was no drive with head over the ball; this was an elemental hit with head thrown back. Phillip, following through, was fortunate his head was a foot or so wide of the ball's path.

Everything about that shot, and the passage of play leading up to it, was pure Jaiswal. He can leave every third ball he faces. He can make a stadium sit up with a shot of pure violence. He can bat in all sorts of moods and tempos, often in the same innings, to the point where it becomes impossible to define the kind of batter he is in Test cricket.

In one sense, though, it's very, very easy to define him. Jaiswal is a run-scorer. Send him out with bat in hand, anywhere in the world, against any kind of attack, and you can be pretty sure he'll find a way to score runs.

One of many, many ways. Jaiswal has now gone past 70 on 14 occasions in Test cricket, and those innings have come at strike rates ranging from 40.38 - when he made 84 off 208 balls while attempting to save the MCG Test last year - to 141.17 - when he smashed 72 off 51 balls during India's push to make victory possible in a heavily rain-affected Test against Bangladesh in Kanpur.

Those 14 innings have ticked all but two of the ten strike-rate "decades" from the 40s to the 140s. Only the 120s and 130s are still waiting to be achieved.

Over the course of three sessions on Friday and a small fraction of one on Saturday, Jaiswal scored 175 at 67.82, and that strike rate, so close to his career strike rate of 66.33, was an indication of just how comfortable he was on a flat Delhi pitch against a modest West Indies attack, scoring briskly while never looking in a hurry or getting too greedy, batting through a whole day's play without ever looking weary or seeming to suffer dips in focus.

We've become so used to this that we almost take it for granted, and forget that he's not yet 24.

The dismissal, in the second over of day two, came first as a shock. Did he really get out, when 200 - even 300, who knows - seemed within reach? But then it began to make sense. If it had to happen, it had to be a run-out. It had to be that particular kind of run-out. It's one of Jaiswal's minor vulnerabilities that he often starts running as soon as his bat meets the ball; if he misjudges how firmly he's struck the ball or how far it is from a fielder, he's liable to realise this only when he's already halfway down the pitch.

Jaiswal, in short, was looking like only he could get himself out. Through most of day one, the other mode of dismissal that had seemed vaguely likely was a top edge off an over-eager square cut. He had been out like this in Ahmedabad last week, but he seldom misses a chance to attempt the shot, even when he doesn't have a lot of room to work with.

And it gets him a lot of runs, and quick runs. Against pace, he's scored 399 runs off 243 balls through his Test career with variants of the cut - cut, late cut, upper cut, ramp, dab, steer, as classified in ESPNcricinfo's ball-by-ball data - while being dismissed five times. That's an average of 79.80 and a strike rate of 164.19; so what if he's achieved all that with a control percentage of just over 71?

Those numbers are a small window into Jaiswal's mind. It's the mind of a batter who understands percentages, who knows that cutting so frequently can lead to plays-and-misses or edges, but understands that he'll still be batting next ball if he's played and missed, and that while top edges might occasionally get him out, the odds suggest they are likelier to send the ball flying over or past the slips cordon if he flashes hard enough.

If these are indeed the workings of Jaiswal's mind, it's a mind fixated not on batting as a pursuit of technical perfection but on batting as a means of scoring runs.

"On Jaiswal, I'll say he's very clever in terms of his batting," Ravindra Jadeja said in his press conference at the end of day two. "He knows which bowler to attack and which bowler to play out. His maturity level is very good. It's not like he looks to hit every bowler. He has a very good idea of which situation to attack in, and at which time to attack.

"I think it's very good when a batsman knows what shot he needs to play at what time. I think this has contributed a lot to his success, and the fact that he's made so many big scores, match after match."

Jaiswal has turned five of his seven Test centuries so far into 150-plus scores, and two of them into doubles. The highly memeable helmet-palm with which he greeted his dismissal in Delhi suggested that 175 was a long way short of the number he had set out to put next to his name when Saturday dawned.

It fell to his partner, Shubman Gill, to take on the mantle of insatiable run-hooverer.

Gill has always had the smarts to know where his run-scoring opportunities lie in any situation. He was just 20, and only in his third Test, when the then India batting coach Vikram Rathour asked him what his plans were if Australia went short to him after lunch on that magical final day at the Gabba.

Here's Rathour's recollection of that conversation, from this profile of Gill by Nagraj Gollapudi:

"And the kid had a great answer. He said that the end [Mitchell] Starc was bowling, it was a shorter boundary on the leg side. So he said, 'I'm not going to pull from the other end if they bowl short, but I will pull from the end Starc is bowling if they bowl short, because I'm pretty sure that I can clear this boundary most times. If it's below my shoulder, I'll look to play it down, but if it's up, I'll look to play it over, and if it's on this [on] side, I will leave. And if it's on this [off] side, I will maybe play an uppercut.' [...] I told him, 'Boss, you have it sorted. So do just that, whatever you want to do.' He had a lot of clarity [about] what he was looking to do. And with logic - he was not just talking nonsense, he was not bluffing his way."

All that ability and all those smarts, but it took a while for Gill to translate them into consistent run-scoring in Test cricket, which only really began to happen during last year's five-match home series against England. And it was only this year, in England, that Gill got his first chance to play a full Test series, home or away, on pitches that gave him a chance to think of batting big time and again.

In retrospect, it should have surprised no one that he finished that tour with the second-highest bilateral series aggregate by any India batter anywhere, anytime. It's exactly the kind of thing everyone's expected from him ever since he was a teenager.

For all that, though, he still gives the impression sometimes that he can get bored if the contest isn't really challenging him. Last week in Ahmedabad, he had been out immediately after reaching his fifty, attempting a reverse-sweep, an echo of his dismissal soon after reaching his hundred in Visakhapatnam last year against England.

He's showing more and more frequently, however, that he can bat in that insatiable Jaiswal way too. He followed Visakhapatnam with the grittiest half-century of his career, a match-winning fourth-innings effort in Ranchi. He followed Leeds this year, where his first-innings dismissal on 147 was one of numerous dismissals of India batters not quite making the bowlers earn their wicket, with a monumental 269 in Birmingham.

And now he followed Ahmedabad with a century of ruthless, getting-the-job-done batsmanship. He played his shots, and played them freely because the situation allowed him to, and asked him to, with India building up to a declaration, but he played Shubman Gill shots. He brought out the slog-sweep when the left-arm spinners left the leg-side boundary unprotected. He brought out the back-foot jab either side of point, a shot he nowadays shelves early on if there's movement for the fast bowlers, but any movement off this day-two Delhi pitch was minimal. He used his feet with aplomb, against spin and medium-pace, and played that pick-up whip over the leg side that he employs so profitably in the shorter formats.

Each time he played a shot like this, it seemed less a reaction to the bowling than an expression of what he felt he needed to do at that moment, against a particular bowler who had set a particular field. But he knew exactly whom to take on and whom not to: he scored at above four an over against six of West Indies' seven bowlers, but just 12 runs off 64 balls from Jomel Warrican, who constantly challenged India's batters with his deceptive trajectory and the odd instance of square turn.

It was the kind of innings Sachin Tendulkar and Mohammad Azharuddin routinely played in home Tests in the 1990s, or that Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman routinely played in the 2000s, or that Cheteshwar Pujara and Virat Kohli routinely played in the period from 2016 to 2019, when India played many of their home Tests on traditional Indian pitches that produced big first-innings totals.

India went away from those pitches in the 2021-24 period, with the pressure of World Test Championship points, the fear of draws on flat pitches, and the fear of toss-influenced results like Chennai 2021 pushing them to prepare a succession of square turners in home Tests. After going down 3-0 to New Zealand last year and falling prey to the pitfalls of dustbowls, India are now making an effort, as Gill confirmed before this series, to try and restore the balance between bat and ball in their home pitches.

Jaiswal and Gill couldn't have asked for a better time to be batting in home Tests. They missed out on big scores in Ahmedabad, but they were never going to miss out two Tests in a row.