Cheteshwar Pujara found another gear for his game with the 79-ball 107 ball for Sussex against Warwickshire in the Royal London One-Day Cup match in Birmingham on Friday.
His scorching hit included a run on 22, in which he turned with three innings of four and a six with Liam Norwell at 45 order gave Sussex – which ended up missing four runs – a shot of chasing a 311 mammoth for 50 laps.
The 34-year-old veteran of the Tests is having an incredible time in the County Championship Division Two, where he is the second highest run runner with 1094 runs in 13 rounds with an average of 109. ,40. His five over 100 points for the season include three doubles hundreds, the last of which (231) came on his County Championship debut against Middlesex in July.
Pujara’s 201 unbeaten run in his first game of the season against Derbyshire in April was his first triple-digit score in First Division cricket in more than two years. His last hundred matches before that was in January 2020 for Saurashtra against Karnataka in a Ranji Cup match.
A series of run-ins for Sussex eventually led him to be called up back to the national team for the rescheduled Thursday Test against England in July, in which he scored 13 and 66 while open the ball.
Long a mainstay in the Indian middleweight in Test cricket, Pujara was left out of the squad for the home series against Sri Lanka in February, following a skinny patch that saw him averaging 26, 29 since the beginning of 2020 in the longest time format.
In the test series in South Africa, India’s final game against Sri Lanka, Pujara made only 124 runs in six innings while averaging 20.66. After being dropped from the Test team, Pujara began his trade in the 2021-22 Ranji Trophy season in which he scored 191 runs in five innings with an average of 47.75, including 91 against Mumbai .
Pujara’s slumping form has also significantly reduced his Test career overall average, which is now 43.81. With the race for a spot in the World Test Championship finals heating up, India hopes Pujara can replicate its form in the English domestic round at international level and score points. 19 order Tons of try – which has been absent from him since January 2019 – sooner rather than later.
