India vs West Indies 2013: The big battle - Rohit Sharma vs Sunil Narine

Sunil Narine and Rohit Sharma have battled in the the IPL in the past

Now that the master has retired, things should move on. It’s time for some more action on the field. The Test series against West Indies proved to be rather dull affairs as both the Tests finished in under less than six days of play. Apart from Shane Shillingford there wasn’t much spark seen among the visitors.

Their batting looked pedestrian. As the legendary Captain Clive Lloyd remarked: “we looked more like a drunk side”. But the same West Indians are an altogether different side in limited overs cricket and have made a name for themselves in the recent past with some stellar individual performances.

Chris Gayle looked clueless against the red ball, which is the exact opposite to his liking for a white ball. They say he is a different man at 9 pm than what he is at 9 am. Kieron Pollard, who matches Gayle’s ferocity of hitting sixes and plucking the balls out of thin air and send them sailing over the boundary lines, has joined the squad. Captain Dwayne Bravo can be a handful with both bat and ball on any given day and Jason Holder’s high arm release makes life  difficult for batsmen.

However, the most fascinating of the duels would not be Gayle versus Shami; rather, it has to be that between the new favourites on the circuit: Rohit Sharma versus Sunil Narine. Rohit is in the form of his life. If there is anything called the purple patch, this is it. His last three innings were 209, 177 and 111*.

Rohit was the most prolific scorer in the ODI series versus Australia and also registered a number of records against his name including that of the highest number of sixes hit and the most number of runs scored in a bilateral ODI series; he has snared the man of the series awards in both the series which India played recently. And most importantly, this is the Rohit Sharma which everybody wanted to see.

The same lad had almost always been a prolific scorer in IPL and Champions League matches, but somehow could not translate those performances into his national statistics. But now he seems to have come to terms with the mystery and learnt the secret of scoring when in national colours. Rohit has been praised by cricket connoisseurs all over the world and the way he hits ball makes the game look so simple. He has blossomed in the role of opener and has taken the responsibility to build the innings with the likes of Virat Kohli and Shikhar Dhawan.

Sunil Narine with his mystery deliveries will be the force West Indian captain will resort to when needed most. His wrong ‘un has been a difficult weapon to counter and he has achieved considerable amount of success with it, foxing almost everybody in the business. Narine will have  a greater role to play in the series, as he might be expected to stem the flow of runs as well as take wickets. The series against Australia was a very high scoring series and each wicket came at an expense of around 50-odd runs.

Holder versus Dhawan and Bravo versus Kohli are the other possibilities of the hypothetical battles which might steal the show, but the one mentioned above is the one which is poised to be the main attraction of the match.