Mayank Agarwal – A Superstar in the making
There is a term that endears cricket fanatic as they like to throw it around often. ‘A flurry of runs,’ or so goes the phrase when a batsman is in such good form that he is scoring runs for fun.
For years, Mayank Agarwal has been doing just that in the domestic circuit. He has average of 50 in both List A and First-Class cricket but somehow, he couldn’t translate it at the top level.
Prior to the IPL in 2018, a lot of expectations were placed on him as he was in a superb run of form prior to the tournament. In the end, Agarwal could only disappoint as he ended the season with 120 runs from 11 matches – a far cry from the player that wowed pundits and fans with his displays in the domestic circuit.
While IPL is not an international tournament, it is at the highest-level when it comes to franchise cricket and playing well there often brings a player to the limelight.
Agarwal, however, blew it – but, borrowing and paraphrasing a line from Christopher Nolan’s Batman, we fall only to learn to pick ourselves up again.
And so pick himself up, Agarwal did – and in style. Fast forward to almost 2020 and Agarwal is on the verge of becoming an indispensable member of the Indian Test team – if he already isn’t.
He showed signs of greatness in his debut Test match against Australia in Australia last December as he scored 76 and 42 in Melbourne. He followed it up with a 77 in Sydney but it wasn’t until the home Test series against South Africa that he really came into the fray.
In October this year, he scored 215 runs in his very first Test innings on Indian soil against South Africa. He backed it up with a 108 in the next Test in Pune and finished the three-match Test series with just a little under 350 runs.
Agarwal picked up against Bangladesh where he left off against South Africa as he scored a mammoth 243 against the Tigers in Indore last month. With that, he now has 872 runs from just 9 Test matches at an average of slightly over 67.
If one looks at the way he bats now, they could say that Agarwal has matured a lot over the last year, adding a rugged approach to his natural astuteness. In an interview with Cricinfo, he stated that he has added the ability to take into consideration the situation of a match to his natural style of play.
“The conversations we had [with the domestic coaches] were about playing your natural game, understanding the situation, adapting to the situation, [and] being smart about it. But also not losing your strength, not losing your key factors as a player - that X-factor which is special to you. But also understanding where you need to curb what to suit yourself to that situation.
“I would say that I would be in a bit of a hurry previously. When I was batting on 70-odd, I would be in a hurry. But now having gone through that, I understand that I can be a lot calmer through that.”
Indeed, in the Test matches against South Africa and Bangladesh, Agarwal exuded a sense of calm like never seen before. He knew his physical strengths and was aware of the fact that he was now more capable of playing the longer innings due to his increases stamina from the use of Fast&Up supplements in his daily nutrition intake.
With physical endurance comes mental stability and thanks to the addition of Fast&Up to his daily food consumption, Agarwal has found the perfect balance of the mind and the body.
And when a player achieves that, everything else falls in place.