Follow UsRavindra Jadeja is enjoying a purple patch in Test cricket with the bat, where he's averaging more than 80 this year, and has added to his golden run by winning the Player of the Series award against the West Indies. He scored a century in the series and also picked up eight wickets.
The promotion to sixth in the batting order and being given a permanent position has worked wonders for him, and he credited coach Gautam Gambhir for giving clarity to his batting role.
“As Gauti bhai (Gambhir) said, I’m at number six now. So I’m thinking more as a proper batsman, and that works for me,” Jadeja said after receiving his Player of the series trophy.
“In the past, for many years, I’ve been batting at number eight, number nine, so my mindset was a little different from what I have now. I’m just trying to spend more time in the middle whenever I get a chance to bat. To be honest, I don’t think too much about records. I just focus on contributing with both bat and ball to help my team win. I always look forward to do that. I feel if I don’t perform with bat and ball, then it doesn’t reflect my value as a player,” he said, speaking after India’s win over West Indies in the second Test
Jadeja also addressed his bowling workload following the retirement of Ravichandran Ashwin. He remarked, “I could get a chance to bowl more overs (after Ashwin’s retirement). But yeah, all in all, we’ve been doing wonderful work as a team, in terms of batting and bowling. I think we know what brand of cricket we’ve been playing over the last five, six months. So that’s a good sign as a team, that we continue to do it over a long period of time.”