Left-arm spinner Mitchell Santner’s career-best seven-wicket haul and skipper Tom Latham’s audacious half-century in the second innings helped New Zealand take giant strides towards their first series win in India as the Kiwis walked away with a comfortable 301-run lead at stumps on Day 2, this after bundling out India for a paltry 156 on a slow-turning Maharashtra Cricket Association Stadium track on Friday.
Tom Blundell (30 not out) and Glenn Phillips (9 not out) returned unscathed with the BlackCaps building on to their 103-run first innings lead, added 198 runs for the loss of five wickets in their second essay at the end of the second day’s play.
Resuming the day at 16/1 on a track that wasn’t quite the square turner that India lost their last Pune Test on – against Australia in 2016-17 – but had enough turn and variation in turn with balls behaving differently from the same spot, the overnight pair of Yashasvi Jaiswal and Shubman Gill survived the first half hour of play, and managed to get their eyes in with a flurry of boundaries, before Santner turned it in the visitors’ favour during the course of an unchanged spell of 17.3 overs.
Santner, who never had four wickets in an innings before this Test, and with just one first-class five-for to his name, kept attacking the stumps from one end, and as a result six of his seven victims were either bowled or lbw. The part-time off-spinner Glenn Phillips complimented the left-armer well, taking out the two dangerous left-hand batters, Yashasvi Jaiswal and Rishabh Pant.
The turnaround for New Zealand came in the 22nd over of the day when Santner managed to get the umpire’s call his way after beating Gill with one that went straight on. Gill’s departure brought Virat Kohli into the middle amidst loud cheers from the crowd. The joy for them was short-lived as Kohli soon missed a full toss, which he tried to mow to square leg to walk back for 1.
With India reeling at 56/3, and the left-handed pair of Jaiswal and Rishabh Pant in the middle, Tom Latham employed Phillips post the first drinks break. It took Phillips four balls to turn one and take Jaiswal’s edge to slip, before breaking through the defences of Pant, who had been kept quiet with in-out fields, and went to pull one that was slightly short of a length.
Sarfaraz Khan, fresh from scoring a 150 in the Bengaluru Test, also found the going tough on the wicket, and soon perished in his attempt to clear the deepish mid-off without getting to the pitch of Santner’s ball. Ravichandran Ashwin followed him back in Santner’s next over, while Ravindra Jadeja, India’s highest scorer with 36, became the left-arm spinner’s fifth victim after the southpaw was trapped in front.
Washington Sundar, the star of the opening day with a seven-wicket haul, kept delaying the inevitable and propelled India past the 150-run mark with an unbeaten 21-ball 18 but soon ran out of partners as Akash Deep and Jasprit Bumrah perished to Santner, who triggered the collapse that saw the hosts losing six wickets for 53 runs.
Trailing by 103 runs, India, staring at their first series defeat at home in 12 years, needed a bit of luck going their way to avoid such a humiliation. However, Tom Latham, who so far, had a below-par series by his standards, had other ideas, and came out with the kind of intent needed from a leader. The southpaw started off confidently against the Indian spin-duo of Ashwin and Jadeja, who surprisingly failed to extract the turn that their junior partner Sundar managed with the same cherry.
For Latham, the demons in the wicket seemed only on paper, as he bossed the Indian spinners, employing sweeps, reverse sweeps and using his feet to reach the pitch of the ball. Such was his domination over the senior spinning pair that Ashwin’s first spell went for 33 in six overs, and Jadeja went for 24 in three. Washington, however, managed to get the wickets of the in-form Devon Conway, Rachin Ravindra and Daryl Mitchell to claim his career’s first 10-wicket haul but New Zealand found runs easier to come by at the other end.
Towards the end of the day, Latham fell 14 shy of a century after being trapped by Sundar, but did his part to leave New Zealand dreaming of history.
Brief Scores: New Zealand 259 and 198 for 5 (Latham 86, Blundell 30*, Washington 4-56) lead India 156 (Jadeja 38, Santner 7-53, Phillips 2-26) by 301 runs.