Former wicketkeeper batsman Deep Dasgupta lavished praise on Ravindra Jadeja after his brilliant performance with both bat and ball in India's resounding victory in the Boxing Day Test against Australia in Melbourne.
After missing the previous Test in Adelaide due to a hamstring injury and concussion scare, Jadeja batted superbly for his 57 in the first innings against a high-quality Australian pace battery and delivered spells of 1/15 and 2/28 to help the team on the bowling front as well.
Jadeja played a very crucial role in one of India's most impressive Test wins abroad.
"Jadeja replacing Virat Kohli in the 2nd Test was one of the things in my mind because of the way he has batted in the last couple of years. Generally, people think about Jadeja that he is a bowler who can bat, someone who hasn't capitalised much in Test cricket," Dasgupta told Sports Today.
"But I always thought he has actually done better than a lot of batsmen in the last couple of years. He's getting runs across all formats, and also as recently as last year he was the world's top-ranked Test bowler."
Dasgupta said Jadeja has improved constantly over the last few years and can now be counted among the world's premier Test all-rounders, including England's Ben Stokes.
"As of now the way he's batting he definitely is (in the same bracket as Ben Stokes). Even during the IPL I actually said why not him at No. 4 for CSK. He's got a couple of triple hundreds in domestic cricket, getting runs there is not easy," he said.
"For Saurashtra he bats at No. 4 but for India he comes in at 7 or 8. Somehow I felt that he never took his batting seriously enough. In 2017 he was dropped from the side but and I think what kind of prompted him was the fact that he wanted to make himself more useful to the team, not just with the ball but with the bat as well. Because Jadeja, I know for a fact, always wanted to be a batsman."
"He always had the skill set with the bat but earlier on he would play terrible shots and get out. But now he's putting a price to his wicket, he's thinking and batting like a batsman and that I think has changed in his batting in the last few years," Dasgupta added.
Jadeja has the best batting (46.29) and bowling (24.97) averages in Tests among all-rounders since 2016. He'll be extremely crucial to India's chances in the New Year's Test in Sydney as well, starting January 7.
After levelling the Test series 1-1, the visitors are eyeing another win that will help them retain the prestigious Border-Gavaskar Trophy.
