Stuart Binny had made his Test debut against England in 2014. He recalled his first game and MS Dhoni's message for him ahead of the final day of the match. India had to save the Test match at Nottingham, and Dhoni had a chat with Binny before the fifth day.
The debutant was under a lot of pressure and Dhoni told him to take responsibility on the last day to save the match. Binny was nervous when he went out to bat but still managed to get 78 important runs.
“A special day in my life to receive my Test cap #281 from Mahi bhai [Dhoni]. That Test match again didn’t go the way we wanted to. We were under the pump on the last day. I had scored 1 in the first innings, so obviously [I had] a sleepless night before that second innings when I walked in to bat,” Binny told SportsKeeda.
“And Mahi bhai told me, ‘Listen, we need you to bat 4-5 hours to save the Test match’. And I looked at him like I can’t believe he said something like that to me because I wasn’t even thinking clearly at that time. I was nervous, I was playing my first Test match and hadn’t got runs.”
India was 167/3 at the end of fourth day's play with Virat Kohli and Ajinkya Rahane in the middle. At the lunch of the final day, they found themselves at a place of bother with 6 down on 230. Binny and Ravindra Jadeja had put up a fight with a fifty runs partnership for the seventh wicket.
“I walked in, and I normally take a leg-stump guard, and I don’t know what I was thinking that I asked the umpire, ‘Can I have a middle stump, please?’ Then I heard myself and [realized] I don’t take that guard. I was that nervous, I didn’t know what I was doing. I just walked around, and till I got the first 10 runs, my mind was so muddled, I wasn’t thinking clearly at all,” Binny said.
“Then the innings slowly built and gave me some confidence. I had batted close to two hours and I was batting on 36, [when] I knew that I definitely belonged at that stage. It was 8-9 years of domestic cricket at that spot – either saving matches or trying to put a game on. It’s experience, I think, that got me through that day. I would have loved to have a Test hundred on debut but it didn’t work out that day. I’ll take a 78 any day of my life.”
India managed to save the Test match after Binny and Bhuvneshwar Kumar scored a half-century each.
