Arshdeep braces up for the big leap to Test cricket

Arshdeep Singh, a white-ball specialist, earns his first Test call-up for India's tour of England.

Close your eyes and visualise Arshdeep Singh at the top of his bowling mark. What you are likely to see is the gangly left-armer, donning a black patka on his head and India’s blue shade over his vest, gliding into his delivery stride and swinging a new white Kookaburra either way in the endeavour to snare early wickets.

When that ball loses its sheen and turns soft in the latter phases, Arshdeep shifts his attention to predominantly targeting the blockhole and clattering the stumps. A sharp bouncer and a slower knuckle-ball, amidst other variations, make an appearance as and when his ever-ticking brain deems fit.

In all of this, there is nothing of Arshdeep with the red cherry and in creamy white flannels that you probably envisage. Understandably so, for he has only played a handful of First Class matches in a professional career that began seven years ago.

Since bursting onto the scene as a skinny teenager who won the 2018 U-19 World Cup in New Zealand, alongside India’s newest Test captain Shubman Gill, the pacer from Punjab has had a total of 21 matches in whites, which translates to just three appearances on average per year. In the same period, he has turned out in 169 T20 and 33 50-over matches.

It had pigeonholed him to a certain extent as a white-ball specialist, but he could engineer an alteration to that image over the next few months. On Saturday afternoon, at the BCCI headquarters in south Mumbai, the 26-year-old was named by chief selector Ajit Agarkar as a member of an 18-man squad that will embark on a five-Test tour of England next month. It is Arshdeep’s first-ever call-up to India’s Test squad, and he must be chomping at the bit like a painter with a blank canvas to get his expedition in the longest format underway.

If the opportunity to wear the whites and make the red ball move to his tune at the highest level had hitherto eluded Arshdeep, it was partly an unintended by-product of his excellence in the shortest format. Since his T20I debut in 2022, he has turned himself into an indispensable member of the Indian team in the slam-bang affair with 99 scalps in 63 matches — he is the country’s leading wicket-taker in the format. So splendid has he been that he has even been entrusted with the lead role on the occasions when Jasprit Bumrah has been convalescing on the treatment table.

But his contributions in the shortest format have come at a cost, even though Arshdeep wouldn’t construe it that way. With a tightly wound international calendar requiring the wiry athlete to spend much of his time with the limited-overs teams, he hasn’t had the opportunity of going through the grind of bowling long spells and spending tiresome days under the sun in the First Class game. Not often enough anyway.