The 155* That No Average Will Record

There is a scorecard that will not enter any official average. Three fields are filled in — name: Yashasvi Jaiswal, score: 155, status: not out. Two remarks sit beside them: the weather, "very cold," and the label, "unofficial Test." The rest of the columns are blank. No date. No venue. No record of who was bowling. No record of which innings it was. And no line stating whether the fixture even carried first-class status.

In reporting, the blank fields usually speak loudest. A report with no date in it is telling you something about its date.

I keep a folder of deals that never happened. It is thicker than the other one. This 155* belongs in that same cabinet — like a transfer that was discussed, that was almost agreed, and that never made it onto paper.

The status has to be settled first, because the entire reading rests on one word. The ICC keeps a register of Test status. A five-day match between two Test-playing nations is a Test only when it is entered in that register. A tour warm-up, a match against a Board XI, a practice fixture — these can run four days, can produce two innings, can look exactly like the thing. They are not the thing. Their numbers go into a different ledger, and nobody opens that ledger.

The money sits in the same place. Under the board's revised match-fee schedule of 2026, one Test is worth ₹15 lakh. Unofficial tour matches do not appear on that schedule. So the earnings from this 155*, read from that column, are zero. The rung above is equally clear — the central-contract tiers the board publishes each cycle are decided on official red-ball numbers. To climb that ladder you need matches that exist in the register.

Then the weather. Cold in New Zealand is not meteorological colour; it is a technical condition. Cold, damp air is denser, the ball moves off the seam more, and a green top combined with that produces an angle where half the batter's game is decided by his feet, not his hands. It has historically been the hardest overseas stop for Indian openers — coping with Australian bounce is one technique, coping with New Zealand seam is another.

Across the last two New Zealand tours I have kept a session sheet. Three columns: how many balls were left alone, how many were hit through the off side, and how many times the batter played the ball after it had already passed the pitch. The third column is the cruellest. A batter who plays early there does not last three days.

*The first hard conclusion this 155 supports is about defensive technique, not talent.** An unbeaten 155 in multi-day cricket means the batter held one intention across fifty or sixty overs, possibly many more — leave the ball on its length, respect the seam, wait for the boundary. In the cold that waiting is expensive, because the hands go numb and the urge to play a shot rises. A batter who finished 155 not out there defeated his own impulse, not the bowler.

The second conclusion concerns the line travelling alongside the innings — "process, routine, discipline." Those are three words from a press line, not three data points. A player's statement about his own work is not evidence of that work; it is part of his self-narrative. I write it in the margin of the notebook, not in the main column. Marginal notes are often correct and almost always unusable.

Third, and most important: the one field that matters most in this entire report is the empty one — the quality of the attack. Any large innings is valued on two things, runs and opposition. If the first-choice attack was bowling, the 155* carries real weight. If it was a development attack, a sixteenth man keeping wicket, the same innings becomes a story about a good net session. The three available facts do not settle that distinction, so I am not issuing a Test-readiness certificate on the back of it.

Read through selection, this is a roster event, not a ranking event. India's opening slot is an open window with three or four names looking through it at once. In that situation an unofficial-match 155* changes nothing on the roster, but it does draw a faint pencil line down the order — because selectors hold so little evidence that they will use whatever evidence arrives.

Let me sharpen that. Indian cricket treats bench strength as a talent question. It is a price question. How quickly a player gets a chance is set by his valuation cycle, less by his run count. A young opener who can bat three sessions in away seam conditions is cheaper on the contract ladder than a player who makes four hundred on domestic pitches and is out in the third over abroad. That arithmetic is done in a meeting room, not on a field.

One more column belongs here: age. Jaiswal sits inside the generational window India's Test side will pass through over the next three years. For any selection committee, "how good is he in three years" outranks "how good is he now." The 155* answers the second question, not the first.

Now the part where I disagree with the room.

The natural reaction forming around this innings is that the "unofficial" label weakens it. I read it the other way: the unofficial label makes it the most convenient document a selector has. It can be used, and it can be discarded, and neither move requires a defence. An official Test 155* creates selection pressure, and the system dislikes pressure. An unofficial score creates no pressure; it creates an option. Systems prefer options.

My second objection is to the cold. Cricket's language treats "very cold weather" as a universal handicap. It is not. Cold is difficult for the batter who plays the ball after it leaves the pitch, and easier for the one who lets it come. Cold is a filter, not a blanket excuse. A batter who passes through that filter for fifty overs tells you something. A batter who is out in the first ten overs tells you something too. The report says he passed through it. That is thin information, but it points in one direction only.

My third objection is to the media cycle about to start. The "process" line is the most dangerous document in the file because it looks like data and is not. Building a maturity story out of a warm-up innings is easy, and that story breaks two months later when a seam bowler finds the same batter's outside edge for the third time in an official series. I have watched this film. It always ends the same way: the folder changes.

In a frozen market, the only thing still moving is the price of patience.

The next domino is clear, and it is not in the 155. It is in the match that follows. If the same batter repeats the same leaving discipline in the official Test, this innings becomes a citation — reporters will call it a signal and selectors will call it proof. If the official numbers run the other way, the 155 goes quietly back into the cabinet it came from, and nobody will remember it was ever out.

I have twenty years of scorecards like this. Most of them are not in any average. They are how you know who is coming.