It was clear even in January 2020 that Dhruv Jurel had big ambitions.
Watch this video, produced during that year's Under-19 World Cup in South Africa. "I just want to be a successful cricketer," he says. "I want to play 200 Test match[es] for my India."
He seems to say these words with no thought of how outlandish they must sound coming from anyone, let alone someone who had played no senior cricket at that point. Or with no thought given to the hurdles in front of him, including Rishabh Pant, older than Jurel by only three-and-a-half years and by then already looking set for a long and extraordinary career.
A year-and-a-half into his international career now, Jurel has played seven Tests, and all but one of them has come in the forced absence of Pant. This, typically, is life for the wicketkeeping understudy. Keeping is a specialist job, and for much of cricket's history it was unusual for regular keepers to be good enough with the bat to play Test matches consistently as pure batters.
It's become a lot more common in recent times, of course, and Test teams now routinely line up with one keeper who keeps and one or even two who don't. On Friday, South Africa are likely to line up at Eden Gardens with a keeping keeper in Kyle Verreynne and a non-keeping keeper in Ryan Rickelton.
India, however, haven't had much of a history of non-keeping Test keepers. Of the 13 India players who have kept wicket in 10 or more Tests (this weeds out specialist batters who have occasionally done the job, like Vijay Manjrekar and KL Rahul), only two have played as specialist batters in non-emergency situations (such as the crises of unavailability that led to Wriddhiman Saha's debut and Jurel's appearance in Perth last year): Budhi Kunderan (in three Tests, with Farokh Engineer keeping) and Dinesh Karthik (in seven, with MS Dhoni keeping).
And both Kunderan and Karthik opened the batting when they played alongside another keeper. Stopgap or otherwise, and with or without the big gloves, keeper as opener is certainly an authentic Indian-cricket tradition.
All this to say, then, that Jurel, against South Africa on Friday, could go where no India Test keeper with a career of any real length (sorry, Madhav Mantri and Chandrakant Pandit) has gone before: starting a Test series as a non-keeping middle-order batter, ahead of specialist contenders within the squad. And if it happens, it will happen because Jurel has made himself near-impossible to leave out.
On September 15, before India A's first unofficial Test against Australia A, Jurel had one century in 25 first-class games, and an average of 47.34. It was a record befitting his status as a keeper-batter of immense potential, but even if he had shown signs of an uncommonly good eye, technique and temperament, there was, as yet, not a lot of evidence to force India to pick him ahead of B Sai Sudharsan or Devdutt Padikkal or Sarfaraz Khan or a host of other candidates in a specialist middle-order role.
Since then, Jurel has rattled off 140, 1, 56, 125, 44, 6*, 132* and 127* in five first-class games -- two Tests against West Indies (in the first of which he scored that 125) sandwiched between India A matches against Australia A and South Africa A. His first-class average has jumped to 58.00.
How do you leave out someone with that record, in this form, who has already shown multiple times that he looks entirely at home in Test cricket? This is someone with a match-turning, Player-of-the-Match performance on a tricky, low-bounce pitch in just his second Test. Someone who, in his most recent match, scored a day-one century on a greentop against South Africa A when no other India A player -- their XI included Rahul, Sai Sudharsan, Padikkal and Pant -- went past 24. Someone who had done the same sort of thing for India A -- twin half-centuries when none of his team-mates scored one in either innings -- at the MCG last year.
India must have come very, very close to the conclusion that you don't leave out such a player, in fact, and that you find any possible way to pick him. And they probably don't have to think too long or hard about how they can do this, because there is a fairly obvious way, and a fairly obvious player to leave out.
During the Tests against West Indies, Nitish Kumar Reddy looked like a luxury player India picked because they could afford to pick him -- not so much for his utility for the immediate task at hand but for helping him grow into the game-changing player they believe he can become. India could afford, in that series, to pick an allrounder who is, at his present stage of development, a sixth bowler and, for all his batting promise, a No. 8 behind Ravindra Jadeja and Washington Sundar who are far more accomplished with the bat at present.
Jurel, except in one innings when India promoted Reddy to give him batting time, batted above all three allrounders during the West Indies series, and looked a natural fit in that position. Now, even with Pant back in their XI, there is every chance India will want the batting edge Jurel gives them over this current, work-in-progress version of Reddy, because South Africa's attack is nothing like the severely depleted West Indies bowling they just faced.
Kagiso Rabada is an elite fast bowler with the experience of two previous India Test tours. Keshav Maharaj is one of the world's best fingerspinners and Simon Harmer a hugely experienced one, and both arrive with more subcontinent know-how than they did in 2019-20 and 2015-16 respectively. Senuran Muthusamy was a debutant and far more of a batter than a bowler when he last toured India, but now he's fresh off a Player-of-the-Series performance in Pakistan.
Who would you pick between Jurel and Reddy, against that attack, when you already have five bowlers?
The question, however, isn't quite as simple as that, because there's a specialist batter in India's squad, and that batter, Devdutt Padikkal, has been in pretty good form too, notwithstanding two lean games against South Africa A.
Since his return from a hamstring injury suffered during the IPL, Padikkal has scored a 150 against Australia A and a 96 for Karnataka against Saurashtra in the Ranji Trophy, and if an average of 38.40 across six first-class games in this period doesn't look flash, there's one mitigating factor in that he batted at No. 3 or No. 4 in all his innings, and typically faced a newer ball than Jurel had to.
And if you put aside the question of current form, there's the fact that the selectors and team management have long viewed Padikkal as the next batter in line for a middle-order role. Does a run of inspired form from another candidate change that view? And does that question become more awkward if that candidate is the reserve wicketkeeper?
The answer, in normal circumstances, would be yes, it would be terribly awkward. But present circumstances are far from normal. Jurel isn't on a random burst of inspired form; he's showing India the run-scoring ceiling that everyone who has tracked him since his junior days has believed him capable of.
Right through his career, people with a deep understanding of the game have looked at Jurel and seen a talent worth fast-tracking. Rajasthan Royals picked him in their XIs, or as an Impact Player, when they already had two keeper-batters as good as Sanju Samson and Jos Buttler, and did this when he had only played three previous T20 games.
When he was first picked for India A, Jurel had only played 12 first-class games, and scored just one century. Three first-class matches later, he was in India's Test squad. Then he spent two Tests on the bench before India gave him his cap and left out KS Bharat, who had been in and around the squad as reserve keeper for close to five years.
So many leaps of faith, and so far, Jurel hasn't once given the wise heads who have made them any reason to doubt their judgment. To select him now as a specialist batter in a Test XI that also includes Pant is another leap of faith, but it can't be a particularly difficult one to make.