KL Rahul Recalled His Young Self To Find His Feet Back In Test Cricket

While K.L. Rahul's success as an opening batsman in the first two Tests has been attributed by the team management to 40-50 days of preparation in the nets in England, a mental shift to his younger days may have also helped him bury the burden of past failures.

Rahul, who played Test cricket after almost two years and only because the regular openers were injured and their replacements not arrived, is India's most successful batsman in the ongoing Test series against England with 244 runs, including a century (129) in the second Test and 84 in the first Test.

"We could not meet personally and do anything because of Covid-19 but we talked on mind performance [ahead of England tour]. We got him back to younger days, how he was in his younger days," Samuel Jayraj Muthu, who coached Rahul through his teens and developed him into a batsman in the initial phase of his career.

"Playing at this level, it is about mind. We told him that you should bat like a kid, like 16-17 years old when he got three successive hundreds," Jayraj told IANS from Mangalore.

"He is matured and 29 years. His basics are very strong and technically very strong from younger days. Any small adjustments is easy for him. So we just spoke about things like what was his way, balance, positioning when he was a kid. How he played, how he left the ball."

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