A month after his forgettable debut at MCG, meet KL Rahul the role-model

Here he is on a Sunday morning in a suburban cricket club teeming with boys and girls who have been just given a speech by their coach before his arrival. “Don’t neglect your studies and also a word to the parents, who I find more ambitious than kids,” the coach says, just as Rahul enters. Clad in a formal shirt, he looks every bit a model boy who would be adored by parents — courteous, patient, and earnest in answering the kids’ questions. Some of the best questions, the hard ones, come from the little ones.

What happened in that first Test? That shy smile again. “I was disappointed. To be honest with you, very, very disappointed. I didn’t know where I was going after that. Self-doubts about whether I belonged at this level or not,” he says. But team-mates, young and in his age-group, helped. “They were more or less my age, and played 10-15 Tests, and they understood my fear and disappointment.” The team-mates, he says, told him that this can happen at this level purely out of the own self-expectations one brings into Test cricket.

Later, after the boys have gotten their autographs, he elaborates on those few roller-coaster days of his first Test match. “Even now when I sit down and think about it, I can’t say much about it. I don’t know,” he says. “I wanted to get my first Test boundary. To hit a four.” He was dismissed on three.

He also talked about how he was more nervous in the second Test. You can easily picture why: If he had failed in Sydney, the pressure would have been so much even for a captain who believed in him to get him one more chance. And more importantly, the pressure that comes internally.

“I don’t know where I was going (after that first Test). I was very disappointed. I cut the phone off. My team-mates were all helpful and even my coach said, ‘It’s better that I failed because had I succeeded, that success would have got to my head,'” he says. Rahul isn’t naive enough to not know that those were just words of consolation. So when he walked out to bat in the following Test, he says he told himself: “This time I am not going to dressing room cheaply.”

“It was then that I realised that it was just matter of two overs of nervousness. I was okay after that. I know I can play the shots I tried in the first Test but I think I went too early into my innings with those shots. I play that in India but not so early,” the 22-year old adds.

So what was it like to face Mitchell Johnson, asks a kid. He asks it in awe, such awe that all eyes in the cricket club turn immediately to Rahul.

“I can’t say much as I just lasted two balls!” he says. “You know, like you all, recently I had watched Mitchell Johnson destroy England. And here I was, facing him. It was him and me. And…” Again that shy smile.

Perhaps KL Rahul was just another cricket tragic who walked into the biggest dream of his life at Melbourne and didn’t know how to react. Luckily for him, unlike most, he managed to recover so quickly in Sydney. And therein lies hope for Indian cricket fans.