Former Team India fielding coach R Sridhar has recalled a conversation with the batter Hanuma Vihari during the home series against South Africa in 2019. Vihari played the first Test of the series and scored 10 (24) in the first innings. He was still fighting for his place and at that time he went to Sridhar and asked to be dropped from the playing XI for the team’s good.

In an interview with Cricbuzz, Sridhar said: “During that Vizag Test, I remember he came to me and said ‘Sir, I should not have played this Test’. Hanuma had played that Test because he had got a hundred in the previous Test in Jamaica. In India, we play with certain combinations… We still won that Test match on Day 5 but it took the class of Shami to get us there and took so much out of him.”

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He again added: “He said, ‘Sir, next Test I shouldn’t play. We should play with an extra bowler because the way we are batting, we don’t need six batters’. Rohit was on fire in that series, Mayank was batting brilliantly at that time and it was also his first Test in India. Hanuma knew that the captain of the team would always keep the team ahead of him. He understands.”

Team India did what Hanuma Vihari wanted and added pacer Umesh Yadav in the playing XI as his replacement in the second Test. The hosts won it convincingly by an innings and 137 runs and won the series 3-0.

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He said: “Hanuma is a terrific reader of the game. Tactically, he’s one of the best I have seen, he has such a good sense of the game. Even with the Indian team, when he was in the reserves, he used to come up with very good tactical inputs. In Melbourne (in 2018), when Ravi (Shastri) told him that you might have to open, he put his hand up and said, ‘no problem. I will play’. He understands the game, knows what the team requires and I haven’t seen him get flustered by not getting his opportunities to play.”