Which is why, when Jadeja ran through the middle-order to take three wickets in quick succession, every dismissal, despite the pressure it was piling on Mitchell, came as a breather. The substitute fielders would run in with fluids and ice packs and Mitchell would get a couple of minutes to cool his head and neck. When he eventually got through to tea, with Ish Sodhi at the other end, it felt like he had finished a marathon.
The first thing he did after reaching the dressing room was to jump in an ice bath. “I think it was probably more the first hour after lunch with me and Will Young batting, that was seriously warm. That last half an hour before tea, I was just trying to be switched on for when the bowler is bowling and trying to conserve as much energy as I could in between balls. Try and concentrate on breathing, and trying to get my core body temperature down and obviously, that tea break was good timing. I jumped in the ice bath and sat in there for about ten minutes. So I definitely came out feeling a lot better after that,” Mitchell would explain later in the evening.
Twenty minutes on, he came onto the field as a different person. Mitchell knew enough to be cautious against Jadeja, who was the most dangerous on the red soil surface, but took Washington on. First, he went deep to whack the offie over deep midwicket and then, used his feet to Washington down the ground not once but twice. With wickets tumbling around him, he did not have much time to get to his century and take New Zealand to a better total. Amidst all this, he would survive some close calls but looked set to get to the three-figure mark once again at this venue — he had scored a century in Mumbai during the ODI World Cup semifinal last year.
However, on the first ball of the 66th over, he had a brain fade. Washington bowled a flatter delivery and the New Zealander guided it directly into the hands of Rohit Sharma at the slips. A frustrated Mitchell punched his bat in angst before taking the long walk back — 18 short of a century, with the 82 runs he scored worth its weight in gold.
Had it not been for him, the visitors would not have managed 200, forget about the 235 they eventually made. At stumps, the hosts were 86/4. And by the time this Test ends, his determination and ability to grind it out on a day where everyone struggled, where the match went into fast forward mode, could well become a differential factor between the winning and losing team.
