England vs India, 2nd Test: Can Lord's give India back its real Ajinkya Rahane?

The 2014 tour to England for the Indian cricket team was unlike any other for 90 percent of the members of that squad. Five Test matches spread across the length-and-breadth of the country in a span of six weeks meant that the recovery time between matches wasn't as much, that you had to find ways to conserve energy, that you had to be at the top of your game, your mind, body and everything else, switched on always.

Expectedly, the young side faltered and towards the end at The Oval, the wheels had come off. India were looking like a team which did not belong in the arena, they were looking downcast as if someone had knocked their stuffing out completely.

However, the end of that series was a complete contrast to how it had begun. At Trent Bridge, the side exuded confidence for certain parts, both with bat and ball and heading into Lord's, it was the hosts who were on the backfoot.

Sensing that, they dished out a pitch, which looked like it was stripped from the greenest grass available in the country and craned and placed inside Lord's. Whoever saw that deck knew two things.

1. The team winning the toss would bowl,

2. Batting was going to be nightmarish.

As expected, both happened. At Tea, India were tottering at 145 for 7, with only Ajinkya Rahane and the tail left to lift the sinking ship.

Whoever had seen the right-hander up until that point felt that he had the je ne sais quoi as a batsman. He had the technique, the style and could score runs at a decent pace. What they wanted to see now was temperament- did he have the ability to rally batsmen much-less accomplished than him to help India reach a total they could compete with?

During the course of the next couple of hours, he showed that and more. He drove, cut, pulled and then reached a wonderful century by the end of the day. He doubled India's score before getting dismissed for 103 at the fag end of the day.

Four years on, Rahane returns to the very venue, in a different mindset, looking and searching for a significant score. Thanks to his ability to counter tough conditions, I have always likened him to someone who is opposite to that of a Computer Science engineering student, who tends to ace C programming but fails Java programming.

Rahane has almost always stood in scenarios where there is strife. It's where he earns his bread and butter. It's what brings the best out of him and then the same player would return to his home base and would scamper for a run and a run there.

The Lord's Test presents Rahane with an opportunity to show that he is still India's Mr. Dependable when they find themselves in a bit of a soup, like they do now, trailing 0-1 in a five-match Test series.

His last five Test scores read: 2,15, 10, 48 and 9. That fourth innings on that list came on possibly the most challenging wicket that he might have played on during his career at Johannesburg.

Rahul Dravid once told about Sachin Tendulkar that he felt the latter was batting well when he whipped the ball to the mid-wicket fence early on in his innings. With someone like Rahane, you get the sense that if early on, he plonked the left foot to the pitch of the ball and either off-drove or on-drove a bowler past him to the fence, he looked in rhythm.

It has always been the distinct characteristic of his game: the footwork and the preciseness of it. At his best, Rahane seized upon length faster than anyone in the side and that meant that he was able to tackle the best bowlers on the most torturous of pitches.

The billion-dollar man in this side showed that runs could be made against this present English bowling attack at Edgbaston. Now it's time for one of the middle-class men to follow suit, at a venue where he will feel happy to come back to.