Ravindra Jadeja spent much of Tuesday doing what he has done for more than a decade in Test cricket: making batters uncomfortable and eventually finding a way through.
But tucked away inside another productive day with the ball in Colombo was a remarkable sequence involving something at which the veteran spinner has been considerably less successful.
Jadeja has now gone 22 consecutive reviews off his bowling in Tests without overturning an on-field decision. The latest addition came during Sri Lanka’s first innings in the second Test, when India went upstairs after an lbw appeal against Keshara Nuwantha. Replays quickly revealed a sizeable inside edge before the ball hit the pad. The not-out decision remained, and India lost the review.
It stood in sharp contrast to Jadeja’s actual effectiveness with the ball. He later bowled Pasindu Sooriyabandara for 80, helping India reduce Sri Lanka to 265/8 at stumps after declaring their first innings at 503/9. The wicket took Jadeja’s Test tally to 353, with Sri Lanka still 238 runs behind at the end of Day 3.
22 reviews, zero overturned decisions
The headline number needs one important qualification. Jadeja’s last 22 bowling reviews have not all cost India a review. Of those 22 unsuccessful attempts to overturn an umpire’s decision, four finished as umpire’s call. Under DRS regulations, that means the original decision remained unchanged, but India retained the review. The remaining 18 were outright unsuccessful reviews and were lost.
Put differently, Jadeja’s record across this extraordinary sequence stands at zero successful overturns from 22 attempts, with India losing the review on 18 occasions. Only four – or 18.2 per cent – were close enough to finish on umpire’s call.
The drought now stretches back more than three years. Jadeja’s last successful review as a bowler came against Kemar Roach during West Indies’ first innings in the Dominica Test in July 2023. At 61.3 overs, Roach was given not out by umpire Richard Kettleborough after Jadeja struck him on the pad. India challenged the call.
This time Jadeja’s conviction was justified. Replays established that the ball had struck Roach’s pad before the bat came down, and ball-tracking returned the required result. The decision was overturned and Roach was dismissed lbw for one. That wicket was also No. 271 of Jadeja’s Test career. He has since moved to 353, meaning he has collected 82 Test wickets since the last time a review off his bowling successfully changed an umpire’s decision.
That is perhaps the statistic which best captures the contrast. Jadeja has continued taking wickets at Test level across different opponents and conditions, yet not one of the reviews initiated off his bowling during that period has produced an additional wicket through DRS.
The sequence is even more striking because concerns over Jadeja’s enthusiasm for reviews predate it. During India’s 2023 home series against Australia, Rohit Sharma publicly joked about the difficulty of assessing appeals when Jadeja was bowling. India had burned all three reviews off Jadeja’s bowling during Australia’s first innings in Indore, despite none producing an overturned decision.
“Especially Jaddu yaar. Every ball he thinks its out!” Rohit Sharma said before the Ahmedabad Test, while explaining that the captain sometimes needed to calm his bowler down and consider where the ball was actually heading. Five months later came the successful Roach referral in Dominica. There has not been another one since.
The numbers make for an unusual blemish on the record of one of India’s finest Test spinners: 22 successive bowling reviews without an overturned decision, 18 reviews lost, four surviving only through umpire’s call and 82 wickets taken in the meantime. Jadeja can still get batters out. Increasingly, though, India might be better served waiting for the umpire to agree with him first.