Murali Vijay, the former Indian opener, has been named the best Indian Test opener after Sunil Gavaskar and Virender Sehwag by his Tamil Nadu teammate and India spinner Ravichandran Ashwin. Vijay has the best conversion rate from fifty to hundred in home Tests among Indian batters. In the Tests played in India, Vijay has a conversion rate of 60%, having crossed the 50-run mark 15 times, of which nine are hundreds. This conversion rate is better than that of Indian batting greats Mohammed Azharuddin, Virat Kohli, and Rohit Sharma.
Ashwin considers Vijay to be a highly underrated player who has not been celebrated enough. Vijay made the opener position his own after the opening combination of Sehwag and Gautam Gambhir came to an end. Though he didn’t get off to a good start in his Test career, he became one of the best Test openers in the world until 2018.
Ashwin also compared Vijay with another Indian batting stalwart, Cheteshwar Pujara, and said that both of them are quite similar in that they haven’t been recognised enough. He also shared some hilarious stories about Vijay and Pujara’s arguments during the match breaks.
“Puji and Vijay are quite similar in that they haven’t been celebrated enough. They also had some of the most hilarious arguments. They used to do the most difficult job in Test cricket – play out the new ball in testing conditions, as we tend to need to do whenever we go abroad – so it is par for the course to have a few eccentricities emerge from that kind of partnership,” Ashwin wrote.
