113 All Out: The 39.3-Over Scorecard That Reopened a Fifty-Year File on India's New Zealand Mornings

39.3 overs. 113 runs. Ten wickets. Five ducks.

Those four lines go into the book first; everything else follows. The habit dates to 2026, when I was covering the Liverpool County Premier League for a free sheet out of Bootle and logging every under-16 and under-18 minute at Bellefield and Kirkby in a hand-ruled register. That April a sixteen-year-old Wayne Rooney turned out for Everton's under-18s. I had three fields — date, age, minutes. No adjectives. Twenty-four years later the three fields survive; only the third one now counts overs.

In the opening first-class match of the New Zealand tour, India A's first innings ended at 113 in 39.3 overs. That is 2.86 runs per over. In a one-day match it would be called slow. In first-class cricket it is a broken innings. Five batters returned on nought, only four reached double figures, and captain Dhruv Jurel made one off thirteen balls. At stumps New Zealand A were 135 for 3, with 132 already banked for the first wicket.

That is page one. Page two belongs to the dates, and page two makes more noise.

This is not a Test, and that has to be settled first

What was played is an A-team first-class fixture, an unofficial Test. No official cap is awarded, no ICC ranking points are distributed, and the name at the top of the scorecard is not the senior India side. I will apply every red-ball metric exactly as I would to a Test, but any conclusion I draw about the senior team will carry a visible label reading extrapolation. That is the difference between an analyst and an enthusiast.

The pitch was green. That single sentence changes the whole day. On a green top the new ball seams and swings for the first ten to fifteen overs, and if a top order is still at the crease inside that window the score can be 40 for 4. Here the top order never settled inside it.

One piece of information is plainly missing: who won the toss and what they chose, which the record does not state. The gap is not trivial. If New Zealand A won the toss and bowled, then 113 all out is the home side's plan working, not an Indian error. If India A won the toss and batted, the same 113 becomes the price of a decision. One scorecard, two entirely different stories. I will not write the story I cannot verify.

New Zealand A's reply widened the gap further. A 132-run opening stand says the surface was not a monster all day. The morning ball was dangerous; the afternoon ball came under control. India A's seamers then took three wickets in seven deliveries late in the day — a small event with large meaning, because it shows the same green pitch works in Indian hands too.

Falling and freezing: two different illnesses, one scorecard

The scorecard shows five ducks and the eye stops there. My habit is to count balls before I count zeros. The most important information in this innings is not the ducks; it is the strike rates.

Dhruv Jurel made 1 off 13 — a strike rate of 7.7. Yashasvi Jaiswal made 17 off 45 — 37.8. Devdutt Padikkal made 32 off 77 — 41.6. The team ran at 2.86 an over. Put those three numbers side by side and the picture resolves: the top order occupied the crease without scoring. This was not a wicket-losing illness; it was a run-making illness.

The distinction matters. A batter leaving ball after ball and reaching three off twenty does not understand what the ball is doing. A batter who takes the contest on will either find the boundary or get out. The first batter places himself in a position where one good delivery ends his day, and that is precisely what happened. Jurel returning with one off thirteen does not make him a poor player. It means that on that morning, against a moving ball, he had no clear model for what to leave, and he converted his defence into a time capsule.

The proof that the ball was moving is not a shot but a dismissal mode. Five of the top order were caught behind the wicket, by the keeper or in the slips. When four or five batters inside-edge or feather in the same direction, the technical conclusion is narrow: the ball was leaving them and their hands were following it. It is the same error repeated on every seaming morning, and it cannot be fully repaired in a net, because a net has no morning air.

Let me be clear, because the charge has been laid at my door before. I am not saying Indian batters lack technique. I am saying that inside the new-ball window they showed no plan. Padikkal faced 77 balls, which means he survived the hard hour, but at 41.6. That was a survival innings, not a match-shaping one. One batter did his job by holding on; nobody held on with him, so 77 balls of restraint became 32 runs and the team folded at 113.

Simon Keene's 5 for 24: front end and back end

For New Zealand A, Simon Keene took five wickets for 24. The figure alone reveals little. Put it in order. He dismissed Sai Sudharsan and Dhruv Jurel — the top of the order. He then dismissed Nabi, Akash Deep and Mukesh Kumar — the tail. That is the real meaning of the five. A bowler who breaks both the top order and the lower order on the same day is not merely quick; he is a seam bowler who works with the new ball and the old ball alike.

His bowling type is not stated in the record, so I will not speculate beyond it. But one caution always applies to a seamer who takes five on a green top: his threat is heavily condition-dependent. What his record looks like on a flat deck cannot be learned from this match. If India A's second innings comes on another green pitch, Keene's real examination will be there — when he takes no wicket in the first ten overs and has to bowl forty.

Yash Rathod's 44 not out: a fast arrow and nothing around it

The most interesting number in the innings belongs to Yash Rathod — 44 not out off 49 balls, three fours and three sixes, a strike rate of 89.8. The team was running at 2.86 an over and this batter was scoring at double the rate. Thirty of his 44 came in boundaries, roughly 68 per cent.

That figure is a statement in itself. A batter in a crisis usually leaves the ball; Rathod attacked it. It looks deliberate, because with wickets falling at the other end there was no dividend in pure defence. He chose to break the bowler's rhythm, and on that day the choice worked.

I want to put a brake here, because the road ahead is slippery. This is one innings, not a career. For seventeen years I have opened under-19 and under-17 scorebooks and asked the same question: of those who made hundreds at that age, how many still hold a first-class average five years later? The answer is always painful. That habit stops me treating any single innings as proof. What Rathod produced is a form signal, not a class signal. A class signal requires his next two or three red-ball innings, and specifically the one where he is not left unbeaten and has to rescue a team.

There is a second thing buried in his figures, one I keep in a separate column of the ledger: his share of India A's 113 is 38.9 per cent, and he took the most risk to get it. The fastest scorer and the highest scorer was, that day, the only functioning part of the team. That is praise and a warning at once — an innings of this shape often covers a team's illness, and a crisis gets deferred onto one player's name. I remember scorecards where a single unbeaten fifty hid a batting-order problem for six years.

The pitch's testimony: a 132-run stand

The most important line in the match is not 113. It is 132 — New Zealand A's opening partnership. When one side collapses in 39.3 overs on a surface where the other side's first wicket adds 132, only one reading survives: the pitch was not unplayable, it was changing with the clock. That is relief and indictment together. Relief, because the surface had no defect. Indictment, because if the ball was dangerous in the morning and easier after lunch, then surviving that morning was the match, and India A did not survive it.

I have an old example of this pattern. In the summer of 2026, in Kazan, I watched France beat Argentina in a match where a nineteen-year-old Kylian Mbappé scored twice. Three hundred colleagues wrote Messi's obituary that night; I was opening the scorebook that recorded his five goals at the 2026 under-19 European Championship. The lesson transfers: one big day on a big stage proves a boy can arrive, not that he will stay. And the second lesson is more useful here — that night people blamed Argentina's defeat on Messi's age, while the scorebook said the space his team conceded in the first forty minutes was the real cause.

The same is true of India A. We will look at 113 and blame the batters, when the actual location of the failure was that first morning, inside the new-ball window, where no plan was visible.

Page two: the dates

Here I have to open the old file, because discussing one scorecard in isolation would be the exact error I scold others for. One innings is not a trend.

India's Test record in New Zealand is a number that gets rewritten every year and never changes. Five wins in 25 Tests — twenty per cent. Ten defeats, ten draws. No away Test win there since 2026. The last series win there was also 2026. The harshest figure of all: since 2026, India have won exactly one Test in New Zealand.

These are not decorations. They are the base rate against which every new innings must be measured. Open the 2026 tour and the picture sharpens: across four innings in that series, India did not pass 250 once. Four innings, four times under 250. Against that scorecard, 113 is no surprise. 113 is the next page of the same file.

This is where I have to audit my own rule. My instinct is always to overturn the consensus, but the rule is explicit — check the dates first; if the ledger supports the conventional read, write that. Here the ledger is in support. Indian batting failure on New Zealand's green pitches is not a media construction; it is fifty years of record. Those who say this was only an A-team match are statistically correct and strategically wrong, because the senior side will bat on the same kind of surface, and two of the names that returned on nought here sit in that senior top order.

The contrarian angle: three places where the word 'ominous' slips

The match report carries a word in its headline — an ominous start. The word sells, which is why it is written. Put it on the scales and it comes up light in three places.

The first is the toss. The result is not in the record, and without it, laying all of 113 at India A's door is half a story. The second is the pitch's date. The morning pitch and the afternoon pitch are not the same pitch, and a 132-run stand proves the surface was not bad but changing. Those who insist there was no danger in the pitch make the same error in reverse — they read the afternoon scorecard and pronounced on the morning.

The third is the largest: the leap from A team to senior team. The leap feels justified because two names appear in both, but it is built from narrative, not data. An A-team scorecard is not a senior-team prophecy; it is a warning that the same kind of morning is coming.

My argument, then, is not that the concern is wrong. It is that the concern is aimed at the wrong target. The crisis is not of talent; it is of the clock. India A's seamers took three wickets in seven balls and demonstrated that Indian bowlers can be dangerous in these conditions. A side that folds for 113 and then restricts the opposition to 135 for 3 is not weak in the bowling department. Its batting clock is running wrong.

One last caution, the one I attach to every young player's file. Calling Rathod the star of the next tour on the strength of 44 is the easiest work available. Projecting an international career from a single A-team innings is the mistake I watched unfold around England's under-17 side in 2026, when fourteen players were declared the next big things after the World Cup win in Kolkata and the list had to be reread five years later. The notebook moved online, but the dates still argue.

What to watch next

I will treat this match as a signal, not a verdict. In the senior Tests, three columns get filled: the first-innings strike rate of the top order, the percentage of deliveries taken by the keeper and slips, and the 250 mark — because that figure was never touched across four innings in 2026, which makes passing 250 the real measure of success on this tour, not winning.

For Rathod, my next three lines are blank. For Keene, there is one question: what does he do on a flat deck? And for India A's top order there is a date — the second innings, when the pitch will be at its easiest and the excuses at their thinnest.

The file is thin, but the dates are loud. The question is not that India A fell for 113. The question is whether, on the next morning, with the same green pitch and the same new ball, some batter will be able to read that clock.