Ravichandran Ashwin scored 39 not out and along with Vihari, 23 not out off 161 balls, helped India save the Test and keep the series level at 1-1.
Ravichandran Ashwin along with Hanuma Vihari made sure to ruin the mood at the Australian camp after they stood tall against their bowling attack the drew the match in Sydney.
While during the third Test India saw a series of injuries, Ashwin's wife Prithi Narayanan revealed that he had been battling severe back pain.
Prithi had tweeted moments after India's game at Sydney Cricket Ground and said that Ashwin "could not stand up straight" on the fifth morning of the Test.
Prithi elaborated how she and her husband dealt with the situation. "By the time I woke up in the morning, his pain was really bad. 'I had to crawl to the physio room,' he said. Luckily, that was the next room. He couldn't bend, straighten, or get up after sitting. I was shocked," Prithi wrote in a column for The Indian Express.
"I had not seen him like this before. 'What are you going to do? How can you bat?' I asked. 'I don't know. I will figure out. Just let me get to the ground,' he replied. That's when Aadhya (Ashwin and Prithi's daughter) cracked her 'put leave, appa' (take a leave from work, dad) comment," Prithi added.
"If only. Even after he left us, to be frank, I was half-expecting a call in a couple of hours from someone in the team that he had been taken to hospital for scans."
She then said, "Over the years, I have seen him handle pain and know he has a high threshold for it, but I had never seen him like this. He was crawling on the floor. He couldn't get up or bend down."
Ashwin's pain was not known till the match was over and it only came to light after the Test. "The first signs of trouble had come the earlier evening, at the end of the fourth day's play. I had seen him on television in some sort of pain a couple of times," Prithi wrote.
"When he walks into the room, he usually has just a few minutes before he rushes to the physio or masseur table and then meetings if any, and comes back late. 'Are you fine, physically?' I asked him and he shot back, 'Didn't you see me bowl?!' and said he felt he had a tweak in the back that was beginning to hurt.
"He felt during warm-ups that morning that he stepped awkwardly and did something to his back."
Ashwin batted for over three hours and faced 128 balls across two sessions with a tweaked back. He scored 39 not out and along with Vihari (23 not out off 161 balls) helped India save the Test and keep the series level at 1-1.
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 "Ravichandran Ashwin and Hanuma Vihari")
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