Mayank Agarwal makes a not-so-easy innings look easy

[Torrent Disney]

It was all hands and wrists, and the gully fielder, placed for that sort of shot, fell resignedly to his right as the ball sped past.

On Indian surfaces offering more turn and bounce, Agarwal may not have looked to reverse sweep Senuran Muthusamy from the rough outside his leg stump, but he did it with ease on this Visakhapatnam pitch.

By his own admission, Agarwal doesn't play the reverse sweep all too often, but he played it three times on Thursday, square and fine, nailing each of them.

"When I played the reverse sweep, the thing that [Rohit Sharma and I] were talking about was that I don't really reverse sweep and we were well set," Agarwal said during his end-of-day press conference. "We were quite happy with the way we were batting and [it was] good that we were able to manipulate the field. They had started to bowl on the pads and it was nice to get a couple of boundaries so they can shift around players, and we were talking about more ways how we can get runs. Risk-free runs."

Pretty much all of Agarwal's 215 runs - save the few during a tricky first half-hour on Wednesday against the new ball - seemed risk-free, even those that came off the shots described above, or off his numerous inside-out drives and lofted hits. There was a sense of certainty about when he chose to play what shots and how he executed them. He did this for close to eight-and-a-half hours and ended his innings with a control percentage of 90.