India, Aug. 24 -- He was Indian Test cricket's sturdiest defence in the last decade. Cheteshwar Pujara, among the most classical modern batters who enriched Test batting with grit and technique while refusing to yield to the increasing lure of strike rate and hundred conversion rate, has retired from all cricket.

Pujara was India's last Test specialist, an outlier at a time when cricket had moved irreversibly into the fast lane. He never played a T20I, and the last of his only five ODIs came in 2014. However, most of India's finest Test wins for over a decade has the Pujara stamp.

His cricket lessons honed under his diligent father Arvind, a first-class player, Pujara rose from the dusty, flat pitches of Rajkot to become a batter who bo...