by Arunabha Sengupta
Conventional cricketing wisdom says that if a team scores nearly 400 in the first innings of a Test match, the side batting second has to start conservative and defensive.
However, for Virender Sehwag no such conventional wisdom made sense. He showed that by the end of the second day, he could be 283 not out in two sessions and the first team could be looking down shell-shocked into the biggest of barrels.
Sehwag was blissfully free from the tentacles of such stifling sagacity. Traditionally Test cricket has always had successful sagas of attack, creativity, unorthodoxy, but generally within a framework of logic. Then came Sehwag and blasted all that beyond the boundaries of imagination.
When he got going – which was often, he scored at the speed of thought, sometimes even faster. Physicists subscribing to the limiting boundaries of the speed of light could blink once in disbelief and end up missing an entire Sehwag masterpiece.
For this man, no rule – cricketing or scientific – held good. As if in accordance to the teachings of the ancient Zen masters, he went about his business after emptying his cup of knowledge, with an unfettered and uncluttered mind.
The MCC Coaching Manual will hardly deem fine third man an area for scoring runs, let alone finding the fence with regularity. Yet, Sehwag did so, and often crossed the boundary on the full as a part of his regular day job. If the ball could be hit there, he would hit it. At the same time, one wouldn’t find him scooping the ball Brendon McCullum style into the V behind the wicket, ending up rolling about in the crease. Such complications would never do for him. If Sehwag attempted something, the approach is always simple.
He occasionally glanced at the manual for reference, and more often than not discarded it for hisown approach. Almost spiritual in its innocent detachment from convention, mixed with the empirical clarity of his own alternative science.
Geoff Boycott reckoned that the degree to which a batsman’s feet move early in the innings demonstrated his form. His text-book didactics were grabbed by the collar and turned upside down by the advent of Sehwag on the scene. While analysing one of Sehwag’s strokes, the Yorkshireman confessed that he transcends traditional technique. Sehwag had just driven a fast bowler back down the ground, his feet as usual rooted to his crease. The slow motion autopsy carried out by the panel of experts revealed that if the left foot had come down the track as per the text books, the ball would have thudded into the pad without sufficient time for the bat to come around the front foot. By not moving his feet, Sehwag had actually managed to avoid being leg before wicket and had also managed to pick up a few runs down the ground.
But, at the same time, he did not discard the rulebook totally. When spinners were in operation, his footwork was as fast and nimble as the best in business. Barring Lara, few played Murali better. Barring Tendulkar few played Warne better. And no one, simply no one, was capable of blasting Saqlain into oblivion in that manner.
The results cannot be disputed. He averaged at par with Gavaskar did as an opener, while scoring at roughly twice his rate in Test cricket. Two triple centuries and once tantalisingly close to a third, huge hundreds and double hundreds, and a 219 in a One-Day International.
By all laws of logic, that should have been a monumental impossibility. Not for Sehwag. He just went there and did it.
Virender Sehwag was born on 20 Oct 1978