Im so happy for my favorite player, Viru, for yesterdays innings - (and his sons friends can finally stop teasing him). It cannot have been easy for him, with all the problems with his eyesight (glasses and all), his slowing reflexes, his hair weave and what not, being dropped from the team amid rumors of his captaincy ambitions and his supposed fallout with MSD, his lack of runs in the domestic season, not being retained by a franchise for which he has been a talisman all these years, and so on ... but to his credit, hes never looked sour or bitter, but always smiling and hopeful. His brutal honesty can sometimes come across as arrogance, but he talks like he plays. Simple, straight, from the heart - hes the perfect example of WYSIWYG. And that is what I like about him, even more than his redefinition of the art of test-match opening batting. As a columnist wrote a couple of years back, all this while the idea was for test-match openers to take off the shine from the new ball by blocking or leaving it. Sehwag did it by repeatedly hitting the ball onto hard concrete walls and other objects beyond the boundary. He is unconventional, yet clear and uncomplicated, in his thinking. My favorite story about him is what Warne narrated on air during one of the IPLs - told him by Darren Lehman, I think. Sehwag was batting in a county match with Lehman. Abdul Razzaq was getting prodigious reverse swing, so Lehman told Viru to be watchful and see off Razzaqs spell. Sehwag told him that instead he would just try to hit the ball out of the ground in the next over and lose it. And he did it too. He probably thought - Na rahega ball, na milega reverse swing. Textbook example of thinking out of the box. And who can forget his six to get to the first ever triple test ton by any Indian. Its not the six itself but his attitude that stood out. A couple of years before that, he was out on 195 trying to hit a six to get his double in Melbourne, and Manjrekar asked him in the post match interview if he regretted that shot. Sehwag said he did not, and that he would do the same again if he thought the ball was there to be hit. And two years later, he did, for an even bigger milestone. As simple as that. Yesterday, in response to a question about how he was timing the ball rather than trying to hit it too hard, he told Ravi Shastri in the most matter-of-fact way that only he can - Well, the talent is there. And, if I may add - so is the attitude. So is the attitude.
Posted on: Sat, 31 May 2014 05:29:39 +0000
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