Opinion Redrawing boundaries

Virender Sehwag announced his retirement from all forms of international cricket on Tuesday. (Source: File)

By the time Virender Sehwag started his international career in 1999, Sachin Tendulkar and Brian Lara were halfway through theirs, and batting adjectives had lost all meaning. Still, when Sehwag played, it mattered not because of the exact number of runs he made — Jacques Kallis scored far more — but for the transformational effect he had on a match, the disbelief he inspired among his opponents and the pure joy he brought to millions of spectators. Yet, Sehwag was never a prisoner, least of all, of his talent.

While artists like V.V.S. Laxman did what they must and soldiers like Rahul Dravid did what had to be done, Sehwag always did what he felt like doing. And he liked nothing better than hitting the cricket ball, hard. Initially, the purists called him reckless — fit only for “pyjama cricket”. But it’s one of cricket’s glorious uncertainties that by the time Sehwag called it a day, he was unanimously accepted as having single-handedly redefined opening batsmanship in Test cricket — the original and most gruelling of all the formats.

Advertisement

Eventually, what distinguished Sehwag from everyone else was not just the simplicity of his approach to the game or the ferocity of his strokeplay but his consistency. No one expected a batsman who scored as freely to turn out as consistent as well. Among all batsmen who scored more than 8,000 runs in Test cricket, Sehwag had the highest strike rate — over 82. And he did it while maintaining an average of nearly 50 runs per innings.

He was the only Indian to score a triple century — in fact, he did it twice, including one that was the fastest ever. But Sehwag’s legacy does not lie in numerical logs. He will ultimately be remembered for rescuing cricket, even the five-day game, from the clutches of the coaching manual.