Ashish Nehra: A tale of promises gone awry

India’s heroics at the 2003 World Cup may have been brutally abbreviated by a rampaging Australian attack in the final, but its journey to the final was peppered with highly-charged moments of ecstasy. Like the match between India and England, where one man stood out with his performance, a performance worth recollecting each and every time the player’s name is broached.

It is said statistics never lie. And bowling figures of 6-23 do more than state the truth. They emphasise it, emphasise the player’s credibility and thrust him into the sport’s limelight for eternity, as Ashish Nehra finds himself almost a decade after his match-winning performance at Durban against the Englishmen.

Batting first, India put up a modest total of 250 runs after Andrew Caddick almost ruined the Indian batsmen’s party by scalping four wickets in the final over. The English run-chase was dented early by Zaheer Khan and Javagal Srinath, as both wrecked havoc on the English openers and kept mounting the pressure, keeping a choke hold on the English batting throughout the 15-over field restriction. And the situation only got worse for the Englishmen once Nehra was brought into the attack. Where Nehra found the perfect line and length, the English response was nervy and hesitant and completely out-of-tune. Not a single English batsman was able to figure out what exactly Nehra was doing, especially not the ones who found their wickets being tumbled by the seamer.

As memorable as the fall of wickets were, Nehra’s celebratory dance after he picked each of his six wickets is equally unforgettable. My cousin called it the ‘helicopter celebration.’ I ought to know it well because we – me and my cousins, i.e. – kept on discussing and rewinding Nehra’s celebratory dance countless times over, even after the World Cup was over. For it meant a lot to a bunch of teenagers, who had braved familial opposition to stay up late at night, watch the match with annual exams scheduled the very next morning. And to tell the truth, we weren’t the only ones, as the next morning, the whole school spent talking about Nehra and his six-wicket haul than the exam scheduled for the day.

In one of the harshest twists of fate, Ashish Nehra has never had a chance to come even close to replicating his 2003 World Cup gallantry. In the years following his maiden World Cup campaign, injuries and fitness issues almost put him into an abyss, recovering from which has been excruciatingly slow and painstaking for the fast bowler. And though he’s made enough of a comeback to make an impact at times, the contemporary evolution of Ashish Nehra still remains a flimsy shadow of what his talent promised and how it was snatched away from him, even before he could capitalise on his initial success.

Even during the 2003 World Cup, in fact even during the Indo-England match, Nehra was in pain and far from being fully fit. As the then-captain Sourav Ganguly put it, it was perhaps this vulnerability that made Nehra come out tops that day. It was as though Nehra was delivering on a promise; made to himself. With utmost conviction and with no hint of insecurity whatsoever, Ashish Nehra brought in a new lease of life to the Indian expectations regarding the World Cup, exactly two decades, after they had won their first – in the most unexpected fashion – at Lord’s. There again,we were defending a target against the mighty West Indians that would have been gettable on any other day, except that it just wasn’t on that day.