Bring back the fear in bowlers: An open letter to Virender Sehwag

Without Sehwag, cricket is clockwork

Dear Viru

I know you will be happy with the way team India fared in this T20 World Cup. We fell just one step short of repeating the 2007 success. But even though our team did so well, I don’t feel bad any more when someone switches the sports channel when Indian batmen walk in to bat.

It is not that the runs are not coming or the batting collapses like cycles in a cycle stand. This team can post huge totals and chase big scores against many oppositions on many surfaces. But something huge is amiss under the cloak of these excellent Indian performances. It is something the scoreboards of the cricketing world can’t measure. And that crack is your absence, Sir. Without you, it is clockwork.

“India is batting” have always been the three words that have made Indian fans skip offices, schools and everything else, just to catch sight of Indian openers smashing the opposition bowlers around the park. Sometimes watching the new openers play is going through the motions.

As an Indian fan who has watched cricket for the last 15 years, it is immensely disappointing to see my childhood cricket heroes retire or get dropped. But it is more saddening to see the baton being handed over to the next saviour fall. Even though our openers scored heavily last year and they have all immense cricketing talent, they don’t have the aura you had.

There was a magic in the way you intimidated the bowlers, even before they bowled a ball to you. Cricket, as they say, is played more in the mind than on the field and you were a testimony to this fact. The plump economy rates of the bowlers only showed the damage you did to those bowlers statistically.

The world remembers you for your mammoth 309 in Multan, a savage 319 against the Proteas in Chennai, the ODI double hundred in Indore, a lightening quick 195 in Melbourne, the 125 in Hamilton that decimated Kiwis and a belligerent debut innings at Bloemfontein in a time of crisis.

But those who have admired you for a nonchalant approach you brought to the crease, will also remember the times when you played those cameos to set-up wins, those boundaries in the first over to bring the opposition under mat, those slip catches, that laidback smile under a hat, the flouting of all the textbook rules –“Take a single after you hit a boundary”, “Have a good footwork”, “Get under the ball before hitting it”. It would not be hyperbole to say that a countless Indian wins happened because of the belief and hope you gave at the top.

Please, find that nick again and that effortless capability of dispatching balls outside the fence at a lightning speed. Find that because, however selfish I might sound, we need you now. We need you to come back, not to prove yourself, but to inspire the ones looking up to you in those dressing rooms. We need you so that the baton doesn’t fall.

And I will be lying if I go on to say that you were perfect. No, you were not. As Sehwag fans, you disappointed us a lot too. There were times when we wished you didn’t give it away so easily. In your bad times, you had a string of bad scores, with each dismissal looking similarly reckless.

But a few long breaths told us that probably being a Sehwag fan is about accepting this whimsical nature of yours – may be it made your best innings even more special. After the selectors lost patience last year, I kept checking every Ranji score of yours only to feel disappointed to find the lack of that hunger.

We will feel unjust, as much as you will, if this entire journey ends in this dismal manner. A 75 off 53 against Haryana in the Syed Mushtaq Ali trophy, the other day, brought back the hope just like every time you found brought hope by finding form out of nowhere. Today, when we are just a year away from defending the World Cup in Australia, I feel you are the missing piece in that jigsaw.

We need you for adding that ingredient of hope every time India comes to bat. For making the third-man watch the ball go over his head. For making us hold on the TV remote tightly when India bat. Till then, it is all clockwork.

A fan for life