The Chennai test marked Sehwag’s unofficial coronation

Article in The Telegraph - by Mukul Kesavan

If a cricket historian twenty years from now were to glance at the score-card for the Chennai Test, he’d see an emphatic Indian win by six wickets with an hour to spare. He would know from the card that India did badly in the first innings and had to come from behind, so he’d realize that this was a dramatic Test match. He would also know that this was the highest fourth innings total ever made in India to win a match, and the fourth highest ever, so he’d be aware of the fact that the match was, statistically, a landmark in the history of cricket, but he might still wonder what the fuss was about.

After all, India has won Tests that had tenser finishes than this one, against better teams. Think of some of India’s great Test victories in recent times (all of them against Australia): the upset at Perth earlier this year, the Dravid-inspired triumph at Adelaide in 2004, the win at Chepauk in 2001 and the back-from-the-dead victory at the Eden Gardens that stopped Waugh’s great team in its tracks. All three of them were nail-biters: in Perth, Australia’s tail-enders, Clark and Johnson, nearly bludgeoned their way into contention in the fourth innings; in Chennai seven years ago, India nearly collapsed chasing a tiny fourth innings total and it was left to Harbhajan Singh to hit the winning runs; and in Calcutta, we needed Tendulkar to turn bowler and take three wickets on the final day to beat the Aussies in a desperately close finish.

If this historian chose to read the Chennai triumph against Pietersen’s Englishmen in the context of the series win against Australia, he might come to the conclusion that this win was the consolidation of a trend, namely India’s ability to consistently impose itself on the opposition under Dhoni’s leadership. India’s 2-0 series win against Ponting’s Australians marked the Indians out as contenders for the top spot in Test cricket. To win three Test matches in a row as captain might be a minor matter for Steve Waugh and Ricky Ponting (both of whom have had winning streaks 16 matches long), but it’s a considerable achievement for an Indian captain. So our historian would be right… up to a point.

What he might not grasp at once is that the true significance of the match was that it marked Sehwag’s unofficial coronation as the greatest Test batsman in contemporary cricket. And this is understandable: Andrew Strauss scored two centuries in the match and the great Tendulkar contributed a useful score in the first innings before constructing a match-winning hundred in the second. In comparison, Sehwag scored 83 in the second innings and not much in the first; not, on the face of it, a claim to pre-eminence. But the scorecard detail that Sehwag was the Man of the Match on the back of statistically inferior scores would offer our historian a clue, and if he followed it up, he would see how the Chennai Test of 2008 wrote Najafgarh’s Virender Sehwag into the short roll-call of cricket’s greats.

In spite of his string of enormous scores (he owns two treble centuries and three double centuries, besides ten other hundreds, most of them big ones) and the ridiculous rate at which he scores them (no opening batsman in the history of Test cricket comes close to his strike rate of 78), there hasn’t been much talk of Sehwag as a batting great. This is partly because Sehwag sets no store by consistency. He had a wildly inconsistent year in 2006, when he scored a big double hundred, a century and a couple of fifties in roughly a dozen Test matches and was dropped from the Test team for most of 2007. That’s hard to believe in the context of 2008, where he has scored a big hundred against Australia, a triple hundred against the South Africans, and a double against the Sri Lankans in a match where the rest of the batting card contributed close to nothing, but it happened, and it should go down in the history of Indian Test selection as a near-criminal misjudgment.

As a result, we’ve had Pietersen being talked up as a modern genius on the strength of a career that never approaches Sehwag’s peaks. In India, Sehwag’s claim to greatness, to genius even, has been obscured by the cricketing public’s understandable enthusiasm for Dhoni and Tendulkar. The importance of the Chennai Test is that in a contest where Dhoni led admirably by example (he topscored in the first innings with a fifty) and where Tendulkar masterfully exorcized the demons of that failed run chase against the Pakistanis in Chepauk, Sehwag produced an innings of such molten purpose that it couldn’t be ignored: it had to be acknowledged as the decisive moment of the match.

Sehwag has been undervalued because he is an original. His take on opening the innings is so radically contrary to cricket’s conventional wisdom that he had to suffer being seen as something of a freak. There was a period when he was seen as unsound against shortpitched bowling, a radical defect in an opening batsman. The fact that he scored big hundreds in quick time all over the world wasn’t enough to persuade the pundits. Then someone worked out that Sehwag’s big scores didn’t often lead to Indian victories and that, in some obscure way, became a defect. The incredible fact that he had scored a triple century at a strike rate of over a hundred the last time he played a Test in Chennai (against South Africa earlier this year) seemed to count for nothing because it was a big-scoring match that ended in a draw.

This time, in the course of scoring just 83 runs, he put those doubts to bed. The sceptics who pointed to the enormous difference between his batting average in the first innings and his batting average in the second were silenced as he set in motion an extraordinary run chase that would have been inconceivable without him. And the extraordinary thing is that before India settled down to its assault on the target of 387 runs, Sehwag had declared in an interview that India could chase down a score of over 300. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that the match was won in the less than 70 balls that Sehwag played: it’s hard to think of another opener in Test cricket who would have backed himself to do what Sehwag managed.

It was appropriate that Sachin Tendulkar finished what Sehwag began, and rather wonderful that the two most gifted batsmen India has ever produced should have collaborated to concoct this amazing triumph. To have one little Master was a privilege; to have two in the same team producing their best is a benediction.