Virender Sehwag - India's Match-Winner In Chief

Daniel Vettori, and possibly the whole Kiwi attack, fears him. Ian Chappell holds him in the highest of regards. The Proteas and the Pakistanis have been humiliated by him. He may originally be the Nawab of Najafgarh but is equally the Sultan of Multan and the Chennai Super King. What’s more he leads a team of Daredevils! Quite clearly, these are good times to be Virender Sehwag, who is now being hailed as India’s best match-winner in recent times.

Cut back to the way he started his India career when he made an ordinary start to an extraordinary career. Against Pakistan in April 1999, he was out for one run off five balls batting at number seven. He came back against Zimbabwe but another two lacklustre ODIs sent him back to the jungle that was the Indian domestic circuit.

It was in the spring of 2001 when the Indian team were trumping up Steve Waugh’s Aussies that Sehwag first gave a glimpse of what he was capable of. A half-century and three wickets at Bangalore in the first ODI, two years after his debut, caught the attention of Sourav Ganguly. The Indian skipper was by then known for his strong likes and dislikes towards certain players, and he definitely liked the spark in Sehwag that had so far gone unnoticed.

Termed a Sachin clone in his early years, his return to the Indian team was painted by a stroke of luck, when Tendulkar missed a whole summer of cricket with the onset of the tennis elbow. Sehwag was promoted to the top of the order and it was in Sri Lanka first that the cricketers from New Zealand first suffered, as he stroked his maiden ton off 64 balls. Two months later, he notched up his maiden Test ton in his debut Test match in South Africa, batting alongside the player he always looked up to, Tendulkar himself!

Ever since then, he became indispensable for the Indian team. Since the middle order was too clogged, and India needed an opener, Ganguly experimented with Sehwag at the top. And boy did that gamble pay off! Not only did he prove his detractors wrong making his hand eye coordination work in the longer version of the game, but also his fast scoring rate meant that he always gave his team enough time to bowl the opposition out. That was first seen on the 2003 tour of Australia, when he struck a brilliant ton in the Boxing Day test.

And again in Multan, with the first of the two triple hundreds. He reached his hundred and three hundred with a six in that particular innings and was hailed as the most audacious batsman after Sir Viv Richards. Not to mention, he was in hallowed company now, for only a select few have ever taken their score past three hundred in Tests. Since that time, Sehwag has inadvertently crossed 150 on almost every occasion that he has scored a ton, like something just resets the score when he gets to three figures.

But like all dream runs, his was to come to an abrupt end as well. His honeymoon was over with Ganguly’s reign as the demons sown by Greg Chappell troubled him as much as some of the other players in the Indian team. He was so woefully out of touch in the run-up to the 2007 world cup that during the South African tour in 2006, he was included in the playing eleven on his spinning quotient.

The world argued that a great talent had not been lost. That he was simply on a good run and that a player like him was too good to be true. In this maddening world of cricket, where the stakes have never been higher, how could a care-free player like him survive and flourish? Even the then Indian skipper Rahul Dravid could only watch, perplexed, as his team’s World Cup bid shattered with the myth that Sehwag was one of the true greats this game had ever seen.

In the next nine months, one only heard of Virender Sehwag playing the odd match for his state Delhi, or local clubs – here, there and everywhere – in a desperate bid to get the ball to hit the sweet spot of the bat once again. To get that lethal hand-eye combination going again; to start enjoying cricket again!

He knew he had to change a bit, if he harboured any hopes of making a comeback. And probably needed a pinch of luck to add on. The team to Australia did feature his name for it was imperative that the swashbuckling opener who had done so well on the previous tour be given a chance to shine once again. What added the cherry to the cake were the words of none other than Ian Chappell who professed the use of Sehwag at the top of the order to demoralise the Aussie bowlers.

Since then what a comeback it has been. He’s added a new facet to his game, where he is willing to wait for the bad balls to hit and still enjoy his game. One thinks that the influence of current captain MS Dhoni is quite visible here, for it is the enjoy-your-game attitude that he imparts to the whole team, is what Sehwag has agreed with the most. Ever since his second coming, he has put a price on his wicket and the result has been staggering: 1198 runs in Tests at 54.45 and 1280 runs in ODIs at 60.95.

His antics over the past twelve months have opened a new debate in the Indian waters. Is he the best bet for India to win a match? With players like Tendulkar, Dravid, Yuvraj, Dhoni and to a certain extent Gambhir present in the line-up, does he trump them all when it comes to winning matches?

Maybe yes, for the Chennai Test win against England wouldn’t have been possible without his effort on the fourth evening. Rarely does Sachin Tendulkar score a century in the fourth innings of a Test match, that too in a winning cause, but even his effort wouldn’t have mattered but for Sehwag.

The biggest quality of Virender Sehwag is in his fearless approach and that is why he is the one to open the innings with. Tendulkar and Ganguly have batted in the middle in Tests but opened in ODIs. Sehwag’s single-minded approach wherever he bats means that he is most effective at the top, wresting the initiative from the beginning without giving the opposition enough time that they have lost the plot so early in the game. And unlike his idol Tendulkar, who is accumulating runs nowadays as opposed to his early days, this attack first-think later approach is the reason that he will never change his style throughout his career, forever etching his place alongside the likes of Sir Vivian Richards.

We are witnessing the making of a legend here, the legend of Virender Sehwag.

© Cricket World 2009

Chetan Narula writes a weekly column from New Delhi which appears on CricketWorld.com every Tuesday. He also appears on Cricket World® Radio's weekly Around The World show with his bulletins on cricket in South Asia.