End of a glorious era?
bat and the ball — have made supermen out of players.
While there have been many, from the time an Indian team stepped out at Lord’s to play their first Test match against England in June 1932, individual performances have got the players attain legendary status. Vinoo Mankad’s heroics at Lord’s in 1952, when he was got back into the team (having been dropped), of spending 18 hours and 45 minutes in the middle in a losing cause can never be forgotten. Nor can Sunil Gavaskar’s 221 at the Oval in 1979, when he made a total of 438 runs to chase batting last, is also an unforgettable epic.
Not to forget the unrecorded (sadly), unbeaten innings of 175 that skipper Kapil Dev played in 1983 against Zimbabwe, when India were tottering at 5 wickets for 17 runs, is part of an all-time folklore. The grit shown by VVS Laxman while putting the monkey (no pun intended) back on Australian shoulders, with 281 runs scored at the Eden Gardens in Kolkata, has many believing that it was the greatest innings played by an Indian at home. Bhagwat Chandrasekar’s magical spell of 6 wickets for 38 runs that gave India it’s first Test victory in and against England in 1971 made the country believe that they could achieve the impossible.
MSDs heroics were different, he will always be known as the ‘captain’ rather than the player who inspired his teams — at the T20WC 2007 in South Africa and the ICC World Cup (50 overs) — to victory. Let’s take a look at his statistics as a batsman, wicketkeeper. In eight matches of the
2007 T20 WC, he scored
163 runs with 45 runs being his highest against hosts South Africa, with one catch behind the wicket. The 2011 ICCWC
50 overs his run tally was
92 in seven matches till the final against Sri Lanka which he finished with a ‘helicopter shot’ sixer scoring a memorable 91 unbeaten runs at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai.
If he will be remembered for that iconic six hit off Nuwan Kulasekara in the penultimate over of the match, his wily decision to give the last over to Joginder Sharma turned the game India’s way in the T20WC
2007. To give a relatively unknown player the ball to bowl to Misbah-ulHaq, turned out to be a masterstroke. Not to forget, the same call could have turned the other way had Misbah pulled the ball to the boundary instead of looping it to the safe hands of S. Sreesanth stationed at short fine-leg.
MSD has not made any announcements about his cricketing future. It was expected that the former skipper, who has quarantined himself from any part of the game after the ICC World Cup last year, would use the IPL as a platform. His performances in the blue riband league would have made him a contender for the ICCT20 WC in Australia. Cancellation of the IPL would broadly mean the end of the glorious career of one of the coolest (literally) cricketers of the shorter, modern era.
The legend, Sunil Gavaskar believes that the team has moved on and that MSD is not someone to make big announcements. Just the way he quietly retired from Test match cricket after the third, drawn match at Melbourne in
2014 and the way he stayed in the background while the Indian team celebrated their victory and hoisted the little master Sachin Tendulkar on their shoulders, it does look like MSDs long journey will end quietly; barring a miracle.