Sehwag Retires: A fan pays Tribute

As I write this piece as a tribute to one of my favourite batsman of all time, I realise that the team India of my childhood is almost over after the retirement of Virender Sehwag.

I started watching cricket from the 2003 World Cup, and only Harbhajan Singh finds a place in the current team, and that too only just.

Now that Sehwag has officially retired, it hits that the feeling of going to Kotla for an India or an IPL match would not be the same anymore. Yes, there is Virat Kohli, the other Dilli da Munda, who’s also the captain of the team now, but the aura of Virender Sehwag was something else.

I didn’t like Sehwag for the way he played his shots, I didn’t like him for his brilliant hand-eye coordination, but what I loved about him was his ability to instill fear in the minds of opposition. And as Brett Lee had rightly said, “No matter how good a bowler you are, Sehwag can destroy your confidence.”

Ask spinners all around the world, and they’ll you tell what Brett Lee meant. Ajantha Mendis from Sri Lanka perhaps suffered the most at his hands, when Sehwag became the second Indian to carry his bat in Galle 2008.

Virender Sehwag was not just another batsman, he was a phenomenon. In all certainty, he changed the way how openers approached test matches and how batsmen in general should approach milestones. An average nearly touching 50 over the span of 105 test matches, with 23 hundreds against his name, proves how lethal he was at the top.

As his former opening partner Akash Chopra mentioned, opening the batting will always be categorised in two eras, BS and AS- Before Sehwag and After Sehwag.

A song on the lips, unusual ease in the walk and a calm mind and body was how Sehwag played the game. In quite a few respects, he was inhuman as compared to others. Most opposition would think that once a batsman is in his 90’s there’s a chance of getting him out, but with Sehwag, they knew nothing like this would happen. Very rarely would you lose defending 386 on a 4th and a 5th-day wicket with two quality spinners like Monty Panesar and Graeme Swann in the side, but then batsmen like Sehwag are perhaps equally or even more rare.

In many ways than one, Sehwag was the typical rags to riches Indian story. From being an ambitious boy playing cricket on the streets of Najafgarh to becoming a world beater, one thing about Sehwag never changed, his simplicity.

Never ever you would have got the feeling from him that he was arrogant, or too big for the game. Never politically correct, he always spoke from his heart. Whether it be answering Geoffrey Boycott’s ‘talented but brainless’ comment, or saying that he didn’t know who Vinoo Mankad was, one thing always stood out, that like his batting, he did the talking in his own way too. Another example of it can be seen in this video:

The two triple hundreds, the innings just 7 runs short of a record 3rd triple hundred, the ODI double hundred, the first ball fours in the 2011 World Cup, the occasional partnership breaking off-spin, the effortless disdain towards spinners etc. Reasons are many to remember Virender Sehwag, but the biggest will always be his unorthodox yet simple approach.

While the trips to Kotla to cheer India would never stop, but a part of me, for whom Sehwag was one of the childhood heroes, would always feel something’s missing when India come out to bat.