Posted by Virender Sehwag: 284 not out overnight. This was Test cricket.
The Sri Lankan players couldn’t just soak it up for 20 overs before seeing if they could do better. This problem wasn’t going away. But what they had to endure almost all day, the crowd got to enjoy all day – that’s the other thing about Test cricket.
We’re not hugely enamoured of matches where batsmen dominate. The other day we complained about the one dimensional nature of a Twenty20 match between South Africa and England. This wasn’t at all like that.
In the South Africa-England match, the batsmen only played the mow to cow corner. Sehwag’s innings has been completely different. Virender Sehwag’s batting approach is all about dominating, but it’s not a bludgeoning, repetitive domination. It’s sophisticated.
It’s the difference between dominating for 12 overs with one muscular shot and dominating for a whole day under a fierce sun, playing reverse sweeps, lofted drives, deft cuts, leg glances and every other shot that might steer the ball between the fielders.
It’s the difference between Twenty20 and Tests.
Great innings. Thoughts….
Sehwag seems to be playing himself in now [based on his last 2 innings] rather than blasting from the 1st ball. Has the coach convinced him that he can still be viewed as an attacking batsman if he takes a couple of overs to settle in ?
Ball has to be replaced. Commentator indicates that there appear to be a flat spot on ball – wonder which 6 did that.
Sehwag runs a ball through the slips with the bat angled at 89 degrees – and still middles it.
We spotted one fine cut shot he played where he presented the bat side on and slid it down to third man.
The amazing part was that Murali was bowling round the wicket, across him, so it shouldn’t have been physically possible to hit the ball with that bat at that angle.
He’d played himself in to the tune of 240 runs by that point.