The Handlebar Rider



Shikhar Dhawan by Prashant

The Australian cricket team is currently touring India. They have arrived to defend the Border-Gavaskar Trophy. India is a keen side, smarting from many defeats since winning the ICC Cricket World Cup in 2011. Four of these defeats were encountered at the hands of Australians in Australia. India, it is certain, will not make it easy for the visitors. The series has, therefore, turned out to be a nightmare for Australia. Perhaps the worst tour of all. Never before has Australia looked and felt as helpless. The pitches are turning, expectedly, but they change nature in bewildering fashion as the game progresses. It is as if pitches have lives and moods of their own. The visitors are besieged with multiple problems – incomprehensible spin, unexpectedly penetrative swing bowling, and Indian batsmen erupting like florid volcanoes of runs from all sides and corners. They were supposed to be dormant, weren’t they?

At the halfway stage of this tour, the lone glimmer in all the miasmatic darkness for the Australians is that they have Virender Sehwag pinned down firmly. Even if all other Indian batsmen are rampaging about, the visitors take solace in this fact – the dangerous bombardier is down and almost out. Australia are expecting to keep India’s batting General in this state, and, to this effect, are probably sending up nightly prayers to the powers that be. A change of guard is the last thing they want – they’d much rather chance it with an animalistic flaying by a conquered Sehwag than have to re-do their homework if a new player is selected in his place. Australia has detected a chink in the fortress that’s India, and hopes to wedge it wider, enough to sneak in a victory.

Imagine their surprise, when out of the trenches Australia thought they commanded, arises an unheralded bat-slinging foot-soldier of Indian cricket who then goes on to shoot down their carefully constructed sub-Himalayan advance at Mohali with fours and sixes and singles well run. Overnight, the situation had changed. The Spirit of Sehwag erupted out of this unassuming contraption called Shikhar Dhawan. Unassuming, unheralded…until he raised his hands high and wide to the heavens from an exultingly arched body. Until evening came and he raised his right arm to twirl his moustache over a job well done.  Indian selectors have executed the perfect jack-in-the-box prank on the visitors who were just beginning to join the party.
 

Dhawan overturns the attack with aesthetic ferocity: with cutting wrists, intuitive foot work, and calculated sashays. Shikhar is a complete surprise and there is no homework on him uploaded into the bowlers. They pitch the ball short, aiming for the ball’s trajectory to intersect Dhawan’s head at some point on the graph; the foot soldier has a quick eye, he swivels around and crashes the ignorant projectiles into the distant stands of Mohali. Be they spinners or pacemen, Shikhar Dhawan had the most perfect riposte to all.

The end result is 187 debut runs at a faster clip than anyone else has ever scored. He doesn’t require as many balls even. They are saying it is a record of sorts. All the statisticians and commentators and news portals from around the world are churning out the details. He has scored over hundred runs in the post-Lunch session itself. With Vijay, who sensibly allows the debutant the entire length and width of Mohali’s pitch to express his self unfettered, Shikhar goes on to add so many runs in two sessions of play that the day’s total jumps past 400. That said, Dhawan’s innings is not all about statistical references it is bound to keep churning out for ages. It is the surprise element, the spring from anonymity, the serendipity that works out brilliantly, the humble veteran seizing a final opportunity to be counted among heroes, the delicacy through which his innate ruthlessness flows to decimate the entire bowling army and morale of visitors and turns a rain-shortened four day match into a result providing thriller. It is about those elements of street game the veteran has learnt and brings accultured to this stage…his debut innings. Those reverse sweeps and late cuts, it is an all-round batsmanship that spans every corner of the ground and combines styles of all formats seamlessly into a memorable Test innings. There is so much more to take from this day of cricket. The world watches Test cricket kicked alive all over again. Sehwag is hardly remembered.

Dhawan’s an old hand. Instant fame is well known to him. He began with a 155 for India Under-19 and has travelled the gamut since. His chances beckoned in the past and they were spurned. A flaw in his temperament runs alongside many sparkling innings of his which regularly prompts an untimely surge of his ambition ahead of concentration and a four dimensional view of his innings. It has kept him in marching boots without stars on his epaulettes. Shikhar has reached this place through a long meandering trek through the rugged terrain of Indian cricket, scoring here and scoring there, enthralling as many people as he has disappointed. He knows more than anybody all this talk about him being a super-Sehwag clone is way off the mark. Dhawan is his own tale, now with many more pages to be written before it rests alongside Sehwag’s story. Shikhar knows that. He is as familiar with sudden elevations as with thumping falls. But now it appears Dhawan is ready for the steepest march of his life.

South Africa lurks just beyond the boundary.