The Serious Side of John McEnroe

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One Shot Wonder

He walks in to bat with 14 runs required off the last over. He strides into the middle of the raucous experience he’s always been told to expect in the World Cup, and be in awe of – ‘a mad Indian crowd backing the Indian cricket team’. And this is a crowd which has danced to the tune of a zillion runs being scored already that day, and are now smelling blood with India making an improbable comeback into the game.

He does the running for the first couple of deliveries in the final over, before he gets strike. He is now nicely warmed up, and England require 11 runs off 4 balls. With the number of runs scored that day, he knows the match already has its place in history. He takes strike. The floodlights beat down. The crowd roars. The bowler sends down a juicy full length delivery. He clears his feet, swings purposefully without a hint of exaggerated strokeplay, and sends the ball sailing over the long-on fielder for six!

Ajmal ‘Shazam’ Shahzad had just contributed hugely towards the final outcome of the game. In the process, he also walked into my list of favourite cricketers. This was eye-popping stuff! The fact that it was such a delightfully clean strike, that it came off the first ball he faced, that it came from a player with next-to-nothing international credentials, and that it came under those intense circumstances, just made it extra special.

By definition, cricket has never been a game where an awful lot depends on a split-second action, unlike say, a 100 metre dash. In fact, cricket lives by its ebbs and flows, and each cricket match acquires its own personality and traits, drawn out over an extended period of time. That’s why a bowler smashed for consecutive boundaries can afford to shrug it off; he knows he always gets another shot at the batsman with the next ball. And though batsmen might complain about how ‘one good delivery is all it takes to get one out’, that’s precisely why at least half the team are batsmen, who can, between them, make up for the inevitable batting failures of each other.

But there are those occasional moments when this maxim is not true. When the entire weight of a match can hinge on a fateful moment, and everyone knows it. And when someone makes a wholehearted attempt to grab such a moment with both hands, it makes for great freeze frames in our minds. Like Douglas Marillier with his scoop shot against an unamused McGrath in Perth, like Hrishikesh Kanitkar hoicking Saqlain Mushtaq away to the mid-wicket fence in the Dhaka smog, like Lance Klusener clobbering through the covers time and again in the ’99 World Cup. Ajmal Shahzad just added himself to that list.

But this is not intended to take anything away from the rest of the happenings on a very eventful day. The symmetry of both teams’ innings stood out for me, in terms of masterful centuries scored by an opener, incisive spells from a seamer which brought the bowling side back into the game, and general floundering around by batsmen at the death. And the match kept twisting back and forth, as a result of quite a few ‘special’ moments, like Pietersen’s rocket finding Munaf Patel’s hands rather than the long -off boundary, Bell being told by technology that technology wasn’t good enough to give him out, the ‘other’ six hitters right at the end for England who heaved in with a couple of lusty blows of their own, and finally, the small matter of the match ending in a tie.

It was a special occasion indeed.