There was only one Virender Sehwag and there will be only one Virender Sehwag in Indian cricket. The impact that the former India opener left on international cricket is unparalleled and will be difficult to match for generations to come. Team India head coach Ravi Shastri bills Sehwag as a ‘unique’ and ‘once-in-a-generation’ player.
Sehwag played 104 Tests, 251 ODIs and 19 T20s in his career for India and ended up as a World Champion in the 2007 and 2011 in the T20 and 50-over format respectively. Shastri calls Sehwag ‘unarguably one of the greatest batsmen of the modern era’.
“He (Sehwag) was a high-risk player for sure, but not a ‘maaro ya maro’ slogger. His mind was always ticking, looking for opportunities to score and he would work out the success/failure percentage of strokes instinctively,” Shastri writes in his new book ‘Stargazing: The players in my life’.
“Any batsman who hits a Test triple century in his career earns immortality. Viru scored two. He would have got a third too, against Sri Lanka at the Brabourne in 2010, but fell on 293 trying to reach the landmark with a big hit,” the former India all-rounder added.
Shastri reminisces the first time he saw Sehwag bats, which was in a far off place like United States in Los Angeles. “The first time I saw Viru bat was in Los Angeles in the late 1990s for India A in a tournament organized by Mark Mascarenhas. Conditions in LA were not suited for cricket, but Viru played some superb cameos on dirty tracks, which caught my eye,” Shastri writes about Sehwag.
The ‘Nawab of Najafgarh’ ended up with 8,586 runs in Tests with 23 centuries and 8,273 runs in ODIs with 15 tons. Shastri felt that Sehwag’s ‘clarity of thought’ was one of his biggest strengths on the cricket field.
“At all times, he was very positive in his mental outlook, and this extended to life outside the field too. I never saw him down in the dumps, whether he made a century or a blob. He’d be whistling at the breakfast table or when taking strike in the middle,” Shastri remembers.
Team India head coach Shastri felt Sehwag’s 293 against Sri Lanka at the Brabourne stadium in Mumbai in 2010 was one his finest knocks in international cricket. “Even the champion off-spinner (Muttiah Muralitharan) looked willing to wave the white handkerchief in the face of Viru’s assault,” Shastri wrote.
