A battle between past, present in IPL 8: The joy and sorrow of watching Virender Sehwag bat

It began in the Sony studio. Once Kings XI Punjab decided to bat, the name Virender Sehwag leapt from the lips of the talking heads paid to boost the IPL. “I can talk about Sehwag all day,” one of them said. If you happened to be an alien who was beamed to earth yesterday, you would have thought Sehwag was India’s answer to Glenn Maxwell, a young gun redefining the bounds of batting possibility instead of a 36-year old former superstar still plugging away at an increasingly younger man’s game. [caption id=“attachment_1456659” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  File picture of Virender Sehwag. AFP[/caption] Once the match started though, a commentator gave it away: “Sehwag has changed the game. He changed it 15 years ago.” Yes, it has been (almost) 15 years since Sehwag made his Test debut for India in November of 2001. The Nawab of NajafGarh was a force of nature who respected only the width of his bat and the acuity of his hand-eye co-ordination. Every sportsperson aspires to play with a clear, uncluttered mind. Sehwag was born that way. He was, in a manner of speaking, permanently in the zone. Then, we tuned in to watch him because we did not know, could not know, what gobsmackingly audacious feat he would accomplish. Today, we tune in because we hope we can catch a glimpse of the batsman Sehwag used to be one more time. Yesterday, for one over at least, we found him. Kings XI Punjab had started sedately. After eight overs, they were 52 for 1. Then came the “strategic time out”. Delhi Daredevils strategically brought on Imran Tahir after the break. Never one to let a spinner settle, Sehwag plonked his front foot down and slammed the first ball he faced from Tahir over the long-off boundary. It takes a brave spinner to toss the ball up after getting smashed, more so in T20, and the next ball from Tahir was flatter and shorter. Sehwag didn’t bother with moving his feet. He simply shifted his weight from front foot to back, paused for the ball to reach him, then dabbed it behind backward point for four. The strain on Tahir’s face was apparent. He was being outwitted by the old fox. He rolled up and bowled a regulation legspinner. Sehwag, weight forward this time, split the gap between short third man and backward point like a surgeon cutting between arteries. Three deliveries. Three different shots. Three boundaries. The crowd roared in delight and approval. Preity Zinta waved her KXIP flag. In the moments between Tahir’s over and the next, you felt the joy of those strokes. Inevitably, the joy was followed by the knowledge that this story was unlikely to have a happy ending. Ignorance, in this case, would have truly been bliss. Sehwag would face another 17 balls and hit just one more boundary – a six off the penultimate ball of his innings. Where once he would have taken the match by the scruff of its neck and shaken it until all the bowlers had fallen out, here you were (secretly) hoping he would get out so the real big hitters could have a go. To watch Sehwag now – bespectacled and slow – is to fight a battle between past and present. This cannot be Sehwag. And yet it is.