“I think we will go after him.”

Run, Jason. Run!

There’s nothing left for you in India. Grab your passport and enough rupees to get you to the airport and just flee. You’re a marked man.

Virender Sehwag doesn’t do milking the spinners. If he wants spin-milk, he’s going right up to the cow of off-spin with a huge great sword and he’s getting it all out in one go. Then he’s going to roll around in the spin-milk, giggling.

We were reading an extract from Shane Warne’s Top 100 Cricketers today. In his entry about Virender Sehwag (number 35), he describes what Sehwag does when he’s struggling.

Sehwag was batting with Jeremy Snape for Leicestershire and Abdul Razzaq, who was playing for Middlesex, started to reverse swing the ball, creating all sorts of problems.

“I have a plan,” said Sehwag and promptly hit the ball out of the ground so that it had to be replaced.

That’s what he does when he’s struggling. He deliberately loses the ball by hitting a monstrous six. So what does ‘getting after the bowler’ entail?

Tags: Jason Krejza, Virender Sehwag by King Cricket
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Murali. Vaas. Mendis. A pitch with one wet end and one cracked end. Rain. Reason. Virender Sehwag defied them all.

Dravid, Tendulkar and Ganguly mustered seven between them. Gautam Gambhir had a lot of luck to edge his way to 56. VVS Laxman hung around for a bit. The tail folded. Meanwhile Virender Sehwag careered along to 201 not out, like a giraffe on rollerskates going down a hell of a steep hill. He should fall, but he doesn’t. He just keeps on accelerating.

You’ve got to admire his reasoning: ‘Hmm. It’s doing a bit. Best keep panning the ball as hard as I can like usual.’

And he’s bald. There’s no way he’s related to Sanath Jayasuriya is there?

Tags: India, Sri Lanka, Virender Sehwag by King Cricket
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Virender Sehwag has now hit the fastest Test triple hundred. He was always likely to achieve it, which is perhaps the biggest compliment of all. A freak innings like Nathan Astle’s is one thing, but Sehwag does this kind of thing consistently. At the close of play Virender Sehwag was 309 not out and he’d scored those runs off just 292 balls, hitting 41 fours and five sixes.

Sehwag’s hit 309 before, against Pakistan. It took him 375 balls. That shouldn’t be bettered, but it just was. Sehwag can also boast the second and seventh fastest Test double hundreds of all time (assuming this one still counts as the third fastest now that he’s gone past 300).

As we said earlier, no batsman other than Virender Sehwag can sustain this speed of scoring for such long periods. He has a unique ability to strike good balls for boundaries without offering chances. Can anyone else play such outrageous shots without seeming in any danger?

He’s only the third batsman to score two triple hundreds after Don Bradman and Brian Lara. Has he got any adrenaline left for tomorrow? Lara’s 400 will surely come under threat if he has. Ordinarily 91 runs is a long way, but Sehwag has so comprehensively shredded this South African team they’re liable to go foetal when they see him return to the crease. He’s made Rahul Dravid look like a tail-ender.

Virender Sehwag must surely be regarded as one of the greats now. Yes?

Tags: India, Records, South Africa, Virender Sehwag by King Cricket
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That’s not a particularly arresting statistic on first glance, but think about it. When Virender Sehwag passes 100 he almost always hits in excess of 150. That’s something.

A running theme of this site of late has been the importance of imposing yourself on the opposition. We alluded to it in our retirement posts about Marcus Trescothick and Adam Gilchrist. Virender Sehwag is a batsman who really can affect the way his opponents think and act. He can change a game beyond his own contribution.

Scoring a common-or-garden hundred is worthy. It’s not something to be sniffed at, but a hundred rarely decides a match in its own right. Bowlers decide matches really. However, if you can score 150 plus, 200 plus or 300 plus, you can win with a significantly poorer set of bowlers.

The great thing about Virender Sehwag is that he scores huge numbers of runs at a ridiculous speed. Concede 540 as India did in this match and you should really be hoping for a draw at best. Not with Sehwag at the crease. He’s probably the only batsman in the world who can score at a run a ball for such an extended period of time that you can overhaul a score like that and set a target with time left in the game.

Dropping Virender Sehwag was mental. You don’t average 50 after 50-odd Tests without being a decidedly gifted batsman.

Virender Sehwag hits the fastest Test 300 of all time against South Africa

Tags: India, South Africa, Virender Sehwag by King Cricket
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Virender Sehwag hit a typically outrageous hundred at the weekend against a group of bowlers we’ve never heard of. Some might say that it wasn’t testing enough to warrant a return to the Test side, but Virender Sehwag doesn’t really work like that.

Whether Virender Sehwag succeeds is largely down to him. He goes after pretty much anything, so even a half-volley can get him if it’s wide enough. The exact same delivery might find the edge of his bat one day or be pummelled by the middle of it the next. It just depends how he’s feeling. 29 today was neither here nor there though.

Rahul Dravid hasn’t actually been away, it just seems like he has. He must have some profound psychological problem with opening the batting, because while he’s looked painfully laboured as an opener in the first two matches of this series, having moved back to three (which isn’t all that different) he’s made a quite respectable 93.

Maybe you could get more out of Dravid if you made him open but didn’t let him know. His partner could walk out first and then shortly afterwards Anil Kumble could say: ‘Balls. Jaffer/Sehwag’s out,’ and Dravid could follow, convinced he was an invincible number three, rather than Mark Richardson with only a third of the shots.

India have turned a clearly dominant position into a so-so one by losing their last two specialist batsmen near the close of play. You shouldn’t do that against Australia.

We’ve deliberately made this post even more boring than our usual dross, because we’re still inwardly smarting at the groundswell of apathy that greeted our Matthew Hayden update the other day. That was better than five comments (one from us).

Actually, we’ve just read it again and maybe it isn’t all that good…

Tags: Australia, India, Rahul Dravid, Virender Sehwag by King Cricket
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India have named their squad for the four Test tour of Australia. It’s not totally straightforward. We’ll talk about the bowlers separately, but batting-wise the big news is the return of Virender Sehwag.

We’ve read that India can’t pick Sehwag in the squad and not play him, which is technically bollocks, yet not without a grain or two of truth. Sehwag’s a big name.

If Sehwag does play - presumably opening with Wasim Jaffer - then the middle order would contain The Usuals as we’re going to call them on this one, solitary occasion. If Rahul, Sachin, Sourav and VVS all play - no first names needed here - then there’s no room for Yuvraj Singh, who only larruped a lightning-quick 169 in his last Test.

For his part, Virender Sehwag has been woefully out of form in every form of cricket since he was dropped.

This rather reads like we think the reselection of Virender Sehwag is a bad idea. Confusingly, we don’t. Virender Sehwag is brilliant. You don’t average 50 after 52 Tests without having an ounce of skill.

Some people think that Sehwag has been ‘found out’. This is true, but no more so than it was after about his third Test match. There’s not much to find out about Virender Sehwag. He likes to try and hit every ball for four. That’s pretty much his gameplan. That he succeeded for so long with such a pig-headedly flawed approach is proof of his talent.

He did get a bit fat though, although that’s not necessarily a bad thing - as previously explored at great length on this site.

Virender Sehwag proves his class by hitting 300 against South Africa
Virender Sehwag racks up 10th hundred in excess of 150

Tags: India, Virender Sehwag, Yuvraj Singh by King Cricket
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