English media cannot leave its typical attitude, the rants on the Ashes and the quality of innings of Sehwag played.
All that planning, all that concentration, all that toil. England had labored for nearly four days to force an impregnable position in the Chennai Test and then along came Virender Sehwag. In his wanton presence, all logic was lost, all outcomes were imaginable. Now anything is possible. England set India 387 to win in a notional 126 overs, a fourth-innings total far in excess of anything achieved at the Chidambaram Stadium. It should have represented absolute security, but Sehwag the batsman is consumed by disobedience. He responded with 83 from 68 balls, with 11 fours and four sixes. India, 131 for one at the close, need 256 on the final day. England's bowlers, Andrew Flintoff apart, were mugged. If Sehwag played like this at Lord's, a shirt-sleeved constable would probably stroll on and serve him an Asbo for rowdiness in a public place. Someone should have told him that the one-day series is over. Such is Sehwag 's reputation that England stationed their best fielder, Paul Collingwood, at third man for the uppish carve. On 26, he hacked through Alastair Cook's hands at gully, the place where Collingwood would normally have been standing. Over-theorizing perhaps.
Sehwag 's disorderly magnificence was entirely out of keeping with an enervating first two sessions in which England moved somberly towards a declaration. Andrew Strauss and Collingwood completed immensely worthy hundreds, all temptation was eschewed and India indulged in shameless timewasting. Harper made a few efforts to chivvy things along, but the umpires generally looked impotent.
Lord Snooty Mike Atherton in Times Online.
An Indian victory remains the least likely, given that they will have to make more runs to win in the fourth innings than anyone has made in India before, and 232 more than any team have chased successfully in Madras (Chennai). With only seven wickets falling yesterday, a draw is still a possibility, although India do not enjoy batting in a defensive manner. This may play into England's hands since wicket-taking opportunities are more likely to present themselves against batsmen taking a chance or two.
That India have been sucked into a run chase at all today is solely down to Sehwag, who blazed away in exhilarating fashion, so that by the close India had managed to reduce their deficit by 131 in a little under a session's worth of batting. Sehwag fell 17 short of what would have been one of the most brilliant of Test hundreds, but his failure to reach three figures, perishing leg-before while trying to paddle-sweep Graeme Swann to fine leg, should in no way diminish his achievement. There were two other hundreds to celebrate, but Sehwag played the innings not just of the day but of the match.
He played with glorious freedom, unconstrained by the situation, the reputation of the bowlers and the pitch, at one end of which the topsoil is completely worn away. England's batsmen had managed two boundaries throughout the afternoon; within 15 balls, Sehwag had found the rope six times. The merest hint of width outside off stump saw the ball skimming through the arc between backward point and third man, mostly along the ground, and once all the way over the rope for six. If England's plan is to bowl short and wide at Sehwag, it needs revisiting.
To restore some sanity, he acknowledges Indian crowd’s petite for the Test cricket :
Test cricket is a remarkable game because of the speed at which things can change and until the mid-afternoon slackness, England were in total control thanks to an epic performance from Strauss, who added another hundred to his burgeoning collection, and a typically doughty century from Collingwood. Strauss's second hundred of the Test occupied 394 minutes, giving him more than 12 hours at the crease in total. Without match practice for two months, he is making up for lost time. He became the tenth Englishman to score two hundreds in a Test and the seventh to do so against India. It was a feat of extreme endurance and high skill and rarely can he have played better than he did from lunchtime on the first day onwards. The “Little Master” Sachin Tendulkar thought so, too, offering a handshake in congratulation. High praise indeed
OPENING the batting in all forms of the international game has to be one of the toughest jobs around. It must take a tremendous mental toll tailoring your game to the many situations these different formats throw up and the recent emotional problems of Herschelle Gibbs and Marcus Trescothick bear testimony to this. Unsurprising, then, that there is something slightly unhinged about the way Virender Sehwag, India's 24/7 opener, goes about his business. He certainly plunged England into shock as he tore into their bowling. Sehwag has not so much pushed the envelope containing the rules on how to open the batting as punch it to shreds. His great gift is synthesis of approach. One minute he is batting as you would expect someone to bat in a Test match, the next he has flicked a switch and has gone into one-day mode, or rather one-day mood, and every ball looks set to end up in the stands.
Earlier this year, on this very ground, Sehwag spent most of the first day of a Test against South Africa batting as though he were in the first powerplay of a one-day game, and raced to the fastest triple- century in Test history. He beat the previous record by a cool 84 balls, so it was something of a Bob Beamon moment. He is also the owner of three of the seven fastest double-centuries in Tests. Like Trescothick and Gibbs, Sehwag has had his ups and downs. He went through a bad trot in one-dayers in 2004 and spent most of last year unwanted in Tests. You could pick a pretty good World XI from people who were not playing Test cricket this time last year, given that Andrew Strauss (this game's twin centurion) was left at home while England were touring Sri Lanka, and Andrew Flintoff was still in the rehab room.
Now, the idea of leaving out Sehwag seems like an act of lunacy. Apart from his huge effort against South Africa, he also made important runs in the series against Australia, but unarguably his finest innings of the year was a double-century in Galle when the rest of the Indian batsmen could make neither head nor tail of Ajantha Mendis. Sehwag 's risk-taking approach seems contrary to his modest background. Raised in Nafargarh, a satellite town of Delhi, as the son of a storekeeper, he might be forgiven for adopting a thriftier approach to his day job. Yet it is actually the likes of Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid, middle-class children both, who calculate every risk three times over before taking it.
But Sehwag now deserves to be properly recognised for what he is: since the retirement of Adam Gilchrist, the most exciting batsman on the planet.
