Yuvraj Singh: Celebrating 33 years of a champion

Yuvraj Singh

There are some brands that you just look at and immediately associate a face with. These faces emanate a wow factor, almost as if the brand is the person and the person is the brand: You look at Infosys and you can imagine Narayan Murthy’s visionary gaze; you think about the Aditya Birla Group and get reminded of Kumar Mangalam Birla’s steely resolve; and when you see the logo of Apple or Microsoft somewhere, the gazillion gadgets don’t come to your mind, but Jobs and Gates do.

Defining the new brand of Indian cricket

At the turn of the new century, Indian cricket embarked on a new path to redeeming itself from the lows of match-fixing. Out of the shadows of an ambitious captain and three masters in their late twenties emerged what was heralded as the new brand of Indian cricket. This brand of cricket displayed sharp fielding, gutsy batting and incisive bowling on a regular basis. It was an unfamiliar territory to be in really, as totals got chased down, mighty teams got humbled in their backyards and fierce competitiveness set in. And the first face to define this brand wasn’t the captain, but rather a young lieutenant of his, who we came to know as Yuvraj Singh.

ICC Knockouts 2000, Nairobi, India at 90/3 – Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid, all back in the pavilion. Out comes a boy who is barely nineteen, and up against him are the likes of Brett Lee, Glenn McGrath and Jason Gillespie. It’s his virtual debut, and he plays an innings of his life. While everyone stutters and stumbles, he single-handedly demolishes the Aussies on a fast, batting track. He notches up 84 off 80, hitting 12 boundaries in the process, and also claims the record for the highest score for India in a batsman’s first ODI innings. Later on, he fields with equanimity, takes a good catch and effects a match altering run-out. After India cause a major upset, Steve Waugh acknowledges his temperament and defines his innings as ‘match-winning’.

Yuvraj Singh, 18 years and some days old, is already a match winner, and many more praises are to come.

Yuvraj the match-winner

You can only sit and admire the confidence and class that Yuvraj exudes. India has had the privilege of fielding some of the most stylish batsmen in the history of the game, and Yuvraj figures somewhere in the top of that list.

Remember the high back-lift and that beautiful arc as it came down on the ball? It gave him that extra time, to mitigate pace. It was his greatest weapon as well as a major chink in his armour - on bad days, the high back-lift would lead to his downfall, with the ball keeping low and creeping upon him.

He averaged his best while playing fast bowling; one can always ask Lee, Stuart Broad or Shaun Pollock, or even Andrew Flintoff.

In his autobiography, he says how being made to practise on marble flooring, by an authoritarian father, helped his game against fast bowling. But he wasn’t any bad against spin either, doing fairly well against the better spinners of his generation, including the great Muralitharan.

Yuvraj Singh’s bat often won games for India single-handedly: a jump in average from 36.37 to 49.68 suggests that. And the fact that 10 of his 13 ODI hundreds came in games India won truly defines what Waugh meant when he called the southpaw a ‘match-winner’. Move over to T20s, and the statistics become more striking – nearly 74 percent of Yuvraj’s career runs in T20s have come in games in which India has won; out of his 40 T20Is, he has been on the winning side 23 times.

One can’t fully do justice to his batsmanship in numbers alone, and a frequent criticism that crops up is his performance in Test cricket. Let’s not forget that the prime of his career clashed with one of India’s greatest middle-orders, and no matter how hard he tried, it would’ve been difficult to make his spot permanent, especially in the wake of Ganguly’s comeback in 2006. However, despite his failures, some of his most impactful innings such as Bangalore (2007) and Chennai (2008) have either come to India’s rescue or have aided in some historic wins.

Kevin Pietersen once called Yuvraj a ‘pie-chucker’, and what a pie-chucker has he truly been. When Yuvraj the batsman wasn’t winning games for India, Yuvraj the bowler was. Time and again, he rolled his arm over and provided some crucial breakthroughs, especially during India’s 2011 World Cup juggernaut. Be it quelling runs or taking wickets, his left-arm orthodox spin bagged as many as 143 wickets and came to the team’s rescue throughout his cricketing career.

It doesn’t look like it is over yet

The amount of flak that he received after the bad outing during the World T20 Final in Bangladesh, earlier this year, is a wee bit sad really. It’s almost like public memory is non-existent. Here’s a man who on his own won you the World Cup with a malignancy in his lungs and who has flown around the park fielding like a Superman – taking 133 catches and effecting a bag full of run-outs over his international career, but is still expected to churn masterpieces innings after innings.

The ball was holding up, and the Sri Lankan death bowling was good. However, all those didn’t matter; the effigies that were burnt were that of Yuvraj’s, unfairly so. The house that was attacked was, unfortunately, his. It’s like one man was responsible for India’s defeat.

After his omission from India’s preliminary World Cup squad, Yuvraj’s overseas performances have been dissected and fitness issues brought up. A forward-looking Indian team has discarded one of its greatest match-winners; the Natwest final is a scorecard and the Sydney magic is a mere Youtube video.

While there’s a rush to complete the epitaphs, it’s fair to say that Yuvraj still has the fire left in his belly, and there are miles to go before he sleeps.