IPL Day 5: Blast from the past and into the future too

The way Gilchrist was blasting the bowlers all over the park shouldn’t have surprised us too much. But if the word going around is to be believed that he played only one T-20 match in between last year’s IPL and this year’s, it should have been surprising but it still wasn’t. That’s the aura of the man. No matter what the constraints are, you still expect Gilly to be the same.

You can sense Gilly is in top form when he starts pulling good length deliveries and we had a few of them yesterday. He plays audacious square cuts, cover drives beautifully and smacks a few across the line, but its his ability to pick up the length of the delivery early and quickly rock back to pull fuller length deliveries is what sets him apart from others. As a bowler there’s just no safe area to bowl to Gilly. How Michael Clarke would be wishing Gilly was in Abu Dhabi and not in SA!

If Gilly’s innings was blast from the past what followed was a blast into the future. I am a huge fan of Rohit Sharma. To me he is the best young India batsman going around and surely deserves a test spot ahead of Yuvraj Singh. He oozes with class, can play spin and pace with equal ease and most importantly he seems to have that extra time in playing his shots. He’s also of that rare breed that spends time in settling down even in a T-20 match and has the ability to up the tempo at will. And he did it against no less a bowler than Anil Kumble when he hit him for 3 sixes in an over just when you were wondering if he was consuming too many deliveries. Except for that last six against Kumble, none of his shots would have been out of place in test cricket as well. At the end of the game his scoring rate is no different from an out and out dasher.

I can’t wait for him to be inducted into the test team, so that he’s ready to inherit the no.4 from Sachin whenever he decides to hang up his boots. Even in ODIs he’s been given the odd chance but dumped immediately. With such a talent, you are better off making the mistake of giving one chance too many than one chance too few. Mr.Srikanth – Are you listening?

And just what’s wrong with B’lore? They have got some fabulous individual talent and a reasonably good bowling attack but somehow they are not able to click as a team. It’s got something to do with the franchise’s mindset. First they made Charu Sharma a scapegoat, then the owner almost openly disowned the team, and then the club paid a fortune to acquire KP for this season as if that was the panacea for all their problems. Along the way Ray Jennings was hired and he had his share of taking a dig at the seniors in the team! There’s been a consistent search for that individual weak point but no talks about cohesiveness of the team. In a team sport, if the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts, then no part is worth a fortune.