When a demotion led to a detonation

It needed Yuvraj Singh just six deliveries to transform an unremarkable Wednesday evening into one of the most iconic nights in cricket history.

The left-hander with the reputation of being the cleanest striker of the cricket ball was having a World T20 (as the T20 World Cup was then called) to forget, with scores of 1 and 5 in his first two outings. He was still feeling the aftereffects of being smashed for five successive sixes by Dimitri Mascarenhas in the final over of England’s innings in an ODI at The Oval, exactly two weeks back. To say that he was already prickly would be an understatement.

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As if The Oval ignominy, his own lack of runs and India’s must-win predicament going into the clash against England on September 19, 2007, weren’t bad enough, Yuvraj was pushed down the order to No. 5, skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni promoting himself when Gautam Gambhir was dismissed with 33 deliveries left.

Seething with rage, Yuvraj had no option but to bide his time. That came when, with 20 deliveries to go, Robin Uthappa was cleaned up by Chris Tremlett. Yuvraj swung off his seat and walked in, no one any wiser about the carnage that was to unfold.

A pesky dot was followed by an aerial cover-drive for four, and Yuvraj was up and running. In the next over, he smashed two good deliveries from Andrew Flintoff for boundaries, was involved in an angry exchange with the man they call ‘Freddie’, and turned his ire on Stuart Broad in a 19th over that read 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6. It was the first time in T20Is, and only the second time after Herschelle Gibbs in the 50-over World Cup earlier that year, that a batsman had struck six sixes in an over in international cricket, Yuvraj’s 12-ball fifty still the fastest in all T20Is.

“When I’d get demoted from my normal batting order, I never liked it, I always felt like I had to prove a point,” Yuvraj tells DH from Mumbai, having just returned from playing a pro-am golf tournament in Casablanca. “That also fired me up. I just hit every ball from the middle of my bat from the time I went in. The two boundaries off Flintoff were off pretty good balls. Flintoff had something to say to me, I reacted, he said something again, I reacted once more, and an argument ensued. It was a bit hostile, different from how I’d expected to play out. It was pretty aggressive, the umpire (Billy Doctrove) came to me and asked me to carry on with the game. I was angrier now because Freddie had started it and I thought he should have spoken to him rather than me.”

By now, Yuvraj was on a very short fuse. “I was angry, but I was focused. I wanted to hit everything out of the ground because that was the only way of giving it back to the opposition,” he philosophises. “Recently, I was playing this Legends tournament and Dimitri Mascarenhas was also playing in that game. Dimitri said to me, ‘After that fifth six, I remember you looking at me and smiling’. When I hit the fifth six, I was like ‘Yes, the monkey is off my back now’. And when I hit the sixth six, I looked at Freddie and he knew I had given it back in the best possible way. (Sachin) Tendulkar always told me to let my bat do the talking and that’s what it did that day.”

The first three balls of Broad’s over disappeared to all corners, but it was after the fourth six that the protagonist felt he was on to something special. “Paul Collingwood (the skipper) went to Stuart after that fourth six and I think the conversation was like keep on bowling outside off stump because there was a big boundary to my left. I was lucky to hit the fourth six; I’d never hit a six over point previously. Just before bowling the last ball, when Stuart told the umpire he was going to bowl from over the stumps, I felt he was making a mistake because the leg-side is my strongest. On the off-side, if you bowl a yorker, you can’t get under the ball. But on the leg-side, I feel you can always get under the ball, no matter how good the yorker is. The ball was shorter, it hit the toe of my bat and went for a six. Any bowler who has been hit for five sixes, he is mentally finished. When I was hit for five sixes, I was totally gone for two weeks, mentally. Like I said, it was great to get the monkey off my back.”

(Writer is a senior cricket journalist)