97, 89, now 89 in final: Sanju chetta plays big brother once again

He is not someone who fixates over milestones and numbers. “I haven’t missed two centuries. I have scored one 97 and one 89. It is a very big deal. I am very grateful for that,” he said after his 89 in Mumbai. In the final, he missed the hundred again but this was yet another match-winning knock. This was something beyond his childhood dream.

The phase of regret was fleeting, as he retreated to the dug-out with a big, content smile. He took one step at a time as he climbed the long stairway to the dressing room. He was soaking in the moment, probably recounting every stroke he uncorked on an electric night when music blared out unabashedly from the speakers and the crowd revelled in the barrage of fours and maximums. Or he might have been wondering at the strange paths his destiny had traversed.

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Before the tournament, he was the forgotten one. Riding a slump, the bat’s sweet-spot unstained, his career a step away from falling apart. But for India’s left-hand heavy batting order and the off-spin vulnerability that threatened to derail India’s campaign, Sanju would not have returned. Before the South Africa game, captain Suryakumar Yadav would quip: “Who would I replace him with? Tilak (Varma) or Abhishek (Sharma). Batting coach Sitanshu Kotak said that Sanju batted a lot in the nets because there were few right-handers in the squad for bowlers to practice.

One last chance beckoned him. A failure against the West Indies, he knew, had the possibility of ending his career. But Sanju did not let pressure wither him. Instead, he chose the breaks to bend the scripts, his own and the team’s, in his own will. Not far from his house in Vizhinjam in Kerala’s southernmost district of Thiruvananthapuram, there is a statue of Christ the Redeemer, a replica of the one in Rio de Janeiro. In the last three games, all virtual knockouts, he has been India’s saviour. It required not only tremendous skill but also fortitude.

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All three knocks had different flavours. The 97 not out against the West Indies was the most emotional one. Tears rolled down his face and melted with sweat as he knelt on the turf and kissed a silent prayer. The 89 in Mumbai was the flashiest one, when unfurled a flurry of gorgeous strokes with carefree abandon. The 89 in Ahmedabad, the highest score ever in a T20 World Cup final, was the most defining one, the knock that a lakh spectators would remember for a lifetime, a treatise on controlled hitting that would form the gold standard of T20 batting, an elusive space where art blends with aggression.

He stroked five fours and eight sixes, including three successive maximums of Rachin.. But one stroke without muscle captured the sweetness of his batting. In the 10th over of the game, Jimmy Neesham ailed the near-perfect yorker on fifth stumps, but Sanju simply opened the bat face and steered it past third man. Few batsmen have such dexterous hands in the world, malleable wrists that he could flex as he wants them to.

It was arguably his most composed knock. He was quiet, batting in a self-contained trance, like an implacable little Buddha. He wore no expressions, as though he was entirely in a world unto his own. Among India’s phalanx of T20 destroyers, he is the most graceful one, coaxing boundaries without breaking a sweat, harnessing the pace and stretching the limits of orthodox strokes. He let Abhishek Sharma and Ishan Sharma seize the attacking initiatives, but from the 10th over, he raised his momentum into a furious end game. He pulled and drove Lockie Ferguson for a brace of gorgeous sixes, strokes gleaned from the textbook, a wondrous exhibition of straight-batted destruction.

It’s the enduring beauty of his batting that has impressed, among others, Kumar Sangakkara and Rahul Dravid, two stalwarts of the game. The Sri Lankan legend would tell ICC: “He’s a special player and when he’s fresh and focused there’s nothing he can’t do. He’s a humble, grounded guy… not much on social media. He tends to like a lot of privacy, cares for the rest of the group. Those are great qualities to have apart from talent and skill.”

He is a hero without hubris, reflecting the disarming virtues of his hometown, Vizhinjam, a fishing town that survived the Tsunami and riots. The resolve is understated, the aggression is undemonstrative, and just like that he has bended the script of a World Cup. He would care less for the hundreds he missed, but rejoice in the weight of the knocks that were heavier than centuries.