After whacking a six off Andre Nel, S Sreesanth, danced down the wicket, swinging his bat around in the air
No one is advocating the milder manners of his predecessors in Indian cricket to S Sreesanth. His belligerence, in fact, is endearing and adds plenty of character to the team. However, someone needs to gently point out to him that Andre Nel is no one’s idea of a role model either - certainly not in terms of on-field behaviour.
Only consider the strange rivalry brewing between the two. Given that they are both fast bowlers, the fascinating contest would be on who can hit the deck harder, knock the batsmen’s ribcage oftener and send the stumps flying farther.
But the basis of competition so far has been on who can be furiouser.
The one-upmanship added some spice and humour to the intense momentum of cricket at the Wanderers. In the process, Sreesanth sunk in the popularity charts around the stadium.
The early signs were visible on Saturday, when the young man from Kerala gave Nel, among others, a sampler of how it felt to have a bowler run down the wicket and talk right into your face. It hadn’t helped that Nel had hit Sreesanth for a four and a six too.
On Sunday morning, Sreesanth exchanged ball for bat as he joined forces with VRV Singh for a last-ditched effort to buttress the target as much as possible. Nel, meanwhile, his furious face and pace on, charged in to bowl. Whack, and there went one over the boundary.
Remember Sourav Ganguly’s shirt twirling? Now substitute the jersey with a bat, and picture the bowler dancing down the wicket, swinging it around in the air. The Indians in the stadium couldn’t stop laughing but Nel couldn’t have been amused. He followed up on the little sideshow with his own arm twirling in the air after every subsequent delivery to Sreesanth.
That wasn’t the end, though. When the Indians came out to bowl, Sreesanth continued from where he’d left off. The aggression, however, went a little over the top when the Indian gave Hashim Amla an unnecessary farewell gesture (hands framing the face, much like one makes when one intends to hoot).
Now, each time they focus on Nel in action, television cameras have brought into living rooms the sight of an angry face shouting cuss words it doesn’t take a lip-reader to decipher. Sreesanth - still new to the game - hasn’t quite the wherewithal yet to complete the picture but the lad sure has figured out how to get the South Africans, including the spectators, riled.
Worse forms of sledging and far more distasteful gestures have been made by bowlers over generations, but the effervescent young Indian may well want to rethink the path he’s decided to tread on before he learns the hard way that rules, again over generations, have been different for different folks.
Lighten up
Lightning in Mumbai is more like a bolt from the thundery blue. You can hardly call it a regular monsoon occurrence, right? So, imagine sitting in your hotel room and watching the sky crackle so close to where you are that your weak heart starts missing many a beat. Word of advice for other such yellow-livered creatures: Can’t take thunder and lightning, then stay away from summers in Johannesburg. Locals say that this is a ho-hum occurrence as far as they are concerned. Having been told that, one could hardly share one’s experience of sitting up till 3 am in the morning, which is when the lightning stopped.
