Shikhar Dhawan: the "showman" turns showstopper
Shikhar Dhawan doesn’t just bat. He prowls. And when he is done , the man unfurls his arms wide. The viciously fluttering brilliant blue India jersey adorning his taut frame, the helmet and bat in either outstretched palm, all make for an immense sight.
His longer-than-long grin is arched by the now world famous moustache. Perspiring brows and beard brim with jet black vitality as if in a comity of their own.
With the imagery firmly set, the showman gazes skyward with those urgent-looking eyes, soaking the sunny spotlight from above. Moments later, he basks in the spectators’ delightful approval of his riveting effort.
He then embraces his comrade and with a flourish, twirls his moustache and looks into nothingness with his vacillating ear-rings for company.
Dhawan puts on the helmet again, doubles up to the crease swiftly and it’s now time for him to face the next ball!
After serenading the scant Pretoria crowd with a record-breaking 150-ball 248 a couple of days ago against South Africa A in a List A match, the showman had definitely turned showstopper!
Dhawan had a rousing start to a career that has careened before assuming sanity. He amassed 505 runs in the 2004 U-19 World Cup; a record which still stands as the most runs scored in a single World Cup in the U-19 category. Those were days when his batsmanship had a bit of showmanship to it; boisterous stroke-making at the start of his innings which would more often than not pan into tales of what-might-have-been on him getting dismissed.
He was keen to take the attack to the opposition, as his frequent inside-out drives and blistering pulls would have us believe. Even with such valuable attributes, he could have been faulted for trying hard, too hard for comfort.
His U-19 World Cup form brimmed over into his maiden Ranji trophy season representing Delhi. Finishing as the team’s leading run-getter with 461 runs in his debut Ranji trophy assignment made him believe, after all, that his methods of trying and sometimes going too hard at it were correct.
And going too hard brought him quick results but also drained him out. Over the next five years, he continued to be the mainstay for his Ranji team, scoring at a healthy near-45 average, but he was fizzling out in a bid to accelerate hard.
Vijay Dahiya and Lalchand Rajput, two people who have watched Shikhar closely over the years, concurred that these were frugal returns for a player primed for greatness of the highest order. He helped Delhi to the title in the 2007-08 season with an aggregate of 570 runs but was constantly being lost to the oblivion that comes with plying your wares on the domestic cricket scene.
His ODI debut in 2010 didn’t really make people stop in their tracks to take note, but he was getting back on the right track to have a tilt at what was his he believed – an India cap!
A nothing-to-write-home-about T20 debut followed in 2011.You could throw in a match-winning half century just to give a better appearance to the entire situation. But Dhawan didn’t just want to be better; he wanted to be rubbing shoulders with the best.
During all those tenuous times in domestic cricket and roller-coaster displays in the IPL tourneys, the glint in his eye was clear and exigent. There was a longing, a desperation even, to be the best; yet the black of his eye seemed to shroud the failures that he chanced upon.
Enter 14th March and the year 2013. Several parts of the world were celebrating this as the Pi day (14th March is 3/14 when written in month day format and is symbolic of 3.14, the Pi constant) while Dhawan was being handed his maiden Test cap from Sachin Tendulkar. The black and white of his eye were in perfect unison, as the Australians might have found at the end of the Test match.