Deep Backward Point

Daniel Brettig on what Virender Sehwag told David Warner:

“Two years ago when I went to Dehli, Sehwag watched me a couple of times and said to me, ‘You’ll be a better Test cricketer than what you will be a Twenty20 player’,” Warner recalled. “I basically looked at him and said, ‘mate, I haven’t even played a first-class game yet’. But he said, ‘All the fielders are around the bat, if the ball is there in your zone you’re still going to hit it. You’re going to have ample opportunity to score runs. You’ve always got to respect the good ball, but you’ve always got to punish the ball you always punish’.”

Which tells me a lot more about Sehwag than about Warner. It also perhaps reveals why Sehwag is a Test great before he is an ODI great, even though his game is– according to the pundits– “naturally suited to the shorter formats”.

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I especially like Sehwag’s sentence construction here: you’ve always got to punish the ball you always punish.

Sehwagology. Sehwag’s law. A weird combination of fate and free will.