400 blows?

I still believe it’s a bad, unequal wicket that doesn’t make for a great contest. I still believe this match is likely to be drawn. Yet, nothing, just nothing can take away from Sehwag’s innings. Every time he scores a century – and 10 scores of over 150 bear this out – he goes on to make a big one. He doesn’t throw it away, there’s a hungry, gritty, run-chewing monster inside him.

It’s tempting to compare Sehwag to K. Srikkanth, another hard-hitting batsman with a quick eye and delightful wrists who, if memory serves me right, got only two hundreds in Test cricket. I remember both those innings – one in Chennai itself, against Imran in 1986-87, and one a season earlier in Australia (which I heard on the radio, but didn’t see). So often, he’d blaze his way to 30 or 40 and then get bored, twirl his nostrils, make some silly error and go home – another of a long list of Indian stylists who scored fewer runs than they should have.

Sehwag started off looking podgy – he is much fitter in real life than the photographs do him credit – but today his stamina spoke for him. It’s remarkable that in team with four batsmen who’re all rated above him, he’s the one who refuses to get out. It would be sacrilege perhaps to mention him in the same breath as Bradman and Lara – the others to have hit two triple hundreds in Tests – but look how he’s polished his limited skills set and where it’s taken him to ... He’s a bit like Ravi Shastri in that sense, only more free-scoring.

These past two years have cost Sehwag a lot – his form, his place in the team, his shot at captaincy. He’s lost that slot to Dhoni and if he decides he doesn’t want it, maybe it’ll just free him up for a long innings as India’s most prolific opener since that day in Mumbai in 1987 when Sunil Gavaskar left the crease for the last time. There couldn’t be two more different batsmen; but only one of them ever reached 300.

Tomorrow, could he make it 400?