He flashes, flashes hard

Ravi Shastri is one of the best allrounders the country has ever produced. Siddhartha Vaidyanathan, writing for Yahoo cricket, talks about Shastri’s role as a commentator and describes the IPL final as Shastri saw it.

Shastri’s commentary, like much of his batting, mostly runs on two gears: the dour and the overstated. When he needs a shield, he pulls out his quiver-full of cliches; when he needs a sword, he attacks with hyperbole. There is a robotic quality to a lot of Shastri’s commentary. So legendary are some of the Shastri-isms that they are immortalized by a Twitter bot that automatically throws out terms like “I just get the feeling” and “that’s gone to the fence like a tracer bullet”.