Sehwag - Godzilla on the warpath
Those who were at Mumbai's Brabourne Stadium will proudly tell their loved ones "I was there." Virender Sehwag crowned the return of Test cricket to the venue with a psychedelic 293, scoring an astonishing 284 in a single day
Kanishkaa Balachandran
25-Feb-2013
Those who were at Mumbai's Brabourne Stadium will proudly tell their loved ones "I was there." Virender Sehwag crowned the return of Test cricket to the venue with a psychedelic 293, scoring an astonishing 284 in a single day. Akshay Sawai describes his knock in in-depth detail, interviews and observes a cross section of people who were privileged to watch the innings, from the local police to the official scorer. Read on in Open Magazine.
The queues were longest on the third day, when Sehwag was on the verge of becoming the first batsman ever to score three Test triple hundreds, with Sachin yet to bat. That explained why wickets in India are flat. Nothing sells like entertaining batting. The line started opposite the Ambassador Hotel, went around the Asiatic corner and to the gates of the Brabourne on the other side. At times, some teenaged boys got carried away with their language and were censured by elders. Near Gaylords restaurant, a lady in her 40s couldn’t take the f-words anymore. She turned around and snapped at the guilty party, a gangly youth with acne. “Continuous bad words”, “Is this how you speak in front of your mother?” were among the snatches of the tirade I overheard. The boy looked sheepish.
Kanishkaa Balachandran is a senior sub-editor at ESPNcricinfo