Yuvraj Singh is not satisfied with being remembered as the World Cup’s Player of the Tournament. He is now focussing afresh on the five-day format and hoping to create a legacy winning Tests for India
Sharda Ugra13-Jun-2011If natural justice had anything to do with cricket, Yuvraj Singh would have been in the West Indies. Strapping on his pads, waiting to get out and continue batting in early April vintage. Not sitting in his Delhi home, watching India’s bench-strength tackle West Indies, pondering doctors’ reports and the most inexplicable months of his life.Natural justice is on vacation and so India’s most emphatic batsman at the World Cup cannot play in the team’s first one-day series as world champions. If MS Dhoni’s six off Nuwan Kulasekara gave an Indian generation its signature shot, the sight of its buddy next door-turned-field marshal at the other end was most fitting. Yuvraj’s twenties – growing pains, coming of age et al – were lived under India’s affectionate yet confused public gaze. No wonder that night millions both celebrated and bawled.The World Cup, though, has been swiftly packed into record books, archival footage and individual memory. The team had no collective celebration, no open-top bus ride through one joyous city (how Kolkata would have welcomed them), and now the steady heartbeat of India’s Cup and the event’s Player of the Tournament, is on the fringe, in limbo.Yet Yuvraj’s faith stays rooted because of what has just gone past. “No one can take the World Cup away from me,” he said, speaking to ESPNcricinfo at length during the IPL. “It is very much in me. It was a big high and the IPL a sort of disappointing low. It was unfortunate that we didn’t have much time after the World Cup, but it wasn’t that we weren’t aware of it. That’s just the way a cricketer’s life goes these days.”His own cricket has gone through hairpin bends at high speeds over the last year, and Yuvraj should be walking around dizzy. Had he toured the West Indies he would have been the batting leader, with an excellent chance to set himself up for a return to the Test line-up. His current concerns are now around a lung infection that set off bouts of coughing in the last week of May. The juicy rumour that he actually pulled out of the tour because he didn’t want to play under Suresh Raina’s captaincy has not left him amused either. Yuvraj’s only response has been in his syndicated newspaper column, taking personal affront at the idea: “Do I need to tell everyone that I play for India and not for any captain or captaincy? Haven’t I played under MS Dhoni and Gautam Gambhir before?” No and yes, of course.Missing out in the West Indies plagues him because he had done enough to climb out of a professional trough. The World Cup, the Indian team’s former mental-conditioning coach, Paddy Upton, said, “was set up to be a defining period in Yuvi’s career”. It was, and he came through in deed and conduct, the perfect bridge between two generations. Captaincy ambitions or not, at this point in Yuvraj’s career, he is not interested in sulking on the sidelines because he can see well into the distance.The thirties lie ahead of him and he has been planning. Yuvraj travelled through the IPL with a personal trainer, Varun Shivdasani, to maintain his fitness for the many series ahead. Before the lung infection knocked him sideways, he felt at his fittest ever and wanted to hold on to it. He now discusses the benefits of protein intake on recovery, and his favourite Caesar is neither Julius nor a neighbourhood dog, but the salad. Time can shrink in cricket and Yuvraj is aware of it. “The only thing now is to concentrate on whatever Test cricket is left and just to excel in that,” he said. “I’m 29, I still have a lot of years to go, and I think these will be my best years.”Sanjay Manjrekar calls Yuvraj “one of the all-time greats in 50-overs cricket”. To many younger than Yuvraj, that is a most desirable benchmark. Straight off, class of 2000 graduate Yuvraj shakes his head. “I am very far away from greatness.” His definitions are different. “Tell me,” he asks, “who remembers a one-day cricketer today? Why do people remember Allan Border and Sunil Gavaskar? Why is Gavaskar on a different stage? It is only because he has 34 Test hundreds. Why do we call Viv Richards, Sir Viv? Great one-day innings, sure, but also 24 Test hundreds. Why will people remember Rahul Dravid? Because of his Test record.”He could live off his World Cup “Player of the Tournament” tag for the rest of his life, but Yuvraj’s sights are elsewhere. He has grown up around India’s greatest batting line-up and knows it. “Greatness to me is two things,” he says in his lumbering drawl, which often disguises a more contemplative self. “One is a cricketer who is always considered a team player and the other is someone who has scored everywhere in the world.”In Tests, of course. “Veeru to me is a great player. He’s a legend because he has scored everywhere, South Africa, Australia, England, Pakistan. Big hundreds – for me that is greatness.”VVS Laxman is great – he may not have 20 Test hundreds, he has about 16-17, but his 80s and his 90s, have been at times when India needed him the most. He has been the crunch man for India in Test matches, and a great team man – a great person.”He scales his own ambitions in the Test game against his batting spot. “I’m not looking towards greatness, because, say, like getting to 20-25 Test hundreds, would be a huge target for me as a middle-order batsman. Whatever Test cricket I play, I just want to do well. I have always looked towards winning Test matches for India consistently.”He stops to give proper credit, “Mostly bowlers win Test matches, but if I can contribute towards winning matches for India, like the game in Chennai…” his voice trails off. Chennai was more than three years ago, but he considers himself a stronger and more renewed cricketer now than he was then. “If I could just get to 70-80 Test matches so I don’t have any regrets when I retire, cricket [that I didn’t play ” [you will win, you have to win, India has to win]. What was left unsaid was something else. “‘If you don’t win we will put up your photos, set it on fire and throw shoes at it.’ No one said it but at the back of the mind sometimes it sounded like that,” he laughs. It was not easy.On the field Yuvraj radiated assurance, dead sure even after defeat in Nagpur that he would take the team to the final. For a year he had dreamt of hitting the winning runs against Australia in the final, the K’Naan song playing in his head. It is why he celebrated like he did in Motera, sliding to his knees and roaring like a beast uncaged. It Australia, the flags waving, and while it wasn’t the World Cup final, the game changed India’s stride. “I had wanted to win that match desperately.” Bollywood director Farhan Akhtar told Yuvraj that his face that night reminded him of a celebrating Muhammad Ali. Probably from that 1965 picture, standing over Sonny Liston.Yuvraj said he had played the Cup for Sachin Tendulkar, but the trophy became a son’s gift to his father. Yograj Singh, the other Chandigarh allrounder left behind in Kapil Dev’s wake, looked at pictures of 1983 and “always wished he had been there”. After the final, when Yograj spoke to his son, he said, “I am proud to have a son like you. You have given me everything.”Yet it is all suddenly cotton-woolled, because India are now the wicket everyone wants. Over the next eight months they must travel far and boldly to stay right where they are – Test No. 1 and one-day leaders in all but the rankings. “There’s more responsibility on us to maintain that. If we can do consistently in the West Indies and England, then there’s no reason we can’t do well in Australia. We’re playing good cricket. I’m sure we have what it takes to get to the next level.”In the last five years, series have been won in the West Indies and England, but Australia remains the holy grail, the monkey on the back, the so-far invincible opposition.Yuvraj Singh was the man who thought about and brought about Australia’s earliest exit from a World Cup in 12 years. With that, his one-day game scaled a dizzy peak. All he sees from there now is an even higher summit.
