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Kapil Dev (175 n.o., vs Zimbabwe, Tunbridge Wells, 1983)
What new revelation can possibly light up a knock that Sunil Gavaskar claims to be the “turning point of not just the tournament, but our lives”?
After Kapil elected to bat his team was choking on its last canister of oxygen, the top order back in the pavilion and a grand total of 17 on the board. Seamers Peter Rawson and Kevin Curran had despatched the openers — Gavaskar and K. Srikkanth — for a cumulative nought and cracked the remainder of India's batting spine with the dismissals of Mohinder Amarnath, Sandeep Patil and Yashpal Sharma.
It was here that Duncan Fletcher took off both Rawson and Curran and brought himself on in tandem with Iain Buthcart.
The pressure relieved, Kapil revelled. He rallied the lower order around him, stringing together three partnerships (60 with Roger Binny, 62 with Madan Lal and an unbroken 126 with Syed Kirmani) that sent Indian cricket on its way into a permanent overdrive.
The skewed location of the pitch — at one edge of the square — allowed a leakage of twos and threes on one side and an ease of clearing the fence on the other. The Indian captain had clubbed his way to 100 off 72 balls when he changed his willow to something resembling a baseball bat.
Carnage followed and witnesses testify to most of Kapil's six sixes sailing over the longer boundary, lifting India to 266, a largesse considering the inglorious start.
It might since have been overshadowed by knocks in a grander setting, but the brutality of Kapil's onslaught, and the desperation that warranted it, has rarely been matched.
Inzamam-ul-Haq (60 vs New Zealand, Auckland, 1992)
Pakistan was touched alternately by dissolution and divinity in this most magical of World Cups in the Antipodes.
But having escaped elimination courtesy of a league washout against England, the plot fell apart once more against New Zealand at Auckland. Chasing 263 for a place in its first Cup final, Pakistan erred on the side of caution and skipper Imran Khan's grinding 93-ball 44 brought it to the brink, needing 123 runs off the last 15 overs, with only the wizened Javed Miandad holding fort in the middle.
Inzamam-ul-Haq, half the size of his later-years incarnation, joined Miandad at 140 for four.
Explosive
How the old fox chided his partner into detonating is not known, but what followed was explosive.
Inzamam tore into the Kiwis, racing to 50 off 31 balls and giving the stick to Dipak Patel, the new ball off-spinner who had until then been the picture of parsimony.
Eighty-seven runs were looted in 10 overs and when Inzy was run out — for the fourth time in five innings — Pakistan needed 36 from five overs. Miandad stuck with it to the end, preventing Imran's distraught reunion with The Rolling Stones' ‘You can't always get what you want'. As for Inzy, picked from domestic obscurity after Imran saw him flicking a Waqar Younis toe-crusher out of the park, it was the first of many memorable knocks.
(To be continued)
What new revelation can possibly light up a knock that Sunil Gavaskar claims to be the “turning point of not just the tournament, but our lives”?
After Kapil elected to bat his team was choking on its last canister of oxygen, the top order back in the pavilion and a grand total of 17 on the board. Seamers Peter Rawson and Kevin Curran had despatched the openers — Gavaskar and K. Srikkanth — for a cumulative nought and cracked the remainder of India's batting spine with the dismissals of Mohinder Amarnath, Sandeep Patil and Yashpal Sharma.
It was here that Duncan Fletcher took off both Rawson and Curran and brought himself on in tandem with Iain Buthcart.
The pressure relieved, Kapil revelled. He rallied the lower order around him, stringing together three partnerships (60 with Roger Binny, 62 with Madan Lal and an unbroken 126 with Syed Kirmani) that sent Indian cricket on its way into a permanent overdrive.
The skewed location of the pitch — at one edge of the square — allowed a leakage of twos and threes on one side and an ease of clearing the fence on the other. The Indian captain had clubbed his way to 100 off 72 balls when he changed his willow to something resembling a baseball bat.
Carnage followed and witnesses testify to most of Kapil's six sixes sailing over the longer boundary, lifting India to 266, a largesse considering the inglorious start.
It might since have been overshadowed by knocks in a grander setting, but the brutality of Kapil's onslaught, and the desperation that warranted it, has rarely been matched.
Inzamam-ul-Haq (60 vs New Zealand, Auckland, 1992)
Pakistan was touched alternately by dissolution and divinity in this most magical of World Cups in the Antipodes.
But having escaped elimination courtesy of a league washout against England, the plot fell apart once more against New Zealand at Auckland. Chasing 263 for a place in its first Cup final, Pakistan erred on the side of caution and skipper Imran Khan's grinding 93-ball 44 brought it to the brink, needing 123 runs off the last 15 overs, with only the wizened Javed Miandad holding fort in the middle.
Inzamam-ul-Haq, half the size of his later-years incarnation, joined Miandad at 140 for four.
Explosive
How the old fox chided his partner into detonating is not known, but what followed was explosive.
Inzamam tore into the Kiwis, racing to 50 off 31 balls and giving the stick to Dipak Patel, the new ball off-spinner who had until then been the picture of parsimony.
Eighty-seven runs were looted in 10 overs and when Inzy was run out — for the fourth time in five innings — Pakistan needed 36 from five overs. Miandad stuck with it to the end, preventing Imran's distraught reunion with The Rolling Stones' ‘You can't always get what you want'. As for Inzy, picked from domestic obscurity after Imran saw him flicking a Waqar Younis toe-crusher out of the park, it was the first of many memorable knocks.
(To be continued)