Shamik Chakrabarty, Mumbai
Loaded Guns can be attractive. This is metaphorical, inspired by the Hollywood action thriller released in the 1970s. Trust me, Ursula Andress as Nora Green will woo you a hundred times more than Sahibzada Farhan and his unloaded willow, with the bat handle pointing towards himself. Egged on by the Pakistan opener, war lingo wouldn’t be out of place here. It wasn’t kamikaze, rather hara-kiri.
Farhan stunk the place out with his ‘gun’ celebration but, more importantly, from Pakistan’s point of view, he lost focus and got out soon after completing his half-century. Things were nicely set up for him to score big and lay the platform for a 200-plus total. Pakistan finished on 171/5 instead. Given India’s batting strength and Pakistan’s powderpuff bowling – Shaheen Shah Afridi in his current form would be trumped by Suraj Sindhu Jaiswal and Tushar Deshpande – Shubman Gill & Co were always going to sleepwalk to the target.
The Indian openers steamrolled Pakistan bowling. Gill and Abhishek Sharma revelled in the irreverence of youth. If Gill’s batting was like the Grande Valse Brillante – apologies for drawing a Chopin analogy in a cricket copy – Abhishek was offering heavy metal. They used their bats to decimate their opponents, not to botch up an immoral celebration.
Throughout their 105-run association, Pakistan players chose to be motormouths. Empty vessels. Shaheen and Haris Rauf tried to rile up the Indian openers. Abhishek spoke about it post-match. “Today was pretty simple, the way they (Pakistan players) were coming out to us without any reason, I did not like it at all,” the fresh-faced Punjab da puttar said at the presentation. “That is why I went after them. I wanted to deliver for the team.”
Gill, his state mate, acted like a leader, even off the field. Monosyllables on social media –
“Game speaks, not words” – and that was enough.
Gill is India’s Test captain and Suryakumar Yadav’s deputy in the T20I team. Going ahead, he will lead in all three formats. And he is the chosen one because he has the leadership mettle. He gave it back to the England players in their lair – forget the outside noise that criticised him for being aggressive. The 26-year-old acted like a leader in the face of Pakistani players’ verbal diarrhoea before yet again proving that the pen – or keyboard, for Gen Z – is still mightier than the gun (unloaded willow).
PS. One needs to have the right education to understand that people turn up at sporting venues to escape the bad things in the world. They don’t deserve to recall guns, missiles and blood.
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