“My father is a proud man today.” – Musheer Khan on his and his brother’s centuries.
Telford Vice / Mangaung Oval
INDIA’S innings in their men’s under-19 World Cup match against Ireland at Mangaung Oval in Bloemfontein on Thursday lasted for 312 balls and more than three-and-a-half hours, but what many who saw it will remember most happened in the space of a single delivery and in the blink of an eye.
Oliver Riley ran in to Musheer Khan to bowl the second ball of the 48th over. Several strides before Riley reached the crease, Musheer started moving towards the off side. The bowler saw the batter going, and speared the ball wide of off stump. By then Musheer had travelled so far from his original position — all the way off the pitch to where silly point might have curled — that, in effect, he was dealing with a leg-side delivery.
Musheer wound himself into a coil so tight he looked like he was threatening to hit the ball onto the greens of the Orangia Lawn Bowls Club across the street from the ground, a distance of some 300 metres. Happily for the trundlers out there on a sweaty summer’s day, and the greenkeeper who would have had to repair the damage, the force that Musheer’s intended feat required negated the necessary precision. Consequently his furious whip to leg didn’t make the desired level of contact.
The force of the effort exploded through the instant when ball met bat and threw Musheer off his feet. He landed in a heap even further onto the off side, and rose in time to see the ball bisect two fielders stationed inside the ring and streak to the backward square leg boundary for four.
The stroke was similar in theory to the six David Warner hit off Shaheen Shah Afridi in last month’s Perth Test. But, in its execution, Musheer’s version was viscerally more ambitious and expansive. Modern players would call it a scoop. In the wake of Musheer’s rendition, the rest of us would consider that a hopelessly anaemic description.
It must have taken years of practice to play the shot as well as he did, even in its partially successful form. How long had he been working on it? Had he attempted it in a match before? If so, how did it come off? How had he been able to train to unleash it considering the real estate that required was more than the width of the average net?
There was not enough shared language between Musheer and the reporters he spoke to after the match to have the conversation properly. The translated version was: “It’s a shot I’ve been working on, and which my father [Naushad Khan] has been helping me with as my personal coach. It’s been part of my routine, and it’s not the first time I’ve played it in a match.”
Musheer wasn’t the only member of the family with reason to celebrate on Thursday. His brother, Sarfaraz Khan, scored 161 for India A against England Lions in a four-day match in Ahmedabad that started on Wednesday. “My father is a proud man today,” Musheer said. Sarfaraz is more than seven years older than Musheer and played 36 under-19 ODIs for India. So it made sense that the brothers should have been in touch about Musheer’s trip to South Africa. “We had a healthy conversation and he passed on a lot of experience,” Musheer said. “That’s helping me to perform better and understand the conditions.”
Two balls after his genius stroke, with India’s hunger for runs curdling into greed, Musheer tried to take two to long-on and was run out for a 106-ball 118. His innings, more than half of it scored during a stand of 156 off 151 with Uday Saharan, who made 75, was the centrepiece of a total of 301/7. It was the second-biggest in the tournament behind the 302/8 New Zealand made against Nepal at Buffalo Park in East London on Sunday.
India took 119 runs off the last 10 frenetic overs against the increasingly rattled Irish, who plainly had not recovered their composure by the time they came out to bat. They crashed to 45/8 inside 15 overs, somehow surviving the sniping Naman Tiwari’s first four overs without him taking a wicket. Tiwari took two in his fifth, another in his sixth, and finished with 4/53. Saumy Pandey found turn and bounce and with that a haul of 3/18 in eight overs.
India’s intensity eased as their victory assumed certainty, and a last-wicket stand of 16 off 38 by Daniel Forkin and Finn Lutton took Ireland to 100 before they were dismissed in the 30th. Seven of their partnerships didn’t reach double figures and five were snuffed out in fewer than 10 balls. Their biggest and longest stand, the 39 shared off 55 by Riley and Forkin, was worth a quarter of the runs of the Musheer-Saharan epic and not much more than a third in terms of balls faced. Another way to help parse the difference between the teams was the fact that India hit 24 fours and five sixes. That’s 41.86% of their runs in boundaries. The Irish? Nine fours, no sixes.
But numbers don’t have the warmth and wonder to tell the story. Rather, what captured the thrust of Thursday’s events and will make them shine in the memory was what happened when Oliver Riley ran in to bowl the second ball of the 48th over of India’s innings to Musheer Khan. That’s what makes magic.
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