Remember the spelling.
Write it down if you have to.
This was a coming out innings.
This is how you greet Test Cricket.
It was like a Disney film about how to make your debut test century.
His team needed it, check.
Batting with the tail when the big guns had failed, check.
Against the current number one side, check.
At the biggest cricket ground in world cricket, check.
All he needed was a girl to run out on the field as he went out, give him a kiss as the music swelled and the camera panned around him.
The innings was created from a place of batting perfection.
His footwork was genius.
He was fred astaire with a bat, and sometimes even ginger rogers.
His sense of moment was way beyond his years.
The occasion didn't get to him, he got to it, and did the right thing at the right time.
His technique was sexy as hell.
The technique was so hot you would sell your first child to hitler if it meant your second child would have skill to bat like this.
And he came out like few before him.
It was Ali v Liston.
It was Zatopek in London.
It was Genghis Khan in Europe.
It was Lara in Sydney.
It was Tendulkar, also in Sydney.
Bill compared him to Neil Harvey.
Nicholas compared him to Lara.
Compare him to who ever you want, the boy can bat.
That was an innings that doesn’t just guarantee you a career, it changes the world of cricket a little bit.
Sometimes things are on your side, Steyn should have been cleaned up multiple times, and Australia were one bowler down on an increasingly flat looking wicket.
But Tendulkar and Lara didn’t make their scores on tough wickets to bat on.
It was how they made them that mattered.
JP made his look easy, calm and sexy, and it wasn’t as if he was batting with Ravi Shastri, he had to make the runs and control the tail ender at the other end.
He just made the most out of every last ball.
Time will be his big test, but JP will always have this, and so will everyone who saw it.
cricketwithballs
www.cricketwithballs.com... We constantly get sodomized down the legside
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