Yuvraj a series away from Rs 1 crore
The thing with anything as extraordinary as England’s 19th over in Wednesday’s Twenty20 match against India is that is impossible to see that moment approaching and even harder to digest as it is taking place.
Looking back now, the scene had already been set with the hour-long between-games interval transforming Kingsmead into Kanpur or Kolkata with hundreds of Indian flags being waved in the breezy Duban evening sky and the music from the DJ booth taking on a distinct Bollywood beat as the game got under way.
But even so, with the score at 171-3 off 18 overs and Stuart Broad coming on to bowl his final over to Yuvraj Singh, there was no real indication of the five minutes of carnage that was about to unfold both on and off the pitch.
As early as the second ball of the over, events could have taken a dramatic and potentially tragic turn.
With the ball dumped way into the crowd, one of the industrial strength fireworks, launched from the top of the scoreboard each time a maximum is scored, malfunctioned, and fizzed, fully ignited directly over the heads of the packed stand and into the Kingsmead turf!
By the end of the over we didn’t need to worry about incoming fireworks as the pyrotechnics out on the pitch meant the supply on top of the scoreboard had also been long since exhausted!
Also looking exhausted were the four dancers in front of me whose particularly energetic routine everytime ’Whoops, Where’s a Six? Whoops, There it is!’ blasted out of the massive PA speakers was starting to flag and become less enthusiastic by the end of the over!
By the time Broady came running for the sixth and, potentially history-making, delivery the 16,000 or so inside Kingsmead were in a state of frenzied anticipation that I’ve rarely seen in all my cricket travels around the globe.
And I’m not afraid to admit, and this might upset a few Englishmen out there, that a little part of me wanted Yuvraj to clear the boundary for a sixth time and create history.
We all know now that that sixth ball did indeed fly into the stand to send the little man who seems to be measuring every six in this tournament scurrying into the crowd to compute Yuvray’s total ’yardage’ for the over!
Better judges than me will have their say on each of the sixes and what Broad and Yuvraj did or didn’t do and should or shouldn’t have done but as pure sporting theatre goes it truly could not have been bettered.
After that unbelievable and truly unforgettable over anything other than a stunning England victory meant the rest of the game could have been a slight anti-climax.
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