Batbricks7

A back-foot punch to the cover fence rang in the moment Sarfaraz Khan had waited for all his life A Test hundred.

As he watched the ball tumble to the boundary cushion, from the corner of his eyes, even as he was running his second run, he took off.

He sprinted aimlessly in cathartic joy, in the direction of square leg, then skidded and stopped, leapt as high as he could, landed and stood like a statue, hands aloft.

He strolled back, kissed his helmet and badge, and gazed skywards, still drowned in a child-like, unalloyed joy.

A deluge of memories would have flooded his mind.

The childhood years when his cricket tragic father Naushad, who used to hawk track pants and caps on railway platforms, devoted endless mornings honing his son’s batting skills in a makeshift practice platform in a corner of the Azad Maidan.

He was making his son live his own unfulfilled cricketing dream, the reason he squeezed into the general compartment of a Mumbai-bound train from Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh.

The teenage years when he struggled to cope with the prodigy tag, the youth when his staggering consistency was consistently overlooked, a time when he fought and conquered self doubts. And now, in only his sixth Test outing he has realised the dream that has fuelled his Test career. “It is not that I don’t have the shots.

I want a team to give me confidence,” he would tell this paper.

This was a hundred with several layers to celebrate.

It was personal redemption, after his first innings duck and the general criticism that he is not cut from the Test match cloth. In reviving himself, he revived his team.

When he walked into bat, India had stumbled to 95 for 2, still 361 runs adrift of wiping out New Zealand’s total.

Enough preconditions to daunt most cricketers making baby steps in Test cricket. But Sarfaraz did not wither. Rather, he clung onto this opportunity like the last lease of life.

He displayed remarkable strength to not eschew his natural attacking game, despite the criticism he faced for his counterattacking endeavours in the first innings.

In the company of Kohli, he breezed to his half-century.

He swept his staple shot against spinners Ajaz Patel into submission, before he uppercut William O’Rourke for a six. Seven of his 16 fours, when he was on 125, and two off his three sixes traversed this route.

The theme recurred. Whenever the New Zealand seamers tried to bounce him, he would unbox his late and upper cuts to frustrate them and alter their tactics.

The Sarfaraz late-cut is not for the faint-hearted. It’s not a cut at all, in the conventional sense.

It’s something between a chop, slap and a glide.

He takes sophistry out of it, instills brusqueness into it, a slice of Mumbai maidan cricket. The first time you watch, it seems fluke, or an instinct he cannot resist. But it’s the Sarfaraz style.