Regulars

Ian Chappell, as provocative and thoughtful a commentator as he was a captain and batsman, made another of his searing observations recently when he compared Virender Sehwag’s mind-set at the crease to that of Donald Bradman.
To most of us – certainly to John Wright, whom he drove to distraction when the New Zealander coached India – Sehwag seems sometimes to bat with hardly a nod towards the occasional disastrous consequences of his lusty hitting.

The upside is he is the most prolific opener in the game – more destructive, even, than Matthew Hayden at his best – evidence for which he provided most dramatically in the innings of 2009, his 293 from 82 overs against Sri Lanka at the Brabourne Stadium.

At other times his carefree hitting has led to quick downfall. As Chappell says, it is not quite that Sehwag is irresponsible or unaware of pressure. He would not have survived so long, with a better average than Sachin Tendulkar’s, had he simply been a brilliant hitter.

No, like Bradman, Chappell writes, Sehwag’s secret is that he bats with an uncluttered mind. Like most gifted athletes, he lives only in the moment, not the missed ball that went before his boundary or the yorker to come. The journey from brain to hands and feet is a quick and simple one.

It seems such a pure philosophy. And it hits home as hard as one of Sehwag’s towering blows when you watch his contemporaries struggle.

You could argue all night about whether Sehwag has more natural hitting talent than Kevin Pietersen but on the evidence of the past year or so there is little doubt who consistently looks more sure of himself at the crease.

Pietersen’s trademark strength has been his self-belief. He appears to leave no room in his mind for wondering. If he sees a scoring opportunity, he will back his talent to make the most of it. It is the sort of positive attitude England have craved and Australia, for instance, have taken for granted.

Nor is Pietersen a dim cricketer. He thinks hard about the game at large and his part in it. Had he been a more flexible thinker, however, and sublimated his ego for just a little while in a difficult transition period that demanded reflection rather than passion, he might have gone on to be a fine Test captain. But it is not in his nature to admit weakness and we will probably never know if he could have done a better job than Andrew Strauss. I doubt it, for a few reasons.

Pietersen barrelled into the upper reaches of the game with a reputation that matched Graeme Hick’s years before him and immediately set out to make an impression, from his haircut to his flamingo. It took the breath away.

And this, possibly, was the root cause of his stuttering form since he returned from injury. He retains the same hunger to please, the same skills, but a more cautious, more professional self-belief. You can almost hear him thinking now where before he did not know what shot he was going to play until the ball was halfway to him.

There is a scintilla of anxiety. Poor scores will do that to most batsmen. They are not just playing for the team but for themselves, for their job and their future, for their pride and their sense of self-worth. If they have done it before, these fine players will say to themselves, they can do it again. But does Pietersen possess the absolutely clear mind Chappell attributes to Bradman and Sehwag?

He did brilliantly on his first tour of his homeland for England, less well this winter – and, for the first time, he looked vulnerable. The swagger of youth when all things are possible (or, in his case probable) has given way to a sort of self-conscious maturity. It is as if he is mentally going through his lines. His demeanour does not look entirely comfortable. He is thinking too much.

Great players have one obvious advantage over lesser team-mates: their genius. It is when they begin to doubt that magic that they are reminded a game they usually find easy can be indiscriminately cruel. Ability alone will not dig them out of their hole. They have to rediscover the calm that attended their shot-making, the serenity of greatness. The paradox is the harder they look for it the more difficult it is to grasp, like bottling mist.

It would be a fool who wrote Pietersen off on the back of a few ordinary scores but it was plain that some of his dismissals in South Africa – notably that length-of-the-pitch run-out – betray nerves that were not often evident before his enforced lay-off.

Batsmen as great as Pietersen and Sehwag thrive on challenge but only because they know that, mostly, they rise to the occasion. The difference between them is that Sehwag does not seem to be in any way rattled by a few failures.

Pietersen, a different sort of perfectionist, is haunted, however briefly, by them because for him success is all-consuming. And that is probably how it will remain.

Kevin Mitchell is a sports writer for The Observer

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