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Follow UsNostalgia is a drug. And drugs, as the civilised society will tell you, are injurious to our health. But we all have poisons of our choosing. Some are addicted to sugar, some to alcohol, and some special ones are destined to live out the glory of their favourite sportspersons and sports teams.
That last kind won’t corrode your liver. It won’t attack your heart. But what it will do is it will make you experience a range of emotions that you previously thought didn’t exist within you. It will make you scream. It will make your entire being deify a human being of mere flesh and bones.
That happened when Yuvraj Singh took the field against a team full of retired Australian cricketers a few weeks ago in a knockout game of the World Championship of Legends tournament. You knew he was not the Yuvraj of old. You could see the extra fluff around his tummy. You could see his reflexes aren’t even half as quick at short extra cover as they used to be in his heydays.
But still, he was Yuvraj. The prince of the off side. The Sixer King. The man who played that era-defining 30-ball 70 in a T20 World Cup semifinal against Australia 17 years ago. And when he started hitting Xavier Doherty for maximums with one knee bent and lifting pacers off his hips for sixes, it all came back to you.
The beautiful arc of his bat swing, the flourish at the end of his strokes, the sound of wood hitting on leather, and the white ball racing across the turf — all came together in Northampton in that semifinal against the Australian side as Yuvraj scored 59 off just 28 deliveries.
At that moment, all you were reminded of were the great innings that he played against Australia in 2007 and 2011, amongst so many other innings in ICC Tournaments and knockout games (Natwest series 2002, anyone?). And you remember those innings for good reason. You see, when it comes to big matches, there is no Indian comparable with Yuvraj.
Talking purely statistically, you’ll find very few players worldwide who would average 52.71 with a strike rate (SR) of 90.3 in ODI World Cups, but in ODIs overall, his average drops to 36.48 and SR to 87.4.
It’s almost as if the occasion's enormity pushed him to a level he never touched! Maybe that’s why Andrew Flintoff shouldn’t have had that verbal volley with him in the England game of the 2007 T20 World Cup, because that instigation was followed by a chain of events that established the legend of Yuvraj, the ‘Sixer king’.
Australia were the unbeatables of cricket at the time. They had the ODI World Cup in their kitty that year, and winning this new format was considered a mere formality. But that’s when Yuvraj stood strong at Durban and played an innings that will always be remembered in Indian cricket folklore.
No other batter in the top six of India apart from MS Dhoni (36 off 18) scored at above 200 SR that day. And Indians needed an above-par score to defeat the Kangaroo batting that boasted of Adam Gilchrist, Matthew Hayden, Andrew Symonds etc. Yuvraj came and just conquered that day, hitting Lee for a gigantic 119-metre six and reaching 70 runs in just 30 balls with five sixes and five fours.
If you look at Yuvraj’s T20I record (average 28.02, SR - 136.38), there’s hardly anything special to discuss. But once you look at his record in T20 World Cups, he has the best numbers against Australia. Even overall in T20s, Yuvraj loved to smack the Aussies (average 56.6, SR - 161.7). His strike rate is only bettered by his strike rate against England (186.1). If you look at the records of all Indian batters, only Hardik Pandya has a better record than Yuvraj against the Australians.
If you go back to the start of his career, Yuvraj began this trend of knocking out the big guns in big games as a teenager. It was the semifinal of the 2000 U-19 World Cup in Colombo, where Yuvraj scored 58 off just 25 deliveries. India scored 284/6, and the Australians fell short by a massive 170 runs.
Yuvraj and the Australians have been in a tussle for almost two and a half decades. That’s why it was hard to keep nostalgia at bay when he even hit the retired Aussies. It was hard to stop yourself from getting high on some of the strongest memories in Indian cricket fandom.
At this point, it’s hard to tell if Yuvraj's nostalgic allure is due to his aesthetic batting display, big-game presence, or his performances against arguably the strongest teams of his era. However, it does establish that Yuvraj is one of the biggest big-match players in Indian history, and the fondness with which he’s remembered has a lot to do with that.
No matter how violent the memories of defeat get, the rosy taint of nostalgia keeps you oblivious to their existence. That’s why nostalgia is more than just a drug when Yuvraj Singh is its dealer.
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