There were times in the history of cricket when he was the only player who was able drive the ball through the tight field placing on the off side (gully, point, cover and mid-off) with a highest possible level of precision, confidence and most importantly elegance. They used to say he masters this type of shots, and even today, many of will not disagree.
He was one of the best batsmen and probably the best captain that India had since 1996. Even though his official debut was against Australia in 1992, I believe that his first test match, i.e. India vs. England in England, June 1996, was more like a debut to him as people start knowing him. This was one of the greatest series he has ever played and scored more than 300 runs in just 3 innings.
As a batsman, he played a lot of memorable innings for India. In ICC world cup 1999, he played his best inning of his entire ODI career where he scored 183 runs in just 158 balls with the help of 17 fours and 7 sixes. His career is enlightened by a lot of such kind of matches. He got 16 test centuries and 22 ODI centuries under his belt.
As a captain, I must say, he performed really well as compared to other captains India had within 1999 to 2007. In about 8-10 ODI series in a row (with, may be, one or two exceptions), he easily took Indian team to the finals, but he was unlucky that none of the series was won by Indian team, including world cup 2003. A convincing journey up to the finals of ICC World Cup 2003 was one of the greatest achievements of his career. Like many Indian captains, performing as a captain, affected his batting performance. So somehow his, what we call a "bad-form", started. Every player has to face such bad patch in his career and so did he. To make things worse, some controversies came up and he was left out from the Indian cricket team for some time, but he eventually gained his pride back by playing some good innings after getting another chance to play for Indian team.
In all, he earned 37 man-of-the-match awards and 10 man-of-the-series awards in his lifetime. His lot of memorable partnerships with Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and a lot of other Indian players helped India actually win some important games. His career came to an end after a test match vs. Australia at Nagpur in 2008. His career is one of the best ODI career among the Indian players and he is one of the few players who scored more than 10000 runs in their lifetime.
Everyone will miss some of his unique qualities like his aggression, taking-off the shirt, exquisite bowling style (especially run-up), biting of fingernails and most importantly his square and cover drives. I am sure that it is impossible to reproduce the same level of elegance these shots carried again for any other human being on the face of the earth.
- AmitHK
