Very Very Special...

Very Very Special Laxman has become a very very sickening sight for the Australian cricket team.He guided India to victory over Australia yet again and thus maintained a record, unsurpassed even by the greatest cricketer of his time (Sachin Tendulkar),of repeatedly fouling up Australian plans.This sure is a squeaky bum time for the men in baggy greens.Australian captain Ricky Ponting, generous in his praise for Laxman, could only smile ruefully about a man who, even with a bad back, completely flummoxed his attack.

"Even with that (a bad back) today he showed what sort of class player he is, he played very well and got the tail enders to stick in there with him, and he had a knack of finding the boundary late in the innings.He has been a bit of a thorn in our side, there's no doubt about that, I guess him and Sachin would be the two who've done the most damage over the years, a couple of guys who've played a lot against us and have got good records against us." said Ponting. 

It should now be clear to Australia that there is no conventional cricket way that Australia can get VVS Laxman out when they need to.Tim Nielsen and others will study many hours of footage, they’ll have designed software packages looking for flaws in VVS Laxman, they might even think they have found some.They will be wrong.For there has always been two Laxmans.

• One swans around world cricket, happy in the knowledge that the limelight is given to other team mates.  He plays the odd cameo innings, wooing the purists, making test cricket pretty, and just doing a good old job.
• The second VVS is a mutated monster of batting with movement seaking laser death ray in his shoulders, knifes that pop out of his wrists during fights, titanium shins with blades on them and the ability to curse, fight, kill while making it look prettier than Natalie Portman.

This latter model only plays against Australia.

The late Arthur Ashe, who brought off a sensational cognitive coup by tactically outplaying a red-hot Jimmy Connors to win the 1975 Wimbledon championship, once famously remarked that when you are being beaten by John McEnroe, you seldom realise what is going on.

“Against Connors and Borg you feel like you're being hit with a sledgehammer. But this guy is a stiletto. He has great balance and he just slices people up. He's got a ton of shots. It's a slice here, a nick there, a cut over there.Pretty soon you've got blood all over you, even though the wounds aren't deep. Soon after that you've bled to death,” wrote Ashe.

Laxman has made it a habit of re-enacting the Mac Act against the Oz's. Quite a few Australian cricketers, from the great Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath down to Doug Bollinger and Mitchell Johnson, might have quite often been under the illusion that they were being given an uplifting therapeutic massage by V.V.S. Laxman while, in actual fact, the Hyderabadi stylist was ferrying them to their doom.

Sport may or may not help build character, but it is certainly character-revealing during some of its most memorable and nerve-shreddingly tense moments. And we were once again reminded — if reminders are even necessary anymore — of Laxman's place in Indian cricket's pantheon of Test cricket match-winners.

Almost self-effacing and refreshingly unobtrusive, Laxman quite often looks as if he is bored with his day job; his demeanor suggests that he'd much rather be away from the glare, his face perhaps buried in the yellowing pages of a copy of War and Peace in a secluded corner table of a public library.

He is a very private person doing a very public job. He has neither the electrifying stage presence of a Sehwag nor the larger-than-life aura of a Tendulkar. Even the upstanding, majestic Dravid looks a bit ostentatious compared with Laxman.

But when he steps out for a high-stakes battle, Laxman is anybody's equal. He makes his shot selection with a great surgeon's decisiveness in pressure-cooker situations and turns what might have been an attritional combat into something sublimely beautiful.Laxman did not bat an eyelid as he turned tightrope-walking without a net into an art form. He was at his bloody brilliant best. Sheer Class speaks for itself.

If there were kids with dreams of donning the baggy green some day watching the match in Melbourne or Sydney or Brisbane, they might have heaved a sigh of relief, given the classy Indian's age.

But let's lap it all up while it is still on offer. Too many things these days are hyped as Very, Very Special stuff. Forget the cliché. Laxman simply does a Laxman… again.

Kudos to Laxman and Team India. 

Cheers! :)