Sarfaraz Khan – the start of a memorable journey for the maverick from Mumbai Premium

Imran Tahir's celebrations and Sarfaraz Khan's unconventional approach to cricket are highlighted in this insightful piece.

There were shades of Imran Tahir in the celebrations. The South African leg-spinner would set off on an extended run each time he picked up a wicket, at any level. So much so that in one club game, he ran himself out of the field of play and onto the road outside the ground. He is a maverick, all right, is Imran.

In his own way, Sarfaraz Khan too is a maverick. In a world of chiselled bodies and a premium on looking fit, he is a throwback to an amateur era when physical appearance wasn’t the be-all and end-all. But he can bat. Boy, can he bat.

Sarfaraz’s sprint around the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium on Saturday morning, in the immediacy of his back-foot punch keeping its tryst with the boundary cushions at deep cover, wasn’t without excellent reason. He was now a Test centurion, in only his fourth appearance. It was the coming to fruition of a childhood dream, a dream instilled in him and his younger brother Musheer by their father Naushad, a cricket tragic if ever there was one.

There was no screaming of expletives, no ‘I am-here-to-stay’ chest-thumping. This was just pure, unadulterated joy, yells of ‘Yessss’ and ‘Come onnn’ indicating how much getting to the milestone meant to him. Sarfaraz has had to wait, some might say unfairly, for a long time to break open the doors to Test selection. Once he succeeded in that endeavour in February this year, he has been determined to stay on the right side of those doors.

Had all other things been equal, Sarfaraz wouldn’t have played in Bengaluru. Despite 200 runs in three Tests against the English, he sat out the Chennai and Kanpur Tests against Bangladesh because such are the resources the Indian team can summon. His debut owed itself to Virat Kohli’s absence from the entire England series through paternity leave, K.L. Rahul’s unavailability for the last four Tests with a hamstring injury and Shreyas Iyer’s axing after a series of underwhelming scores. For all the volume of domestic and India-A runs, it was a backdoor entry of sorts, but Sarfaraz wasn’t complaining.

In his very first outing in Rajkot, he showed that Test cricket held no fears for him, that he was insulated from nerves and pressure and tension. He batted like he always does, with impish cheekiness. He stayed true to character and was rewarded with twin half-centuries, to which he added a third fifty-plus score in the final game in Dharamshala.

Come September and Bangladesh, and Kohli was back in the fray, Rahul had regained full fitness. How could the former skipper not figure in the XI? How could the man with a century in Centurion in December and a flowing 86 against England in Hyderabad in the first Test before he sustained the injury be overlooked? And so out went Sarfaraz, through no fault of his but in deference to pedigree and proven performances rather than just reputation and seniority bragging rights.