Gather round, you gin-soaked reprobates, for the universe has finally served up a news story that makes sense: a 15-year-old Indian cricketer, one Master P. R. Sharma (I presume his initials stand for ‘Pure Run-getting’), has plundered a half-century in just 11 deliveries. Yes, you heard that correctly. Eleven. That's fewer balls than I've had hot dinners, and considerably fewer than the number of times I've been ejected from Lord's for ‘aggressive heckling of the umpire.’ The record, previously held by some Afghan gentleman who was probably born in a cave with a bat in his hand, now lies in the dust, kicked aside by this child who clearly mistook the cricket ground for a piñata at a particularly violent birthday party.
Now, British scouts, those fine specimens of tweed-clad desperation, have been put on high alert. One can picture them now, clutching their clotted cream scones and squinting through rain-streaked windows, muttering ‘By Jove, we must acquire this boy before he develops a taste for chapati and rebellion.’ The ECB, in a state of predictable panic, is no doubt already drafting a letter that begins ‘Dear Mr Sharma, We have observed your son’s remarkable ability to hit a cricket ball and would like to offer him a comprehensive package of damp weather, Marmite, and existential despair.’
Let us examine the facts of this preposterous innings. The boy, a wiry streak of pure kinetic energy, faced deliveries that died screaming in the outfield. He played shots that were not in any coaching manual, a series of desperate, beautiful swipes that would have made Geoffrey Boycott choke on his thermos of tea. The bowler, a poor wretch who will now be known forever as ‘the bloke who got tonked by a teenager,’ presumably spent the rest of the match in a foetal position behind the sightscreen. The scorecard, a document usually as dry as a vicar’s handshake, now reads like a fever dream: 4,6,6,4,6,2,6,4,6,1,6. The final ball, a lazy full toss that was dispatched with the contempt of a man swatting a particularly stupid fly, brought up the milestone. The crowd, initially stunned, then erupted into a cacophony of joy, hawkers selling increasingly exotic street food, and at least one accountant who had bet his life savings on a Sharma century.
But what does this mean for the delicate ecosystem of international cricket? It means, my friends, that the natural order is being upended. India, a nation that has already conquered the world through call centres and Bollywood, is now producing batsmen who have transcended mere mortality. This boy is not a cricketer; he is a force of nature, a walking, batting hurricane. The British scouts, a species usually found haunting the Eton-Harrow match and complaining about the quality of the champagne, are now facing the grim reality that their best hope for the next Ashes series might be to kidnap him and raise him as their own. I can already see the headlines in the Daily Mail: ‘Immigrant Boy Steals Our Cricket, Now We Must Steal Him Back.’
Meanwhile, the boy himself is probably more concerned with his GCSEs (or whatever the Indian equivalent is) and the persistent queries of a thousand cricket journalists asking him if he fancies a rain-drenched county season against Glamorgan. The pressure on this young shoulders is immense. He will now be expected to solve global warming, broker peace in the Middle East, and score a century before breakfast every day for the next twenty years. The British, in their desperation, will offer him a central contract, a flat in Birmingham, and the promise of a knighthood if he can score a fifty for England in a World Cup final. But let us not get carried away. He is fifteen. He probably still thinks girls are yucky and his main concern is whether his mum will let him stay up to watch the IPL final.
So raise a glass of the finest London Dry, my fellow cynics. We have witnessed a moment of pure, unadulterated sporting absurdity. A child has humiliated adults with a bat. The British establishment is in a tizzy. And somewhere, a gin and tonic is being prepared in celebration. The world, for once, is exactly as it should be.
