The sound and music of Rohit Sharma
Good batsmen make for great percussionists. If you listen closely, you can tell a good shot from a bad one by the sound of the bat hitting…
Good batsmen make for great percussionists. If you listen closely, you can tell a good shot from a bad one by the sound of the bat hitting the ball. Over time, you can even start identifying batsmen by their rhythm and timbre. A Sanath Jayasuriya cut sounded like a firecracker going off, a Tendulkar straight drive felt like a staccato note that concludes a crescendo — Virat Kohli’s is similar, just a little more forceful and punchy, and the sound of Mark Waugh or Mohammed Azharuddin playing a flick resembled a swoosh more than a hit.
Rohit Sharma isn’t interested in firecrackers, his environmentalist inclination notwithstanding, and neither do elaborate, complex polyrhythms — the kind AB de Villiers masters in — interest him. Rohit’s trademark tone is that of the bat caressing the ball, merely guiding it to its destination, hitting just hard enough that his needs are met. There isn’t an ounce of violence or anger. He almost treats the ball with the respect a bowler would. In many ways, Rohit’s bat acts as a noise cancellation padding, leaving only the sweet mid-range frequencies of batting’s holy cadence to go through to the listener’s ear.
2019 has been an epochal year for Rohit and his band of bats. Across the World Cup and the South Africa test series, Rohit Sharma has batted on a plane beyond anyone else. Like Harsha Bhogle often says, it is a phase he would like to bottle up and carry wherever he goes. In a zone like this, the sound of Rohit’s bat, if possible, gets even sweeter.
Rohit has always had an elegance about his batting, but over the last few years, especially in 2019, he seems to have discovered a new side to himself. You know how, when musicians mature, they seem to hold back a lot more than they show, thereby growing in command of playing exactly the right note at the right time? Rohit Sharma is currently in that Miles Davis and Art Blakey-esque mode. There isn’t a shot that seems out of place.
On a dewy Rajkot night, defending merely 153, Bangladesh were in trouble before Rohit even took stance. But once he unleashed his first trademark pull of the night, on the first ball of the second over, it was showtime. Over the next ten overs, Rohit unfurled his entire palette of strokes, each sounding sweeter than the other.
Amongst all the pulls and drives, there was a flat batted steer between gully and short third man, the ball barely making a sound off the bat, like a perfect ghost note, and disappearing to the boundary before the commentators had finished describing the shot.
The commentators, who sometimes turned into fans on-air, were almost willing Shikhar Dhawan to take “smart” singles and give Rohit the strike. Media is a sacred(sigh) profession and you must maintain objectivity, but ex-cricketers are human too, and the charm of Rohit’s bat isn’t easy to evade. Shikhar, enjoying the best seat in the house, complied; Rohit obliged. This 85 may not make it to the top shelf of Rohit Sharma innings’, but it was as memorable as most others, purely for the pristine quality of stroke-making that comes like second nature to him. In the touch he is in, Rohit could’ve scored 15 and it would’ve been memorable.
The shot with which he got out sounded crisp and looked like another six until the boundary ropes proved to be a couple of metres too far. Rohit Sharma is at that rarified stage of batsmanship where, in rise and fall, he exudes grace. Maybe someone can write an article about watching him as a religious experience.