An odd selection, a memorable finale: Making sense of Ashish Nehra’s farewell at the Kotla

New Delhi: The Feroz Shah Kotla was jam-packed. It was a peculiar occasion – a Delhi cricketer was bidding adieu to the game. Outside, leading up to the stands, you wouldn’t have guessed. Replica jerseys were on sale, but only bore the names of Virat Kohli, MS Dhoni and Hardik Pandya (yes!). There were no free face-masks distributed. Hell, there weren’t even any mega banners abounding.

Inside too, nothing seemed out of place. Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Jasprit Bumrah warmed up, while Hardik Pandya marked his run-up. Despite ample dew, two spinners were in the playing eleven. Hoping to win a first-ever T20I game against New Zealand in their sixth attempt, India were playing their first-choice bowling attack.

With the addition of Ashish Nehra.

An odd selection

Of course, Kohli didn’t pick him in the XI for this game. The team management and selectors didn’t pick him either. Nehra ensured that when he had announced retirement during the Australia T20I series. It was a stunning call, putting everyone in a fix, made even more so by the fact that Nehra was making himself available for just the first match of the next series.

“I felt that Bhuvi was ready. If you had seen earlier, Bumrah and I had been playing. Two spinners play, and the third fast bowler is Hardik Pandya. So Bhuvi misses out. After the IPL, I personally felt that as a bowler I would not like to keep playing at the expense of Bhuvi,” said Nehra, at the Kotla after his final game, addressing his last media conference.

The oddity of this statement cannot be lost. Pecking order in team selection is a forever-changing concept, and in the last couple months, Kohli and company have traversed an experimental path in ODIs and T20Is. There has been one constant though – the Bhuvi-Bumrah pairing. How Nehra saw himself playing ahead of either of them on return to the T20 squad is quite unfathomable.

He alone isn’t to blame here either. His selection against Australia was not deserved by any stretch imaginable. MSK Prasad and company didn’t rest Kumar or Bumrah for the T20 series, didn’t bring back Umesh Yadav, Mohammad Shami or even Shardul Thakur to the fold, and instead went with Nehra? On what basis you might wonder, as he is not part of the ODI plans for the 2019 World Cup and the next World T20 is only in 2020. Did the selectors really imagine that a 38-year-old could be picked to warm the bench?

Previously, Prasad had underlined clear communication to Nehra, which the latter – again surprisingly – denied. “I didn’t ask for any farewell game, it is just that this match happened in Delhi. Virat and coach Ravi Shastri are part of the team management because those are the (only) people I spoke to. I have not spoken to any selector on this issue,” he said.

And then, in the inimitable Nehra-style, he added, “When I started playing cricket, I didn’t take any selector’s permission. When I am leaving, I am not leaving with their permission.”

Nehra was Indian cricket’s last link to the uncertain nineties. For the glorious golden decade that followed, he was its penultimate reminder as Dhoni is still around. Together, they identify that Indian cricket’s significant step up between those two eras and it can be best explained by respective mannerisms in departing the international stage.

Did Dhoni opt for a farewell Test? No, it isn’t his style. And, as per Nehra’s definition, the Boxing Day Test against Australia just happened to be in Melbourne and not Ranchi. Dhoni’s generation – and the current one – may be entitled to some vanity, but it hasn’t yet breached limits of narcissism.

Picking and choosing games was a hallmark of the quintessential nineties’ Indian cricketer, and there are many examples of this selfish trait, you just have to turn back the pages.

Sachin Tendulkar, late in his career, did the same in the ODI arena. Yet, there was an element of acceptance about it. The man scored 18000-plus runs across nearly three decades spent playing that format. He was in a different standing altogether – can the same be said about Nehra’s 120-odd ODIs since debuting in 2001?

Sure, selectors ignored him at times, especially in the latter years. But he did also spend a lot of time out injured. Coming back from umpteen injuries is never easy, but isn’t fitness a pre-requisite for an international cricketer and isn’t he – leaving aside his surgeries – responsible for maintaining the same? Tendulkar stayed extremely fit through the 200 Tests he played. Currently, Dhoni – challenged everyday to prove his continued relevance to the ODI/T20 side – is pushing the envelope of fitness higher with every outing.

In his 18-year-long career, Nehra cannot even boast of a Test for every year that he was an international cricketer (17 Tests altogether).

Final hurrah

“It was my own decision and for the betterment of Indian cricket and the team. Even today, people wondered whether ‘Ashish Nehra will play or not?’ If I’ve come here, I’ve come to play. I am not here to roam about,” he said, when asked about the uncertainty over his selection for his final game.

That last sentence just about sums it all up. The team management had been handcuffed into playing Nehra in the XI on Wednesday, sure. But history books will only record that India beat New Zealand by 53 runs for a first time when the toothy, lanky left-arm pacer played his last. Met with cheer when stepping onto the ground to warm up, greeted with raucous applause when he bowled from the temporary ‘Ashish Nehra End’, and then honoured with a final celebration lap when he called time, the 38-year-old can look back on this day with some satisfaction.

At best though, Nehra will remain an enigma for the billion-strong Indian fandom. Forever, he will remain the hero of Durban and Karachi, spells that defied laws of physics and logic, respectively.

Perhaps his final six deliveries encapsulated this best. Bowling his last over, Nehra just ambled in from a short run-up, though still bursting with pace at final release. And just to remind of his inconsistency through the last two decades, he sent down a wide too. Don’t look at the statistics, he would tell you though. Maybe, look at the adulation he received.

Particularly when an invader burst through fences and heavy police cordon to run in and touch his feet. Tendulkar, yes. Dhoni, yes. In the future, a decade or so from now, Kohli, yes, someone will invade a cricket ground or two to touch his feet too.

Could you ever imagine this happening to Nehra though? Cricket revels in the glorious and the uncertain. On Wednesday, at the Kotla, it celebrated the two together in shape and form we know as Ashish Nehra.