Chris Gayle, Virat Kohli, AB de Villiers, Shane Watson. Not, as it happens, the start of an argument about the world's best Twenty20 batsman, but Royal Challengers Bangalore's actual top order. In real life.
The Indian Premier League, by its very nature, has always done a decent line in Fantasy Cricket. But even by its own gilded standards, RCB's top four this season feels like the start of the ultimate Dream Team.
And at next drop? An 18-year-old Indian kid. Is he up to it? Is he ever. If the Fab Four say “follow that,” Sarfaraz Khan seems capable of responding with: “Is that all you’ve got?”
Like when RCB played against Sunrisers Hyderabad on Tuesday night. Gayle went early, then Kohli and De Villiers played the sort of cricket that IPL ... no, make that T20 ... no, make that cricket in general, was invented for.
Then Watson, arguably the most valuable overseas player in IPL history, played a musclebound cameo.
And Sarfaraz? Well, he just came in and scored 35 off 10. No biggie. And even that allowed for a drop off in his scoring rate the final few deliveries.
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One T20 plunder against a bedraggled bowling attack does not make a player, but this is a rare talent. Sarfaraz might be the next big star of cricket, not just in India but the international game, too.
OK, so he is still nearer to his 18th birthday than his 19th, and has played just six first-class matches to date. But his range of skills is vast, and perfectly fitted to cricket du jour.
His method is ultra-modern. Old School Theory had the classiest players hitting straight down the ground, in the v-between mid-on and mid-off.
Sarfaraz inverts that entirely, preferring chips, ramps and scoops, either reverse or regular, behind square. Arriving as he often will in the IPL - given RCB’s powerful top order - in the death overs, his method will be difficult to combat. He already seems like a Jos Buttler 2.0.
When he played here in the UAE in 2014, as a precocious youth in the Under 19 World Cup for India, Sarfaraz stood out as much for his demeanor as he did his talent.
He was a fidget, prone to verbal diarrhoea of the sort that gets up the noses of opposition players, and might even make him a difficult teammate some of the time, too. Still, though, through it all he did seem like a player who it was hard not to like.
Gayle, for one, seems to love him already. In a pitchside TV interview, he said he thinks of Sarfaraz like a son. Stood next to each other, they look a bit like a father and son, too – one of the fully grown man sort, the other the kid waiting for his growth spurt to happen.
Sarfaraz may lack the height, the experience and the stature of his vaunted forebears for now. One day, though, they might be looked back on as his warm up act.
pradley@thenational.ae
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