This piece is meant for cricket aficionados who follow the nuances of great stroke-play by the legends that eloquent commentators of yore described as ‘poetry in motion’ ! One of the most elegant shots in the book is the classic ’cover drive’. It’s the stroke on the cricket ball through the covers (field position) with well-timed wristwork and conventional movement of the front foot toward the pitch of a delivery aimed at or outside the off stump.
As a veteran cricket buff, I often wondered what’s it with left handers and glorious cover drives they could caress through the off side so effortlessly ! Purists will recall left hand batting legends Neil Harvey (Australia), David Gower (England), Brian Lara (West Indies) and Kumar Sangakkara (Sri Lanka) as finest exponents to demonstrate the elegance of the cover drive. There may be others but here it’s all about classiness and not brute power.
From the coaching point of view, batsmen able to master the cover drive are usually given high praise because of the shot’s difficulty in execution and requirement of exquisite timing of the ball. When played to perfection, the cover drive comprises a batsman’s seemingly effortless wielding of the blade in a downward trajectory through the off side, the cricket ball gliding through infielders in the covers at pace toward the boundary at deep cover.
Most left handers seem to have a penchant for this particular shot. Some of my finest cricketing memories of mid 1990s was ‘Dada’ Sourav Ganguly’s perfection of the shot that earned him the iconic sobriquet ‘God of Offside’ from none other than Rahul Dravid, his great team-mate. An illustrious lefty from the same era was Yuvraj Singh and a magnificent off-side player. In contemporary cricket, dominated by white-balls, young Yash Jaiswal’s & Axar Patel’s cover driving are delectably special and in text book style. King Kohli is still regarded as the best in business but he bats right-handed.
Times change and so do our perceptions as we watch some huge talent emerging from different quarters. My current favorite is none other than the poster girl of women’s cricket in India, Smriti Mandhana, so elegant as she steps out to hit a six on the off side, reminiscent of Dada’s panache !
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