In my formative years in cricket, the influencer years, a game against Pakistan was never a day of joy, of excitement; rarely was there a sense of anticipation at seeing something exceptional. It was a game that your team had to win and so it was a tense day; a delectable cover drive or a glide behind square played artistically was a thing of beauty only if played by the person with the right identity. It was a terrible way to watch sport.

And as happens inevitably, the team that is more tense, more coiled up, is more vulnerable; the team that is obsessed with not losing almost always does. You cannot win unless you are willing to tempt defeat and Pakistan, the gamblers who backed themselves, won more as a result than they lost. Except for a phase between 1984 and 1985, a close match always went away.

Then 2004 happened and we began to see a new Indian player on the horizon; fearless, confident, willing to live for the day and for whom a shot was a calculated gamble, not a risk-free effort. In the five years since, this new breed is the face of Indian cricket and I saw that demonstrated on Wednesday at The Oval when a cricket match that might have been classified as tense, as a must-win game in another era, was transformed into an almost cavalier exhibition of strokeplay; the bat, in the hands of Rohit Sharma, was powered by timing and self-belief, the fear of making a mistake erased by the anticipation of a good shot. It is a critical difference in the mind.

... contd.