What Virender Sehwag did for Indian cricket will never be forgotten. The guy made scoring daddy hundreds ridiculously easy and during a 15-year-long career, arguably became India’s greatest Test opener after the legendary Sunil Gavaskar. Sehwag changed the perception of batting in Test cricket, broke free of the defensive mindset. Long before Rishabh Pant bedazzled with his reverse-lap-scoop-sweeps, and Brendon McCullum invented Bazball, there was Sehwag, launching sixes off the last over before lunch, tea and stumps. That Indian cricket thrived immensely under Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid owed plenty to Sehwag, the only Indian batter to notch up two triple centuries in Tests.
However, even the great Sehwag experienced moments he isn’t too proud of. With the Asia Cup 2025 just one sleep away, we go back about 21 years, when Sehwag said something that would come back to haunt him in a terrible way. The year was 2004, Sehwag and India had just come off a very successful tour of Pakistan, winning both the ODI and Test series. The team was on a red-hot run, having won the NatWest 2002 final and reached the final of the 2003 World Cup. It was some of the best cricket the Indian team had ever played, before the wheels came off the Indian team, and Sehwag had to eat his own words.
Call it a fit of cockiness or arrogance, Sehwag, ahead of the start of the Asia Cup, had declared that he could become the first man in history to smash an ODI double century. “If I stay at the crease for 50 overs, I can score a double-century. In fact, a lot of batsmen can do it provided they bat the full 50 overs. It is certainly not easy to score a double-century in one-dayers, but it is also not impossible,” he had said.
Sehwag’s dramatic fall
What transpired from that point onwards was nothing but a brutal reality check. Sehwag’s scores in that tournament read 0, 37, 16, 1, 81 and 5 as India lost to Sri Lanka in the final of the Asia Cup by 25 runs. It was the beginning of a dry patch for Sehwag, who, the entire year, scored 671 ODI runs from 26 innings, his worst-ever. John Wright, the then-head coach of Team India, weighed in on that Sehwag incident, explaining how cricket can become a hard game when you tend to get too ahead of yourself.
What John Wright said
“When we regrouped in 2004 it was like the post-World Cup hangover, only worse. After winning in Pakistan, it was being said this was the best Indian team ever, and the air the players breathed had become even more rarefied,” wrote Wright.
“In the land that traditionally hero-worshipped great batsmen, even our quick bowlers Irfan Pathan and Lakshmipathy Balaji had become cult heroes. Our first assignment, the Asia Cup, was regarded as a fait accompli and there was a bit of swaggering in the media, such as Virender Sehwag suggesting that he could score 200 in an ODI if he batted 50 overs.
“It reminded me of what my old Derbyshire captain, the South African all-rounder Eddie Barlow, said to me after I’d followed a big 100 with three soft failures: ‘If you take the piss out of cricket, cricket will take the piss out of you.’ In his first 13 ODIs that season Sehwag got one 50,” Wright added.
