McCullum takes flight once again

Freeze the action just after Tharindu Kaushal lets rip with the 20th ball of his Test career. Rip is the right word too, not tweak. Bouncing in with high knees, wrist bent, flapping around, Kaushal is like a marionette. When he lets go of the ball, the wrist whips around the other way, imparting more work on the ball than his fingers. An offspinner with a leggie's method. "Shades of Murali," his domestic team-mates have said about him.

That 20th ball was to Brendon McCullum, whose form has not dipped a fraction since he slammed a hundred off 78 balls, then progressed to 202 off 188, against Pakistan, late last month. In fact, he is even better today. This is not Sharjah, with its pitch like brushed granite. This is a surface with greenery so thick, undiscovered species were living in it 40 hours before the toss.

Still, having hit just one run from his first ten balls like a spring loading up, McCullum had begun to uncoil violently. Soon, his own wrists were whipping at warp speed, a flash of willow in their wake, and the ball whistling through backward point for his first boundary.

He is on 57 off 52 when Kaushal bounces in for this delivery. As soon as the spinner releases the ball giving it plenty of air and rip, Kaushal's legs stiffen, and his hands begin to move towards his head. He has become tense because at the other end, McCullum has begun to dance. Crouched low - a packet of power - he is slinking out to get to the pitch of the delivery.

Both players are making an act of surrender. Kaushal is throwing the ball up, knowing that it is exactly the kind of length a batsman like McCullum relishes, yet also knowing that with risk comes potential reward. If he puts as much work on it as he can, the ball can dip, then pitch and grip. He is giving himself up to the whims of the air and the clay. It was his first high-profile match, but watching him do this over and over, even after he had been taken for over 100 runs, you feel this is what he has done all his life. Surrendering to the unknown is the only way he knows to play.

McCullum, perhaps, can sympathise. The delivery Kaushal has released could be another ball of the century in the making. If McCullum stays at the crease, he retains a lot more control. He can play the ball off the pitch, and has longer to measure the flight and the turn. The last Sri Lanka spinner he ran down to, made him look a fool, in the World T20. But today, he still dances.

There is a split second, when the ball is hanging in mid-air, when both players' eyes must have lit up. Kaushal is so anxious to see McCullum advancing, the excitement makes his limbs rigid. He knows the batsman has raised the stakes. McCullum, seeing the ball tossed up again, is emboldened, knowing he now has a greater chance of reaching the ball as it pitches.

No one who has seen the scorecard is in any doubt as to who wins this battle. McCullum goes through with that whirring swing, and sends the ball high over long-on, where a man in the crowd shells the catch. But in the middle, there Kaushal is, with his hands near his scalp; a bowler who has just been defeated in the most emphatic way the sport allows, acting like it was so nearly a triumph for him. All through the day, on a pitch too green to allow big turn, he kept chasing the triumphs, while his team-mates chased leather. He eventually got McCullum, who finally failed to reach the pitch of one, but should have had James Neesham and BJ Watling too, had his team-mates not dropped those chances. His day's figures were 1 for 159 from 22 overs.

But if McCullum and Kaushal were in the same dressing room this evening, perhaps the older man would have some words, born from experience, for the debutant. It wasn't so long ago when McCullum was frustrating, not titillating, his nation, with a blunt refusal to trade in a little aggression for a bit of sense. Before the start of 2014, McCullum averaged less than 35 in the previous three years.

So prevalent was the opinion that McCullum was a wasted talent, that when outgoing coach John Wright implored his players to abandon the "that's how I play" defence and take on more responsibility, those comments were interpreted as a barb aimed, to significant extent, at McCullum. In New Zealand's most recent Test series against Sri Lanka, later that same year, McCullum's second-innings swipe to send the ball aerially to deep midwicket, tilted an even Test towards the opposition, and sparked the collapse that led to his team losing inside three days.

Now, McCullum is the first New Zealand batsman to hit more than 1000 Test runs in a year. He is the man who denied India with his nation's first triple ton, and the man who sunk Pakistan, when all of Australia's much-hyped talents had failed in the UAE, and the cricketer who turned the city's air electric for a day.

Maybe he would tell Kaushal that there will be more days when he will go at plenty an over. That there could be more days when he concedes 82 runs in boundaries. But most of all, he would tell him to keep playing the only way he knows how. To stay true to himself, and to keep up those acts of surrender. Because one day, maybe for Kaushal too, "that's how I play" will not be an excuse, but an emphatic testimony of triumph, won hard through the difficult days.