It was Twenty20 at its wham-bang crescendo. Yuvraj Singh smacking Stuart Broad for six consective sixes in an over to equal the world record in international cricket.
It's a pleasure and a relief to see that such a feat has come in a match between two quality sides, and not a boring, hopelessly one-sided South Africa-Netherlands clash in the recent ODI World Cup. Herschelle Gibbs had smashed his way into the record books, against a hapless bowler by the name of Daan van Bunge .
For Yuvraj the sense of achievement would be tinged with relief. After all it was the same Yuvraj, bowling the last over, who had been whacked for five sixes off his last five balls by an English cricketer - Dimitri Mascarenhas very recently. This was the only way he could wipe off that stigma, as he indicated in the post-match interview with Ravi Shastri.
It may have been coincidental, but it was fitting that Shastri posed the questions to Yuvraj, considering Shastri himself slammed six sixes off Baroda's Tilak Raj in the mid-1980s in a Ranji match. The first to achieve the feat being the peerless Sir Garfield Sobers, for Nottinghamshire against Glamorgan in 1968.
As for Yuvraj's record 12-ball 50, it's the shape of things to come in cricket, with Twenty20 making the game more and more a paradise for batters.
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