Monday, November 12, 2001 The Wisden style-sheet urges us to be wary of the word enigma. It isn't on the banned-substances list as "the red-haired Kiwi southpaw" is, but you are advised to employ the word with caution. Is Graeme Hick an enigma, or is he just a front-foot thumper who was found out by Test fast bowlers?

VVS Laxman puts you in a real quandary. Just what do we make of him? He is certainly no flat-track bully. Unlike some other Indian batsmen with flattering records, he hasn't plundered the meek. Both his Test hundreds have been at the expense of the most potent bowling attack in the world and he has got good fifties in West Indies and against South Africa and Australia. Steve Waugh will tell you that he can bat. And how.

Laxman in full bloom can put Tendulkar and Lara in the shade. He rarely brutalises bowlers; he prefers to bedazzle them. He creates boundaries from nowhere, without fuss, with minimum effort. His footwork is negligible, yet his bat flows like a natural extension of his arms and he cover-drives fast bowlers off the back foot as if cosying himself in a beanbag. Bowlers rarely notice that he has hit them till they see the ball beyond the ropes. Only to the truly blessed does batting come so naturally.

Yet, he can be a captain's nightmare, because you never know what to expect from him. Just as it is impossible to set a field for him, so it is impossible to plan an innings around him. He conjures his own dismissal as easily as he whips up boundaries and if the law governing suicide was applicable to cricket, Laxman would have been behind bars by now.

It is easier to come to terms with Sourav Ganguly's repeated failures in Test cricket. He is just not good enough against the short ball and, like Hick, he has been found out by the fast men. He can only hope that practice will make him a better player. But for someone who has shown himself to be as much at ease in South Africa as Laxman did during his brief stays in both innings, self-destruction amounts to perfidy and treason.

A case can be made for him on the grounds that this is his natural style of batting; he scored that unforgettable 281 batting in much the same way and as long he plays a matchwinning innings every five Tests or so, he should be left alone. His occasional genius can more than atone for his casual indiscretions.

It is a compelling argument. And Laxman may well prove it right at Port Elizabeth with a sublime century. But a closer scrutiny of his Test career would nail the misconception that he is incapable of tempering his strokeplay. Before his 281 at Calcutta, Laxman's career strike rate stood at 40.84. In his his six innings of 50+, his strike rate was no more than 52.52, even though one of them was his blistering 167 off 198 balls against Australia at Sydney. His first Test fifty was a 170-ball 51 against South Africa and two matches later, at Cape Town, he stayed undefeated on 35 off 109 balls in India's embarrassing second-innings collapse. Even his epic 281 took all of 452 balls with a strike rate of 62.16 and he galloped only after scoring the first hundred.

But post-Calcutta, his batting has been trance-like: runs have come fast and furious. His last 284 runs have been scored at a one-day rate of 75.65. Yet his last six Test innings have yielded a mere 162 runs and India have lost two of these three Tests. He has played some breathtaking strokes, but there has also been a breathlessness about his approach to batting. The euphoria of the 281 seems to have blinded him to a fundamental truth about batting: the great are great not only because they know how to assert themselves over the bowler, but because they instinctively know the right ball to hit.

Catch your breath VVS, the flight out of South Africa isn't till November 29. And without fond memories, it could get long and lonely.

Sambit Bal is editor of Wisden.com India. His Indian View appears every Monday.

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