“Hope Dhoni has seen in Paul Valthaty what the Mumbai selectors could not”

By Suhrid Barua

The likes of Manish Pandey, Manpreet Singh Goni and Swapnil Asnodkar had announced themselves through the IPL platform in its previous editions.

And the 2011 IPL saw a little known Mumbaikar – Paul Valthaty set the cash-rich tournament on fire on Wednesday with a blistering unbeaten 120 - off just 63 balls – to almost single-handedly help Kings XI Punjab engineer upset defending champions Chennai Super Kings (CSK).

Valthaty’s buccaneering knock panned out to be the first century of IPL4. His innings was punctuated with 19 fours – a new IPL record and two sixes.

The 27-year-old right-hander had little cricketing pedigree to boast of going into this match. He had played just one List A game for Mumbai in 2006 and 13 T20 matches. He turned out for Rajasthan Royals in the 2009 season but met with very little success. His previous IPL best score was just six.

The manner in which he took the strong Chennai bowling attack to the cleaners was a treat for sore eyes. The fierce square-cuts, the delicate late-cuts and robust pull shorts were executed when the ball was pitched short, and he would hit them straight when the ball was pitched up.

Makarand Waingankar, who seen the boy from the time he used to hone his skills at the ELF Vengsarkar Cricket Academy, opines: “He’s a kind of player who may not play with regularity, knocks like the one he played on Wednesday, but he will win you games. I thought he batted very smartly. He kept playing off the back foot for most part and murdered the Chennai bowling.”

Valthaty joined the Vengsarkar Cricket Academy at the age of 11 as a medium-pacer. “Once during an under-14 game he opened the innings and massacred the opposition attack. That’s when one first saw the brutal side of his batting,” Waingankar recalls.

The veteran cricket scribe smsed him on Wednesday morning to keep him pumped up: ‘You hang around for 10 balls and rest of the time the bowlers will be watching you.’

Waingankar is happy that he heeded the advice and didn’t play any rash shots early on. “He just played in the ‘V’.”

Valthaty was part of the India Under-19 team for the 2002 World Cup in New Zealand that had players like Irfan Pathan and Parthiv Patel. “He suffered an eye injury when he was hit by a ball in one of the matches. When you suffer an injury like that it obviously affects your confidence. And that’s exactly what happened with him,” Waingankar says.

At 27, Valthaty isn’t exactly young, yet he can be optimistic about breaking into national reckoning by the sheer weight of Wednesday’s innings. For good measure, his pyrotechnics was seen by none other than Indian captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni behind the stumps. “I hope Dhoni is not as blind as the Mumbai selectors to what unfolded in the middle on Wednesday,” Waingankar says, a touch upset.

Former Indian captain Dilip Vengsarkar, who saw Valthaty go through the paces at his academy, was pleased to see his one-time ward come up with a special knock. “He was at our academy for eight years before he joined Air-India. He always had the potential, but I think the eye injury he sustained really set him back.”

Tiger Pataudi played international cricket with one good eye, so there is no reason why with two good eyes Valthaty cannot come good, as he showed against CSK.