Out-of-form Yuvraj goes to the master for tips

From Bollywood flicks to batting tips, to having his mother by his side...

From Bollywood flicks to batting tips, to having his mother by his side, Yuvraj Singh is trying his best to turn around his sagging career. The batting prince of India’s next generation of cricketers, Yuvraj is finding the ground slipping fast under his feet. The coronation is nowhere near; the banishment after an innings or two is more of a possibility.

His mother Shabnam was with him in Australia for the last eight days. She wouldn’t be around to see his 200th match, the one against Sri Lanka here on the 19th of this month.

The left-hander has scores of 2, 0, 5, 12, 0 in his last five Test innings. In one-dayers, it is 2, 3 and 6. He has not played 100 balls yet in Tests or one-dayers in this series. The dashing left-hander just cannot understand why every second shot of his is going up in the air.

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His dismissals in this series, flicking or driving into the hands of short extra cover or short midwicket, has been a norm. Now an advice has come his way from none other than the little master himself, Sachin Tendulkar.

Tendulkar has advised Yuvraj to have a round-handed top grip on his bat—to get more control on his top hand and stop shots from going into the air. It’s an interesting advice but another of Tendulkar’s observations is very significant, that about Yuvraj’s slouched stance. In Tendulkar’s opinion, Yuvraj’s left shoulder sag is because he expects every delivery to be a bouncer. The notion of bowlers testing him out with short-pitched stuff is keeping Yuvraj pinned back on his backfoot.

Consequently, he is late in coming on to the front foot and not always in full control of his drives. The little master wants Yuvraj to correct this anomaly. Tendulkar feels Yuvraj has no reason to be overtly concerned by bouncers: he must trust his reflexes and he is good enough to tackle them competently.

Tendulkar cited that Yuvraj’s best innings to date, at the Twenty20 World Cup in South Africa, when the southpaw hit six sixes, and all of them barring the last, were thrashed over point, were delivered off the front foot.

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It was not, Tendulkar reasoned, as if he was batting on a sub-continent pitch. This innings came about in Kingsmead, Durban, and against a frontline international fast bowler Stuart Broad.

Yuvraj has not been able to follow a piece of Tendulkar’s advice, offered early in this tour. Tendulkar wants him to bowl more and more in the nets in order to gauge the pace of the wickets in Australia but the young left-hander has not been able to put it into practice because of the knee injury he suffered in Perth, .