Of KP’s switch hits and Hussey’s last-over heist

With the cricketing world still coming to terms with the game's latest format, T20 cricket in 2010 was still an idea waiting to be embraced and explored.

- Shantanu Srivastava

Standalone T20I tours were still unheard of, and teams were happy to do their bit by playing the odd T20 at the end of a full-fledged rubber — more a perfunctory compulsion than an organic acceptance.

The humming, buzzing potential of T20 cricket was yet to be tapped and while the likes of Yuvraj Singh and Shahid Afridi had shown the world what raw ambition and an unshackled mind could achieve, T20s were far from the inexhaustible behemoth they would become in the decade that followed.

The era of packing the batting lineup with big-hitters was still over a decade away although teams usually carried a few designated hitters for death overs. Yusuf Pathan from India, Chris Gayle in West Indies, Kevin Pietersen for England, and Afridi in Pakistan espoused that thought even as the presence of batters who approached their innings in traditional building blocks — now almost disparagingly called ‘anchors’ — exemplified the safety-first philosophy.