Mike Atherton's analysis I Sehwag, the best batsman in the world I Scoreboard and stats

OPENING the batting in all forms of the international game has to be one of the toughest jobs around. It must take a tremendous mental toll tailoring your game to the many situations these different formats throw up and the recent emotional problems of Herschelle Gibbs and Marcus Trescothick bear testimony to this.

Unsurprising, then, that there is something slightly unhinged about the way Virender Sehwag, India's 24/7 opener, goes about his business. He certainly plunged England into shock as he tore into their bowling.

England had spent the day pussy-footing around for more than two sessions edging their lead up by another 139 and must have imagined that India might bat in similar vein. But that's the great thing about the truly great players. They don't do what everyone else does.

Sehwag has not so much pushed the envelope containing the rules on how to open the batting as punch it to shreds. His great gift is synthesis of approach. One minute he is batting as you would expect someone to bat in a Test match, the next he has flicked a switch and has gone into one-day mode, or rather one-day mood, and every ball looks set to end up in the stands.

Sehwag obviously reckoned India's best chance in the face of a daunting run-chase was to hit the England bowlers hard and see how they responded. It was hard to argue with the thinking, especially given the scars he had inflicted on them in the one-day series. Steve Harmison, James Anderson and Panesar are all mentally frail at times and Graeme Swann is playing his first Test. Thank goodness, then, for Andrew Flintoff, who at one point seemed to be shoring things up at both ends.

Humiliatingly, Panesar ended up bowling from over the wicket in an effort to staunch the flow of runs.

Earlier this year, on this very ground, Sehwag spent most of the first day of a Test against South Africa batting as though he were in the first powerplay of a one-day game, and raced to the fastest triple- century in Test history. He beat the previous record by a cool 84 balls, so it was something of a Bob Beamon moment. He is also the owner of three of the seven fastest double-centuries in Tests.

When, in the tenth over of the innings, he pushed a single into the on side - just to show he could - it brought up his half-century from 32 balls. There are 11 instances of faster fifties in Tests but none by an opener. Things have certainly moved on a bit since Geoff Boycott's day.

Boycott's idea of chasing 387 in the fourth innings would have been to bat three sessions and then see how things lay.

Like Trescothick and Gibbs, Sehwag has had his ups and downs. He went through a bad trot in one-dayers in 2004 and spent most of last year unwanted in Tests. You could pick a pretty good World XI from people who were not playing Test cricket this time last year, given that Andrew Strauss (this game's twin centurion) was left at home while England were touring Sri Lanka, and Andrew Flintoff was still in the rehab room.

Now, the idea of leaving out Sehwag seems like an act of lunacy. Apart from his huge effort against South Africa, he also made important runs in the series against Australia, but unarguably his finest innings of the year was a double-century in Galle when the rest of the Indian batsmen could make neither head nor tail of Ayantha Mendis.

Sehwag's risk-taking approach seems contrary to his modest background. Raised in Nafargarh, a satellite town of Delhi, as the son of a storekeeper, he might be forgiven for adopting a thriftier approach to his day job. Yet it is actually the likes of Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid, middle-class children both, who calculate every risk three times over before taking it.

Sehwag's first coach was so frustrated by his carefree ways that he resorted to tying his feet to the back of the net to stop him charging the bowling. Clearly, it did not work.

Sehwag was often compared to Tendulkar in his early days. Tendulkar was the player he had modelled himself on and physically resembled. Yet Sehwag plays like a Tendulkar liberated of the enormous pressure of being India's greatest sporting icon.

But Sehwag now deserves to be properly recognised for what he is: since the retirement of Adam Gilchrist, the most exciting batsman on the planet.