Cheeky Cricket

40.2 Nel to Karthik, FOUR, that's a unique shot! good length delivery outside the off stump - Karthik shuffles across a long way, manages to gets inside the line and then he lofts it over the keeper - cheaky

That's an extract from George Benoy's ball-by-ball commentary at Cricinfo for yesterday's match between India & South Africa. What George meant was cheeky, (so it's just a typing error) and even Harsha Bhogle described the shot as cheeky. It was cheeky indeed, but the CHEEKINESS was nothing if you compare it to a historic shot that was played on this very day, exactly seventy-eight years ago.

On the 3rd of December 1928, in a match between the Hindus and Parsees (Bombay Quadrangular) a bowler was so taken aback by a shot that he appealed: Kumar Shree Duleepsinhji had just played the world's first reverse sweep!! In A Book of Cricket Days, Bakhtiar Dadabhoy captures the moment in the words of the non-striker L.P. Jai - "Without changing the grip of the bat, he tried to turn the wide ball backwards towards third man with his bat turned and facing the wicket-keeper". Cheeky!!