Yuvraj Singh hits a hundred despite a knacked back

Has any batsman every played a more destructive innings while wearing a girdle? We’ve always liked Yuvraj Singh, but he’s lost a little bit of lustre lately. This is largely thanks to Sky Sports’ ‘look at all the cricket we’ve got’ advert which starts with a big orchestral crescendo, before breaking into soft indie music for an underwhelming montage of cricket footage.
Think of the start of the Stiltskin song off the old Levi’s ad, only instead of cutting to the loud Stiltskin bit, it’s some chump feigning an American accent over music that Busted would discard as too puny.
Anyway, at one point you see Yuvraj Singh celebrating winning a match. It was possibly the Twenty20 World Cup final, we can’t really remember. That’s not important though. What’s important is that he pulls a stump out of the ground and adopts this utterly contrived, muscle tensing contortion, which he holds for the cameras. At least that’s what it looks like: a big pose that he’d honed in front of the mirror.
If that’s not what’s happening, please let us know, because it’s excruciating to watch and the advert doesn’t seem to be going away in a hurry.
At one point in today’s whopping great 78-ball 138, Yuvraj Singh hit a six. Nothing unusual in that. He hit six in all. But this one was different.
His follow-through barely got to waist height. It was pretty much a lofted forward defensive, yet it sailed away. Batsmen shouldn’t be able to hit sixes without putting some effort in, no matter how well they time the ball. They really shouldn’t.