Robin Uthappa's best friend is snooker and billiards champion Pankaj Advani.
Maybe that's the reason the 21-year-old so cooly snookered England's attempts at winning the 6th one-dayer at the Oval.
He didn't have the best World Cup for India - scoring just 30 runs in three games - but Uthappa definitely put his Carribean experience behind him with a match winning 47 not out from just 33 in the Oval one-dayer against England.
At 234 for 5, it was still anybody's game. India needed 83 runs to win off just 9.4 overs, with Robin Uthappa and MS Dhoni - India's last recognised batsman at the crease. And while both are known for their big hitting, this was the time to put one's head down and play a sensible knock.
"Just watching him bat at the nets, the way he was playing, he was begging out to be picked and selected and you know credit too him. Probably he has never batted at 7 in his life and the way he managed the chase, controlled the chase was fantastic," said skipper Rahul Dravid.
Uthappa had made his international debut against the same opponents barely 18 months ago and introduced himself to the English with a cracking 86 off 96 balls, as India had chased down a somewhat mammoth 288 runs to win in Indore.
Ofcourse this time around not all his shots had one reaching out for the Oxford English Dictionary but as long as the runs were coming, well no one really cared.
"I knew that they were going to bowl yorkers in the last 7 or 8 overs. I knew when the faster bowlers came to bowl they would look to bowl yorkers. They would not bowl really short, just bowl slower balls or yorkers," said Uthappa.
"That was the only thing they were going to do with variation so I was setting myself up and I knew that I could either hit the ball straight down the ground or pick the full tosses and hit them over fine leg."
But there was some sensible batting, especially in the latter stages of the match, like making sure that with six balls to go he had the strike rather than risk a second run.
And there were contributions in the field too - the run out of Luke Wright putting an end to the Sussex batsman scoring spree against India, all of which will come to use in the Twenty20 World Cup in South Africa.
Uthappa comes good at The Oval
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