Problem with a celebration is that it always tends to become an emotional overstatement. Reason and rationale, more often than not, go missing from a tribute. It is this aspect of ?overdoing? the thing a bit that is perhaps the only way we can remedy not having celebrated VVS Laxman enough. The fourth of the fab four, little does Laxman know what he has to do to elevate himself to a higher rank despite having played some of the best Test match innings ever for India. A man who has tormented the world champion Australian team for over a decade, given us incredible joy while watching him bat and has carried himself exactly the way a role model should amidst others who have crossed the line with alacrity, VVS deserves every possible accolade we can provide him with. And his match saving hundred at Napier is just the right stage to do so.

In celebrating VVS Laxman, I need to go back exactly a year and three months. The day: January 1, 2008. Context: India 0-1 down in the series down under against Australia. As VVS Laxman was about to enter the nets on the eve of the second Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground we had a brief eye contact. To be honest, it was one not lasting for more than five seconds. In the course of that very brief exchange, if you can call it such, I wished him luck and a happy new year and he gave me a warm smile, one of acknowledgment more than anything else. But that brief exchange was enough for me to demand a few things from one of Indian cricket?s real legends. To put it bluntly ? Laxman, despite being the most successful Indian cricketer against cricket?s best side, has hardly been given his due. Yet, every time India has managed to herald a turnaround against the world champions over the last decade it has been VVS who has led the fight back. In what was perhaps his last tour down under, it was desperate time for India at Sydney, much more perhaps than at Napier. If the Australians won their sixteenth straight Test with ease, the series was surely beyond India. On the other hand if the Indians were able to show some real pluck, it could really become a true contest between the champion and the challenger. And to achieve this near miracle, the amicable VVS had to wield the sword, one that had in 2001 reduced the great Shane Warne to being a mere spectator on occasions and on others into a bowler who still had much to learn.

Making the battleground more romantic in a perverse sense, Laxman walked into the act at Sydney when Brett Lee was literally breathing fire. He had just bowled Wasim Jafffer with a ball bowled at a speed of 152 kmph. India was well and truly under the scanner. Even when Laxman finally got out after a superb 109, India wasn?t out of danger. However, that one innings brought back the intensity that was lacking in Melbourne. It was that one stand out innings that transformed this series into what it was billed as-the champion versus the challenger.

Napier was similar. With Tendulkar falling early on the fifth day, New Zealand was expectedly going for the kill. It was just that Laxman refused to be slain. Rather, it was the other way round. In tandem with Gautam Gambhir, he put paid to all of New Zealand?s chances in the process elevating this Indian team into the next level, the level which belongs to the champions?teams that are equally adept at saving a Test match. Make no mistake, saving a Test match is equally great an achievement as winning it and more so when it comes after batting out more than six sessions.

As I write, India is playing the third Test match of the series at Wellington. Such is the form of VVS and his mates that I am encouraged to make a rather over the top prediction ? New Zealand will not be able to take 20 Indian wickets. The series then, thanks to our famed batting line up, is ours.

The writer is a cricket historian