Who is Shane Watson?

There is a dialogue in the novel Atlas Shrugged, which goes like this

“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders-what would you tell him to do?"
"I . . . don't know. What . . . could he do? What would you tell him?"
"To shrug."

You  would not be mistaken if you can put Shane Watson in the place of Atlas in the above dialogue, just that as an Australian fan you would not want him to shrug

It became more apparent from yesterday's match that Watson is the premier Australian cricketer now. That's quite an achievement from where he found himself in the early and middle part's of the last decade

Watson was basically hyped up as the next all-rounder for Australia as soon as he entered the domestic scene and notched up few runs and wickets. That he was in contention with Andrew Symonds for a Test berth talks volumes about the trust that the selectors had in him. In fact it was an injury to Watson that handed Symonds a chance at the Test level

Ian Chappell went on record to say that selectors should only consider him if his fitness manages to hold up for an entire domestic season. With Symonds consolidating his position in all forms of the game, Watson found himself in wilderness when it came to his own position

IPL changed it all, when as a trusted lieutenant of Shane Warne, he helped Rajasthan Royals storm to the inaugural edition. There was no looking back from there on as he went on to score his maiden ODI hundred in West Indies and come Ashes 2009, he consolidated his place in the Test team too

Following summer he struggled in converting his half-centuries to hundreds in Test cricket but continued to flourish in the shorter version of the game by scoring centuries in the semi-finals and the final of Champions Trophy

Despite scoring close to 400 runs and getting starts in eight out of ten innings in the Ashes, he had to watch from the losing side as he failed to convert any of those eight starts into a big hundred. In terms of an impact player, it was felt that Watson was not yet there but reaching there

With floods affecting his home state, Watson would not have been blamed if he said that his concentration lay somewhere else. Instead he tried to focus all his energies on the game and shined brightly in the two T20 Internationals

What provided succor to the embattled fans of the losing team in the Ashes was the way he raised his game in the first ODI. It was a rare appearance of the seldom seen converter. When he began to cramp as he was in his seventies, crowd and the people watching on TV would have had the feeling of déjà vu

It was not to be as he not only battled the cramps but also the bowlers as he went on to play one of the best knocks by an Australian, in a chase. He showed remarkable patience when between the 35^th and 50^th over, he just faced 29 balls and showed remarkable poise to hit the boundaries when they were exactly needed

                       

The way he handled the spinners showed the strength of the man as he realised that Yardy was not going to spin the ball and was just going to dart it in. So he moved across and swiped/slogged/powered the ball into the vacant spaces on the leg side

Early in the innings, he went on the attack and immediately put Strauss on the backfoot as he was not prepared for an all-out attack by the batsman. In fact, Strauss was taken aback so much by the assault that he delayed in calling the second Powerplay

Now that Watson has proved himself to be the player to be depended upon across all the formats of the game, all he needs to do is to concentrate on converting his starts into higher scores and help the team in getting an upstart. That would be the time when he can ’shrug’