Having scored a valiant hundred at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, Nitish Reddy established his dominance in Test cricket on the third day of the ongoing Boxing Day Test of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy. Reddy walked out to bat at a point when India had already lost six wickets with just 191 runs on the board and were fighting against the first-innings score of 474 on the part of Australia. From then onwards, he continued to bat throughout the day. After making the record-breaking partnership with Washington Sundar for the eighth wicket, the Andhra batter scored his maiden Test hundred and celebrated it in a unique manner.
After getting the fifties, Reddy copied the famous move of Telugu actor Allu Arjun in the blockbuster film ‘Pushpa’. But the century celebration, Reddy took off his helmet, stamped his bat on the ground, and puts the helmet on the bat while pointing his finger towards the sky.
While fans on social media believed that the young batter struck a pose of another Telugu superstar ‘Prabhas’ from his film ‘Salaar’, it, in fact, wasn’t. In an interview with Star Sports, he was seen expressing what the whole celebration meant to him after the completion of the day’s play on the fourth day.
Reddy spoke to Star Sports saying, “The 50 celebrations, you all are aware, are when I came to Australia, and I wanted to do this in for a mentality I want to carry in the center; that’s how I want to be.”
“And that hundred, the 100 celebration was, I wanted to stamp the bat over there and there is an Indian flag symbol on the helmet, right. So, I wanted to keep my helmet. Like I want to feel like I stamped my Indian flag on this ground and salute, just did the salute to the helmet,” he added.
Nitish was out for the first Indian batter in the first innings, and before his dismissal, he scored 114 runs with the help of a total of 11 fours and a six. He became the third youngest Indian Test centurion in Australia, after Sachin Tendulkar and Rishabh Pant.
