Jimmy Neesham complains of not understanding Virender Sehwag’s tweets

Jimmy Neesham is more famous for his hilarious tweets on the micro-blogging site than for his run at the international level.

New Zealand all-rounder Jimmy Neesham is more famous for his hilarious tweets on the micro-blogging site than for his run at the international level. He hogged all the headlines in his debut Test by scoring an excellent century in the second innings of the second Test against India while batting at No.8 in 2014. It was the same Test where former Kiwi skipper Brendon McCullum scored a triple-ton. He is also a handy pace bowler apart from his prowess with the bat. Neesham is considered to be among the promising all-rounders in Tests in contemporary cricket.

Neesham is currently touring India to play the Tests and One-Day International (ODI) series and on this occasion, he made some unusual and interesting comments in an interview with ESPNCricinfo. Known for his hilarious tweets, the first question in that interview was also about the same as he tweets in an unfiltered way, which not every athlete does and reacted to it by saying, “I don’t really see the point of filtering things too much. There are times when your opinion is not popular and you have to tone down a little bit. But I think the more you are yourself, the easier it is to get on with daily life.”

Talking about the tweets, when asked who the second-best cricketer at tweeting is, Neeshan added, “A lot of people tweet me saying Virender Sehwag is quite good, but a lot of his stuff I can’t understand because it’s not in English. A lot of Indians tell me I am the second funniest behind him.”

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Moving on to further interesting answers by Neesham, one of them was about ‘beard’ to which he quipped, “You can learn a lot. If a person has a very tidy, trimmed well-maintained beard, he probably is more conscious of how he comes across to other people. If you have guys like Kane [Williamson] who just lets it run wild, he doesn’t really care what everyone else thinks of his beard. I think it can show a little bit of a window to a person’s conscience.”

Neesham also revealed an annoying thing about his previous captain McCullum and said, “He’d never let you pay for anything. He always managed to find a way to sneak off in the middle of a meal and slip some notes to a waiter. You would go to pay at the end of the meal and the waiter would say it has all been taken care of. A few of the lads have only just found out what a beer costs since he’s retired!”

Since there were talks about things that annoyed him, Neesham said something related to the commentators, which annoys him. “The one that most annoys me is when commentators talk about pulling off the front foot. Any pull shot is off the front foot by definition. So when the batsman pulls off the front foot and the commentator says he is taking the bowler on, I find that really strange,” said Neesham.

Coming to his bowling, Neesham feels that there should not be any rules on ball-tampering and added, “I would quite like to see what would happen if there were no rules on ball-tampering. If you could just do whatever you wanted to the ball. That would probably make Test cricket more interesting. It could make more tedious sessions more exciting with the ball reversing more.”

He also spoke about his favourite shot, which is hook and also feels that cricket should be included in Olympics as well. “I think the ICC should be doing everything within their power to get cricket into the Olympics. One of our main aims as a sport should be expanding playing numbers throughout the world, and the Olympic Games is a perfect way to achieve this.”