You Must Like Cricket? (11 page)

Now, everything was turned on its head. All of a sudden, we were the best team in the world. (At least, that was what the record books said.) A few years later, we won the Benson & Hedges Cup. Okay, so it wasn't as impressive as winning a world championship, but the tournament featured all of the game's leading sides. Before we knew it, all these titles – many of them inconsequential in themselves – became crucial to the Indian cricket fan. We never won the Robert Mugabe Cup or the Idi Amin Championship but had we done so, we would have talked about them for years.

As we got better, and the one-day game became ever more popular, we played it more and more often. Before the mid-1980s, few international tours featured anything but Test matches. As attendance for ODIs skyrocketed, visitors were soon playing one-day series and no Tests at all.

The Prudential Cup triumph arrived at just the right time. Flat, dead pitches and negative captaincy were turning Test matches into a travesty on the subcontinent. When England toured India in the autumn of 1981, they played a six-Test series. India won the first, low-scoring match. The next five were all drawn. Often, less than 200 runs were scored in a day. After that first victory, India took only fifty-eight wickets in the next five Tests. Play was not so much attritional as mind-numbingly boring. It may well have been the most boring Test series in the history of the game.

And this was not a one-off. Nearly every series played on the subcontinent at the time followed the same, dreary, pointless pattern. Spectators began to stay away; they felt cheated. Test matches in India had literally lost the plot; they had been stripped of their most attractive quality: their unfolding narratives.

Under the circumstances, one-day cricket, with its promise of a result, and continuous action in-between, was a godsend. It brought people back into the stadiums. Once satellite TV arrived, it drove viewing figures and advertising. India had become a cricketing nation that was to be taken seriously. And all because of that win at Lord's on 25 June 1983.

But what I remember most about that day, of course, is wheeling around with the waiters at the Kwality.

* * *

My daughter was born the year we beat Australia at the Eden Gardens after following on. It is one of the greatest Test matches India has ever played. It is one of the greatest Test matches anyone has ever played.

It's a nice way to remember the arrival of a child, I think. Not everybody else agrees.

It's like this. In mid-2002, I am at a bar with a few friends from university. Most of them have left Kolkata now. By chance their visits home have coincided. Every one of them is married; most of them have become parents. As the evening progresses, we switch from talking about the way we were to talking about the way we are. Soon enough, the conversation is about children: why we choose to have them, how they grow up, how expensive they are, how they become the centre of your life, only to leave you with a gaping hole as they begin to make their own.

One of my friends turns to me and asks, ‘Which year was your daughter born in?'

Now I am not one of those fathers who neglects his children, who scratches his chin when asked what grade his daughter is in and mumbles something incoherent. On the contrary, I pride myself on being a New Man, graceful with the nappies, efficient with the feeds and as important an influence on my daughter as her mother is. (It's my way of making up for having done nothing to bring my daughter into the world. Nothing, that is, apart from the impregnation. And that is the nice part.)

But somehow, the question throws me. Perhaps it is because at the time, I am accustomed to thinking of her age in terms of months rather than years. (She hadn't had her first birthday yet.) Perhaps it is just one of those temporary blank periods that hit me once in a while. But the fact is that I can't think of the answer. I scratch my chin, and gaze from the depths of my vodka to the arched eyebrow of my friend. What a prick, the eyebrow seems to suggest, as does the hand that has frozen, its fingers curled around the glass, halfway to his lips. Can't even remember the year his daughter was born in.

‘Urn, well, she was . . .' And then it strikes me. ‘She was born the year India beat Australia after following on. Laxman's epic double, you know. His and Dravid's match. Well, Harbhajan's also.'

My friend looks at me incredulously. ‘Are you fucking crazy or what?'

I don't think so. It is just that I tend to think of every major event in my life in terms of something that happened on a cricket pitch. It helps me keep things straight, I find. I think it is a perfectly serviceable way to keep my memory sharp and fresh. (A lot of people use mnemonics, don't they? Are
they
fucking crazy or what?) But the truth is, it is the only way in which I can remember anything at all.

* * *

The 2001 Eden Gardens Test was remarkable, as far as I was concerned, for another reason. I wasn't there. Having watched every international game at the Eden Gardens for the last quarter of a century, having flown all the way from London to catch a final there, I had decided to call it quits. I'd turned my back on the Eden for various reasons. Having made up my mind, I didn't find I regretted my decision. At least, not as Day One ended. (I
did
feel a twinge of bitterness that they had found someone to take my place in the stands. The ground was packed. Clearly, no one in Block L was missing me.)

Australia arrived in India having won fifteen Tests on the trot. They made it sixteen when they breezed through the game in Mumbai in a little over three days. Beating India in India, their captain Steve Waugh was on record as saying, was the final frontier; as the second Test began in Kolkata, there seemed to be little standing in Australia's way.

On 10 March, the evening before the game started, I was discussing India's prospects with a few of my colleagues. (Essentially it was a discussion about whether India could avoid humiliation.) Having had more beers than was strictly necessary for an after-work, camaraderie-fostering trip to the bar, I had a flash of perspicacity.

‘It's a game of moments,' I said. ‘Remember Tendulkar? Remember him walking back after Ponting took that catch? Remember his face? That could be the image of this series.'

In Mumbai, Ponting had leapt out of nowhere to take what had seemed like an impossible catch. I've seen Tendulkar look disappointed many times after being dismissed but I shall never forget the look of despair on his face as he walked back. Once Tendulkar had gone that day, nothing could prevent Australia's victory. Or India's defeat. Depending on how you chose to look at it. And he knew it better than any of us.

‘Yeah, remember how he took them apart in 1997–8? That was the key then. That will be the key now. Unless Sachin does something . . .' a fellow editor trailed off.

That's when I got my feeling. ‘No, it won't be Sachin. It has to be somebody else. It has to be someone they're not expecting.'

It wasn't just the drink talking. History supported my hunch. In 1959–60 against Australia in Kanpur, India's hero had been Jasu Patel. Coming from nowhere, he'd ripped through the Aussies, taking fourteen wickets for 124. Complete unknowns had won us matches against the West Indies on a couple of occasions. Now India had a young spinner called Harbhajan Singh. We didn't know anything about him – except that the captain wanted him and the selectors didn't. That was just the right pedigree for a miracle-worker.

‘We need someone to run through the Aussies.' (Former India batsman Sanjay Manjrekar on the eve of the match.) ‘We need runs on the board.' (India's coach John Wright.) Simple formula: score enough runs, bowl out the opposition twice, you win the match. You hardly needed an expert to tell you that, do you?

But who was going to do it for us?

For much of the first day, I thought it was going to be Harbhajan. He picked up Mark Waugh, then became the first Indian to get a Test hat-trick. At 269 for 8, we were making a game of it. We may not quite have had a noose round the visitors' necks, but for the moment it was enough that we were not being strangled ourselves.

On the second morning, it was Steve Waugh's turn to play hangman. With support from Jason Gillespie and Glenn McGrath, he completed his twenty-fifth Test hundred. India didn't take the last Australian wicket until the afternoon session.

When India batted, S. S. Das, Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly all got decent starts, but none of them hung on long enough to convert them. At 97 for 7, the series seemed to be over. At least V.V.S. Laxman put up some resistance, stroking the ball beautifully for his fifty-nine. But it didn't make much difference. Before lunch on the third day India had folded for 171, 274 runs behind. Australia enforced the follow-on. There was only one positive sign: Laxman was in such fluent form that when he returned to the pavilion, his captain and coach asked him to keep his pads on. In the second innings, he was promoted to number three, ahead of Dravid.

When Laxman came to the wicket for the second time on Day Three, India's score was only fifty-two. Not one of those present at the Eden Gardens or watching it live on TV had any idea that he was about to make history. I'd have certainly paid more attention myself if I'd known. (But you never know – if you did you'd have been paying attention.) At the end of the day he was 109 not out. India were twenty runs behind.

The Australians couldn't say they had not been warned. Just a few months before in Sydney, Laxman had scored 167. It had been one of the greatest innings an Indian had ever played in Australia. But India had lost that match. Did the stylist from Hyderabad only show us his best form when it was too late to matter?

On the morning of Day Four, we had an appointment with the gynaecologist. I begged my wife to postpone it.

‘I really want to watch Laxman bat. Really.'

‘You will soon become a father. We have to see the doctor about that. And you want to watch a cricket match in which India will lose.'

‘That's not the point.'

‘What is the point then? What's the use? Aren't India going to lose anyway? That's what you were saying, weren't you, on the phone last night. The papers say so too.'

‘Ah, yes, but you see, the moment there is a glimmer of hope, one shouldn't do anything to encourage it. In fact one should do one's best to
discourage
it. I am superstitious about these things. I only told Ashis that we would lose so that we might have a chance of not losing.'

‘Oh, do grow up. You are so infantile, we may as well as not bother about children.'

We cancelled the appointment.

On the fourth morning Laxman came out with Dravid. He went back at lunch with him. Came out after tea with him. And they returned to the pavilion together at stumps, having put on 335 runs in ninety overs. It was something the likes of which I had never seen before.

To find something comparable, at least in terms of figures (probably
only
in terms of figures), you had to go back nearly half a century: Pankaj Roy and Vinoo Mankad's stand of 413 against New Zealand in Madras in 1955–6. Laxman's and Dravid's 376-run stand overhauled the highest fifth-wicket partnership for India (214, Azharuddin and Shastri against England in 1984–5) by some distance, as well as the highest for any wicket against Australia (an unbroken 298 between Vengsarkar and Shastri at Mumbai in 1986–7). Laxman's 281 was also at the time far and away the highest individual score an Indian had ever made in the history of Test cricket. In the
Wisden
Indian Cricketer of the Century awards of 2002, Laxman's innings was voted the best Indian Test innings of all time.

The records are important; but they are not everything. What was really important was that Laxman's 281 was against an Australian bowling attack which had been taking a wicket every nine overs. Laxman had changed the course of the match, the course of the series and the course of Steve Waugh's career. The great Aussie's team had stumbled at the final frontier.

As I write – four years after it happened – I get goose pimples; at the time, there was merely awe and a sort of bewildered delight.

Laxman had always been an elegant batsman; but he had also been one to fritter away a perfect beginning with a waft outside off stump. He drove you to despair with the same ease with which his artistry thrilled you. But on 14 March 2001, V. V. S. Laxman lived up to his new nickname: very very special. It was an innings of courage, commitment and stamina. But also of diabolical swishes and swats. And everything came off. Watching John McEnroe demolish his opponents, Arthur Ashe once said: ‘A nick here, a cut there, pretty soon you've got blood all over you.' Laxman made things very bloody for Australia. But not once did he become violent.

In that innings, Laxman gave us the perfect example of how an athlete can rise above himself; of how a very good player can, on one day or over a fleeting period of time, aspire to and attain greatness. It can happen in any competitive sport. But when it happens in a team game, it is especially exhilarating. Because one individual can carry eleven.

During that fourth day, I felt, for the first time, a wave of remorse for having abandoned the Eden Gardens. I wanted to be there at the ground. What stopped me was that I could not bear to miss the action in the time that it would take me to get to the stadium.

Later, when I read a
Wisden Asia
interview in which Laxman talked about how unbelievable the crowd had been, how it had kept both him and Dravid going, I felt as though my absence had let my side down. I felt as though I had let myself down too, that I had missed the opportunity of a lifetime. Because the opportunity to play a role, however peripheral, in that game may have been the closest shot I will ever have at greatness.

On the final day of the Test, I was in the office. It was one of those days. I pretended I was working; actually I was watching the newsroom TV. (‘I'm chasing a story on the phone' or ‘I'm writing something which will need a lot of research on the internet' are handy lines when one needs to stay in the office to watch cricket on a work day.) Sourav declared at 657 for 7, the second-highest total a side batting second has ever made. Australia had to last seventy-five overs to force a draw. Or, given that this was Australia, they had seventy-five overs in which to score 384 and win their seventeenth consecutive Test.