A. THE SERIOUSNESS:
As someone whose hobby is to dabble and swim tirelessly in the ocean of cricket statistics, one simple stat always made me feel ashamed: total number of test series India had won in Australia and South Africa in history = 0. World Cup win is undoubtedly the ‘biggest’ achievement in cricket. But over the years, I have realised a test series win for a subcontinental team in these two places to be perhaps a touch tougher.
B. THE TWO COLOURS:
Flashback to nine months ago: IPL 2018 started in the month of April in India. That’s the time when cricket players became more expensive in India along with onions and petrol, and the middle-class partly bored with their routine lives threw the dust off their coloured sunglasses preparing to watch cheerleaders gyrate to mishits going for DLF maximums sponsored by Paytm. At the same time, there was a different kind of colour in the quiet country-sides of Yorkshire. Flowers were starting to bloom; fields were starting to get greener again after the long depressing winter; Nature was unfurling its glories after hibernation – slowly but surely summer was coming. Murmurs were heard mostly among old people in the beautiful quiet valley – an internationally acclaimed batsman was rumoured to be coming to play County cricket for Yorkshire. He had arguably been the best player of spin in world cricket since the retirement of Younis Khan; but his record outside subcontinent had indicated that he lacked the skill and technique to succeed in alien conditions just like some of his predecessors Vengsarkar, Jayawardene and Zaheer Abbas. Experts generally agreed that he belonged in the above category rather than the subcontinent giants who conquered all conditions (Tendulkar, Gavaskar, Sangakkara, Dravid, Miandad, Kohli). But the man was not giving it up without a fight.
C. THE INVISIBLE WHIP:
It’s not important that he failed over the next three months and couldn’t score even one half-century in 12 innings, but that he failed in spectacular misery! He knew shortcuts to failure are only for the lazy and the faint-hearted. So he employed his bat, his brain, body, concentration and sacrificed his reputation to humble grinds like 7(42) and 6(28) against Somerset, 2(15) against Nottinghamshire, 32(109) and 0(11) against Hampshire and 23(111) against Surrey before being completely outclassed by County bowlers! He seemed to have access to an invisible painful whip that can only be constantly lashed at himself till he rectified his life-long technical flaws, but without any trickery – in that failure of a County stint there were zero shots played in frustration, no shots executed in desperation. Much later when he summarised his philosophy after the Adelaide century, any casual cricket-lover found it hard to believe this to be the advice from a successful person in the 21st century: “It is easy to play shots. When you start playing shots [during a testing spell], that means your game is not capable enough to play the test format. You are trying to survive rather than understand the situation and play accordingly. When you start playing shots, it means you are under pressure as a batsman and you are not able to handle that situation. When you defend confidently you know you are in command. You are on top of the bowler, and he doesn’t have a chance to get you out.” Nobody fully appreciated his methods during those failures (including a heart-broken well-wisher like me, I confess) and he was dropped from the first test in England. Today, that drop is as relevant as a CEAT Tyres Strategic Timeout.
D. HAMMOND-ESQUE:
Most people would say that the series win down-under sounds a bigger achievement than it actually was this time – and they would be absolutely right in saying so. After all, what Australian cricket went through in the last year is no secret – and any team without its two best batsmen stands crippled. Indian bowlers certainly had it easy this time. But that made zilch difference to Indian batsmen who still had to face Australian bowling in its full might. Don’t fool yourself into believing that Starc-Haze-Cummins-Lyon isn’t the best bowling attack Australia has put up ever since the retirements of McGrath and Warne. The only reason they looked slightly off-colour in Sydney is because they were tired after India’s no. 3 kept them on the field for days before that in Adelaide and Melbourne. The fact that the remaining 10 batsmen combined to score only 2 hundreds in the whole series in addition to his 3 is a validation. In fact, if weather allowed India to complete their third win of the series in Sydney then it would only be the second time in Australia’s 142 years-long test cricketing history that a visiting batsman would score 3 centuries in 3 different matches in the same series all for winning causes! The great Wally Hammond did it in the 1928/29 series – but even Hammond’s biggest fan won’t say that particular Australian attack had any good fast/fast-medium bowlers.
E. THE LIMELIGHT:
This colossal success of India's first-down batsman in Australia and also in the England test series before that is a lesson for hundreds of young talented batsmen in India. You don’t need to be a pompous abusive tattooed gym-conquering celebrity to become as successful a test cricketer as Kohli – there is also another way, the ChePu way: sweat it out in the middle for hours and days and months and years when nobody is watching. Today after the historic series is won, everybody will come to hog the limelight and media attention. The clueless Coach will explain how this time the score-line is a correct reflection of how the sides played unlike in the England and South Africa series, and how this series win means all the tactical decisions since he took over have been proven correct. You’ll hear soundbites from BCCI and maybe even some politicians eager to take credit. Other cricketers will get busy preparing for the upcoming tight limited-overs schedule followed by IPL. But Cheteshwar Pujara, our dark knight, will go back to toil it out again in Ranji Trophy and County Cricket as far from limelight as possible – to a place where brand endorsements, IPL contracts and paparazzi can’t disturb his inner peace and sense of triumph.
His scalps didn't actually look impressive, but he's got the figures on a dead pitch. I now hope he's a fixture in all our plans abroad because he's a genuine weapon as opposed to fat Ashwin.
