Long before Yash Dayal and Sandeep Sharma, there was Chetan Sharma. And long before the dubious sting operation that cost him his job as India’s chief selector, there was the last-ball six, a stroke that traumatised a generation. It wasn’t until a new millennium that India were able to return that Javed Miandad blow with interest, courtesy the blade of Sachin Tendulkar, and there was then another two-decade wait before Virat Kohli added another shot that will echo through the ages in this most complicated and intense of rivalries.
India-Pakistan matches were seldom about the cricket. In the background, there was always diplomacy, intrigue, war, and terrorism. More than 1.5 billion people – a fifth of the planet’s population – united by the shared love of a colonial sport, and divided by the boundaries and barriers that those same colonisers had drawn on a map before they left.
Miandad’s six off Sharma occurred long before the advent of satellite television, yet its impact was felt for years. You could almost make the argument that it changed the fate of two cricketing nations. In the first half of the 1980s, Indian cricket was an emerging force. The improbable World Cup win in 1983 had been backed up by a remarkable unbeaten run through the World Championship of Cricket in Australia in 1985.
Along the way, India beat Pakistan in the group stage, and thrashed them in the final. In fact, two of the emblematic images from the early years of colour television in India are from that match. First, the usually restrained Richie Benaud yelling: “Knocked ’im over! First cherry! Great yorker!” after Kapil Dev had sneaked one through Qasim Omar’s defence. And then, the same Benaud, a great leg-spinner in his day, enthusing about the ripping leg-break with which Laxman Sivaramakrishnan had Miandad stumped by yards.
Going into that Sharjah final in April 1986, India held an 8-7 edge in the head-to-head rivalry with Pakistan. Then Sharma bowled that full toss, Miandad swung for the sand dunes, and India-Pakistan cricket was never the same again. In the remaining years of that decade, Pakistan won 13 ODIs to India’s two.
The emergence of Tendulkar, allied to the economic reforms that were implemented soon after, transformed Indian cricket, but the hat-trick of World Cup victories over Pakistan between 1992 and 1999 held little deeper meaning. In 1992, Pakistan would go on to lift the title. Four years later, any Indian celebrations were cut short by the dismal nature of their own exit to Sri Lanka in the Eden Gardens semifinal. And in 1999, it was Pakistan that moved on to play mighty Australia in the final, while India went home early.
By 2003, and the clash at Centurion, the world itself had changed. The Internet made it possible for millions of fans to follow the game in real time, no matter where they were geographically. Online message boards were the rage, with thousands of threads generated about the big games.
For India and Pakistan, the stakes had never been higher. While the 1999 game had been played in the backdrop of the conflict in Kargil, the match four years later came in the aftermath of a terror attack on India’s parliament, and Pakistani duplicity that had made Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Indian Prime Minister, roll back his peace initiatives in disgust. You could have cut the diplomatic tension with a knife, and it was no surprise when Tendulkar spoke later of how he hadn’t slept for nearly a fortnight before the game.
When Pakistan set a target of 274, the omens didn’t look good for an India team that had ambitions to build on the victory (shared with Sri Lanka) in the Champions Trophy a few months earlier. In the build-up to the game, Shoaib Akhtar, whose fiery pace had won Pakistan a Test in Kolkata four years earlier, had promised more of the same, and with Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis still in the ranks, India had their work cut out.
That was when Tendulkar did something unusual. After walking out to open the innings, he marked his guard to face the first ball. Afterwards, the late David Shepherd, umpiring that match, would ask him why he hadn’t started the innings at the bowler’s end as he usually did. “Because the boys must be shown the way,” replied Tendulkar.
“Tendulkar began with a superbly executed stroke through point and then found himself facing Akhtar and his thunderbolts,” wrote the late Peter Roebuck in his match report. “The shock-haired paceman hurled down a flyer and in a trice Tendulkar sent it soaring over the boundary at third man, and deep into an ecstatic crowd.
War had been declared, a battle between flashing blade and hurtling missile.”
Tendulkar would make 98 from 75 balls that day – “It was the best one-day innings it has been my privilege to watch,” wrote Roebuck – but it was that six over third man that remains indelible in millions of memories. A deft flick of those impossibly strong wrists, and the Sharjah ghost was buried. This was, after all, a World Cup game, with a media presence from countries that didn’t even take cricket seriously. From the New York Times to Papua New Guinea’s Post-Courier, there was scarcely a media outlet that wasn’t following what was happening at Supersport Park in Centurion.
“He hit me for a six in Centurion, which makes India very happy,” said Shoaib, voice laced with sarcasm, in an interaction on Instagram not long ago. “They keep showing the same six. If I knew that one six can make 1.3 billion Indians so happy, I would have conceded a six every day. Sachin has been a very, very close friend of mine, he’s a tremendous guy, very humble.”
A 14-year-old in Delhi was among those watching Tendulkar’s heroics that evening. At the time, Kohli was making his way through the age-group teams. An India cap and sharing a dressing room with Tendulkar were still the stuff of dreams, but he never forgot what he saw – the power of one shot to change the collective mood of millions.
Nearly 20 years on, Kohli was in the middle of the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG), a venue that most Pakistani fans remembered as the scene for their finest hour – Imran Khan’s Cornered Tigers winning the 1992 World Cup. This was a different format, not 50 overs, but with diplomatic relations and bilateral cricketing ties non-existent, the pressure was as intense as it had ever been.
Up against him was Haris Rauf, whose skills had been honed flinging a tape-ball on the streets. The back-of-length delivery is a weapon of choice in tape-ball games. Batters can’t get under it, and the erratic bounce can be hard to get on top of. The MCG, with its vast boundaries, was the ideal venue to try the same. The square boundaries aren’t easy to clear, and who could possibly hit such a delivery back down the ground?
Kohli did. The more you watch the shot he played, the more unreal it seems. When you start cricket coaching, you’re advised to get in line and drop such balls at your feet. There’s little else you can do with them, unless your reflexes are quicksilver enough to play the pull or hook. No coach would ever tell you to try and punch it back over the bowler’s head.
When Kohli connected – the contact so sweet it was almost musical – you could see the impact on both Pakistani players and fans. The equation was still loaded in their favour, but you could see the belief draining away. As with the Miandad six and the Tendulkar upper-cut, it was a stroke that will not be forgotten. A rivalry that goes back seven decades, and is influenced by so many off-field factors, can never be glibly reduced to snapshots of three balls. But when you now think of India and Pakistan, you picture Tendulkar and payback. And Kohli putting the cherry on top.