India’s Test rivalry with Australia was barely worth talking about in the 20th century. All that changed in 2001, when an unforgettable series came to life partly because of a war of words in the media.
For close to 150 years, one rivalry – the Ashes contested by England and Australia – has defined Test cricket. For a couple of decades, the Frank Worrell Trophy contested by West Indies and Australia was equally fierce, and South Africa’s return from post-Apartheid isolation saw the resumption of their heated contests against Australia. Indian cricket didn’t really have anything comparable in the 20th century. Cricketing ties with Pakistan were always too tenuous for a genuine sporting rivalry to take root in the Test arena.
Matches with England always had some spice, but contests with Australia were generally infrequent and one-sided. The record books may show that India won 11 and lost 28 of the Tests they played against Australia in the 20th century, but as many as four of those victories came in the late 1970s against Australian teams gutted by the exodus to Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket. In more than half a century of touring Australia, India won precisely ONE Test there against full-strength opposition, when a hamstrung Kapil Dev famously bowled them to victory at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in 1981.
It wasn’t therefore surprising that tours of India were seen as something of a punishment. The heat and dust, the travel arrangements, the hotels and the food were all reasons to quibble for Australian tourists. Much of this is beautifully documented in Gideon Haigh’s The Summer Game, as is the Australian churlishness about Jasu Patel’s action after he bowled India to a historic Test win in Kanpur in 1959.
Given that history, it seems unreal to imagine just how big the India-Australia rivalry is now. For a while in the early 2000s, as England went from shocking result to disaster in the Ashes, it even threatened to become the game’s premier contest. Some would say, in terms of playing quality, that it is now.
But it wasn’t a match or special innings or remarkable bowling spell that finally lit the torchpaper for this rivalry. It was instead a war of words on the front pages of Kolkata’s Telegraph newspaper. Australia had arrived in India in February 2001, still smarting from their defeat in India in 1998, when Sachin Tendulkar’s mastery had seen off the challenge posed by Shane Warne’s leg-spin.
By 2001, Warne was backed up by two of the greatest pace bowlers the game has known, Glenn McGrath and Jason Gillespie. Not having won a series in India since 1969-70, Steve Waugh and his team arrived determined to conquer what they saw as the final frontier. It was an incredible team, which landed on India shores having won an unprecedented 15 Tests in a row, including a 5-0 thrashing of once-mighty West Indies.
They extended the streak to 16 in Mumbai, in a match where Tendulkar’s genius batting was no match for a relentless pace attack. Harbhajan Singh, the inexperienced offie who had replaced the injured Anil Kumble as India’s main spin threat, had exposed some chinks in Aussie armour by reducing them to 99 for 5 in their first innings, but blistering counterattacking centuries from Adam Gilchrist and Matthew Hayden swung the match decisively Australia’s way.
Indian needed inspiration from somewhere. It came from a former Australian captain. Ian Chappell had been part of Bill Lawry’s victorious team in 1969-70, and had gone on to carve out a niche in the media. Apart from his TV commentary duties, Chappell’s columns on the series were widely read and shared, even in the pre-social media days. On the eve of the second Test in Kolkata, he trained both barrels at Sourav Ganguly, India’s captain, and let fly.
“Ganguly has made a number of poor decisions (not all off them on the field)” wrote Chappell in his Telegraph before going on to add that “it is his arrogance towards his fellow players that is the biggest threat to his tenuous hold on the captaincy.” The innuendo in the opening line was bad enough, a snide reference to off-field controversies, but the suggestion that Ganguly didn’t have the backing of the dressing room sparked a furious reaction.
The Telegraph gave Ganguly space for a rejoinder the next day. “While I respect Chappell’s right to be critical of my batting and captaincy, he has no business talking about things he doesn’t know of firsthand,” wrote the local hero. “How does Chappell know what goes on in our dressing room? Also what does he know of my relationship with teammates? Frankly, either Chappell is himself ignorant or has made the observations at the behest of someone else. This isn’t cricket.”
On the field over the next few days, India’s fortunes went from bad to worse. By the close of the third day, India were 254 for 4 after following on, still 20 runs shy of making Australia bat again. The commentary team was looking up tee times for golf on the scheduled final day. India’s goose, they assumed, was well and truly roasted.
No one told VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid. The Miracle of Eden has been recounted enough times over the past two decades, so we don’t need to go into details here. All that needs to be said is that the duo batted all day without being separated, adding 336 runs in the process. A near-certain defeat was transformed into a magical 171-run win, and no one present at the Eden Gardens on those epochal final two days will ever forget the noise and fervour that helped overwhelm one of the greatest teams in history.
India would go on to clinch a thriller in Chennai to seal the series. By then, no one was thinking of one-sided rivalries. There have been more classic series down the years, including India’s two memorable victories in Australia on their last two tours, but few will ever come close to matching the drama of 2001.
Laxman and Dravid. Harbhajan’s off-spin. Tendulkar’s leg-spin at Eden, and masterful hundred at Chepauk. Sameer Dighe’s guts in a tense finish. But most of all, Ganguly. A captain under fire and up against formidable opponents, he just refused to throw in the towel. Words on a page took life on the field, and cricket history changed forever.