A generation ago, in Chennai on March 22, Sourav Ganguly’s Indian team registered one of cricket’s greatest wins. The modern-day team observed the anniversary with a shoddy, series-losing performance against Australia.
For Indian cricket fans of a certain age, the combination of March 22 and Chennai is a magical one. In fact, you could argue that it’s right up there with memories of any of India’s three World Cup wins. It was in the city on the Coromandel coast 22 years ago that Sourav Ganguly’s team, a year of from the trauma of the match-fixing scandal and less than a month after being thrashed inside three days in the first Test in Mumbai, beat Australia by two wickets to put the seal on the greatest series seen on Asian soil.
A week after the unforgettable triumph at Eden Gardens, Harbhajan Singh – the hero with 32 wickets across the three Tests – squeezed a full delivery from Glenn McGrath past point to clinch the narrowest of wins. The format and the intensity of the occasion may have been very different in 2023, but there was never any danger of Australia loosening their grip in the final stages of this ODI series decider. India were ahead of the game at various points in the chase, but the manner in which it fizzled out should cause a few alarm bells to ring with just six months to go for the World Cup to begin.
Five batsmen made 30 or more on a surface where the ball gripped enough to keep the spinners interested, but the highest score for India was Virat Kohli’s fairly subdued 54. Australia’s innings had followed a similar pattern, but where Australia’s tail scored 36 vital runs between overs 41 and 45, India could manage a paltry 21, despite losing just a wicket in that phase.
That India lost when Mitchell Starc had one of his rare off days – ten wicketless overs for 67 – will make the defeat all the more galling. And there could only have been envy in the Indian dressing room as Adam Zampa picked up 4 for 45 to effectively settle the game. India had an experienced leggie in the squad in Yuzvendra Chahal, but they clearly no longer trust him in the big games. With leg-spin a big part of the armoury of other World Cup challengers – England have Adil Rashid, Australia have Zampa, and Pakistan have Shadab Khan – it’ll be interesting to see what the Indian think-tank does to plug this hole in the line-up.
You can’t really extrapolate performances in bilateral series to global events, but the sloppiness of the batting display shouldn’t be glossed over either. Rohit Sharma, KL Rahul Kohli and Hardik Pandya, who had each spent enough time at the crease to assess the conditions, all fell to false shots. Rohit and Rahul hit the ball straight to fielders, Kohli miscued one within the circle and Pandya tried to let his ego get the better of the funky field that Steven Smith had set for him when Zampa came back for his final spell.
And after a third straight first-ball duck, is this the end of the Suryakumar Yadav experiment in ODIs? As long as Shreyas Iyer is out injured, SKY will be part of the selection discussion, but with India next playing ODIs in the Caribbean in July, maybe it’s time to look at others like Sarfaraz Khan, Prithvi Shaw and Yashasvi Jaiswal who h