Across The Pond

On a rivalry, a kinship, and an enduring fascination

I remember the first time I saw them. A lot of ambient details have faded from memory, but the hues are still vivid and sharp. The 1996 World Cup was in its early weeks, and India were playing them in Bombay.

I had only recently begun watching cricket with interest, my world so far limited to whatever Doordarshan deigned to show of India's matches. I familiarised myself with our tall, lithe captain who carried himself with practised dignity. Then, there was this cherubic fellow who looked like he should’ve been in my class but was somehow good enough to play for India at a World Cup. And all our bowlers came from the southern peninsula.

India had begun the tournament well, but this was the big game held in the big city. Bombay, home to our last great batter and current boy-genius. Bombay, where cricket ran in the city’s veins.

It must’ve been early afternoon when I saw the Australia team walking onto the field. I remember this because it was a school day, and the game began after I reached home. The Australians walked next to our guys, and yet looked like inhabitants of a different universe. Their yellow was bold, bright, popping out of our television set, making India’s sky blue shirt look like something picked out by my grandfather. They strode out with zinc-smeared lips, top two buttons on the shirt casually undone, mouths moving like pistons punching through gum. Our men, on the other hand, were taut and buttoned-up.

Australia batted first, and their captain charged at our main bowler as if only cricket’s laws were stopping him from actual, flesh-to-flesh combat.

Who are these guys?

If their batters were brave and audacious, their bowlers were a notch higher. A few weeks later, they were in the semi-final and staring at a certain defeat. The cold air of Mohali would’ve stung as the giant electronic scoreboard flashed ‘West Indies need 40 runs in 9 overs with 8 wickets remaining’. A stroll, at best. Then the captain handed the reins over to Shane Warne and Glen McGrath. Australia reached the World Cup finals, and those of us young enough got a new lesson: with these guys, nothing was impossible, no cause lost.

Newspapers and magazines brought me closer to this phenomenon called Australian cricket. They spoke of a heritage that ran from Bradman through Benaud and Border, to now -  a lineage of excellence that had smoothly transitioned from cricket’s early, sepia-toned settings to modern day’s technicolor explosion.

I learnt that Australia had recently toppled the erstwhile dynasty of Test cricket. Steve Waugh had batted dog’s years for a 200 in Jamaica, and walked off with a heavyweight boxer’s quota of bruise marks on his torso. He hadn’t flinched as the tall, sharp West Indies bowlers maimed his body with bouncers.

The team of greats and would-be greats pivoted around Shane Warne, who looked and bowled like a rockstar. He didn’t believe in limitations. You got out to him if you stepped out or stayed back, attacked or defended. He toyed with batters’ mind and skills, and often left them looking stupid. Ricky Ponting used to have a neatly-cut french beard. Fast bowlers regularly aimed at his throat. Ponting, sometimes wearing only a thin cotton cap, swivelled and hit those balls into the crowd. I learnt that the shot was called ‘pull’. Glenn McGrath made the ball pitch close to you and yet hit your chest. Then he bowled 59 more balls on the same spot. It was suffocating to even watch.

While England were the inventors and owners of the sport, Australia symbolised excellence and success.

I wanted to see them against our guys in Test cricket. When they landed in India in the spring of 1998, the series was billed as Tendulkar vs Warne. The best batter in the world vs the best bowler in the world. We were confident but scared.

Warne got the first points, and then he did not see another point for a year. Between Chennai, Sharjah, and Dhaka, Tendulkar dealt with Warne as if he was avenging some generational pain. He sent the Aussie bowlers to all corners of every ground they played in. By the end of that summer, Warne confessed to seeing Tendulkar in his nightmares. Mark Taylor, asked to give his opinion on the India tour, came up with five simple words: “We lost to one man.”

Tendulkar mattered because he was our sole window to cricketing excellence, our lonely nomination in the conversation about greatness. No one in our camp came close, and no one had since he first played international cricket.

But later that year, my mind was blown to bits when I saw Test cricket in Australia. For starters, it didn’t happen through post-school lazy afternoons. Cricket in Australia happened before school even started. At times, I had to wake up earlier than my grandparents to catch half a session before the proverbial whistle blew. A lesson in hemispheres and weather arrived through the cricket - it was biting cold in Delhi and summer in Melbourne.

The shapes and sounds of cricket in Australia, though, was nothing like what I had seen until then. This was almost a higher, bolder version of the sport.

“Five-thirty: the hour is beautiful. Birds can be heard, and milkmen, but in the melting inkiness of the house you know you have beaten the city. Australia comes to us like a secret, crystalline. The cricketers in their whites are more defined than elsewhere. The sound of the ball pitching is harder; the thump into the wicketkeeper's gloves - fingers facing up - louder. The slips are in conspiracy. They are chewing gum. They have paint on their faces and casual, staring eyes. In the background are bikinis, sombreros.” - Rahul Bhattacharya, here.

That winter - or summer, heh - England turned out to be no match for Australia. As we found out within twelve short months, India did not even speak the same language. With bat, ball, or in the field, Australia operated on a different frequency. They were, as Rahul Bhattacharya called them, a superteam. It hurt that our guys struggled to respond. Someone from our team scored six consecutive ducks. Come on, man.

But we were also developing a dislike. They bounced us, swore at us, treated our presence as an inconvenience. When Javagal Srinath’s delivery caught Ponting on the cheek and he went to check on the batter, the response was purely Australian – profane, direct, unapologetic. 

Yet our fascination never dimmed. It was a masterclass in cricket every time they played. Warne, McGrath, the Waugh twins, Taylor, Bevan, Ponting, then Lee, Langer, and Gilchrist. Damien Martyn was poetry in moving pictures. No other team held us in such thrall, even as they held us by the throat.

Why was it so? And were they even 1% as curious about us?

With time and text, I got around to finding the breadcrumbs. Gideon Haigh and Peter Roebuck told me about Benaud, Lillee, and Thompson. Indian cricket has a special place in its heart for Benaud’s statesmanship in 1959. The teams didn’t play each other often in the monochrome era, but whenever they did, there was always something in the air. 

I recently found out that when Vijay Hazare scored two hundreds at Adelaide in 1948, he paid obeisance to his guru, the Australian great Clarrie Grimmett. Bradman, then, casually responded with two hundreds of his own. This one time, Gavaskar threw a petulant fit in Melbourne, then Kapil took five and won India the game.

There was a tied Test in Madras, one of only two in cricket’s history, a game so epic it has a 38-page chapter to itself in Mike Coward’s book, Cricket Beyond the Bazaar. ¹Madras would witness another thriller just a year later, when Australia beat India by one run in the World Cup. Perth and Sydney would witness the first flourishes of Sachin Tendulkar, then only 18, and mark him out for destined greatness.

Australia were always the benchmark. When we played them, it was a battle between who we were versus who we’d like to be. Sometimes, the latter was whispered. There isn’t an Indian cricket fan above the age of 50 who hasn’t wished he could be a bit of a jet like Lillee; or one, much younger, who hasn’t wished he could be a carefree child of life like Shane Warne. Go on Twitter, and you will find Indian fans with usernames that pay homage to Ellyse Perry and Meg Lanning.

By the turn of the century, the suits had recognised the commercial potential of this connection. The best team versus the biggest market, excellence versus enthusiasm, tradition versus emerging power. They named the series after two legends, two of Test cricket’s highest run-scorers, and scheduled it with clockwork regularity.

Steve Waugh’s Australians arrived in 2001, wreathed in gold. They were on a streak of fifteen consecutive Test wins. Waugh’s team had won everywhere except India. He called this The Final Frontier, acknowledging the challenge of beating India on their home patch, but attaching a grandiose label to a series that he probably expected to win 3-0. The teams were not comparable either way, and then, India were going to play without their best bowler.

Australia won within three days in Mumbai. The game never looked like going further. Then they reached Calcutta. A per-day crowd of nearly 60,000 watched Australia reduce India to a gooey mess in the first two days. This game threatened to be over in three days too. 

From our trip to Australia, we knew they played cricket from a different planet. This was a rude lesson in how far behind we were, even in our backyard.

Michael Slater and Steve Waugh took out the cigars and wine bottles in the dressing room that evening. It would be over by the next day, they were sure. It should’ve been.

And then, something very very special happened. The most incredible partnership, a wall of defiance. Two blokes, so sick that they could barely practise in the lead-up, batted for a day and a half. The sardar from Jalandhar twinkled out the fried and tired Australians on the final afternoon. India won the next game in Chennai and took the series 2-1. The most miraculous of all results.

Indian cricket would never be the same. Some changes in the ecosystem were already afoot.

“In his book India on Television (2008), Nalin Mehta calls 2001 a hinge point in the coverage of cricket in that country, led by the new Hindi news network Aaj Tak, which turned the three Tests into ‘news’ at every opportunity, to the extent of running an all-day ticker with the score and cutting away to studio chats at lunch, tea and drinks.” - Gideon Haigh²

The team was undergoing a transformation too. In a couple of years, India were beating Australia in Adelaide and almost winning the series in Sydney. Steve Waugh retired, wrote a final memoir, and offered the foreword to Rahul Dravid.

In between all of this, while India were decreasing the gap on the pitch, bit by bit, Australia showed that it would always stay wide enough. They won three ODI World Cups in a row, the last two without losing a game. In one of them, they met India in the final and scored 359 in 50 overs. I was too young to know of the term ‘What The Fuck’, but over time, I have used this many times while thinking of or talking about that game.

Off the field, the shift was more tectonic. India had become an irresistible market. No country could do numbers like us. Somebody put Bangladesh and Kenya in a tri-series against India, scheduled it mid-summer, and still got an audience.³ And, for better and worse, this ability to bring money into cricket made us the centre of the sport.

In 2008, the Australian team alleged that one of ours had used a racial slur against one of theirs. The Indian cricket establishment, offended and insulted, threatened to pull out of the tour, leaving Cricket Australia in losses to the tune of millions of dollars. We got court hearings, verbal punches, newspaper columns that ran like water from a stream. The air surrounding these two teams has never had a worse AQI reading.

But, Australian cricket found a way to bow and let the series continue. This wasn’t a flexing of cricketing muscles, but a high-definition video of India’s home gym and the warehouse full of whey protein supplements they sat on.

Some years later, India stopped the Australian run of World Cup titles by winning one of their own. In Mumbai, no less. Warne, McGrath, and Gilchrist were gone; Ponting would be gone soon too. Australia got over them and threw up Steve Smith and Pat Cummins.

India were moving forward. Tendulkar went, Kohli came. Tendulkar was a surgeon; Kohli, they discovered, was a boxer. While Tendulkar didn’t bother acknowledging McGrath and Lee during their verbal assaults, Kohli came armed with a vocabulary that matched his counterpart’s. He looked into Mitchell Johnson’s eyes and pulled him for four. The Australians didn’t like him; he was a Ponting impersonator. The Australians loved him; he was just as good.

Kohli became captain, took his bow in Australia, and built his team around something that we had always envied those guys for: an array of fast bowlers. Kohli’s India went to Australia and won two Test series on the bounce.

The respect and friendship, first witnessed with Hazare and Bradman, has had its sine wave-rhythm, but largely stayed on course. These days, maybe thanks to the Indian Premier League, a fondness for the other culture has bound these teams.

David Warner routinely uploads videos on Instagram dancing to regional Indian music; Virat Kohli wrote one of the two forewords in Glen Maxwell’s autobiography. And yet, there isn’t a team that Kohli enjoys playing more than Australia. He measures himself against them, like all the greats who came before him. His finest hours as a Test and T20 batter came in Australia. Steve Smith spoke of the 2014 Australian summer - where he scored 700 runs against India - as one of his most cherished phases in Test cricket. He likes playing against India. When he retires, he will, almost certainly, name his 109 at Pune as one of his best Test knocks in a career full of great knocks.

In the last decade, Australia have not won a single Test series against India in either country. In the last eighteen months, Australia have defeated India in the two most important games in the cricket calendar - the World Cup final and the World Test Championship final.

And so, here we are. By this time next week, the latest chapter of this rivalry will have started in Perth. India have arrived hurt and unsure. Their star batters can’t buy a run, and one half of their two biggest bowling threats is recovering from a long, brutal injury. Australia are ebullient, waiting to correct the decade-long red line. It is their turn to break some streaks.

I asked Gideon Haigh why this rivalry works on so many levels. His answer was simple. “There is a significance to India discountenancing Pakistan.  Obviously there are political reasons for this.  But I think in some ways that rivalry had become inhibiting, maybe even for both parties. While the cricket was often great, it was also complicated, and the relations were precarious.  While there are certain unavoidable cultural and racial sensitivities, Australia v India can actually be about the cricket in a way India v Pakistan cannot.”

Australia vs India. Five Tests, old-school style. The play will begin before our usual alarm times. We will be hearing the birds and the milkmen, in the melting inkiness of the house, before anyone else is up. The cricket, whichever way it swings, will be the finest drama on television. If you want an advertisement for Test cricket, this is it.

The Australian media is on board the hype train. Courtesy: Melinda Farrell

1. Fun fact - this book was written in Palavakkam – the very corner of Chennai where I now sit, typing these words.

2. Gideon Haigh has a new book out, called Indian Summers. 10/10, as usual.

3. Not an exaggeration