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SPORTS: CRICKET
The
New Gladiators
The inside story of how a ragtag Indian side overcame
their fears to beat the world's top team
By Sharda Ugra in Chennai
Harbhajan Singh
takes Australian wickets by the bucketful, but, on the fourth evening
of the Chennai Test, wants to talk batsmanship: "You must mention
my batting-I scored 208 runs in the Ranji Trophy," he says. Less
than 24 hours later, he scored three, but never have three been sweeter.
For his mates, some holding their forehead staring into an abyss, others
not daring to blink, and a coach muttering "calm down guys, calm
down". For 40,000 inside a steaming, dusty, hollering Chepauk, and
millions outside, who do not even remember what calm means, two runs to
get, two wickets left and only the biggest series of their lives to play
for. A wicketkeeper-cum-qualified airline purser called Samir Dighe is
Harbhajan's partner and they scramble a couple, begin to celebrate and
then stop, confused, asking the umpire if they need another, or whether
they had only tied the scores. Around them are the Australians, frozen
into figures from a painting, unwilling to believe that it wasn't them
racing off the field as if joyously breaking out of jail. That a team
which usually fumbles, folded, and fell over when the stakes were raised
to their highest had broken their mental shackles and run into a world
of immense possibility.
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TRUE
GRIT: For a change hero Harbhajan wields the bat to give India a magical
win over Australia in the Chennai Test match |
Take a step back and commit the picture in your
mind's eye to memory. Of the time when the Indian cricket team defined
the moment rather than let a moment define it as once more inadequate
and incapable and individualistic. India has never won a Test by a narrower
margin than two wickets and the last time that happened was in Mumbai
in 1964, in a Test match against Australia.
Only a handful of teams have come back from a
Test down to win a three-Test series, fewer still after being walloped
inside three days in the first and as good as dead in the water, following
on in the second. And none, it must be said, against a team which had
won 16 Tests in a row, and was considered among the best in cricket history.
It is no small achievement. A single fightback may happen by chance, but
repeatedly, hour-after- hour, day-after-day as it did in the Chennai decider,
adrenaline alone cannot sustain a side. It is the difference between motion
and action, sports psychologists call it the dividing line between mere
arousal and genuine motivation.
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| COMEBACK
CAPER: Ganguly holds aloft the Border-Gavaskar trophy |
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In the euphoria of a cricket series that has
defied logic like few others before it, it must be stated right here and
now that Saurav Ganguly and his men are not a great cricket team. Yet,
they stopped the Australians at the final frontier. And to do that they
played tough, competitive and hard. But despite a batting line-up capable
of conjuring heebie-jeebies out of thin air and a bowling attack now held
together with string and glue, and even Ganguly admitted, a little hand
from the forces of destiny-it cannot be denied that today they are a team.
At the end of their media call in Chennai, in
which Harbhajan had played both lone star and natural comic, coach John
Wright stopped a scramble for the exits by saying he had one final comment.
He then virtually roll-called his entire squad and listed their part in
the team's series victory. Runs and wickets from Sachin Tendulkar, catches
from S.S. Das, 50s from Rahul Dravid, the part played in the team's larger
plan by an assembly line of spinners thrown into the fray.
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SMELLS
LIKE TEAM SPIRIT: A determined Ganguly (centre), despite failing with
the bat, created a fighting force from the Kolkata Test |
The indivdual performances that kickstarted the
Indian fightback were not all random acts of nature. The team's conditioning
camp in Chennai is where Harbhajan practised bowling the steady line that
helped him pick up wickets (see accompanying story) and where the fielding
drills produced the spectacular close-in catches that tripped the Australian
batsmen. A blueprint on how to deal with each and every Australian was
charted out before the series and two days before the first Test, a cricket
personality came in to talk to the team about what they meant to a nation
of a billion people.
It was technical and mental preparation that
received a battering in Mumbai, but one of its prime believers gave the
team the first sign that things could be different. Says Wright of V.V.S.
Laxman's epic 281 in Kolkata: "It proved to the players and the media
and the public that we were prepared to fight."
Laxman is a tall, thoughtful 27-year-old who
is inspired by the philosophy of Swami Vivekananda. He was also seen as
a man with a deathwish, someone who laid his entire international career
on the line last year, informing selectors that he would not open the
innings for India as he believed he was a specialist middle-order bat.
When Laxman believes, he believes. These days,
he believes in his team and his faith-in his ability and their cause -creating
the meltdown of a mountain. The Kolkata double hundred has already gone
down as one of Indian cricket's most epic innings and its architect says
he was able to bat like a blizzard because he'd spent time in the company
of those who couldn't. Laxman batting at No. 6 in the first innings got
his eye in, feet moving smoothly and then listened to No. 11 Venkatesh
Prasad telling him that together they, stylist and struggler, could conjure
up the impossible. Laxman told India Today, "For me, that was the
turning point-Venky, who had taken blows on the elbow, coming up and saying,
'listen, we can avoid the follow on'." They did not, but you get
the picture.
Ganguly sat draped in a towel as Laxman and
Dravid batted and later, said that he'd never prayed as hard for anything
as he did for his two batsmen to keep going. "We back each other
and try to help each other out, especially those who are not doing well."
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