Some iconic moments in Indian cricket post 2000 are etched forever— Kolkata 2001, Headingley 2002, Adelaide 2003, Perth 2008 and Melbourne 2018. Now, Brisbane/Gabba 2021 joins the pantheon as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of all time.
There is a raw emotion when it comes to sport. Just like the way you can’t fake humor, you can’t fake emotion in sport. What you see is what you get? At the end of the day, when the team that you support achieves the desired result, the overlapping of emotions between the players and the fans is something that can only be experienced by people who play or follow live sport. The oohs and the aahs of near misses transform from instant grief to a lifelong obsession of what ifs visualizing alternate endings. Chennai 1999 was one for the ages and the trauma of that result has had long term repercussions in my thought process. That game shattered my confidence and did not allow me to take anything for granted in life.
The 2020–2021 series between India and Australia will go down as one of the greatest series of all time. The constant ebbs and flows between two proud sporting nations produced a series for the ages. The depleted Indian side took all the adversities in its stride and produced a stirring fight against world class Australian bowlers in their den. India had no business saving that match at Sydney. India had no business chasing that total at the Gabba. But then, India had no business getting demolished for 36 at Adelaide. From the ravages and ruins emerged players, one by one, doing things that felt as though they were individual pieces fitting themselves into a giant jigsaw puzzle. No batters, no problem, let’s pick someone from the rubble; no bowlers, again, no problem, let’s get the net bowlers to do the job. Every man for every occasion couldn’t have been more apt than in this case.
Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Four iconic Australian venues. India blown our for 36 in the second innings of Adelaide. Just to have the mental fortitude to come back from that point, leaving behind a truck load of negative baggage, losing their talismanic player and captain, Virat Kohli and one of the best new-ball bowlers in the world, Mohammed Shami, and then putting in that performance at Melbourne, no words can do justice. Then came the resilience at Sydney, thanks to Ashwin and Vihari. What came next at the Gabba was truly inexplicable. It was a great win because of the invincibility of the Aussies here. Playing probably a third choice team against a full strength Australian team and having to negotiate a tricky fourth innings chase at 4 runs per over on an up and down pitch with the series on the line is no easy feat. How the Indians pulled it off, I don’t know, if this can ever be explained over time.
Pujara plays according to the conventional norms of test cricket. Slow, defensive, play the new ball and protect the lower order batters from facing the new ball. I don’t know whether he frustrated the viewers but for sure he frustrated the Australian commentators. I understand fans raise the issue of his slow scoring rate but the fact that the experts were confounded was what was truly confounding. Pant on the other hand doesn’t play according to the conventional norms of test cricket. He has a Sehwagisque approach to batting. Oh his day, he can really turn the match on its head. On other days, you just have to live with his chivalry. He wouldn’t want to be on Twitter on those days. In the fourth innings of the Gabba Test, it was the former Pant. Some of the shots that he played were just outrageous. It might have come across as outlandish to the viewer, but Pant backed himself to get those runs. Even if one of those shots had gone to the fielder, he would have been derided. And there exactly is the fine margin between praise and derision.
Years of watching early morning images from Australia with huge disappointment, the 1999 tour had set such low expectations that I thought it will take decades to recover from that trauma. Then, the 2000s gradually changed that picture. The Indian team got folks who did not have the scars of previous Australian tours. India-Australia rivalry became something to look forward to. Slowly and steadily, we took the fight to the Australian camp before it culminated in a series win in 2018 in Australia for the very first time. But, it was always referred to as Australia minus Smith and Warner. All those doubts were negated in a pulsating series that culminated in a sensational finish at the Gabba. It was literally an Indian B team or a C team defeating the full strength Australian team. The Aussies know it too.
The net result in sport rests on super fine margins. The difference between a wretched heave over mid-wicket and a well timed shot over mid-wicket decides whether the player gets the brickbats or the bouquets. Oh, he played his natural game and that cost us the game. Oh, he played his natural game and that helped us win the game. Oh, why try to clear the ropes when there was a fielder placed for that exact shot. Oh, the audacity to clear the rope even with a fielder present on the boundary line. Decision making is an invaluable trait in life, and in sport in particular. There are no two-way door decisions in sport. A split-second decision in sport goes through a lifetime of analyses. Some people ponder till they die and I don’t know, maybe, these folks can never be successful in sport.
There is a certain magic in live sport that is unmatched. There is no secretly peeking at the last few pages of a thriller to figure out the ending. There is no Googling to find out the outcome. The magic unfolds with time. Every session was a mystery. India remained in contention never allowing that required run rate to creep up. The nerve wracking moments were juxtaposed with periods of bravado but the target was so steeply perched that the end result wasn’t clear even as the required run rate slowly crept towards 5 runs per over. Multiple chats on WhatsApp groups were going off at the same time. No one knew what was to come.
As the winning runs were scored, it felt like a personal achievement. I let out a full throttled roar. Congratulatory messages were being exchanged with friends from all over the world. We celebrated as one. The magnitude of what was achieved will surely reverberate for decades to come. This victory will certainly be a fairy tale for generations to come. I just took a deep sigh and was thankful that I was alive to see the greatest series of all time. It was certainly one for the ages.
