Amidst all the Sachin love, we must also thank Laxman and Dravid

VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid

A couple of days have passed since the retirement of the grand old man of Indian cricket - Sachin Tendulkar. The man did it all! His presence on the field gave everyone hope. Before India became the side that it was in the 2000s, there was just one man doing everything. This was the period of the ‘Get Tendulkar and the match is won’ thinking. For us fans, as long as he was at the crease, there was always the possibility of a victory.

But there was a period in Indian cricket that must’ve left even the little man feeling utterly bewildered and hopeless. Suddenly, the illegal off field activities of the players were in focus. At the turn of the millennium, the country was rocked by the fixing scandal. For the Indian team that had just returned from the disastrous tour of Australia and had suffered at the hands of South Africa, this was the last thing they’d have wanted. The scandal took down a lot of people including the then captain of the team.

The Indian team was just recovering from the blows of the scandal when the Australians came around for that epic tour in 2001. To put it euphemistically, India were in a terrible state as a Test team. A new captain, a relatively new team and up against the number one Test side in the world. But for a change, this was a side that consisted of honourable men.

After the first Test in Mumbai, India’s record against Australia in their past five Tests looked something like this – LLLLL. And the margins were also interesting:

• Mumbai- 10 wickets
• Sydney- innings and 141 runs
• Melbourne- 180 runs
• Adelaide – 285 runs
• Bangalore – 8 wickets

By normal cricketing standards, these margins were huge. And to be beaten by such margins with such regularity was, quite frankly, disheartening.

The teams then moved to Calcutta for the second Test. What made it interesting for general observers was that the last 10 meetings before Calcutta between these two teams had not produced a single draw. The record was 7-3 in Australia’s favour. But no one was prepared for what happened in Calcutta.

The second Test, quite simply, was the best test I’ve ever witnessed. India were well on course for another walloping when they were asked to follow on. They were bowled out for a paltry 171 in reply to Australia’s 445 in their first essay. When Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman came together with the score reading 232/4 on Day 3, India were still staring at a deficit of 42 runs. Tendulkar and Ganguly were back in the hut. This was India’s last recognized batting pair.

So India had to wipe out the deficit and take a substantial lead in order to have at least an outside chance of winning the Test. A draw was definitely India’s best bet. To secure a draw, they had to bat out of their skins for at least four sessions. They were up against a fast deteriorating pitch and a bowling attack that consisted of ruthlessly accurate metronomes – McGrath, Gillespie, Warne and Kasprowicz. To make matters worse, the Australian team had won its previous sixteen Tests and was most definitely keen on winning the seventeenth in Calcutta and creating a record. All this brought us to the unforgettable Day 4 of the Test. This one day will go down in history as the day that turned Indian cricket around for good.

In 90 overs that day, India added 335 runs for the loss of zero wickets and the Test had completely turned on its head.

India had a lead of 315 runs at the end of Day 4. Australia used as many as nine out of the possible eleven bowlers without even a hint of success. India had almost saved the Test. Laxman scored 281 masterfully-stroked runs and for me, this one innings changed the face of Indian cricket. Before Calcutta, India was essentially a one man army – Sachin Tendulkar. After Calcutta, everything changed.

But India weren’t done. What happened on Day 5 was further beyond the realm of human imagination. Driven by a hundred thousand fans at Eden Gardens, Sourav Ganguly’s boys rallied around Harbhajan Singh to bowl Australia out in 68 overs and clinch the match in the dying minutes. To put things in perspective, the match would’ve ended in a draw had Australia batted out another 60 odd balls. India further outdid everyone’s expectations when they clinched another thriller in Madras a few days later and won the series 2-1.

All throughout this series, the battles were gladiatorial, the performances were outstanding and the crowds were even better.

While many will claim that the Kolkata Test was the greatest of all times, what is sometimes ignored is the deeper impact of that Test. Or to put it more precisely, the deeper impact of the Laxman-Dravid partnership on Day 4.

It was a well-known fact that India were imperious in home conditions. India did not lose a Test series at home between April 1987 and March 2000. For thirteen long years they were unbeaten at home, which was quite an achievement. It took a highly motivated Pakistan team in 1987 to beat India at Bangalore in what was Gavaskar’s final match. In 2000, India lost 2-0 to South Africa thanks to a string of poor performances with both bat and ball.

In between these two matches, India were generally very good. Of the 37 Tests that India played at home in that period, they won a staggering 20 matches while losing just 7. That translated to a win/loss ratio of 2.85 at home which was rather good. India was the third best country in terms win/loss ratio, behind Australia and just fractionally behind South Africa. In terms of the win percentage, India won 54% of the matches played at home while Australia won about 55% of its home matches. Such was India’s dominance at home.

Sachin Tendulkar was already a star. India would regularly put forth pitches that were rank turners. Non-Asian batsmen would be all at sea as the capacity crowds egged the home team on. Most Indian spinners of that era, despite not being world class, were always a handful. More often than not, most of the wins in home conditions were engineered by some great batting performances and some decent bowling performances.

But this home dominance was a façade to a huge problem. A Test team is always judged by its performances away from home. Which is why, the Australian team of the 90s and the West Indian team of the 80s were considered great sides. They won everywhere!

Coming back to the problem, in that same period from 1987 to 2000, India played 48 Test matches away from home. And astonishingly, they won just 1 out of those 48 matches. It is quite impossible to believe that a team that was blessed with such prodigious talent was so awful in alien conditions. Not surprisingly, they had the worst win percentage among all Test-playing nations – a dismal 2%. They also had the worst win/loss ratio – 0.05. Which meant that for every match that India won, they lost 20 matches. India was saved the ignominy of being the worst touring party by Zimbabwe, simply on the basis of the number of draws that India managed to play out – 28 – which was incidentally the most for any country in that period.

Take Zimbabwe out of the equation and India was the worst touring side of that era and the numbers speak for themselves.

A closer look at the batting and bowling figures of teams in away games reveals a startling fact. India’s front-line batsmen (from positions 1 through 7) averaged a respectable 35.25 in away games and they were the third best performing batsmen away from home behind Australian and South African batsmen. Indians averaged about one century per match while batting. No other team came close to matching India at this.

Indian bowlers, meanwhile, were having a stinker of a time. They were easily the worst performing bowlers away from home. They averaged a staggering 40 runs per wicket while the South Africans (who were the best in that period) averaged a fraction above 27. Which meant that over 10 wickets, Indians conceded almost 130 runs more than the South Africans in each innings. Away from home, Indian bowlers were taking a wicket every 85 balls. The West Indians, meanwhile, were taking one wicket every 59 balls. In other words, Indians took almost 25 overs longer than the West Indians to bowl a team out.

All these stats point to two malaises – bowling and fielding, two areas in which Indians have never been world beaters. Although Indians were renowned for poor fielding, the bowling had never been so bad. When the conditions suited them at home, they were able to skittle out batsmen for paltry scores. But when the conditions did not suit them, they were downright terrible. This pointed to a great lack of skill in the bowling department.

But why was this the case? Why was there such a huge difference in the performance at home and away from home?

This period marked a time of a great lack of bowling resources. Kapil Dev was by far India’s best bowler at that time and he too had retired by 1994. So not surprisingly, India won no matches outside Asia in that period. Their only win came in Sri Lanka. What the number of draws reveals is that although they did manage to save a lot of matches, they were just not able to make that final push and win matches consistently. In a four match series, for example, they would manage to draw two or may be three games at best. But they would eventually capitulate and lose the deciding game and the series with that.

So did it change?

Yes.

When?

Stay with me. Read on.

Just before the epic home series against Australia that I talked about at the start of this article, Sachin Tendulkar resigned as the captain. That, to me, was the best thing to have happened to the team because quite frankly, Tendulkar, with all due respect to his batting prowess, was a terrible captain.

So in came Sourav Ganguly and with him came a new coach John Wright. A few young chaps like Zaheer Khan and Harbhajan Singh were also given a look in. Although India lost Anil Kumble to injury before the series, they had a fairly settled side with just Anil Kumble’s place up for grabs. And then Laxman and Dravid played the innings of their lives.

While Laxman and Dravid were going about their business on Day 4, slowly but surely, the Indian team was turning a corner. When the series ended, India was a new team.

While India’s frontline batsmen and bowlers averaged worse than their Australian counterparts, the individual performances of unimaginable magnitude had turned it around for India. And these performances, for a change, did not come from Sachin Tendulkar. They instead came from Laxman, Dravid and Harbhajan Singh (Sachin did crack a century in that series but that was the norm in those days!) at pivotal moments in the series.

You now had a good bowler who could take wickets and you also had the services of batsmen other than Sachin who could score runs for the team when it mattered. And all these performances came against a full strength Australian side that was on the rampage. They came at a time when there was not the slightest hope of even securing a respectable draw. Somewhere deep down, this team now felt alive. The self-belief that we’d been missing for so long, had been found. We were on to something special.

In the decade that followed this historic series, the Indian team turned it around splendidly. Not just at home, but even away from home! Between 2001 and 2010, India played 47 matches at home. They won 22 of those. They had a win/loss ratio of 3.66 – which meant they were losing fewer matches at home. When ranked according to performances at home, India came second among all teams. The bowlers were doing their job and so were the batsmen. But the real story was in their performances abroad.

Under Ganguly, India won their first Test outside the subcontinent in 16 years and that historic win came against Hooper’s West Indies at Trinidad. They won their first Test in Australia after 22 years. Not just that, but they even managed to level the series 1-1. Ganguly and Dravid plotted India’s first ever series victory in Pakistan in 2004. It took India 49 years to win their first Test in Pakistan and it came in this historic series. They went to England and levelled the series there as well!

Under Dravid, they won their first ever Test in South Africa in 2006. In less than five years after the 2001 series, India had gone to every major Test playing nation and won a test. New Zealand was the only exception to this. India eventually won a Test (and the series) in New Zealand in 2009, after a gap of a whopping 33 years.

India’s limited overs performances also improved immensely under Ganguly. He led them to the finals of the Champions Trophy in 2002 and the World Cup the year after that. India finally broke their jinx of losing nine consecutive one-day tournament finals and won the Natwest series in England in dramatic fashion.

In the first decade of the millennium, the Indian bowlers steadily improved their performances. Although they still averaged more than a few other teams, they were striking once every 63 balls, which was second only to Australia. The pleasing fact to note is that there were three Indian bowlers (Kumble, Zaheer and Harbhajan) who’d picked more than 100 wickets away from home in the first decade of the new millennium. The other notable fact is that in that period, only eight other bowlers had managed this feat.

India also found a great opener in Virender Sehwag and he almost single-handedly altered the way India played its Test matches. Even the bowling lineup was settled with Zaheer, Harbhajan and Kumble being the mainstays. The middle order went on to become the most feared ever with Dravid, Tendulkar, Ganguly and Laxman.

As a follower of the game, I’ve always had the feeling of dissimilar treatment being meted out to players at the same level. The players never complained, but what is important to remember is that they’ve all been equally important cogs in the wheel that is Indian cricket. So the next time you watch a good Test match involving India in a foreign land, make sure you utter a quiet prayer and thank Laxman and Dravid!