It was the third Test at Headingley that was to show the emerging new India. Before the Test, Ganguly who had struck up a friendship with Boycott, invited him to a curry buffet to pick his brains about a ground he knew so well. Fortified by this, the Indians decided that for all the talk of Headingley being a seamer’s paradise, they would play to their strength and picked two spinners, Kumble and Harbhajan. They also decided that, with Wasim Jaffer failing as opener, they needed a new partner for Sehwag.
Das was the logical choice. He had made 250 against Essex in the game preceding the Test, but Ganguly and Wright choose Sanjay Bangar who could also be the third seamer. Bangar had been around for a long time, having made his first-class debut in the 1993–1994 season.
His story was the classic Indian internal migrant story. Hailing from Aurangabad, he had found work with the railways, played for them and needed a lot of resilience as this meant travelling for months on end, playing on dust bowls, living in railway bogeys and dormitories. Bangar never forgot his roots, and after he started playing for India when he played for India in Delhi he often left the team’s five-star hotel to go back to the railway dormitories and spend the night with his friends.
But perhaps the decision that showed the self-belief India was acquiring under Ganguly was that on winning the toss India batted.
This was despite the fact that the wicket was green, it was damp and overcast and it seemed ideal for a modern-day English bowler to do what Fred Trueman had done in 1952.There was an audible gasp in the Headingley press box as Ganguly signalled India was batting and much shaking of heads.
What we did not know was that in the Indian dressing room Dravid had argued that he was sick and tired of India on green wickets putting the opposition in when India’s strength was spin.The batting had to be trusted so India could make the opposition chase a target in the fourth innings.
The first signs suggested Ganguly had got it wrong. With the score on 15, Sehwag was out for 8. But then Bangar, whom the English knew as a utility player (he had made his Test debut against England in Mohali batting at No. 8 and bowled a few overs) showed he could be an obdurate opener and played a classic second fiddle. Bangar then was so shy that Dravid nicknamed him Buddha. He certainly batted with a Buddha style calmness.
The curry lunch with Boycott had clearly paid off, for the Indians were not tempted to play anything they did not have to. As Boycott had always said, a good batsman knows where his off stump is. The Indians certainly did. Bangar made 68; Dravid was 110 not out at the end of the first day, when India were 236 for 2, old-fashioned scoring for a Test match but one that totally flummoxed the English. Dravid had played what Nasser Hussain would describe as one of the finest innings he had ever seen.
On the second day, a very different Indian batting was on display from Tendulkar and Ganguly.
Tendulkar, who before the match had been welcomed back to Yorkshire as if he was one of their own, after a careful start began to unveil his strokes. He had come out wearing an inner-thigh guard, something he had never used, worried that Flintoff was jagging the ball back. But then he realised this made him change his stance and he discarded it. He and Ganguly put on 249.
In contrast to the Dravid–Bangar stand, this was scored at four an over, more like the rate in modern Test matches. If Tendulkar was at times magical, Ganguly’s play was so freewheeling that the Wisden write-up would say it “would have been at home in a seaside cabaret”.
Crucial to this partnership was how Tendulkar and Ganguly dealt with Flintoff. Flintoff was bowling into the Indian captain’s body, reflecting perhaps the feelings between the two men, and it was decided that Tendulkar would take Flintoff while Ganguly handled Ashley Giles’s off-spin, which, Ganguly being a left-hander, also made good cricketing sense.
This did produce the one moment of mirth, after tea on the second day, as the pair – still not out – went back to the dressing room, having negotiated a hostile Flintoff spell. Ganguly told Tendulkar in Hindi, “Woh beech wale Flintoff ka spell humne kya jhela yaar. [We did really well to see off Flintoff ’s spell].” Tendulkar could not help responding “Humne jhela? Saala maine jhela hain! [We did? Bastard! I was the one who did].”
The dressing room had not often heard Tendulkar use the word saala, which can be jocular and also abusive; this one was jocular, and they fell about laughing. Tendulkar finished on 193, his highest Test score against England and passed David Gower to climb to seventh on the all-time list of Test run-getters. Ganguly made 128, and when he declared at 628 for 8 it was the highest score India had ever made against England. That they made it in England, and what is more at Headingley, meant some of the shame of 1952 and 0 for 4 was wiped out.
This is when Dravid’s argument to make a big score and let the spinners loose paid off.
Kumble, finally getting to bowl when batsmen had made copious runs, was in his element and took three wickets. Harbhajan also took three and England made 273, leaving them 355 behind. Ganguly asked England to follow on, the first time India had made England follow on in England. For once in the series Vaughan failed, and while Hussain made a hundred there was no holding back Kumble, who took four wickets and the final one was the perfect ending – Andy Caddick’s edge off Kumble being taken by Ganguly at slip while on his knees but clinging on to the catch. To add to the pleasure, Flintoff made a pair.
While the Indians did not sledge quite as much as Patel had famously done to Waugh, throughout the innings they kept up a barrage of banter, some of it in Hindi, which the English did not understand, but enough in English to make the English batsmen know exactly what they felt about them. As Tendulkar put it, “We were all extremely motivated and did not want a single English batsman to settle down and take control.”
India did not win the Oval Test which would have been special as this was Tendulkar’s hundredth Test match and the BCCI issued a commemorative plate listing all the great cricketers of India. Neither did Tendulkar mark the occasion with a hundred; he made 54.
It was Dravid who shone. This was the innings which gave him the nickname ‘The Wall’. No English bowler could get him out. He was run out for 217, suffering from Ajay Ratra making a bad call. He had batted ten-and-a-half hours and made his highest first-class score. He was the first Indian since Gavaskar on the groundbreaking 1970–71 West Indian tour to score three consecutive Test hundreds in the same series. He had occupied the crease in the Test series for more than thirty hours, which was an entire Test match, or as one writer put it eight showings of the epic sports film, Lagaan. That India could draw a series in England, after being badly beaten in the first Test, showed that even away from home they could fight back.
The series also revealed a new face of India off the field. For the first time the growing importance of the Indian diaspora was evident.The sporting moneymen certainly understood it, calling it an Indian summer. The film Lagaan was widely publicised, Bombay Dreams, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical opened in London, and Indian spectators came in droves to matches. The Indian tricolour was proudly displayed by many, drums were sounded and the noise and festivity the Indians brought to the grounds were not only alien to the English but worried the MCC. They feared cricket going the way of football.
However, when a pitch invasion happened, it was not by an Indian but an Australian. It had come in the Indian second innings at Lord’s when, as Tendulkar was bowled by Matthew Hoggard and walked back sadly to the pavilion, a twenty-four-year-old Australian jumped onto the field and put a consoling arm around him. It was meant in good fun, although the security implications could not be ignored as the man could well have had a knife.
Excerpted with permission from The Nine Waves: The Extraordinary Story of Indian Cricket, Mihir Bose, Aleph Book Company.
