There are times in sport when teams decide that the best course of action is to go on the defensive and wait out the storm. It is a legitimate tactic if the goal is to eventually win. After all, it doesn’t make sense to wildly attack when the game situation demands a different approach.
But on the third morning of the Test match between India and England in Bangalore (now Bengaluru) in 2001, Nasser Hussain’s team employed a leg-side tactic that in the eyes of many watching was an affront to the spirit of the game.
First, right-arm pacer Andrew Flintoff started by banging the ball in short from round the wicket. Then, left-arm orthodox spinner Ashley Giles started landing his deliveries a foot outside leg stump with wicket-keeper James Foster standing in readiness. Scoring proved to be almost impossible even though the batsman in the middle was Sachin Tendulkar.
“If Sehwag and Tendulkar are smashing you everywhere and the crowd going ballistic, ‘Sachin, Sachin!’ echoing around the ground, I would look into my bowlers’ eyes and they would be a little bit gone. So I knew the key was to silence the crowd, take the crowd out of the equation. And the only way to do that was to stop Sachin scoring,” Hussain said on the Sony Ten Pit Stop in 2020.
“That pitch in Bangalore as well, there was a bit of rough there, but nothing on the main pitch, it was an absolute belter,” Hussain added. “If our bowlers had just bowled on the normal bit of the pitch, it would have done nothing. So I got Ashley [Giles], who was bowling a tight line and not just chucking it wide down leg stump. Ashley got close to the stumps and bowled quite a tight line and tried to hit that rough.”
On that morning alone, 90% of Giles’s deliveries pitched outside leg, and Tendulkar padded away more than half. It was all a bit of a farce. These were tactics that England’s captain in the Bodyline series, Douglas Jardine, would have been proud of but many watching wondered whether they had space in the modern game.
Rahul Dravid scored 3 off 61 balls and Tendulkar’s scoring rate was severely restricted as well. So in a sense, it worked but it wasn’t a tactic designed to help England win and that was its flaw.
It ended with Tendulkar finally deciding he had had enough. He charged down the wicket, clearly frustrated by the tactic, and got stumped for the first and only time in his Test career.
After losing the first Test of the series, Hussain decided that Giles needed to go into an ultra-defensive holding mode. Of the 216 balls Giles delivered in the final two Tests in Ahmedabad and Bangalore, 153 of them - around 70% - pitched outside leg-stump.
Giles later argued that the point of the tactic was to win.
“We are in the business to entertain but we are also out there to win. Bowling over the wicket you do cut down your options. People say it is a negative strategy, but it can be used to attack,” Giles said in an interview to PTI then.
He added: “I did it to slow him down. He still scored heavily but not as quickly. Bowling over the wicket you do cut down your options by not being able to get him (Tendulkar) out leg before or bowled and people say it is more of a negative option. There are men around the bat to catch him. Obviously, you are trying to wear him down, stop him from scoring and wait for him to make a mistake.”
Tendulkar needed 198 balls to reach his 90 in that innings – slow by his usual standards – and the match ended in a draw due to rain but the tactic caused an outcry from some of cricket’s more celebrated figures.
Immediately after, the outlawing of such tactics was agreed upon after a successful Indian-led campaign within the International Cricket Council, led by Sunil Gavaskar, the chairman of its cricket committee.