After losing to the hosts in Adelaide in the first Test of the 2020-21 tour of Australia, having been bowled out for 36 on the morning of 19 December 2020, India held a team meeting around midnight. “We were determined to get past that one bad hour and a lot of ideas were on the table,” recalls Ajinkya Rahane, who’d taken over the captaincy from Virat Kohli in the most challenging circumstances. “That’s when Ravibhai [Shastri] said we could think of 36 as a badge. Would it be a badge of disgrace or a badge of honour? That was for us the beginning of the turnaround.”
These recollections of Rahane, the stand-in captain for three of the four Tests on that tour, which India capped off with an epic come-from-behind 2-1 victory, reminded us of the team meeting on the 1971 tour of the Caribbean in captain Ajit Wadekar’s room. It was at this meeting that the mercurial Salim Durani declared to the whole team that he would get the wickets of Sir Garfield Sobers and Sir Clive Lloyd the next day. He eventually did achieve what he had set out to do, helping script a historic Indian win in Trinidad. Those two wickets, hugely important in the circumstances, were badges of honour Durani wore all his life thereafter.
In many ways, the trail of India’s series triumphs overseas that began in the West Indies in February-March 1971, entered a new phase later that year with the series-clinching win against England at the Oval, and came a full circle with the victory against Australia in the series decider at the Gabba, in Brisbane, in January 2021. Prior to 1971 and 2021, India had never won at the Oval or the Gabba. The similarities don’t end there, though.
From the Oval to the Gabba, separated by half a century, Indian men’s cricket journeyed from one epochal phase to another. Wadekar and his team were the first to walk this path of glory before Kohli and Rahane’s troops left their imprint on this historic trail. The twin series wins in 1971 and the triumph on the 2020-21 tour of Australia make for two of India’s greatest ever shows of dominance, not least two of their greatest underdog stories of all time.
When Wadekar and his men won in England, a lot was said of their feat. What assumed greater pertinence over the years, though, was all that was left unsaid at the timeThe break with royalty and the Raj hangover was complete. It was as though a new India was speaking to the world. Fast forward to Brisbane. In Rishabh Pant was manifested a custodian of a new India, who would be speaking the same language as his predecessors from the twin series wins of 1971, perhaps only louder and more fearlessly.
The moment that actually completed the transformation, though, happened after the [2020-21 Australia] series had been decided. During India’s victory lap, Mohammed Siraj, the Hyderabad pacer who had lost his father, an auto driver, a month earlier while he was on national duty in Australia, was handed the tricolour as he led the victorious team’s march along the boundary rope. The scene was emblematic of a united India proud of its diversity. Siraj, a 26-year-old Muslim man, metamorphosed into the torchbearer of a resilient India that stands shoulder to shoulder to meet, and overcome, adversity head-on. Leading his colleagues, Siraj gave a wordless reply to the spectators who had hurled racist insults at him and his teammate Jasprit Bumrah during the third Test at the SCG. He was also underlining that cricket, and sport at large, remains one of the most powerful unifying forces, a supreme leveller, and that the game doesn’t distinguish between a Hindu and a Muslim, the rich and the poor…
The parade in Bombay, organised for Wadekar and his men upon their return from India’s first-ever series win in England, commemorated Indian cricket’s ability to break through class and power hierarchies. Wadekar had worked hard on helping align Indian cricket with meritocracy and, in the 50 years since he first excelled overseas as captain, his legacy helped give birth to more success stories in the sport.
If India today look like the team to beat, it’s hard to pinpoint just one important reason for their supremacy. An abundance of raw talent and bench strength explain the dominance only in part. Likewise early strategic planning and institutionalised processes for the discovery of talent. Well-timed exposure for national prospects, robust infrastructure at the grassroots and sizeable professional rewards, too, tell only a part of the story. There’s no denying that these factors play a role in shaping outcomes, but the work ethic and professionalism of the current team also warrant counting. This is perhaps the only difference between 1971 and 2021. In time, the benefits of ’71 were lost and India plummeted to an ignominious 42 all out the next time they toured England, in 1974. Player unity suffered and some of those cracks remain conspicuous to this day. The standout feature of the 2021 team, however, was their ability to move on quickly, be it from the most crushing disappointment (the Adelaide defeat) or fairytale success (the Brisbane victory), to the next assignment. England visited India soon after the epic Brisbane victory on a twelve-match tour, kicked off by a four-Test series that got underway on 5 February, less than three weeks after the Brisbane Test ended. It was a match that India would go on to lose, but the second Test, also played in Chennai, saw a comprehensive Indian victory. Indian cricket fans the world over may have wished to linger over the triumph Down Under for longer, but Team India had moved on. ‘Just as we moved on from the 36 all out, it was important to move on from the series victory as well. That’s now history,’ said Bharat Arun matter-of-factly.
In closing, we must acknowledge [yet another] common chord between India’s victorious overseas exploits in 1971 and 2020-21. This involves the central actor in the drama in 1971, who, scoring a record 774 runs at an average of 154 in his debut series in the Caribbean, gave Indian cricket teeth and muscle. In 2021, he was there again, on the tour of Australia, [albeit] in a different capacity, braving the pandemic and a 14-day hard quarantine. The only Indian commentator Down Under describing the exploits of Rahane and his men, it was fitting that Sunil Gavaskar would witness from close quarters a young Indian team script a historic 2-1 Test series victory and lift a trophy that takes half its name from him. On 19 January, as the 2020-21 BorderGavaskar Trophy came to a formal close, Indian cricket had well and truly come full circle.