April 2, and World Cup redemption

The main chapter of this epic wasn’t written at the Wankhede Stadium, or even during the semifinal against Pakistan that had the eyes of the world focused on it. No, the highest peak that India had to scale on their way to World Cup redemption was inside the vast concrete eyesore that used to be the Motera Stadium in Ahmedabad.

If you didn’t watch cricket in the first decade of this millennium, it would be hard to imagine just how intimidating Australia were. The loss to Pakistan in the group stage had been their first World Cup defeat since 1999. They hadn’t lost a knockout game since the Lahore final against Sri Lanka in 1996. If you counted the Champions Trophy, the only other global competition, they hadn’t lost a winner-take-all clash since the 2002 semifinal against Sri Lanka. Nearly a decade of utter dominance, the likes of which no sport had seen.

Since beating Sri Lanka in the twilight at the Kensington Oval in Barbados four years earlier, they had lost Adam Gilchrist, Matthew Hayden, Glenn McGrath and Andrew Symonds to retirement. But those that remained had still won the Champions Trophy in South Africa in 2009, finding their best form in the moments and matches that mattered.

India and Australia weren’t meant to meet in the last eight. India had tied with England — a game rescued only by Zaheer Khan’s old-ball brilliance — and lost to a Dale Steyn-inspired South Africa, while Australia had seen their outing against Sri Lanka rained out before coming a cropper against Pakistan’s bowling. Instead of the Wankhede showpiece, the tournament’s two most fancied teams had to contend themselves with jousting a few hundred kilometres to the north, with the ultimate prize still another two games away.

By the time I got to Ahmedabad, I was running on fumes. It was late March, the heat was hideous, and I had already been at ten games in the previous four weeks. While those that covered only the India beat had enjoyed a few longish breaks in between, my journey had taken me from home turf in Bangalore to Dhaka, Nagpur, Delhi, back to base, Delhi, Nagpur and Chennai, before packing the bags one final time.

I’d clocked close to 11,000km in the air by then, but the most arduous stretch was yet to come. As a freelancer, albeit one with contractual obligations to a couple of publications, I was master of my schedule. But that schedule was also dictated by the needs of editors. And once the quarterfinal picture became clearer, it was apparent that South Africa’s match with New Zealand in Dhaka would get very little coverage. India-Australia was the tie of the round, while the vast majority of the British media had stayed on in Colombo for England’s quarterfinal against Sri Lanka.

What can we do, an editor asked me? South Africa had topped their group, and looked like they might just end that World Cup hoodoo. Like half the world, I couldn’t miss the match in Ahmedabad, but a long trawl of the travel websites suggested a solution, albeit a harebrained one. I could catch a 3am flight from Ahmedabad, just hours after the match ended, to Mumbai, and then take an 8am on to Dhaka. Provided the traffic there was kind — it usually wasn’t — I’d be in Mirpur in time to watch the first ball.

It wasn’t just the prospect of additional work that enticed me. There was a gut feel that wouldn’t go away, that the game wasn’t going to be the formality many expected it to be. New Zealand, long before they reached consecutive World Cup finals in 2015 and ’19, were one of sport’s biggest overachievers. And in Daniel Vettori, they had a captain with both the skill and the nous to make best use of the pudding-like pitch in Dhaka.

But that Phileas Fogg-like journey was still far from my thoughts as Australia and India started their cage match. Despite Ricky Ponting’s century, Australia’s innings never found a top gear. With R Ashwin — he wouldn’t play another game in the tournament — and Yuvraj Singh probing away, and Zaheer Khan at his knuckle-ball best, the promised surge never came. David Hussey’s 26-ball 38 got them up to 260, but those that still winced while recalling the 359 Australia had piled up in the 2003 final were breathing a lot easier. Still, 260 isn’t the sort of total often chased down in knockout games, and India knew that a solid start was key.

On the way to the ground hours earlier, the rickshaw driver’s tinny music system had been playing Tu Jahan Jahan Chalega (Wherever You Go), and watching the hundreds flocking to the venue with Tendulkar’s №10 on the back of their shirts, you realised there was no more appropriate soundtrack. Most of the so-called golden generation had moved on. Sourav Ganguly and Anil Kumble had retired. Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman hadn’t been part of the ODI plans for years. Only Tendulkar, who had made his debut before any of them, kept ‘rolling along’, like Paul Robeson’s Old Man River. But even he knew that there wouldn’t be a seventh World Cup. It was now or never.

He went some way towards ensuring it wouldn’t be ‘never’ with an assured half-century. Gautam Gambhir chipped in with one of his own, and despite an awkward wobble in the middle, Yuvraj Singh saw India home with 14 balls to spare, celebrating on bended knee as Australia were left to contemplate the end of an era.

But for me, the key innings came from the man who was at the non-striker’s end when Yuvraj slapped the winning runs over cover. Suresh Raina had been a polarising figure right from the time Greg Chappell and Dravid fast-tracked him into the side in 2005, and had had little opportunity to show his worth earlier in the competition. Despite being a model of consistency in the years leading up to the tournament, his name was very much an afterthought next to the batting Galacticos. His unbeaten 34, which included a stunning straight six off Brett Lee, went some way towards righting that.

The enduring image of that match, however, was what happened later. The clock was nudging midnight by the time the press conferences were over. After his was done, Ponting trudged across the outfield, with only the media manager and an ICC official for company. No words were spoken. The stands had long since emptied. All that was left of the firecrackers that had gone off after India won was a pall of smoke. Ponting, whose thrilling 140 had destroyed Indian hopes eight years earlier, knew his World Cup race was run. That lonely walk was a reminder that sport seldom throws up happy endings, even for its greatest protagonists.

Soon after, I packed my bag and said my goodbyes. The airport and Dhaka beckoned — “You’re completely mad,” said a former colleague — as did a couple of features on how the World Cup wouldn’t have green-and-gold ribbons on it for the first time in a generation.

Thanks to the Dhaka traffic, I missed the first ball, but I was in my seat in time to watch Brendon McCullum fall caught and bowled to Robin Peterson in the third over. The local journalists, some of whom had invited me for lunch in the Daily Star offices a month earlier, were just as bemused to see me. The small South African contingent included a few guys I’d known for years. There were some tense faces there. Most journalists try to be impartial, but they had seen so many crashing lows at global events. The last thing they needed was yet another ‘choke’ story.

History records that that was what they got. But such an assessment is grossly unfair to New Zealand. South Africa didn’t get close enough to lose the game. New Zealand won it, quite emphatically. First, Jesse Ryder, not a man anyone associated with monk-like patience, played an innings for the ages, crafting 83 from 121 balls, and then the bowlers took over. Nathan McCullum turned the odd one square, but mostly let the pitch do the work, while Jacob Oram’s height and accuracy made him devilishly difficult to negotiate on a surface where timing the ball was such an ordeal.

Eight years later, Martin Guptill would run out MS Dhoni in a World Cup semifinal. In Dhaka, it was AB de Villiers that was the victim of his throwing arm. As he walked back, having batted as though in another dimension for his 40-ball 35, I glanced quickly at my South African friends. They looked like they had seen ghosts. Not Banquo’s, but the ones from Karachi (1996), Edgbaston (1999), and Durban (2003).

I can recall few sadder occasions than the Graeme Smith press conference that followed. Smith was a fellow Liverpool fan, and a top bloke who had taken so much criticism with considerable grace. That night, he was broken, and you sensed a wound that would never heal. A couple of my journalist friends looked as defeated. Edgbaston may have been the unkindest cut of all, but the nicks that followed were no less painful.

My next stop was Mohali, and a semifinal that would draw a bigger global audience than the Barcelona-Manchester United Champions League final a couple of months later. To this day, I’m unsure why a stadium that could hold only 28,000 had been chosen for a semifinal. BCCI politics undoubtedly played a part, but why would the ICC have signed off on such a plan? As it was, with Pakistan providing the opposition, a stadium seating 280,000 wouldn’t have been enough.

In the days leading up to the game, I lost track of the number of stories, features and radio crosses I did, while simultaneously trying to arrange tickets for some friends. I hated the hype, and the war-like-slant that some of the coverage had — it had been less than three years since the Mumbai terror attacks — but any attempt to downplay the occasion was as silly. Chandigarh and Mohali had never seen anything like it. There wasn’t a broom cupboard to be found if you wanted accommodation and tickets were changing hands for six-figure sums.

India won relatively comfortably in the end, though the conspiracy theories about Saeed Ajmal getting Tendulkar leg before, before being denied by technology, linger to this day. Again, Raina was central to India’s batting effort, with his unconquered 36 making sure the bowlers had a big enough total to defend. Nearly half a decade earlier, I had watched Ian Frazer, Greg Chappell’s assistant, ping golf balls at him on a concrete slab in Centurion in a desperate bid to get him back in form. Raina would never speak of the debt he owed Chappell for fear of upsetting some of his seniors, but it was hard not to think of those efforts as he showed the toughness of a gnarled veteran on the biggest stage of all.

Chandigarh’s usually organised roads were witness to chaotic scenes in the aftermath of the Indian victory. Hundreds of cars with the tricolour unfurled out of windows, crackers being burst, and the sort of mayhem usually associated with Holi. The next afternoon, as I waited for my flight to Bombay, it was obvious that most in the departure area needed a bed and plenty of shut eye. It had been that kind of party.

Each time exhaustion threatened to overwhelm me, I’d remind myself of those like Chirag Makwana, who had followed the Indian odyssey without any of the privileges that I had. Chirag had taken leave from his job in the UK, and journeyed around India supporting the team. Trains at odd hours, often without reservation, sleeping in waiting rooms when there were no hotels available, sourcing tickets any which way, and keeping humour intact despite all the hardships.

Indian fans had got a bum rap down the years, but there’s little doubt in my mind that the endless waves of support played a huge part in pushing the team over the line. They may have let themselves down on occasion in the past — notably after the team’s early World Cup exit in 2007 — but there’s something to be said for the stubborn, obsessive love that followed the team everywhere four years later. It never let up, and player after player has spoken of how it lifted them.

Mumbai was almost the calm after the storms. Sri Lanka’s own living legend, Muttiah Muralitharan, was years past his best, but unlike Tendulkar, he already had his World Cup winners’ medal. The team itself had made a habit of peaking on the big stage. And unlike ‘arrogant’ Australia and Pakistan, very few Indian fans disliked the Lankans. The edge that had been there during the quarterfinal and the semi simply wasn’t there. It was replaced by this sense of near-dread — surely it couldn’t go wrong now?

What that Indian team had though was a sense of destiny. The core group had spent so much time together that their belief in each other was near absolute. There were many miles in those legs, and much heartache in the back catalogue, but there was also an acute awareness that this was their time. It wasn’t just Tendulkar who was seeking one last day of summer. The likes of Virender Sehwag, Yuvraj and Zaheer also knew that a chance wouldn’t come again.

At halfway, with India needing 275 after Mahela Jayawardene’s dazzling hundred, the smart money was on the underdogs. But India never panicked. Sehwag’s departure second ball and Tendulkar’s after an 18-run cameo signaled gloom in the stands, but not the loss of hope. The fans knew that there was much more to come, that this was a far cry from the team that had once prompted glib comments about №10 and ten others.

Gambhir, who had been instrumental in the World Twenty20 win three and a half years earlier, laid the platform, and Dhoni, who had scratched his way through the competition, finished things off with a return to fluency. Virat Kohli and the ubiquitous Yuvraj played their parts, and it was tempting to headline the final copy: Never in doubt.

Clinical isn’t a word usually associated with Indian sports teams, unless you go back to the hockey sides of the black-and-white era, but that was precisely what we saw that evening as night descended on India’s largest metropolis. Each man who came to the crease knew what they had to do. Gambhir and Kohli consolidated. In boxing terms, they jabbed, feinted and jabbed again, until Sri Lanka had clouded minds and shaky legs. Dhoni, after a few exploratory jabs of his own, landed the punishing rights, hooks and upper cuts.

It’s hard to describe the emotions once it was all over. For the fans, it must have been part-delirium and part-catharsis. For journalists, who faced multiple deadlines, it was something else. It was hard to make sense of it all, the many narratives. Tendulkar and redemption. Dhoni leading from the front. Yuvraj’s all-round heroics through the tournament. Kohli, the face of Indian cricket’s future.

I still recall Jaideep Varma interviewing me for the Running between the Cricket documentary even as I was filing one of many copies that night. I’m not sure what I told him, but I do remember that my first thought had been of those that missed out — the champions who had contributed so much to the journey that had just ended with the team on the top step of the podium. Kumble of the broken-jaw heroics, Ganguly and his twirling-the-shirt celebration, Dravid who had almost always delivered in crunch situations. How did they feel watching on from the sidelines?

A part of me was happy that Tendulkar hadn’t made a significant contribution in the final. That would have hijacked the story, making it less about how almost every single member of the squad had contributed something to the triumph. This wasn’t a tale of one king, but of 15 musketeers.

It took hours to walk back to my hotel that night. Marine Drive was so packed with revellers that it was hard to tell where the sea ended, and the swell of humanity began. I remember having a quick drink with Tristan Holme and Nagraj Gollapudi before we each went back to our laptops and the requests for stories that just wouldn’t end.

I was supposed to head back home on April 3, but such was the demand for post-victory coverage that I had to postpone my departure a day. The penny finally dropped after I’d checked out and moved to a hotel near the airport, far from the celebrations that showed no signs of abating. After 14 matches in 43 days, my World Cup was also over. The last posts had been sent, the final reserves of energy exhausted.

As Mark Knopfler’s Going Home played in the background, I remember breaking down. I’d shadowed this team for the better part of a decade. Though I’d grown up a West Indies fan, bonds had been formed along the way, some of which endure to this day. At some point, this had become a group I cared about. And as happy as I was for them, I was even more delighted for those like Chirag, whose faith is really the bedrock of sport as we know it. Almost 28 years after Kapil Dev’s team had lit the match for modern-day Indian cricket, the bonfire was raging.

It was hard not to be blinded by the light.

Originally published at http://dileeppremachandran.wordpress.com on April 1, 2020.