South Africa have been worthy opponents for Australia in recent times, and there have been standout Ashes contests, but one match-up has consistently been the most competitive
Sidharth Monga18-Nov-2024Australia had us at “Hello, mate.” It didn’t come to us through books or news or history. It entered our consciousness one morning before school. Through cricket. When we grow old enough to talk of “my days”, we will talk not of the imagined tranquil greens of England. We will talk of loud, unapologetic cricket from Australia: huge banners, Daddles the Duck, zinc cream on lips and under eyes, the inverted scores, the extra bounce, always sundries and not extras, the feeling of vast open spaces, and viewers dressed for summer while we slowly shivered our way into getting ready for school.The exact moment of initiation might be different for different people. For me it was Ajay Jadeja running in to catch Allan Border to the hysterical commentary of Tony Greig and Bill Lawry. The catch went on to become part of “Bush Classic Catches” along with David Boon’s juggling effort at short leg off a full-blooded flick during the Tests earlier in the “summer”.The background music for the package was Europe’s “The Final Countdown”. The David Bowie-inspired space-themed lyrics went beautifully with this theatre of dreams. At that time both represented possibility. Australia was our zeitgeist, our pop culture, our aspiration. It was our America.Related
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Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma and R Ashwin, coming up towards the end of their careers now, and MS Dhoni and Yuvraj Singh before them, were adolescents or touching adolescence during this period. They all grew up wanting to be like Australia, wanting to beat Australia. We walked in to bowl our legbreaks like Shane Warne. When the obsessed Yograj Singh chucked balls at his son from half a pitch’s length, he wanted Yuvraj to prepare for Australia. It was the first accent we picked up. Irfan Pathan started saying “, mate” unironically.To Australia we were nobodies, kids who could never muster the money to buy what their glitzy store was selling. After that 1992 World Cup, it took India eight years to be invited to Australia again. When Australia came to India, they travelled with their own baked beans and Foster’s. They nudged awake the homeless people sleeping at train stations to take their poverty-porn photos, as witnessed by Malcolm Knox in this piece. A considerable improvement in behaviour from two decades before, when Allan Border wrote of how they would throw money out of their Kanpur hotel windows, only to pour water on the poor people who scrambled for the currency notes.The start of something big: India win the 2000-01 series in Chennai:•Getty ImagesThen India halted their victory march in 2000-01. The kids were teenagers and young adults now. They would soon join forces with the older lone warriors of the ’90s and start stepping up to Australia, seeking to be their equals. Nothing less would do. Also, the BCCI had become rich and started to throw its weight around. It knew, though, that Australia was a success model to emulate, so it created academies on the lines of the Centre of Excellence in Australia, where some of the Indian kids went previously. The first programme was designed by Rod Marsh. The pace academy in Chennai also brought in an Aussie coach, Dennis Lillee.One element of the rivalry was in place. The cultures were clashing. India, themselves victims of racism in the past, proved they could be racist to the one non-white player in the Australian team. Under fire, Australia’s hard-but-fair cloak began to disappear. Australia were showing themselves for what they were: hard-nosed, win-at-all-costs elite athletes. The new India saw nothing wrong in it. They emulated it.The contest on the field was still missing, but India made rapid and dramatic strides. Probably without realising it, their system was engineering batters who were at home in Australia. Pace and bounce didn’t fetter them anymore. With the fitness standards improving, India were now able to throw at Australia a combination of bowlers few others could. The other ingredient for a rivalry was not too far behind: the money.When Virat Kohli plays the Gabba Test, he will have played more Tests in Australia in a 13-year career than Sri Lanka have done in their entire history. And that’s despite the paternity leave he took on the last tour. India are now like West Indies, who made five Test trips to Australia from 1979 to 1992 and never lost a series, only with a bigger TV audience and expat population.What we have as a result is a contest that features a better cricketing competition than the more traditional nemeses for these nations – England and Pakistan – provide. The Ashes are rarely as competitive and India-Pakistan contests are bogged down so much by the fear of losing that they often tended to produce dull Test cricket.