The Surfer

Before it began, the second Test of the ongoing India-Australia series was termed pivotal, a do-or-die match that could well decide the destination of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy. Give yourself some time, perhaps a year or two, look back and then let me know what this do-or-die was all about.

Australia's tour of India might not be a water-cooler topic at Madrid's Bernabeu Stadium, where the world's second-best footballer makes his living, but the Australian all-rounder's exploits are not going without recognition on the Portuguese island from where he and Ronaldo hail.

The round-ball game, not cricket, is the leading sport on Madeira, off the west coast of Morocco. Yet word of Henriques's outstanding Test debut on the subcontinent will make its way to that part of the North Atlantic if his father has anything to do with it, no matter if no one there knows reverse-swing from a reverse-sweep.

When Australia's sense of affront subsides, and we remove our partisan blinkers, we might appreciate Chennai as cricket from and in another dimension, a game for mystics and genies.

He may harbour doubts, unnecessary ones, about his standing with "the people". But in an Ashes year, where Trott will expect to add more centuries to the three from six he already has against Australia, no one in their right mind would rather see another man walk out at No.3. "The most important thing," he says, "is the respect of your teammates. You don't really care what the press say. When you go out to bat and look around that changing room do you have the full faith of the people in it?

Though this was a highly talented side, it had been underachieving until the 1976-77 series against Australia and West Indies. It was only after these series that Pakistan cricket finally managed to be taken a lot more seriously and the international worth of a number of their cricketers grew two-fold.

Chennai stands at a cross-roads today. It is now a major Twenty20 venue and the patience of its patrons with respect to other formats is being tested. The new stands don't allow for the relief of shade during a gruelling day of Test cricket. Ticket availability, other than for the Indian Premier League, is a big question mark because the administrators refuse to sell them online, generating serpentine queues from 4am on match days. Security checks are a hassle at every entrance point and there is a lack of proper access for the umpteen fans, compounded by a paucity of facilities.

I have been asked on a few occasions to compare the 175 with the back-to-back hundreds against the same team at Sharjah in 1998. I don't think a comparison can be made. The expectations were way higher at the final stages of the tri-series in Sharjah. The Hyderabad hundred was scored in the middle of a bilateral series, and hence the circumstances were very different, physically and even mentally.