Better times for an Indian cricket fan

So it’s happened at long last. After more than 77 years of bashing it about with the Big Boys, at a time when India have won a whopping 101 Test matches in all, making the yearly win ratio a princely 1.31, they’re officially recognised as the No.1 team in the world. News channels, particularly some of the infamously hyperbole-centric Hindi ones, proclaimed the day as the biggest ever in the history of Indian cricket. And somewhere I personally longed for the good old days (even by the standards of a 27-year-old, the heydays of Test cricket do appear eons ago).

Days when Test cricket was what it was meant to be. That thrill of waking up on the Rest Day, with a Test match evenly poised and all results possible, made it a cracking talking point with classmates at school. Days when the four-yearly World Cup was just that - a four-yearly carnival that came and went and was dutifully followed for the time when it was on (note that World Cups back then didn’t seem to start one March and appear to finish the following December!). Days when Indians routinely lost matches abroad, but there was always a silver lining in every defeat; watching them on grainy old television sets or hearing the commentary on radio while sipping hot coffee at 4:30 in the morning just made the extra effort of doing so worth its while. Days when India were Tigers At Home. Make no mistake about it. Raju would bowl like Warne, and Kumble was like Laker at Old Trafford. And the odd occasion when these gentlemen had an off-day, Srinath was lurking around to feast on hapless foreign teams on an uneven fifth-day track.

Actually, these are better times for an Indian cricket fan. They’ve seen the financial muscle develop over the last 16 years (I always cite the 1993 home series against England as a starting point) but now they appear to have the cricketing nous to go with it. Sachin Tendulkar was a champion back then, and he is one even today. The difference is in the quality of those around him. Back then the only other mercurial genius they queued up to watch was Hyderabad’s Mohammed Azharuddin. Sanjay Manjrekar and, for a brief while, Vinod Kambli, proved to be middle-order mainstays. And there was a reinvented maverick at the top of the order from the North: Navjot Singh Sidhu, who was perhaps the first cricketer in the world to welcome Shane Warne to the bowling crease in a Test by dancing down the track and smacking him back over his head for six. There still is a Deccan classicist (VVS Laxman), the mainstays are more solid than they were back then (Rahul Dravid has won more matches with his broad blade than both Manjrekar and Kambli combined) and in Virender Sehwag, we have an opener who can instil fear in the minds of the best bowlers in the world, spin or pace!

And then there is MS Dhoni. The bowling could be better, and indeed that is the one department that needs to pull its weight if we have to have any chance of competing with top teams like Australia and South Africa on a regular basis. Specifically the spinners came a cropper in this series, and barring a few debatable decisions that went his way, Harbhajan Singh would probably have been a massive weak link in the bowling attack at crucial times. All said and done, this is just the beginning. Its perhaps unfamiliar territory for most of us Indian cricket fans (say when was the last time we had a captain whose Test record read 10 played, seven won, three drawn?) but we’re not complaining.

The key thing is how we’ll be able to sustain this level of performance, and whether the powers-that-be are at all keen on seeing the oldest and most exciting form of the game survive!