Twenty years on.

 This morning I chanced upon Siddhartha Vaidyanathan's this excellent piece on Twitter. He writes

Twenty years down the road, you might not remember all the details from this Test. What is likely to remain are vivid memories of time, place, and feeling. Where you watched this final day, at what time of the day or night, with whom. Maybe your phone buzzed with texts and notifications in the climactic stages. Maybe you slept through an entire session.

The man is a genius. He happens to be one of my favorite sportswriters. I haven't read anyone who can effortlessly capture every emotion that one would experience while watching a cricket match.

The final session of the Gabba test that ended on 19th Jan 2021 was truly epic! I have always been a fan of test cricket and T20 hasn't managed to allure me away from it. And I have been eagerly looking forward to this series down under and like everyone I was really apprehensive of India's chances.

Given that I was now in London, there was a challenge with the telecast time. The match telecast started at 11:30pm and ended at 7am! Luckily due to the lockdown caused by the pandemic, my sleep pattern was completely screwed and I didn't have much trouble staying up late and following the entire series. 

Cricket is a team sport! One fares well at it only if you are part of a good team( either as a player or a fan)! So on that final day (a really freezing morning in London) at around 6:45am, when India was 265/5, I messaged my college WhatsApp group asking if anyone was following the match. I got an immediate response from Deepak and Saravana; with Sapta joining a while later. What followed was a rollercoaster ride of emotions.

Frustration on Mayank throwing away his wicket. Delight at Pant's strokes. Awe at Washington Sundar's two fantastic hits of Cummins. A sigh when Sundar got out. Trepidation when Shardul Thakur fell. Sheer elation when Pant finally scored the winning runs (I did a Ganguly dance early in the morning)! The #Gabbatoir had been breached! All of these emotions were experienced during several texts that we exchanged in the group in a matter of 15-30 minutes!

SidVee in his article compares the just concluded Brisbane test to the Chennai test of 2001. Surprisingly, I had felt the same as well. I did say this to my friends on the chat.  Readers of this blog will know that I have already documented how my friends and I missed the birth of the Draxman legend. But would you believe it if I told you that we weren't fortunate enough to follow the 2001 Chennai test as well?

It so happened that on the final day of the test match, We were forced to remain in college well beyond the stipulated hours as we had to get our Analytical Chemistry records certified by our Professor. Our Professor had decided to take his NSS cadets to a camp and was expected to return only around 3pm that day. It was really frustrating! We however managed to find a guy who was following the scores on his car radio, and there we sat intently listening to the commentary. Every second of that see-saw battle in the final session was torture. The occasional Hindi commentary on the radio was comical (Thankfully we didn't have to put up with Manjrekar)! But, we all experienced the same rollercoaster of emotions during that final session of play! 

Twenty years have passed from Chennai to Brisbane. TWENTY YEARS! In these 2 decades, a lot has changed in our lives. We don't meet each other that often. We hardly see each other in person. Saravana and I live in the same city(worked in the same part of the city) but we haven't met each other for over 3 years now! We all have had our ups and downs in our lives. many of us are still learning and thinking about what to do with it! But I am really glad that one thing hasn't, the collective joy of watching a test match together!!

I am sure 20 years from today when all of us are close to retirement (or already retired) we will continue to enjoy cricket and test matches as we did on that day in Chennai!

Draxman Saga

13 summers ago, on this very day, My friends and I decided to bunk college and go to a movie, a decision which I have regretted till this date! Why you ask? Well, it was on that day, a partnership in cricketing parlance, known as Draxman union began. The Draxman Saga (Dravid - Laxman) is something that cricket lovers of my generation (30ish something) will recall with fond memories.

For those who came in late, back in 2001, the Indian team wasn't world beaters (Well they aren't so even now, but at least they weren't as consistent as they are now!). The Indian team had got their worst pasting in Australia back in '99, then came the match-fixing controversy. The public had lost confidence in the team. A new Captain was at the helm and the team was picking one broken stick at a time.

Meanwhile, the Australian team was on a roll. The juggernaut had won 16 tests in a row. And just a week back, they had steam-rolled India at Wankhede in under 3 days! The Aussies had already started their mental disintegration tactics. Michael Slater continued to sledge Dravid at Wankhede.

Eden Gardens wasn't a lucky ground for India as well and but surprisingly India managed to restrict Australia to under 300 for around 8 wickets on day one. But then Captain "Ice Man" managed to get Australia beyond 400 on day 2, while India was reduced to 128/8.

On day-3 India was asked to follow-on, we were able to witness the magician Laxman at work. He did score a century. But like all Indian cricket fans at that time, we thought the innings was just a flash in the pan, and the floodgates of wickets would with the fall of just one more wicket. On day 4, my friends and I wanted to save ourselves from another heartburn, hence decided to bunk college and go to a movie (For the record the movie was *Minnale*, which became a cult classic in its own right, and continues to remain even today, one of the favorites of many my generation).

While returning home from the movie, I avoided discussing the match with others. Only after I returned home was I aware of what I had missed. I regretted that decision so badly, that I decided to bunk college again the very next day in order to catch the action on day 5. Not that I was confident that India will win, I was only hoping to watch more of the Draxman partnership.

What happened on day-5 is history. You don't need me to say what happened, you can read that on Cricinfo. The Indian coach in his book "Indian Summers" calls this innings as the biggest comeback since Lazarus. Well, I don't know what he means by that, neither do I know who was Lazarus. But that one innings was the turning point in Indian cricket.

An average Indian fan was always a "die-hard". He/She would have continued to support the team, come what may. But that one inning gave the average Indian fan confidence to trust the team to bounce back even when the chips were down!