Their Finest Hour

GH on Test cricket's second tie

I wrote this account of Test cricket’s second tied match for a history of Indian-Australian cricket that did not in the end go ahead; it now features in my own anthology of historical writing about Indian-Australian cricket, Indian Summers, published today by Allen & Unwin.

The odds on a Test match finishing in a tie are incalculable, but clearly astronomical. Nearly 500 Tests had to be played for it to happen once, when Australia and the West Indies split 1474 runs and forty wickets right down the middle at the Gabba in December 1960. More than 500 further had to transpire before the event reoccurred, as the shadows lengthened towards the end of a stupendous Test involving India and Australia at Madras, where first 1392 runs had been interspersed with only twenty-seven wickets, then seven fell for 94. Even then, at the denouement, with just a ball remaining, the scoreboards at Chidambaram Stadium disagreed by a run, as though themselves disbelieving. Confusion reigned before euphoria broke.

In a modern era so dedicated to scaling cricket down, too, the dimensions of the match seem almost inconceivable. The longest individual innings lasted eight hours, twenty-two minutes. The heaviest individual bowling effort involved 407 deliveries, and five players bowled more than forty-five overs apiece. The final day started at 9.30 a.m. and climaxed at 5.19 p.m., accommodating 347 runs and ten wickets. Nobody knows how many attended, but claims must be close to those of the first Tied Test – a proverbially huge number. It was in a way a coming of age for both teams: for India against Australia, and Australia in the subcontinent, each captain striving to win, each country curiously fascinated by the other.

Both XIs were defined by axes – one established, one new. In India’s case the polarities were those of mercurial all-rounder Kapil Dev and master batsman Sunil Gavaskar, their alternations as captain an invitation to comparison and critique. After Gavaskar’s three-year reign had been ended by a torrid tour of Pakistan, Kapil Dev’s tenure had built rapidly towards a defining triumph in the World Cup. Gavaskar won the top job back after a disappointing home series against the West Indies, and Kapil had even been omitted from the team for what was deemed an irresponsible shot in the Delhi Test against England in December 1984. But India’s defeat in that series led to Kapil’s restoration as captain, and he had come clean about his feelings for Gavaskar in an autobiography in June 1986, claiming that the batting star had ‘never given me the same kind of support playing under me that I gave him when I was playing under him’, and ‘played under my captaincy on sufferance’.

The pair, of course, were as individually different as their skills and their statures: Gavaskar the peerless technician, the rationalist supreme; Kapil the creature of inspiration and energy, Indian cricket’s elan vital. Their public rupture was healed over with what in hindsight seems remarkable ease – Kapil walked back from his own autobiography, claiming he had been misrepresented by his co-author; Gavaskar kept his own counsel, and contributed usefully as India got the better of England in England for the first time. The effect, however, was to invest any event involving the two with a murmurous undertone, and Gavaskar’s exclusion from the first two one-day internationals against the visiting Australians was popularly viewed as a continuance of various agendas: ‘Kapil takes his revenge’ read Mid-Day’s unambiguous headline. None was assuaged when chairman of selectors Chandu Borde insisted that Gavaskar had merely been ‘rested’; he was bombarded with threats and abusive telephone calls. As if sensitive to the potential for ruction, the Board of Control for Cricket in India asked the Vedanta guru Swami Parthasarathy to address the team before the match. Gestures of inclusion ensued: before Kapil walked out for the toss, Tamil Nadu’s governor Sundar Lal Khurana presented Gavaskar with a silver salver in token of his hundredth consecutive Test match.

The new axis in the Australian team was between that of its hard-bitten captain Allan Border, with eighty-one Tests behind him, and its hard-headed coach Bob Simpson, with three decades of uncompromising perfectionism to draw on. Border had been grappling uneasily with leadership for more than eighteen months as the outstanding player in a callow team: the next most experienced of his touring party were vice-captain David Boon, left-arm spinner Ray Bright and middle-order batsman Greg Ritchie with sixty-one caps between them; the rest shared fifty-eight Tests in toto. At home against India, they had very nearly come to grief: only rain on top of Border’s resilience had saved the hosts from the ignominy of a Boxing Day Test defeat. Australians had traditionally shied from the notion of the national team needing a ‘coach’: to their minds, elite players should need no nursemaiding. But since the simultaneous retirements of Greg Chappell, Dennis Lillee and Rod Marsh, and the defections of fifteen other players to South Africa, they had been compelled to reconsider – the concession to their reservations was that Simpson was referred to as ‘cricket manager’, as though an adjunct to ‘team manager’ Alan Crompton. Nobody mistook Simpson’s very hands-on purpose, least of all himself: he determined to rebuild the team from the ground up, beginning with fielding, where he led drills of furious endeavour. The team trained in such infernal heat at Baroda that they were rewarded at the end with a spraying by the local fire brigade.

In India, however, there was heat, and there was heat. As the Australians descended their airliner’s gangway in Madras, near midnight on Monday 15 September 1986, they noticed the strong odour of sweltering tarmac, the oppressive humidity that quickly soaked their clothes, and the general torpor of the city’s ‘second summer’. Awaiting the relief of the north-eastern monsoon, Madras would be the third player of the First Test. Chepauk’s Chidambaram Stadium, the unbroken circle of its stands excluding such breezes as there were, was just about the city’s least habitable quarter, suffused with the reek of the filthy, cloacal stream of the Buckingham Canal. Simpson was a hard taskmaster, but not a foolish one. He granted his charges a day off ahead of the Test at Fisherman’s Cove, a resort on the Bay of Biscay, then kept their trainings light, with lots of time at their Taj Coromandel digs. It was here, in fact, that Border hinted at something of a new composure in his role, summoning to his suite the twenty-five-year-old Victorian Dean Jones. Jones had made 67 runs in his only four Test innings more than two years earlier, before being distracted by injury, indifferent form, and the inducements of South African agents. He had come on tour with no certainty about his role – indeed, he and his West Australian roommate Mike Veletta suspected that they were vying for the same place. Border more or less confirmed it: ‘I want you to be my number three for the next few years. Do you want it?’ Jones stammered a thrilled acceptance. From Border, who had always seen himself as a caretaker, and who had flirted with resignation more than once, this was itself a maturing step. Border’s faith and Jones’s alacrity strengthened both of them.

Few contributions Border would make to the First Test would be greater than the simplest: his calling correctly when Kapil tossed the coin on Thursday. It was a relief to certain individuals in particular: Ray Bright had suffered an overnight case of food poisoning and was slumped on the dressing room couch. But it was mostly a general lift: India’s batting unit, even without an injured Dilip Vengsarkar, was replete with quality, having piled up 520, 445 and 4/600 during the recent series in Australia. In an exploratory opening spell of three overs, Kapil found no swing; twenty-year-old Chetan Sharma, despite pounding the ball in, found little bounce; spinners Shivlal Yadav, Maninder Singh and Ravi Shastri were soon bracing for long spells. Boon and his opening partner Geoff Marsh were little troubled through the first hour, save by the climate, quickly shedding helmets for sun hats.

The Australians were surprised to find that the heat vexed the Indians just as much. Jones had been in only a short time after the fall of Marsh when he crossed paths with local boy Krishnamachari Srikkanth. ‘Oh Deano, terrible hot isn’t it?’ he confided. Jones was puzzled: ‘Hang on a minute. It’s hot for me but you live here for heaven’s sake. Surely you can take it?’ Srikkanth shook his head: ‘When it’s this hot I don’t stay in Madras; I go and live in Bombay . . . This humidity is killing me.’ With the thermometer nudging 40 degrees Celsius, the hygrometer hovering at 80 per cent, the concrete of the stands was hot to touch and the fumes from the canal thick enough to cut. Boon worked on changing his gloves about every eight overs: fortunately he had brought a dozen pairs to India. Jones started to hear the squelch from his shoes, as sweat sloshed out of their eyelets. The pitch was so hard underneath it felt like running on concrete. Consolation for the batsmen were that the bowlers had it worse, the margin for error tiny, with Boon favouring his back foot and cutting adeptly, Jones quick to advance on anything offering the scope. Neither threatened to break away, but nor was the dull roar of the crowd enlivened by appeals.

The most animated sections of the day involved umpire Dara Dotiwalla, who began to fret about Jones’s footwork to the slow bowlers, and how his spikes might scuff the featureless surface. This flushed Simpson from the stands, remonstrating that Dotiwalla was overstepping his authority. Rather than stand on his rights, Jones made the change voluntarily. The Indians were not fussed. They had nothing to do but bake. After lunch, Jones and Srikkanth passed one another again. ‘I knew we were in for trouble when I was coming to the ground this morning and I saw the rats running away,’ Srikkanth now quipped.

Boon’s would be the first century of a run-rich Test. He reached the landmark, for the third time in four Tests, courtesy of a misfield at cover from Kapil’s bowling after tea. His celebration was weary. Jones thought he was looking off colour, and tried farming the strike for a time in a fashion the Australians had discussed: between times Jones reached his own maiden Test fifty, in three and three quarter hours with just two boundaries. As the close approached, the Australians prepared for the second new ball, Border rousing the queasy Bright to act as nightwatchman – a wise precaution as Boon exhaustedly nicked off in the day’s penultimate over. But 2/211 was everything Simpson had hoped for, and Jones’s 56 from 171 balls precisely what Border had mandated. The batsman could not sleep with excitement, shrugging off his bed clothes at the Taj at 3 a.m., looking out over the city lights, and forward towards his destiny.

The heat and humidity of each day of the Test was a little worse than the last. Bright hung around eighty minutes on Friday in spite of himself, sweeping a six as he gasped for breath, before returning to the dressing room with eyes streaming tears. Jones’s hard grind of the day before now paid off; wearing superlight pads lent him by Steve Waugh, he felt unassailable through the morning, treating the left-handed Maninder roughly, leaving the crease before ball’s release and revelling in his sense of control. ‘How do you like them apples?’ he would ask, as each boundary pealed from his bat. ‘How do you like them apples?’ If the idiom was a mystery to Maninder, the alpha maleness was clear. An on-driven boundary from Shastri took him to a maiden hundred. But even Jones was beginning to suffer. He felt pins and needles in his extremities; he bent over and started to vomit; then he feigned vomiting in order to urinate. Teammates swarmed around him at lunch, when he was 131, like a pit crew around a racing car, stripping, showering, refreshing, redressing and re-equipping him for the afternoon, even if he could stomach no more than a banana, and he resumed batting with neither thigh pad nor protector. By now, Jones was not noticing much. If he could not hit a four, he and his captain walked a single. His solicitous opponents came over with suggestions for tonics: ‘It looked at one stage as though they were more worried about me than they were about the match,’ Jones recalled. His captain was more gruff. ‘That’s fine,’ said Border, when Jones, approaching the ninth hour of his innings, confided that he might have to retire hurt. ‘We’ll get someone tough out here – a Queenslander.’ Jones did not miss the reference to Ritchie, and seethed about it, pushing on until, on the brink of tea, he nicked Srikkanth wide of slip to become the first Australian double-centurion in India. An exhausted slog cost him his wicket fifteen minutes after the resumption, concluding the match’s highest partnership, 178.

The drama was not over yet. While Border plunged on, Jones plunged into an ice bath prepared by physiotherapist Errol Alcott, which nonetheless felt strangely lukewarm. Waugh thought him like a ‘walking corpse’, and pretty soon he was not walking either, having suffered a syncopal attack as teammates attempted to rehydrate him – their dutiful baggage man Govind Bawji Vadolikar hastily summoned an ambulance from the Apollo Hospital. When Border re-entered the dressing room after scoring his own hundred and was told of Jones’s collapse, he felt culpable: ‘My God, I’ve killed him.’ In fact, connected to a saline drip and ministered to by half a dozen starstruck doctors, he bounced back quickly, even if he was not to regain the 8 kilograms he lost over those two days for another eighteen months.

The Australians pressed on for thirty-seven further minutes on Saturday morning, and struck after an hour of the reply, removing an indiscreet Gavaskar, then Amarnath and Srikkanth in consecutive balls after lunch to reduce India to 3/65, still more than 500 runs in arrears. Again the slow bowlers bore the brunt of the labour, Bright’s left-armers in harness with Greg Matthews’ off-breaks. But with two days’ fielding in their legs, the batsmen were hard-pressed too: Mohammad Azharuddin, Ravi Shastri and Vengasarkar’s locum Chandrakant Pandit played with a freedom that was almost light-headed. At 7/245 late on the third day, India looked doomed to follow on. Had Dotiwalla upheld Waugh’s lbw appeal against Kapil (8), they assuredly would have. As it was, two years since he had been disciplined for a similar misdeed, India’s captain harangued his players at stumps for essaying one-day shots in a Test match.

It was to be a case of do as I say, not as I do: his first three balls of Sunday, Kapil hit for four, and kept going from there, while Sharma and Yadav maintained a vigil at the other end. Tall and straight as a pillar topped out with a white helmet or sun hat, he was severe on every bowler, cutting Reid, hooking McDermott, defying Bright’s spin by hitting over mid-wicket and Matthews’ by stroking inside out. To attack or defend? Border thought simply to wait, but had to concede the follow-on, and eventually a virile hundred, Kapil’s fourth, studded with twenty-one boundaries. Speeding up the match, India’s skipper had put the ball in his rival’s court: how prepared was the Australian to lose in order to win?

The answer, at least at first, was not very. India’s slow bowlers now slowed the tempo adeptly, and the Australians struggled to challenge them, tempers fraying in the enervating heat. Shastri enjoyed his hundredth Test wicket, bowling Marsh; when Maninder dismissed Jones, he ran 30 metres to shout the unintelligible idiom: ‘How do you like them apples?’ Australia’s scoring rate over forty-nine overs never passed 3.5. It looked a little as though the Test had given its all and would end in stalemate, like eight of the preceding dozen Tests between the countries, and four of the last six Tests at Chepauk. Back at the Taj, however, Australia’s captain and coach compared notes. While batting, Border had seen deliveries from Maninder and Shastri turn sharply from the rough. While India had an enviable fourth-innings record, Simpson worked out that no country had scored as many as 348 on a final day to win a Test. What a shame, they agreed, if a Test so good so far should peter out. Border decided to sleep on it, and woke refreshed and resolved. ‘You can have another bat,’ he told Kapil when they met at 9 a.m. ‘We will be going for a win,’ Kapil advised his charges on returning to the dressing room. The public of Madras were caught faintly unawares: only 5000 were in attendance as Gavaskar and Srikkanth began the Indian chase on Monday, but word of their obvious ambition spread through the city so that the ground filled steadily towards capacity.

With a minimum of eighty-seven overs to be bowled, requiring a scoring rate of 4 an over, Border’s declaration was a beckoning invitation. The openers soon made it look nearly foolhardy. Srikkanth swished six swift boundaries before being caught on the run at long-on. Gavaskar, supported by Amarnath, followed with unaccustomed flamboyance, punching straight, driving on the up, looming large. When his back knee touched the ground as he stroked McDermott through the covers, Border felt an anxious pang: while Gavaskar always exuded control, this was command. Jones and Waugh, batting purists, were perversely enthralled. It was Gavaskar joining the batting pageant – even, at the scene of his record-breaking thirtieth Test hundred, outdoing it.

Border was hemmed in. Two of his four specialist bowlers, the pacemen Reid and McDermott, were impotent; a third, Bright, was still unwell, coming and going from the field. There had been no rest day, conditions were at their worst, and the canal stench was so overpowering that some fielders wore handkerchiefs over their mouths. Australia had one trump, Matthews, who had taken his first five-for in the first innings, and was toiling towards a second with eccentric determination. When not whirling away over after over, he was on the boundary edge either bantering with the crowd or taking advantage of a small stool they offered. At one point, he called for a jumper, then a second, explaining that he had seen a documentary about livestock herders in a desert country who wore woollen overcoats to ‘keep the cool air in’ – it seemed more like a proclamation of Australian resilience, a demand that the weather do its worst. Dotiwalla denied him a bat-pad appeal at silly point against Amarnath, then half an hour later granted one at short leg to leave India 2/158.

Either side of tea, Matthews and Bright worked to slow India’s scoring, to keep Gavaskar off strike, and Azharuddin pinned down on leg stump. Each batsmen hit a six, but between times were becalmed. With the hosts needing 144, Gavaskar drove prematurely at Bright, and Jones timed his leap at extra cover perfectly, thinking as the great batsman departed: ‘I wish the little bugger had got out for a duck but I admired every minute of his innings.’

Border kept thinking that, sooner or later, India would settle for a draw, allowing him to bring catchers in. But as the final score of overs approached, the chase surged again. Pandit swung about him robustly and there was an explosion of approbation as India came within two figures of their target with seven wickets remaining. Then, suddenly, a break: Azharuddin and Kapil holed out in consecutive overs. Again, though, remission was temporary. For a studious player, Shastri could swing a bat in generous arcs: just over eighteen months earlier, he had joined Garry Sobers in hitting six sixes in an over in a first-class match, all down the ground off a left-arm spinner. As he hit Matthews into the crowd, Border skewed his field to leg. ‘Christ,’ he thought. ‘There’s no justice here. We score 570, declare twice to make a game of it, and we’re going to lose.’ The need was down to 57 when Pandit, pulling back to make room, dragged on.

Still the Indians continued their headlong pursuit. No sooner had Border drawn his field in than Shastri hit again into the stands, rousing the fans further by the tamasha gestures of clapping his bat on his gloved hand. Lengthy adjustments ensued, drawing the ever officious Dotiwalla into the fray, who began to remonstrate about the over rate. Border barked back. Dotiwalla gestured towards the pavilion, as though expelling the Australian captain. ‘He can’t send me off, Babsie, can he?’ Border asked Boon. Boon shrugged his shoulders. Somehow the match continued, but when Tim Zoehrer appeared to stump Chetan Sharma soon after the aggrieved umpire shook his head, the Australians shook theirs. Batsman and keeper had a colourful contretemps; Sharma followed up with clumping strokes; the target shrank to less than 18 from five overs, with four wickets in hand.

Bright came back, queasily but willingly, and struck with consecutive deliveries. Sharma aimed down the ground, and miscued to mid-on; More aimed to leg and was trapped, Dotiwalla pausing dubiously before raising his finger. Number ten was Yadav, with a solid defence and a strong bottom hand. If he was to hit, Shastri counselled, Yadav should aim with the spin. He duly hoisted Matthews over the fence, almost swinging himself off his feet in the process. But in the penultimate over, with four runs required from nine deliveries, Yadav was bowled trying to repeat the stroke off Bright. When last man Maninder Singh defended the next two deliveries, the toils of 2400 previous deliveries depended on what occurred in the last half dozen. By now the ground was reverberating, the heat, humidity and stench forgotten. The press box was electrified. Calcutta journalist Debasish Datta had never smoked before, but when a lit cigarette was passed to him he began puffing. Kapil and his team looked on Shastri as their saviour. The Australian enclosure eyed number eleven Maninder confidently. ‘How nervous do you reckon this bloke would be?’ Simpson asked manager Crompton.

Matthews took the ball for his fortieth over of the day out of eighty-seven, his baggy green rank with sweat, his dirty creams clinging to his flanks. After coolly defending the first ball, Maninder tugged the second behind square, where the ball took a bad bounce as it approached Waugh, and the batsmen scurried back on the misfield; pushed in front of square, the third ball yielded a single that tied the scores. It was playing safe and taking a chance: India now could not lose, but depended on a batsman with a Test average of 4.7 to drag them to victory. Border’s fear had been victory by a bold blow from Shastri; now the likelihood was a scurried single for which he could plan. At last he drew his field in, standing at silly point himself, placing Marsh at short-leg, and enjoining Matthews to bowl straight at the stumps. Maninder fended away the over’s fourth ball, but missed the fifth, and umpire Venkat Raju, overshadowed throughout the match by his voluble partner, had his arm aloft almost before the appeal had commenced. Border never actually appealed: he was too busy scrambling after the ball. Waugh was typically cool: he swooped on the striker’s stumps, souveniring two.

Was there an inside edge? Maninder entreated Raju to change his mind; Shastri was so convinced that he ignored Raju altogether, and was at first bemused at the Australian celebrations; Raju was equally adamant otherwise, even if he suspected the decision played a part in his never umpiring another Test. There is a theory, ventured by some, that criticisms of Indian umpiring from overseas had led to their indulging visiting teams; yet the Australians could easily point to the counterexample of Dotiwalla, who seemed to do them no favours. Waugh put it most simply: ‘Like us, he [Raju] wanted to be part of history.’ Whatever the case, the scorebook is unambiguous: lbw Matthews 0, match tied. Also tied was the man-of-the-match award, between Jones and Kapil, although the Australians so esteemed Matthews’ 10/249 that Border gave him the ball and Waugh a stump. But there could be, as Tiger Pataudi noted, no doubt of the fitness of the result: ‘It was a match India did not deserve to win nor did Australia deserve to lose. A draw would have been a satisfactory outcome, but a tie took the game into the realms of fantasy where there were no losers and the greatest gainer was Test match cricket itself.’

The participants, fleetingly antagonists if closer to co-religionists, benefited also. A year later, India hosted its first World Cup and Australia won, both drawing on confidence forged in that cricket crucible at Chepauk. The players? The glory does not fade; if anything, the events of Monday 22 September 1986 grow more remarkable for each passing day. The running total of Test matches has more than doubled in the ensuing thirty years, and there have been no further ties – except, perhaps, those that bind.

You can order Indian Summers from Booktopia here.