VVS Laxman during the unveiling of his autobiography in New Delhi on Tuesday evening. (Anil Sharma)Australia, somehow, always veers into the discussion, almost incidentally, when you have VVS Laxman in the midst.
After all, this is where the 44-year-old has written and re-written his legend during the four tours Down Under. The infamous 2007-08 series gets a mention, where India lost the second Test in Sydney after a series of dubious umpiring decisions, and Harbhajan Singh and Andrew Symonds found themselves in the middle of a racial-abuse storm. More than 11 years later, it now emerged that Laxman, had, in fact, asked his team-mates to pack their bags and leave the country.
“I was the one who asked my team to pack our bags and leave the country after whatever had transpired during that Sydney Test that had some dubious umpiring decisions. In the end, I’m glad the manner in which our captain Anil Kumble handled the whole situation. It was his diplomatic skills that ultimately proved to be the difference,” he reminisced. “Perth win mattered for what happened at Sydney. We as a team felt that we were let down by umpires, there were a lot of atrocious decision given against us, and we lost that match, so it was important for us to win at Perth.”
Laxman warmed up a cold winter evening in the national capital with several such anecdotes as he unveiled his autobiography titled aptly ‘281 and Beyond’ in the presence of a galaxy of his former team-mates and mentors. It was a star-studded evening that saw the presence of everyone from Virender Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir, Harbhajan Singh, Murali Karthik, Irfan Pathan, Ashish Nehra and RP Singh to name a few, as they took a walk down the memory lane.
Sehwag remembers one particular incident related to Laxman that took place in the winter of 2001. The swashbuckling 23-year-old was happily seated in the confines of his hotel room, cock-a-hoop at being elevated as the team’s opener by his captain Sourav Ganguly.
Just then, he gets a knock on the door. It was a rather flustered VVS Laxman. Sehwag was pleasantly surprised at his presence, greeted him in. “Viru mat kar yaar. Don’t open the batting. You’re a middle-order batsman, and that’s where you ought to be batting,” he explained. Sehwag was perceptibly baffled, and countered him. “Lekin Laxman bhai, you scored that magnificent 167 in Sydney (in January 2000) as an opener. I think as an opener, I too will get a chance to score big hundreds.”
But Laxman was persistent. “I know what it’s like to open in Tests, I don’t want you to suffer like the way I did,” he explained further. Looking back in hindsight, it was a good thing that Sehwag did not pay heed to Laxman. Because if he had, international cricket, in all probability, would probably have been robbed of the string of some of his most sensational knocks, all of which came after he made the shift as an opener.
One couldn’t find fault with Laxman for his act of dissuasion though. Even after scoring truckloads of runs as a middle-order batsman for Hyderabad in first-class cricket, he could rarely translate that form as India’s ‘make-shift opener’, during the initial phase in his international career. Not surprisingly, even the numbers are heavily stacked against him. He averaged a below-par 28.54 in 25 innings as an opener, when compared with his overall career average, which stands at an impressive 45.97 when he batted at No.6.
He put down his failure as a Test opener to his cluttered approach.
“Unlike Sehwag, I was very cluttered when I was asked to open early on in my career. I think that affected my batting.
Thankfully, Viru did not suffer from such apprehensions. His approach was pretty much the same, be it as an opener or as a middle-order batsman. I think that helped him,” Laxman noted. Of the many chapters in this book, one that takes considerable precedence over others in Laxman’s omission from India’s 2003 World Cup squad. It had become one of the big talking points back then. More than 15 years later, it continues to evoke considerable interest.
The BMW challenge
During India’s ill-fated tour to New Zealand in 2002-03 season, Sehwag had famously told Laxman: “Bhai, you need to score atleast a 50 in the next match, or else you will be dropped from the World Cup squad.” To which, Laxman put a challenge in front of him.
“If I get selected for the World Cup next year, I will gift myself a BMW sedan. As the story goes, he would get dropped from the team, and Sehwag added in jest: “Now you know why he still travels in a Toyota Corolla,” which elicited guffaws from the gathering.
Despite his misgivings as an opener, he was extremely prolific down the order, where he crafted priceless match-winning gems, while batting with the tail.
“I have scored atleast 60-70 per cent of the team’s runs while batting down the order. Looking back, I don’t think I would have been able to score without the efforts from either Ashish, Zak (Zaheer) or even Harbhajan. With time, I began to trust their instincts as a batsman and, in turn, began to give them more strike. I think that also boosted their confidence,” he said.
