India couldn’t have asked for a better vaccine before the real vaccine reaches the masses.
The cricket team’s Phoenix-like Test series win over Australia, completed with a Rishabh Pant straight drive in the golden light of the Brisbane evening, made the country forget, momentarily, the gloom of the Coronavirus. Such is the significance of the win that Pant’s final boundary should not rank far behind MS Dhoni’s six to close the 2011 World Cup, and other such images of triumph in Indian cricket history.
“Not just players, but every Indian should enjoy this victory,” captain Ajinkya Rahane said after the match. “What we did here was historic.”
India may go on to conquer more great peaks but the circumstances of this win are unlikely to be repeated. That makes it special. It was achieved during a pandemic, without the team’s main batsman - Virat Kohli. In the final Test, it was also without its main bowler, Jasprit Bumrah. Imagine Apple running smoothly without Steve Jobs and Tim Cook. Then injuries took out Mohammed Shami, R Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, Umesh Yadav and Hanuma Vihari as well.
What’s more, Australia had Steve Smith and David Warner back in their team, unlike in 2018, when India won a Test series in Australia for the first time.
Stand-in captain Rahane managed to rally whatever was left of his young and battered platoon to stage a recovery in the series. It started with Melbourne, where Rahane himself scored a captain’s century, then played out in Sydney and finally, Brisbane. The pirate army included newcomers and debutants such as Mohammed Siraj, Shardul Thakur, Washington Sundar and T Natarajan. Pant and Sundar were not even born when the first Border-Gavaskar Trophy was held in 1996. Now they have played a part in bringing it home.
“We were left with no choices. We had to play the guys who were there,” coach Ravi Shastri said. “If you look at the attack we had in 2018, none of those bowlers were there here (in Brisbane). Ajinkya did a great job being calm, marshalling his resources.”
The series showed us greatness in its different avatars. It was in the variations of Ashwin that tied up Steve Smith, in the leap and deviation of a Siraj outswinger, in the fearless flamboyance of Pant and Cheteshwar Pujara’s boxer-like refusal to buckle despite suffering one blow after another.
The word fairytale is used often in sports but India’s win in this series came close to one. It is exactly a month ago, December 19, that the team was bowled out for 36 in Adelaide, its lowest score in history. Look where we are now.
Shastri called it the toughest tour ever. And this wasn’t commentator Shastri suffering from adjectivitis, being paid to drum up excitement. He had valid reasons for his statement.
“If you look at the circumstances in which this team came to Australia, being in lockdown four months... Lot of people living in metros couldn’t even leave their flats, leave alone having an opportunity to train,” Shastri said. “Then to go to the IPL and someone like Jasprit Bumrah bowled 64 overs, that’s it. None of the other guys got a proper hit in the middle. Then to come here and take on Australia in their own backyard. To be bowled out for 36. Then to come back from there and play like absolute champions, is unreal. The penny has still not dropped and it will take a long time to drop.”
On Monday evening, Indians were busy checking the weather forecast for Brisbane, a city 10,048 km away from Mumbai. It was supposed to rain on Tuesday. It did not. Sometimes life and weather are fair.