India’s 1000 one-dayers, one decade at a time

BABY STEPS (1974-1979)
Synopsis: India stutters and stumbles as they grapple with the ways of the new format.
Played: 13, Won: 2; Lost: 11

Three years after the accidental birth of one-day international cricket, India, the future cradle of this format, made baby steps into the unknown. There, though, was no sense of history-making or excitement, or a sense of foreboding that the format was to change the landscape of the game in the country, for most of the eleven debutants. “Looking back, and compared to the boys now, we were naive,” says Madan Lal, then just a 23-year-old overzealous youngster.

There were graver concerns, for both the country and its cricket team. After mounting expectations before the series, they stumbled to a 3-0 defeat in Tests and worse of all, were skittled out for their then lowest Test score of 42. While they were still in England, there was tumult back home. Vijay Balla, a giant bat erected in memory of India’s series wins in England and West Indies in 1971 were defaced by tar in Indore. Soon upon landing, captain Ajit Wadekar lost his captaincy, whereupon he retired. The nation, meanwhile, was descending into a state of Emergency.

There, though, was curiosity. From the outside, it looked like a compressed Test match. They laid plans accordingly, before their leap into the dark at Leeds in June 1974. A brief and rough plan was sketched. “How do you prepare for a format you haven’t played? Or even watched. The general approach was that we would bowl as normal, but start playing attacking shots a bit earlier than in the Test matches. There were a few more men near the ropes, but at the same time slip-fielders and other catchers. More than batting and bowling, we struggled in setting fields,” he remembers.

For first-timers, they batted with stoic clarity. In the first game, they compiled a modest 265 in 54.3 overs (of 55 overs), powered by Brijesh Patel’s 78-ball 82. But they could not contain England with the ball. “We got a taste of the format and we liked it. Obviously, we had to trial and error to be successful in a new format. We knew that the more we played, the better we would get in this format,” Lal recounts.

Nearly 10 months later, a fortnight before the Emergency was declared, India were in England again for the inaugural World Cup. They thought they were better prepared, but then the moment of truth arrived. Sunil Gavaskar’s 36 not out off 176 balls against England when chasing 334 (in 60 overs) stood out as a metaphor for their confused approach in the format. Lal refutes: “That game was an aberration. We were a much more competent side, and knew what this format required. Just that we were inexperienced. We played just two, three games a year,” says Lal. The first win winked in — against East Africa, a hotchpotch of Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya and Zambia — but that was as good as it got.

There were years that passed by without them playing a single game (there was a 32-month ODI-less stretch, that largely overlapped with the Emergency in the country). “Often, it was like starting all over again,” he says.

As the years unrolled, it didn’t get any better. They played just six games in the next three years, managing to win just one game, against Pakistan, and contriving to lose all three in the 1979 World Cup. Wages were meagre — the weekly allowance for the 1979 World Cup was 105 pounds. Jerseys barely fitted; no sponsor’s logo blazed from the sleeves. The sweaters were so substandard that an English apparel company donated them woollen. The set-up was amateurish.

Tell them they were going to lift the next World Cup, Lal said chuckling: “We would have rolled on the grass.” There was no hunch of history awaiting them, though by then they had a taste of the format’s dynamics. And they liked it.

A LEAP (1980 to 1989)
From childhood, India leap straight to youth
Played: 155; W: 69; L: 80

One of the greatest underdogs stories in world cricket was scripted at the World Cup in 1983, but that was not all. It was the decade both India and the ODIs truly emerged. ODIs as the sport’s glamour-spread, and India as its fast-emerging market. For Indian cricket, there was no tumultuous teenage, it was a straight leap from childhood to early adulthood.

The World Cup triumph altered the trajectory of Indian cricket in ways unimagined. But even some of the World Cup-winning cricketers realised the format’s capacity for change at the World Series Championship in Australia two years later. If the World Cup popularised the sport, WSC glamourised it. Cricketers were made to feel Hollywood. “The first time I played, it was unlike any other tournament I had played,” says Dilip Vengsarkar.

There was so much colour, literally and figuratively. “It was the first time we played in coloured clothes, and under lights in packed Australian stadiums. White balls were used and the atmosphere was truly electric. There were actual prizes of the Man of the Match and Man of the Series. I thought like how quickly the game had changed in a few years,” he remembered.

The grandeur was sparkled further by splendid broadcasting. Topnotch commentary — spearheaded by Richie Benaud and Tony Greig — introduction of multiple camera angles, pitch reports (in which Greig always plonked his keys in the pitch), the magic marker that helped us learn about field placements and stump cam all made WSC an endearing, often unputdownable spectacle in an era were televisions were becoming popular in the country.

The concept of multi-team series gathered currency and in 1984, Sharjah hosted the Rothmans Cup for the first time. It was the dream-child of Abdul Rahman Bukhatir who, back in 1981, envisaged turning Sharjah, an outpost in Arabia, into another Mecca for world cricket, after falling for the game when at school in Pakistan. The stadium was then just a concrete block with a couple of tents, with the grass playing area leased from the local football club, but he had faith. Till 2003, it was an annual affair, though the names changed frequently, as Sharjah became the venue that had hosted the most ODIs (191). Driven no less by marketing forces and the burgeoning clout of cricket’s South Asian bloc, the World Cup dragged out of England, as Pakistan and India co-hosted the 1987 edition, which was a box-office hit.

Suddenly, the cricket calendar filled with more dates to accommodate the swelling demand of 50-over cricket. “From playing two-three games a year we started playing 10-15 a year. So we got more familiar with the format, and we did pretty well too in big tournaments. We won the World Cup, World Series Cup, a series against England and two, three Sharjah Cup,” he says.

Along with the game’s shooting portfolio came celebrity-hood, sponsors and better wages. From drawing remuneration of Rs 1500 plus an allowance of Rs 200 for a one-day game in the 1983 World Cup, there were five-digit salaries, besides advertisements and endorsements.

On the field, they played an exuberant brand of cricket, the success corner-stoned by their panoply of all-rounders and dashing batsmen. “We had all sorts, all-rounders who bowled swing, seam, off-spin, left-arm spin. The team had great flexibility,” he says.

By then, cricket had well and truly arrived in the country and expectations had begun to rise. The sport reached the far reaches of the nation, and cricket had begun to be the country-unifying force it would later be, like its magnificent railways. And for this reason, Vengsarkar calls the era “the most significant one in the country’s history.” A foundation-laying era, without which the sky-piercing skyscraper that is Indian cricket would never have sprung up.

THE EMOTIONAL ERA (1990-1999)
India were expected to fly, but they barely walked despite Sachin Tendulkar, the opium of the masses
Stats: Played: 257; Won: 122; Lost: 120

There wouldn’t be an era where fans were so emotionally or passionately invested in the game. The market had opened up for foreign investment, the board became richer and more powerful, thanks to hefty sums for broadcasting rights, and most especially of all, Indian cricket had its first deity-superstar-multimillionaire cricketer, Sachin Tendulkar.

No cricketer, before or after, has enjoyed as much adulation or admiration, or love, as Tendulkar. Tendulkar in the 90s was an ineffable emotion, one you could explain only if you have lived in that era. You needn’t necessarily be a cricket fan to understand that. When he batted, he dictated the mood of the nation. When he scored a hundred, the nation smiled; when he didn’t the nation mourned. More often than not, he made them smile and dance, forget the pangs of an economic crisis of the early years, stock-market crashing and acts of terrorism that were getting more frequent.

To him was attached the warmest of 90s memories, be it the twin hundreds in Sharjah, the famous Desert Storm that stoked a passion for the game in the mind of his spiritual successor Virat Kohli, or his five-wicket haul in Kochi against Steve Waugh, the mauling of Henry Olonga, thrashing Kenya in the 1999 World Cup, soon after performing the last rites of his father. A generation would relate their memories to the knocks he rolled out, sometimes even the strokes he unfurled. He was the first love of the 90s kids.

The Desert Storm knocks still make you tear up in joy. “It inspired several generations of cricketers and will continue to do so. It has to be one of the most important 50-over knocks, and to me, the best by an Indian batsman,” says Anshuman Gaekwad, who was then the national coach. “It gave India the belief that they could beat the best teams from any situation. It was several years later that they won the Champions Trophy and the Natwest Trophy. But it all began here,” he adds.

It was not always Tendulkar — there was a clutch of match-winners, from Mohammad Azharuddin and Anil Kumble and Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid towards the end of the decade — but it was still always Tendulkar. Yet, for all the quality on paper, India struggled to lap up trophies, most heartbreakingly the 1996 World Cup. The other two World Cups too ended on a disappointing note. The 1999 edition is one of regret for Gaekwad. “We were just a bit unlucky. We missed Sachin for that game against Zimbabwe. We lost that game and it had a huge bearing on our campaign,” he observes.

The board, though, got wealthier and more powerful. For the first time in 1993, the BCCI sold television rights to Trans World International (TWI) for the India-England series, which earned them $600,000. Consequently, there was an explosive spurt in the number of 50-over games they played too. The graph just kept climbing; in 2018, the Star Group shelled out 944 million dollars for broadcast rights for matches in India.

But in arguably the most competitive era of one-day cricket, India were woefully inconsistent and lagged behind the likes of South Africa and Australia in fielding, bowling resources, all-round utility and planning. “But towards the end of the decade we were winning more consistently, and we all knew that we had the nucleus of a good team. There has to be a beginning, and that beginning was that victory in Sharjah,” says Gaekwad.

Through all these travails, though, they tugged onto Tendulkar, like a pillow.

WINDS OF CHANGE
Emboldened by a crew of young cricketers, its potential harnessed by a passionate leader, India embrace a bolder, tougher approach to assemble the blocks of a World Cup-winning side in the next decade
Played: 307; Won: 161; Lost: 130

Ten years flew by. The decade began with Indian cricket, nay world cricket, slumping to the worst match-fixing scandal in its existence. Hordes of disillusioned fans slunk away from the game, some never returned, but for a majority, the sport was an irresistible pull. They returned, they could not but, once India resurged under Sourav Ganguly. There were fresh faces, a confident and daring, at times even abrasive, generation; unabashed to throw their bodies around, stare into the eyes of their mean-eyed combatants, spout expletives if need be. Ready to punch, ready to grit, ready to pour their mind on the ground and put the body on the line, demonstrating steel and athleticism that was often absent from their predecessors.

Leading them on the field were Mohammad Kaif and Yuvraj Singh, often prowling the arc from cover to backward point. “Great fun it was, we liked to dive around, block runs and pluck catches. Such efforts brought a smile to the face of the bowlers and audience, besides creating a buzz. It’s what you played the game for, for that buzz,” says Kaif.

Ganguly embodied their spirit (the steeliness of mind, not always athleticism) — when he whipped off his top and whirled it frantically on the Lord’s balcony, as much as an act of spontaneous joy as a piece of defiance. A symbolic statement that never again would India be the uncomplaining patsies of world cricket. Even now, it stands as a metaphor of the Brave New India. The beginning, catalyst, the coming age, the moment of enlightenment or maybe all rolled into one. In this context, the Natwest Trophy victory had far-reaching consequences.

The greatest joy for Kaif, who conceptualised the steep chase with 87 not out off 75 balls, is that people still relive that moment. “The other day when I was at the airport, a security guy told me that he had just watched the highlights of the game. There were others who had told me that they did so and such things so that they could watch the match, or that they were doing this or that when the match was going on. So that shows the impact of the knock,” he says.

Less than a year later, they reached the World Cup final, losing to arguably the finest of all Australian World Cup winners. India wailed and wallowed when they lost the final, but they dragged themselves back onto their feet, self-commiserating that it was one of the most competitive editions. Like the 90s, it was an ultra-competitive era. “When we played Pakistan, it was like playing for a team of legends against a team of legends. We had Sachin, my role model and inspiration, Sourav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid and Anil Kumble, and they had Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, Saeed Anwar and Shoaib Akhtar. Then there was Ricky Ponting, Shane Bond, Glenn McGrath and Shaun Pollock and all. It was a great era to play cricket,” Kaif remembers.

Match-winners popped up, one after the other, the pieces of the jigsaw falling into its perfect places as if glued by destiny. First came Zaheer Khan, Yuvraj Singh and Mohammad Kaif; then came along Harbhajan Singh and Virender Sehwag, before MS Dhoni and Gautam Gambhir emerged. Together with Tendulkar, they formed the nucleus of the 2011 World Cup-winning side.

They cracked the elusive code of chasing — stitching 17 successive ones. “Not long ago we failed to chase 250-odd against England at the Wankhede, and here we chased down 325. That made us believe that we could chase any target, and that’s the reason we became good chasers in the coming years,” says Kaif. A mental block was cleared.

There were thorns strewn on the rosy path. Like the disastrous 2007 World Cup campaign, the tumultuous Greg Chappell days. There were distractions too. Like a new format, a World Cup victory in it, the IPL, auctions and after-match parties, but India were hurtling inevitably to World Cup glory and cricket’s financial behemoth. The CB Series win in Australia was a precursor.

PEAK AND PLATEAU (2010 to 2019)
India begin the decade triumphantly before they flat-lines amid an existential crisis for the format itself
Played: 249; Won: 158; Lost: 78

The narrative of the decade could be told through the overlapping careers of three icons of the game. Through Sachin Tendulkar, the ageing superhero who got to kiss the one piece of precious trophy that had eluded him all his life. Through MS Dhoni, the country’s most successful leader in this format and finisher exemplar, wrapping up the World Cup win with arguably the most famous six in Indian cricket’s folklore. Through Virat Kohli, an inheritor of the mantles of both Tendulkar and Dhoni, the premier batsman in the post-Tendulkar era and the captain when Dhoni relinquished his throne.

The World Cup remains the pinnacle; its memories still fresh and radiant. Suresh Raina breaks into a nostalgia-hewn trip. “For a lot of us, the greatest moment of our lives, one we had been dreaming of since we were kids. It was a fabulous team, all legends and heroes, and at the peak,” he says.

Flawless a team seldom has been — as opposed to the first World Cup winners. Batsmen of hues, from biffers to finishers, bowlers of all sorts — left-arm seamers to off-break virtuosos — agile fielders and astute strategists, it would have been a catastrophe had they not held the trophy aloft. Raina delves on an often under-stated dimension — the role of the part-timers. “Viru pa and I used to bowl off-spin, Sachin paaji bowled leg-spin, off-spin and seam-ups. There was the left-arm spin of Yuvi pa. Yusuf (Pathan) bowled. We all used to relieve some burden of the main bowlers, and chipped in with wickets,” he says.

Their diminishing was among the reasons India plateaued after scaling the peak in 2011. Post-2011, India were expected to set up a dynasty as Australia had in the previous decade, they seemed to have the goods, but that was not to be. The 2013 Champions Trophy was their last stand of glory. They had the most ingredients to be a superpower — arguably their best ever fast bowler (Jasprit Bumrah), a clutch of extraordinary batsmen (Kohli, Rohit Sharma and Shikhar Dhawan), a rare seam-bowling all-rounder (Hardik Pandya) and a wrist-spinner (Yuzvendra Chahal). Yet, they have often emerged as the second-best or the semifinalists. “Definitely, this team would be better with some of the part-time all-round options we had,” says Raina.

Bizarrely, India somewhat failed to sense the direction the format was to take, thus lagging behind teams like England and New Zealand with their bolder, braver philosophy. In that sense, the decade was a blend of the eighties and 90s. The spurt of the former and the stasis of the latter.

A powerful India ODI team is indispensable for the format’s survival, at a time when it’s grappling with context. T20s have clearly usurped the ODIs in the popularity scale. Any given window, boards exuberantly squeeze in T20s, like how ODIs were in the 90s. The triangular and quadrangular series ceased to exist long ago, and subsequently the number of ODIs have gone down (from 307 in the aughts to 248), for the first time since India won the World Cup. Bilateral series are more like a complimentary side dish with the main menu, assuming significance only in the proximity of a World Cup that comes in four years. But Raina says the doomsday is distant. “It’s still an exciting and popular format.

Despite T20s, they still run full houses. I think it will stay on. The last few years didn’t have too many games because of the pandemic,” asserts Raina. A lot of the format’s popularity hinges on how India would perform in this decade. In this context, the next World Cup at home could be as significant as the 1983 and 2011 editions. Lest it would be like a geriatric on the deathbed, the days of glory and gaiety long over, and waiting now for the requiem.