Cricket 2008: When India won on and off the field

Harbhajan Singh started 2008 by escaping a ban in an acrimonious racism row in Australia and finished it as one of the leading wicket-takers, helping India to back-to-back Test series wins over the Australians and English.

The feisty offspinner's Teflon-like ride mirrored India's season inside and outside the arena as cricket's commercial powerbroker flexed its considerable clout.

Just as the lucrative Indian Premier League and the numerous Twenty20 competitions that sprouted around it threatened to elevate the shortest form of the game to the highest standing in cricket, some tight Tests involving India, England, South Africa and Australia revived the five-day game.

Interest heightened when India's late successes over Australia and England, cricket's oldest powers, were sandwiched around terror attacks in Mumbai that killed 164 people and threatened to derail the game on the subcontinent.

The November attacks, in which a luxury hotel that frequently hosts international cricket teams was among the prime targets, sent the English squad packing for a week, caused the cancellation of the inaugural Champions League that was supposed to feature eight provincial teams from five countries and, inevitably, caused India's refusal to tour Pakistan next month.

The Indian government blamed Pakistan-based militants for the attacks.

So while India was able to lure England back this month for the Test series — after the English abandoned a limited-overs series they were losing 5-0 — with security assurances, it was not willing to reciprocate for neighboring Pakistan.

England was widely commended for returning to India, although former Pakistan captain Rashid Latif was outspoken in his criticism of both international and national administrators for what he thought were the double standards of encouraging tours to India while turning their backs on Pakistan due to safety fears.

But International Cricket Council president David Morgan said England's return, and it's subsequent six-wicket loss in the first Test in Chennai, continued "the feel-good factor around the longest form of the game".

Cricket "has probably never been stronger than it is right now with three viable and vibrant forms at international level, including the positive effect of Twenty20," Morgan said. "The Perth Test between Australia and South Africa has also produced some great cricket and (recent matches) have been a real reminder that Test cricket is the pinnacle of our sport with its unique ability to produce twists and turns and sustained drama."

Latif said India's status as the game's key market gave it the pulling power Pakistan lacked. The eight-nation Champions Trophy in Pakistan was postponed in September after five teams refused to tour.

"It's all about money and nothing else," Latif said. "If India didn't have the financial clout no team would bother to go there so soon after the Mumbai attacks."

Latif wasn't the only critic of India's cashed-up backers.

Sections of the media openly questioned who was running the sport when Harbhajan was let off a two-match ban on appeal in January after allegedly making a racist taunt against allrounder Andrew Symonds, the only black player on the Australian team.

That decision came amid Indian threats to boycott the remainder of the tour. The ICC also acquiesced to India's demands for veteran West Indies umpire Steve Bucknor to be removed from the series after making some incorrect decisions.

Harbhajan pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was fined 50 percent of his match fee — he later served a five-match ODI ban for slapping a teammate in a domestic Twenty20 match.

Australia had won the disputed Sydney match to equal its world record of 16 consecutive Test wins and take a 2-0 lead in the four-match series, but lost the subsequent match in Perth and only narrowly held on to the series.

Symonds went to India in April as one of the highest-paid players in the inaugural IPL Twenty20 but was later dropped from the Australian lineup for going fishing instead of attending a team meeting in Darwin ahead of a limited-overs series against Bangladesh.

He said he felt let down by Cricket Australia's handling of the racism row and he missed the four-Test October tour to India which the home team won 2-0.

Harbhajan, who took 15 wickets in the series, ended with 63 Test wickets for the year, one behind South Africa paceman Dale Steyn as the most prolific wicket-taker to Christmas.

Over the course of India's last two series wins, Sachin Tendulkar became the leading runscorer of all time and Anil Kumble retired at No. 3 on the all-time Test wicket-takers list.

"We are working well as a unit... and we all enjoy the success of each other," said paceman Zaheer Khan, voted player of the series in the 1-0 win over England this week. "It's been a great year for Indian cricket."

Australia's position at No. 1 came under the most pressure in a decade with South Africa and India closing in.

The search for able replacements for legspinner Shane Warne and paceman Glenn McGrath — two of the leading wicket-takers of all time — has been slower than Australian selectors had hoped.

As it neared the end of a tumultuous year, a stuttering Australia bowling attack was unable to prevent resurgent South Africa chasing 414 to win last week's series-opening Test in Perth — the second-highest successful fourth-innings run chase in Test history.

It was South Africa's first Test victory in 14 years on Australian soil and put the hosts under enormous pressure in the series, having never won a three-Test series after losing the first match.

South Africa even had the chance to move to No. 1 in the rankings with a 3-0 series win in Australia, but it would need more history to achieve it. The Proteas have never won a series in Australia.

How good is Haydos?

Far out in Kingaroy, Queensland's peanut-growing heartland, Gary Hayden used to rehearse leaving the ball. His young brother Matthew, to Gary's consternation, would almost never let a ball go unhammered, and he has done a lot of hammering and not much leaving ever since. The result is a batting average as bulging as his sun-browned forearms. Bigger than Victor Trumper, Bill Ponsford, Arthur Morris, Hanif Mohammad, Bob Simpson, Bill Lawry, Geoff Boycott, Sunil Gavaskar, Gordon Greenidge, Graham Gooch, Desmond Haynes. Bigger than nearly every opening batsman in history's daydreams. Bigger than 50. Fifty-one-point-three-four. It is a good average. "Poor Matthew Hayden looked as comfortable as a white man on an unescorted tour of a black township." So wroteAge sage Peter McFarline, gazing down on the slingshots and slitherers of Allan Donald and Fanie de Villiers, when Hayden played Test cricket for the first time. And it is McFarline's words, rather than 51.34, that sum up the man's batting right now, as he fronts up for the 102nd time, and for what any dark day soon could be the last time. Nearly three years skipped by after that hostile beginning at Johannesburg's Bullring. At last Hayden surfaced once more. Bill Lawry, in his second Test, had scraped out 130 at Lord's, battered black and blue on a pitch not merely green but sporting an unmistakable ridge at the Nursery End. Hayden, in his, got clobbered on the elbow and stuttered to 5. Fifth ball of the second innings, a Curtly Ambrose straight one, pitched on off stump and deviated not a centimetre. Instead of hammering it, Hayden yanked his bat up high and left it. The MCG laughed, and he was discarded soon after, for three more years. He returned not as Hayden, but Haydos. Feet a yard out of the crease, battleaxe at the ready, bottom sticking out, chest puffed up, a mound of muscle between breastbone and neck, covering his stumps like a sightscreen on tree trunks… With a pinch more imagination, team-mates might have nicknamed him Haydox. Hundreds piled up, against Indians, New Zealanders, South Africans. When he got to 100, he'd draw a cross in the air, then shoot for 200. Someone from the formerly critical press pack asked him what had changed. Hayden's first thought, as Greg Baum has observed, was to reply: "Only your mind." For how long he thought it, and whether he went close to actually saying it, no one knows. But the thought was, on reflection, a touch too hubristic. For one significant change, seldom remarked on, was that Hayden's earliest tormentors - Donald and de Villiers; Ambrose, Courtney Walsh and Ian Bishop - had all conked out. Shaun Pollock's zippiest days were behind him, Chris Cairns' too. The few lethal quicks still in circulation were playing on the same side as Hayden. More hundreds poured forth, against Pakistanis, Poms, West Indians, Zimbabweans - Zimbabweans especially. Haydox was unrammable. All those hours under the sun made his skin glow almost orange; when he took off his helmet, sweaty tufts of hair spiking out in every direction, it was as if Queensland's own Giant Pineapple was bestriding the crease. No critic now thought to query what had changed. But Hayden himself remembered his three seasons of county cricket, not long ago, when bowlers kept ducking balls into his pads and he kept slugging them through midwicket. Was that what had changed - had he converted a weakness into a strength? Or was it that Test bowlers were now bowling like county bowlers? Nineteen Test hundreds was his career's haystack coming up to the 2005 Ashes tour. A couple against India, in 2001, twinkled brightest, two fits of sweeping so majestic as to put Cinderella out of business. Another, his Boxing Day 102 against England, made hearts beat faster under blue singlets. When Craig White bowled to Hayden, spectators beyond the long-on fence jumped for their lives, twice. He was elegantly violent that day. None of these hundreds passed the classic test of greatness: a bewitching pace attack, a tricky pitch, a team in trouble. But that was surely to do with circumstances, not Hayden, and something an Ashes tour would surely rectify. He returned not as Hayden, but Haydos. Feet a yard out of the crease, battleaxe at the ready, bottom sticking out, chest puffed up, a mound of muscle between breastbone and neck, covering his stumps like a sightscreen on tree trunks England had Steve Harmison, Andrew Flintoff, Simon Jones and Matthew Hoggard, and for four Tests Hayden had the horrors. In the fifth Test he played an innings most curious. He edged and groped and miscued and scratched at imaginary scuff marks and edged some more. Australia needed desperately to win. But Hayden went off twice for bad light and was outscored by Justin Langer and draped 138 runs over three murk-affected days. And when the Test was over, the Ashes lost, the selectors let him stay in the team. The hundreds resumed, at the same rate as before, built on the same method too: one giant step forward, then one brutal swing. He made half the textbook look obsolete. Back-foot play? Why bother, mate? The bowlers once more had a happy malleability about them. The trends of the time seemed to suit him: helmets, dead pitches, few quicks, fewer swingers. The old West Indian awesome foursome was by now a clueless threesome. Dillons, Drakeses, Collinses, Lawsons, Blignauts, Ervines, Mahwires, Agarkars, Nehras and Zoysas abounded. Hayden hundreds abounded, as well. And then, three months ago, he encountered a bowler named Zaheer. Another named Ishant. Then Southee and Steyn and Ntini. And when critics now ask him what has changed in three months, it is possible he still thinks: "Only your mind." He never did play an innings like Bill Lawry's at the Battle of the Ridge in 1961. When we think of audacious openers, we picture Gavaskar perplexing irate West Indians under his skull cap and sunhat, Gooch clipping bouncers off his moustache, Hanif swaying and blocking for 16 hours while most others quailed, Trumper whistling up centuries before lunch on uncovered English mudheaps. It is safer perhaps not to put Hayden a rung above them. Safer simply to note that he has given us rich entertainment and hit many hundreds. To entertain and make hundreds in hard situations against great fast bowlers, you need to see those bowlers off sometimes. You need to know when to hammer, when to leave. Or else you get peanuts.

Debutant Duminy lives the dream

JP Duminy: "It's something that definitely I will cherish for the rest of my life" © PA Photos

Test debuts don't come much more rewarding than the one JP Duminy experienced in Perth. He struck the winning runs in the second-highest chase of all time and with the same cover-driven three went to 50 not out, an invaluable innings that helped South Africa forget about their past heartbreaks against Australia. Duminy could have been forgiven for wondering what all the fuss was about.

At 24 and having never played an international of any format against Australia, Duminy was free of the memories of South Africa's previous failures. The significance of the triumph certainly hit home as the squad celebrated that night. Veterans like Jacques Kallis and Mark Boucher have spent more than a decade trying to get one up on these opponents, while many other great names have faded into retirement without tasting that success.

"A lot of the guys got text messages from guys that have been here and they sort of understand what this victory means to everyone," Duminy said. "I think we understand what it means to everyone back home and we're grateful for it. Hopefully we can pull off another victory."

But if Duminy didn't know the pain of losing to Australia he at least knew the disappointment of being a teenage fan of South Africa during some of their lowest moments. As a 15-year-old cricket nut, he watched on in horror as Allan Donald was run-out in the semi-final of the World Cup, leaving the match tied and sending Australia into the decider.

"I've lived through all those days of just near, nearby," Duminy said. "Definitely the World Cup in '99 [was the worst], especially with the run-out, I think I watched every ball of that game, so it was a bit painful."

Now Duminy is doing his part to help write a new chapter in South African cricket. The value of his innings at the WACA cannot be underestimated. When he came to the crease at the fall of the fourth wicket they still needed 111 and he was due to be followed by Boucher and then one of world cricket's less convincing lower orders.

He had also managed only one run in the first innings. Talk about pressure. But he was batting with AB de Villiers, a man he had grown up playing with in under-age representative teams, and rarely did Duminy look flustered as he calmly bunted away danger-balls, lofted the spinners with confidence down the ground, and cut with precision. He didn't look tense. He was.

"I just made sure that I didn't want to portray a sort of nervous, uncomfortable feeling out there," Duminy said. "I was definitely feeling the pressure but my main objective was just to soak up everything and take it ball by ball. Myself and AB spoke a lot in the middle about just facing it ball by ball."

When Duminy left the field the hugs from his team-mates were tighter than those afforded to de Villiers, whose century earned him the Man-of-the-Match award but whose calmness was less surprising as he was in his 47th Test. The captain Graeme Smith could not have been happier with Duminy's effort.

"It's incredible," Smith said after the match. "He's travelled with us for a period of time now, he's watched so many Test matches with us over the last year-and-a-half from the sidelines, probably gaining a bit of experience, seeing what it's all about. He's played his fair share of one-day games now so he's had a taste of it.

"As I said to him now in terms of the pressure he faced today, he's not going to get any worse probably ever in his Test career so he played superbly. A guy at this stage of his career, an innings like that can only really do wonders for him as a person."

His opportunity arrived only because Ashwell Prince hurt his thumb and while Prince is no certainty for the Boxing Day Test, Duminy is resigned to losing his spot whenever the more experienced man is ready. His position may vanish but nothing can erase the mark he left on Test cricket in his debut match.