A quick look at India-Australia rivalry on the cricket field

New Delhi: India and Australia have been big rivals on the cricket field through the decades. It's not just the quality of contests between bat and ball that have made India versus Australia arguably the greatest rivalry of recent times. There have been many ugly, heated and controversial moments on and off the field that have added to the drama and intensity of Test matches between the two countries. Time and again have the situations gone out of hand, time and again has hue and cry been raised, but none can deny the excitement that comes alive when a India-Australia series arrives. It was a rivalry which didn't exist long back. In the famous incident of the 1981 match at MCG, icon former cricketer Sunil Gavaskar staged a walkout and almost foreited the match. A contentious LBW decision by an Australian umpire was the spark and Gavaskar walked off the pitch with his partner Chetan Chauhan. It was only a timely intervention by the team manager that the situation did not run out of hand. But during the last decade, things began to change slowly. Here was an Australian team, who were struggling to keep their dominance in world cricket intact and then there was India, an emerging side trying to establish itself. Self-interests clashed and brought about a torrent of dubious decisions, ugly clashes, enthralling innings, quality bowling and lively cricket matches.Things began to take a different dimension. Indians were strong at home, and nearly invincible for the Aussies. They were getting stronger outside their continent. Aussies were the number one in the world, a league apart from the others. Yet they had difficulty in winning a series in India. Moreover, now India was posing some problems for them in their own backyard. It was too much to digest for the Australian team. The Aussies started to indulge in mind games. They started sledging, challenging, harassing and clashing with the opposition team to unsettle the opposition player's mental balance.Each umpiring blunder was taken as something done intentionally by the common men, though it was never said so and reports only suggested the errors committed. Following are some of the incidents that made contest between these two countries more intresting:Melbourne 1981: Sunil Gavaskar. Ever the gentleman, the man always playing with the spirit of the game, master at keeping emotions in check, lost it that day in Melbourne as after given LBW on 70 off Lillee, Gavaskar insisted he got an inside edge. With Lillee and the Aussies sneering and umpire in no mood to revert his decision, Gavaskar took his partner Chetan Chauhan with him and started walking off. Thankfully Team Manager Durrani stepped in, calmed Gavaskar down and sent Chauhan back to the crease.Chennai 1986-87: Batting under unbearable humid Chennai weather which even the Indian batsmen found hard to cope, a dehydrating Dean Jones played according to Bob Simpson, ‘The greatest inning ever played for Australia' and the match fittingly ended in a tie with Greg Matthews trapping Maninder Singh LBW. Maninder till date mentions that he was not out.Perth 1991-92: ‘Scintillating' and ‘captivating' was what Wisden called it. He was only 18, yet two years into international cricket. But this is when he announced himself, on the fastest pitch in the world against one of the most difficult bowling attacks; 18 year old Tendulkar displayed his class scoring magnificent 114 when others around him were falling in heaps. Tendulkar Vs. Warne 1998: The most awaited clash of the 90s looked like going the Aussie leggie's way when he got Tendulkar early in the first innings. But a turnaround was to follow in the second innings; a turnaround so brilliant that it resulted in Warne having nightmares about Tendulkar even years later. Tendulkar scored a belligerent 155 at a strike rate of 82 with 14 fours and 4 sixes. Warne kept pitching into the rough outside leg and Tendulkar kept putting his left foot away and sweeping him into the ropes and over.Kolkata 2001: John Wright, in his book Indian Summers, the account of his days as the Indian coach, terms it “The greatest comeback since Lazarus'. Wright had a huge role to play in it. It was he who shifted Laxman from no.6 to no.3 in the second innings. Laxman and Dravid fought every odd and from 232-4 whilst following on, they took India to 608 before being separated. They batted an entire day. And India became only the second team in test history to win after being asked to follow on.Adelaide 2003-04: Laxman and Dravid. The pair tormented Australia once again, this time in their own backyard. Ponting scored a double, Australia notched up 556, India 85-4. But Dravid matched Ponting. His 233 and a triple century stand with Laxman meant there was nothing to separate between the teams on the basis of first innings.Then Agarkar had his finest day under the Sun as his six-for wrecked Australia on 196. A target of 233 was tough but gettable. India lost six wickets and at one point when Ganguly left it was anybody's game. But Dravid stayed till the end and got India home with an unbeaten 72. It was only fitting that when he cut MacGill for a boundary to seal victory, Agarkar was there at the non-strikers end. India defeated Australia in Australia for the first time in quarter of a century.Nagpur 2004-05: Australia's final frontier of beating India in India in a test series was achieved in this series. Particularly in this test at Nagpur, where BCCI's internal politics (against the pair of Jagmohan Dalmiya and Ganguly) meant the 22 yards at the VCA stadium had grass so lively that Indian skipper Sourav Ganguly faked injury on the morning of the test, knowing completely well that India were going to be rolled over on that pitch. And they did as Australia won inside four days. Sydney 2008: “There were two teams out there but only one was playing cricket”. A quote last heard during the bodyline series was reiterated at Sydney in 2008, by Indian captain Anil Kumble. What happened at Sydney over those five days was anything but cricket. The ‘Monkeygate' scandal where Symonds accused Harbhajan of calling him Monkey, a racist remark. But much to the frustration of the Australian team Harbhajan was saved, not because he was found innocent but because of a certain defence lawyer named Sachin Tendulkar.However, the umpiring in the game was so bad that it overshadowed that incident. A whopping 13 umpiring errors were made in that game and India were at the receiving end of 10 of them. So it was quite clear that had the umpiring been a little better, India would have at least saved the match and the series. Umpire Steve Bucknor was sacked after the match.