"Voh dedh mahina Diwali tha (Those 1.5 months felt like a festival)," quipped an animated Sourav Ganguly with a glint in the eye when he was asked to sum up the 2004 tour to Pakistan. Virender Sehwag, the dasher at the top for India, then quickly recalls buying 25-30 suits for the ladies in his family and being insisted not to pay since he was the 'guest'. The Indian cricketers reminisced about the hospitality, the food and the love they received in Pakistan on a tour whose initial stages were tense, filled with paranoia and uncertainty but ended up being one of the landmark assignments in the cricketing rivalry between the two nations, who act more like bickering siblings than independent democracies run by competent people.
I am obviously talking about the three-episode short documentary series, 'The Greatest Rivalry: India vs Pakistan' that dares to dream and does rise above 'just being a nostalgia-driven ride' but is too afraid to dive deep into the conflict because of which the rivalry exists in the first place. "I think, it's the political garnish," says Ramiz Raja, former Pakistan cricketer and erstwhile PCB chairman on what makes this rivalry great. I may have to correct Ramiz here because the politics might be the whole dish here and actual cricket is more likely to be the garnish.
The India-Pakistan rivalry
At a time when India and Pakistan have mutually agreed not to step foot on each other's doorstep even for the ICC events, the documentary is a timely reminder of what the rivalry was and stood for. Sehwag sending shivers down Pakistan's spine while Ganguly and Co spending hours decoding the basher in the form of Inzamam or Indians behaving like a cat on a hot tin roof, those tours between 1999 and 2008 actually made the contest and the rivalry what it eventually became.
Six runs needed in one ball in an India-Pakistan match after 99.5 overs? If that were to transpire today, the broadcaster would have shown 36 advertisements in between the over. But those were the glory days when Pakistan were also breathing down India's neck. Those were the days when the result of an India-Pakistan match was a mystery, it had to be known through trials and tribulations of 100 overs, through the dogged fight, of neither side giving up, of the classic remontada compared to the watered-down version, which is what we witness today. In recent years where apart from the T20 World 2021 clash, Pakistan just haven't turned up against their arch-rivals, especially since the two teams now only face each other in multi-team tournaments.
So, the 2004 tour of India to Pakistan has been given the heft, weightage and importance it probably deserves because it marked the emergence of the two blood-seeking geniuses on a cricket field, Virender Sehwag and Shoaib Akhtar. Akhtar surprisingly was a profound yet entertaining voice that gave this short documentary series a flavour and a bit of a colour it desperately needed. Akhtar spoke about how India vs Pakistan is not like any other match because the spectators come to watch these games with the baggage of the political, geographical and diplomatic history between the two nations. Sehwag amid all the fluff took me as an audience and a cricket nerd a little into his mind as to how to decipher a madman like Akhtar.
Getting dismissed to someone like Akhtar — who has a rhythmic flow to his run-up, a monstrous presence on the field and a mindset of forcing the batter to bite the dust on your India debut, which is and will be sacrosanct to anyone representing their country on the world stage for the first time — can be heart-wrenching. Here the narrative sort of removes its onion peel when Sehwag speaks about consulting psychologists and getting actual help to get rid of the negative thoughts. What Akhtar did to him five years ago, the whole episode played like a broken record in his head and Sehwag admitted that even taking help didn't actually work before the sleeping Kishore Kumar inside him woke up and then the tormentor went on to play what is probably the innings of a lifetime by an Indian cricketer in the Multan Test.
Verdict
However, revelations like these were scarce not letting you fully engage with it. When the nearly two-hour-long series eventually ends, there is a bittersweet feeling inside you as to what really could have been achieved by Chandresh Narayanan, Chandradev Bhagat, Stewart Sugg and the team. It almost seemed like the makers were coerced at gunpoint not to spend much time on any other subject apart from the 2004 tour. They were always in a hurry to just finish it off while giving very little access. The emergence of the IPL and Indian and Pakistani players playing for the first time alongside each other and the subsequent simmering conflicts and bans are flipped through like pages of the book as if they were forbidden.
"It was named friendship tour but when a pumped up Shoaib Akhtar is running at you at 150 km/hr, there is no friendship there," stated Ganguly, who came up with some terrific one-liners on the coronation of the 2004 tour of Pakistan. The leaders and ministers always resorted to cricket diplomacy in umpteen failed attempts to get the two states closer but that's not the case anymore. The enmity has only risen and like several of us, the likes of Sunil Gavaskar, Inzamam ul Haq and Ramiz Raja reiterated their stance of hoping for some resolution but the depth of those scenes was of a doughnut hole. The series ultimately remains surface-level and plays to the gallery unlike the relations between India and Pakistan which continue to be complex and hostile.
The documentary series is now streaming on Netflix.
