August 15, 2007	Wednesday	Sha’aban 1, 1428

LONDON, Aug 14: For the third time since they first played their inaugural Test series against them in England in 1932, India did beat the odds to win a series against the hosts in England.

The drawn decisive third and final Test at The Oval on Monday earned the Indians the series 1-0 by virtue of their victory at Trent Bridge.

In 1971, Ajit Wadekar’s team had won their first series here and in 1986 it was the great all-rounder Kapil Dev who made it happen for the second time. A jubilant Rahul Dravid squad deserved to win the series as much because in the final reckoning they were the ones who looked a better team.

It surely was a huge leap for them having suffered their ignominious exit from the World Cup early this year to be condemned by their supporters for the shock ouster before the Super-Eight round.

Saved by the bell in the first Test at Lord’s where a defeat seemed imminent, India improved and progressed in leaps and bounds to outplay the hosts in the second Test at Trent Bridge to go one up in the series winning the match by seven wickets. From then onwards they never looked back and continued to tighten the knots around England’s neck.

Though a lively series, it will however be remembered perhaps for the wrong reason. Having seen all the Indian visits in England since the sixties I do not remember any encounter between them so charged and so unsavoury as has been in this series.

For this surely England is lot to be blamed. They have a reputation of being bad losers. Their series win against the West Indies early in the summer may have spurred them to show a bit of aggression to subdue the quiet Indians. It certainly did backfire though.

To me however it did not come as a surprise when besides sledging at the Indian batsmen, a fist full of jellybeans were thrown at the crease by the close-in fielders when Zaheer Khan walked in to occupy the crease.

Zaheer’s anger and reaction to that therefore was not to be blamed but it certainly fired up the Indian paceman Shantakumaran Sreesanth who later bowled a beamer at Kevin Pietersen and then having bowled a huge no ball walked on to England captain Michael Vaughan at a breathing distance to stare into his eyes.

The referee fined Sreesanth for that, strangely, however, he ignored the antics of the English players.

Successive English teams however have this reputation of behaving poorly when faced with defeat and this surely is not an understatement.

We all remember that from the 1932 Ashes series in Australia when the Mumbai-born England captain Douglas Jardine ordered his bowlers — Harold Larwood, Bill Bowes, Bill Voce and Gubby Allen — to bowl in line of the body of the batsmen instead of aiming at the wicket. As a result the Australian captain Bill Woodfull was hurt and few others too during the series which we still know as the ‘Bodyline’.

Their tactics still failed to contain Don Bradman who finished with an average of over fifty. It also soured the relationship between Australia and England for some time to come.

The behaviour of the MCC ‘A’ team to Pakistan in 1956 was even more insulting and degrading. Led by Donald Carr, the members of the team not only kidnapped the Pakistan umpire Idris Baig from the Pakistan team’s hotel in Peshawar but also assaulted him having taken him to their hotel. The MCC, at the time, were losing the unofficial Test at Peshawar and Idris was being accused of being poor in his decision making.

Threatened with deportation, the MCC captain then wrote an apology as did the then president of the MCC Lord Alexander of Tunis to save the tour. But Carr never played for England again. Ken Barrington, one of the players involved in throwing buckets of water on Idris, did write a detailed account in his biography of the incident.

England’s 1987 tour to Pakistan was as much acrimonious and controversial when Mike Gatting’s England team started to behave badly after they had lost the first Test at Lahore. They had a lot to moan about that Test because I felt then that they were at the wrong end of the stick through some poor umpiring by Shakeel Khan and hence perhaps their reaction.

It was no justification however to react that poorly as they did in the Faisalabad Test when Gatting and his team gave vent to their anger over Shakoor Rana, the umpire in the match. The England captain was accused of incommoding the batsman Salim Malik, moving the fielders behind him when he faced the bowler. And Gatting did not like Shakoor’s allegation, involving himself then in a finger-wagging insulting behaviour which resulted in a day’s play lost in the Test and the tour threatened. Gatting, too, after a couple of years, lost England’s captaincy.

In defeat the English team’s behaviour was not any different on Pakistan’s 1992 tour to England when Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis started to knock the hell out of them. The ball-tampering allegations became a huge controversy.

An enraged Geoffrey Boycott was so angry with England’s attitude that he told the media that Wasim and Waqar are so good that “they could bowl the England side with an orange.”

The annals of history is full of such bloomers by an English team faced with adverse situation. And for this they have been deservedly condemned for their attitude this summer.