Playing It My Way: My Autobiography (29 page)

Rahul got a hundred and both Sourav and I fell in the nineties. Sourav was out for 99 while I was bowled for 92 by part-time off-spinner Michael Vaughan to what was probably the best ball he ever bowled. The ball pitched in the rough outside my off stump and turned a long way to go through the gap between bat and pad to hit the stumps. That we managed to hold on for a draw, thanks to some dour resistance from wicketkeeper Parthiv Patel, a teenager at the time, was an important statement and it laid the foundation for the fightback at Headingley in the third Test.

There was a long gap between the second and third Tests, which allowed us to unwind and refocus. By now we had come to terms with the conditions and were feeling more relaxed. We were enjoying ourselves socially, going out to interesting restaurants to try out different types of food and spending a lot of time together, which is always essential in the middle of a difficult tour.

It was around then that a friend of mine suggested visiting the famous Harry Ramsden’s, in Guiseley in West Yorkshire. This restaurant, I was told, served great fish and chips and Ajit Agarkar and I decided to try out the fare. There was one item on the menu titled Harry’s Challenge, which invited the customer to eat a giant portion of fish, either cod or haddock, served with chips, bread and butter and two other side dishes. If successful, the head chef would personally sign a certificate for the customer. I’ve always been a big eater, so I decided to take on the challenge. I must say I managed the giant portion of fish fairly comfortably and also polished off the salad and other side dishes served to me. The only thing I did not eat was the chips, which I thought might be just a little too fattening. Impressed with my performance, the chef signed my Harry’s Challenge certificate all the same.

The wicket was very damp at the start of the Headingley Test on 22 August 2002. Despite this, we decided to bat first after winning the toss. We were all in agreement that we should put runs on the board and try to put the English under pressure. Sehwag got out early but then Rahul Dravid and Sanjay Bangar, our makeshift opener for the game, put together an excellent partnership of 170 that turned things our way. Batting wasn’t easy on a fresh wicket and they both played exceptionally well, leaving a lot of balls outside the off stump.

I went in to bat in the last session of day one and decided to wear an inner-thigh guard. I had never used one before, even in practice, but Andrew Flintoff was getting the ball to jag back in to the batsmen and I thought the inner-thigh guard might be a sensible protection against injury. However, I soon realized that my stance had completely changed. Normally the forearm of my bottom hand rests on my thigh while I take stance, but at Headingley it felt completely different because of the new guard. I immediately decided to get rid of it and the experiment was never tried again.

In this innings I was circumspect to start with and decided to play out the day, waiting for my opportunity the next morning. Flintoff bowled a hostile spell and I really had to knuckle down. He was getting the ball to swing and bounce and there was not much I could do but defend. The following morning Matthew Hoggard, who had the ability to swing the ball both ways, also bowled impressively, getting the ball to move away from the bat at good pace. Quality outswing is difficult to negotiate and I had to be watchful while playing big drives on the rise. Shot selection in this innings was the key.

Andrew Flintoff produced another really probing spell. He was bowling into Sourav’s body and it was decided that I would face up to him while Sourav, a left-hander, took as much strike as possible against Ashley Giles, who was once again bowling a defensive line to me outside my leg stump. When we went back for tea to the dressing room, Sourav said, ‘
Woh beech wale Flintoff ka spell humne kya jhela yaar.
’ (We did really well to see off Flintoff’s spell.) I couldn’t resist pulling his leg and jokingly said to him, ‘
Humne jhela? Saala maine jhela hain!
’ (Did
we
? I was the one who negotiated Flintoff!) The whole dressing room burst out laughing.

In the third session of the day we shifted gears and launched into the English bowlers, who were gradually starting to tire. It was one of those rare matches in which we refused to take the light even when the umpires offered it to us. We were dominating proceedings and there was no reason to go off.

In the end the umpires came up to us and said that as they could not see the ball they were calling it a day. I was unbeaten on 185 and we had a mammoth score on the board. We could not lose the Test match from that position and we already had enough runs for our bowlers to play with. By the time England’s turn came, their task would be even more difficult, because the wicket was becoming uneven and the odd ball had started to keep low. In fact, it was a low bounce that cost me my wicket on the morning of the third day, when I was lbw to Andrew Caddick for 193. We finally declared our first innings at 628–8, one of our highest ever scores on English soil.

The bowlers took over and from the start of the English innings managed to put them under pressure. Kumble and Harbhajan bowled beautifully in tandem in conditions that were not so helpful for spinners and picked up three wickets each in the innings. There were no big partnerships and we kept taking wickets at regular intervals, finally bowling England out for 273 and then enforcing the follow-on. Our huge first-innings score had allowed us to put a lot of fielders in catching positions and we attacked the whole time.

In the second innings, with close to 400 runs in the bank, we kept up the pressure and gave each English batsman a hard time. Even Nasser, who scored a hundred in the second innings, wasn’t spared and there was a lot of banter in the middle. We were all extremely motivated and did not want a single English batsman to settle down and take control. Nobody held back and our bowlers made regular inroads into the English batting. Each wicket was followed by a lot of talk and the new batsman was given a rousing welcome. When Andrew Flintoff got out for a pair, caught by Dravid at slip off Zaheer Khan, our left-arm fast bowler, we knew we were within striking distance of a famous victory. Anil did the rest, picking up four wickets, and we bowled England out for 309, winning the match by an innings and 46 runs.

At Trent Bridge in the previous Test we had played well to draw the match and now we had cashed in at Headingley. Kumble bowled his heart out for his seven wickets in difficult conditions and all the other bowlers – Zaheer, Ajit Agarkar, Sanjay Bangar and Harbhajan – chipped in with important wickets.

We followed up with another very good performance at The Oval. Rahul played a gem of an innings and his 217 allowed the rest of the batting to revolve around him. This match had special significance for me because it was my 100th Test. I was nervous and excited on the morning of the game and the chief executive of Surrey County Cricket Club, Paul Sheldon, presented me with a commemorative plaque. A special announcement was made and when it was my turn to bat people were expecting me to carry on from where I had left off at Headingley. I hit some good shots on my way to my half-century, but then I unexpectedly got out to a ball I completely misread.

I could see the ball in Caddick’s hand as he was about to start his run-up and it was clear that the shiny side was on his right side, or the on side. With normal swing, that would indicate an outswinger, so I said to myself here’s an opportunity for a big drive and I was ready to play the ball between mid off and cover. To my complete surprise, the ball came
in
a long way and hit me on my heel. I have rarely been beaten so comprehensively and was out plumb lbw. The ball had reverse-swung and it was the first and only ball that did so in the innings. In normal circumstances Caddick didn’t bowl big inswingers, but got the ball to cut in to the batsmen. On this one occasion he somehow got the ball to reverse-swing a mile. It was particularly difficult to deal with because it was a Yorker-length delivery.

It was unusual for me to misread a bowler’s swing in that way, as I normally backed myself to work out what the bowler was up to by watching the ball in his hand. For example, every time Ben Hilfenhaus, the Australian fast bowler, held an old ball cross-seam, I knew he would bowl a bouncer – and I would be prepared for it. This strategy came in handy during the India–Australia series in India in 2010, when I managed to score a double hundred in Bangalore. Similarly, I noticed that the Pakistan fast bowler Shoaib Akhtar would swing his bowling arm twice before he delivered his effort ball as he tried to generate more pace into the delivery. Again, I would be prepared for it.

As for spin bowlers, I have always monitored a bowler’s release point to work out what the bowler was planning. In the case of the Sri Lankan legend Muttiah Muralitharan, he would have his thumb on top of the ball when bowling a doosra. For his normal off-spin deliveries, he had his thumb below the ball. We once had a conversation in the dressing room on how to pick Murali’s doosra and I told everyone that all they needed to do was watch his thumb. One day, we were practising at the SSC Ground in Colombo when Murali came to the ground. Bhajji decided to go up and ask him how to bowl the doosra. Murali told Bhajji to use his thumb to support the ball from the top – that was the secret. I had no idea about this conversation until Bhajji told me later. I felt very gratified that I had worked it out for myself.

Being able to spot the doosra helped me a lot, and not just when I was batting. When I did an over of commentary during the final of the IPL in May 2013, I said on air that Bhajji had just bowled a doosra to dismiss the South African fast bowler Chris Morris. Morris had played for conventional off-spin when the ball had actually gone the other way. The commentators, including Harsha Bhogle on air, said they were impressed because they had not been able to pick the doosra and the replay had not yet been shown.

I should also say here that there were other occasions when I found it difficult to figure out what a bowler was planning to do. One bowler I found particularly challenging in this respect when I first faced him was the New Zealand fast-medium bowler Dion Nash. His action was such that I thought he would bowl inswingers at me, which he never did. I got out to Nash on the flattest of decks because I played for the inswinger when the ball was actually an outswinger. Eventually I worked him out, and even got a hundred against him in Wellington, but it did take me a while to do so.

Another bowler I had great difficulty picking at first was the West Indian left-arm fast bowler Pedro Collins. I had first seen Collins in a practice match during our May–June 2002 tour of the West Indies, when he bowled our opening batsman Wasim Jaffer with a big inswinger. I made a note that here was a bowler who started with inswing early on. Accordingly, in the next few innings I played for this inswing, only to see the ball leaving me and I ended up nicking deliveries behind the wicket. I was out to him three times and didn’t last more than two or three balls in each of these innings. Midway through the series, I spoke with a number of West Indies players and I was told that actually Collins hardly ever bowled inswing – he normally got the ball to angle away from the right-hander. So by the time of the final Test in Jamaica I was more confident against him and I managed to score 86.

The best bit about dealing with Collins, however, happened in India when the West Indies visited in November 2002. By then I had fully worked him out and had started to consciously watch the shine to tell which way the ball would be moving, because he was reverse-swinging the ball. If the shine was on the outside I would even leave balls pitched on middle stump because I knew that by the time the ball passed the stumps it would be close to the sixth or seventh stump. This frustrated Collins and after a while he realized my strategy and decided to go round the wicket. That’s when the mind games started. He did all he could to stop me seeing the shine of the ball. He ran in from right behind the umpire so that he wasn’t in my line of vision. To counter this strategy, I deliberately pulled away once or twice and subsequently asked the umpire to crouch. I said I wasn’t able to see the bowler and did not know when he was about to deliver the ball.

Then I did something completely unorthodox. I decided not to take my stance when Collins was at the top of his run. Instead, I moved to the off side so that I could see how Collins was holding the ball. I knew once he started running in he couldn’t change the grip and I had just enough time to come back and take my stance. It was actually hilarious: a batsman standing wide of off stump, craning his neck to see a bowler’s grip. It’s not an everyday sight in international cricket. The strategy worked surprisingly well and I more than made up for my bloopers against him in the West Indies earlier in the year.

The Headingley win, which helped us to draw the Test series, followed a memorable victory in the NatWest tri-series, making it a fabulous English summer for India. England, Sri Lanka and India were the three teams playing for honours and we met England in the final after playing each other three times in a round-robin format. The final on 13 July was one of the most exciting one-day internationals of my career, and it is still fondly remembered by scores of Indian cricket fans.

All the way through the NatWest series I had been in good form, with two hundreds in the six pool games. We had successfully chased down several high scores and we weren’t overawed by the England total at Lord’s. Rather, we were silently confident of reaching the steep target of 325. We started the run chase well, with Sehwag and Sourav scoring freely and laying a brilliant foundation. However, as often happens in cricket when you are chasing a big total, we lost a number of quick wickets and slipped to 146–5 in no time. I was out bowled trying to cut a ball from Ashley Giles. By now the mood in the dressing room had turned sombre and nobody was speaking – until Yuvraj Singh, the talented left-handed batsman, and Mohammad Kaif, a right-handed middle-order batsman and excellent fielder, started an unlikely recovery act. They were scoring boundaries freely and at no point did the asking rate go beyond manageable limits.