At the end of the first Test in Perth, a journalist asked if the Border-Gavaskar Trophy was now the greatest bilateral contest in the long-form game. This was not an unreasonable question because Australia was the dominant Test-cricketing nation for twenty years before being consistently beaten over four series, home and away, by India. At the same time, India’s near-invulnerability at home and much-improved record away gave it a reasonable claim to being the new champion of Test match cricket. It led people to argue that the series between the former No. 1 and the current No. 1, the top two sides in the world currently, were the summit of contemporary cricket.
Michael Vaughan, the former England captain and cricket pundit, disagreed. He argued in an article in The Daily Telegraph in November that the Ashes series remained the summit of the bilateral game because they were so old and so storied. The fact that they didn’t involve the two best teams in the world any more didn’t diminish their box office value because champion teams might come and go but the Ashes go on forever. By this, Vaughan meant that the rivalry between Australia and the West Indies, when Caribbean teams led by Clive Lloyd and Vivian Richards dominated the long game, epic though it was, hadn’t endured. With the decline of the West Indies, the Frank Worrell Trophy became a shadow of the contest it once had been, dwarfed by its fabled history.
Vaughan had half a point. The Ashes have a grip on the cricketing public’s imagination that other contests don’t. It starts with the name. From the satirical obituary notice to the little wooden urn that completes the myth of origin, the Ashes are that clever thing: an insider joke that everyone’s privy to.
The post-imperial English are the greatest heritage gardeners in the world. No other culture cultivates tradition, real or invented, more diligently. The late Victorian pink terracotta pavilion at Lord’s and the gasworks at the Oval are just two examples of how English cricket grounds are invested with history. Watching a Test on television should be a homogenous business, given the sophisticated multi-camera set-ups that define cricket coverage everywhere, but it isn’t.
The difference between watching a Test match at Feroz Shah Kotla and Old Trafford is the difference between watching a game framed by gutka ads, chain link fences and ugly concrete stands and one played against the backdrop of a period pavilion and checkerboard lawns, the essential elements of an English pastoral.
The fact that the Ashes are played between the two rich, English-speaking countries that founded Test cricket and played it exclusively between themselves for decades supplies a historical depth to which no other contest can lay claim. This history has sustained the rivalry through lopsided periods when mediocre English sides have been comprehensively outplayed by their Australian cousins as has been the case through most of this century.
But as cricket’s economy has shifted decisively towards India, playing India at Test cricket has become lucrative for other cricketing nations and the BCCI has been wooed with frequent series against Australia. There was a time when outstanding Australian cricketers like Dennis Lillee and Greg Chappell could complete their careers without playing a Test in India. That’s unimaginable now because India, thanks to the IPL, is where the money is. The cadence of Test cricket between India and Australia is such that journalists start to ask the question that we began with: has the head-to-head contest between India and Australia eclipsed the Ashes in terms of cricketing quality, excitement and eyeballs?
If the crowds in Adelaide for the first two days of the ongoing Test are anything to go by, the Indian team has galvanised Australia’s cricketing public. Australian fans have piled into the stadium in record-breaking numbers. The excitement about Jasprit Bumrah, the hype around Virat Kohli, the angst caused by consecutive series defeats and the pragmatic acceptance of India’s financial pre-eminence have set up a series for the ages.
But it’s a mistake to try to imagine a new pecking order with India at the top along with Australia for several reasons. First, while Test cricket remains a bilateral game, the World Test Championship has begun to aggregate these bilateral contests into a league that helps decide, every two years, who the champion team in Test match cricket is. India has been a finalist twice, losing first to New Zealand and then to Australia, but the fact that a country outside the self-appointed Big Three (India, Australia and England) won the World Test Championship should discourage hubris.
More important is the inconvenient but unavoidable fact that New Zealand hammered India into total submission in a home series this year. India had beaten all comers at home for a dozen years when New Zealand arrived on its shores without the services of their best batsman and captain, Kane Williamson, and proceeded to whitewash the home team 3-0. India was comprehensively outbowled, first by New Zealand’s seamers and then by its spinners on pitches that were designed to produce home advantage.
The amusing thing about this mauling was that New Zealand had been pulverised by Sri Lanka in a short, two-Test series right before they whitewashed India and they are currently being dismantled at home, by England. The same England that India destroyed earlier this year, 4-1. India could claim that in a roundabout way this proves that India is the best team in the world but it’s probably best not to because this daisy chain logic would allow Sri Lanka to enter the same claim.
We should be content that the Indian sides of the past decade have been the best and most successful teams India has ever produced. In Bumrah, Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja, we have a triumvirate of Indian all-time greats. And yes, there is an argument to be made that India over the last five years has been best Test team in the world.
But none of this should tempt us into assuming that Australia and India are a new duumvirate destined to rule the cricketing world. First, because hubris calls up Nemesis (New Zealand in our case) and second because it’s a form of bad manners. It was infuriating when English pundits, ex-players and commentators began to look forward to the Ashes in the middle of a series being played against India. They did it when Kohli’s team was up 2-1 during the 2021 tour and it made me think, ‘Why don’t you concentrate on the match at hand?’ Treating other teams like dress rehearsals for the ‘real thing’ is a form of rudeness that desis should avoid. We are better than that. The Border-Gavaskar Trophy has made for some wonderful cricket, especially over the last decade, but it’s one of the many contests that make up Test cricket, which is greater than the sum of its bilateral rivalries.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com
