The famous 2001 Test win against Australia was as much about “the” Dravid-Laxman partnership, as it was about how Harbhajan Singh’s closing traps sent the famed Aussie line-up on a 16-match-streak, going on 17, scrambling.
It left Ricky Ponting especially haunted. “Alone, helpless,” are some of the feelings he could never forget, even though there was a bizzare take-away from his bowling that he holds dear and uses to lighten up the heart, talking about the Ides of March Test series loss, in his autobiography, ‘Ponting at the close of play.’
In his memoir written with additional credits to Geoff Armstrong, Ponting details the mood from the Aussie camp, and how his batting unravelled, under sustained pressure frim Harbhajan. But the Tour had started on another grim note. “There was a sombre mood in the Australian camp when the news (about Sir Don Bradman’s passing) came through, but it had been apparent to me from the first time I stepped foot in this country that Indians revered the Australian batsman and often knew more about him than we did,” Ponting writes. “To see his passing marked with such solemnity and dignity in a country so far from home was an experience that left an impression on all of us.”
On the field things had begun upbeat for the No 3, who had scored 56 and 68 in an A game — the first in which Harbhajan had played. So even after Turbanator dismissed Justin Langer and Mark Waugh in his first 10 overs, Ponting wasn’t concerned. “But given the confidence I’d garnered from those twin half centuries, I was hardly quaking in my boots as he moved in to bowl. Maybe I should have been,” he quips.
In the Test, Bhajji’s first delivery spat up off a length, took the shoulder of Ponting’s bat, on to the top of his pad and ballooned meekly out to the fielder at short leg, the Aussie recalled. “As I walked off, I was in somethingbif a daze, with the same thought going around in my head: I did everything right…but I got out,” he wrote.
The impact went deeper than he’d initially cared to admit at the start of the Tour. “In one ball the faith I had in my technique was shattered. I can’t begin to stress what a profound effect that delivery had on me. When it came to playing off-spin on Indian wickets, suddenly I was shot,” Ponting writes.
Nevertheless, Adam Gilchrist teed off to a century in 84 balls and Matthew Hayden confounded Indians by sweeping just about everything, Ponting noted. Australia won by 10 wickets extending their Test win streak to 16, dating back to Zimbabwe in October 1999.
In a semi-jesting tone (or not, it’s unclear), Ponting recalls how his bowling might have changed destinies, but it quite pointedly, didn’t.
“We might have won 17 if fate and the umpires had been kinder to me in . This was the Test we looked to have wrapped up after three days, but then VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid batted right through Day Four, a turnaround that ended with the home team becoming only the third side to win a Test after following on,” he recalled. Ponting would dub it an extraordinary performance from Laxman and Dravid, given they batted against McGrath, Warne, Gillespie.
He however fancied himself a partnership breaker bowling his gentle probing mix of hurls.
“What people don’t remember is that the bowler who came closest to breaking their epic partnership was a bloke named Ponting, who would gave dismissed Laxman in his second over if only his captain gad given him two slips (instead, the edge ran down to third man for four) and who to this day believes he had Dravid plumb lbw in the last over before lunch. How the Umpire didn’t give that one is something I’ll never understand…” he mock-rants in his book.
It hadn’t helped that his teammates didn’t quite chorus with chagrin. “When Gilly gave the umpires an absolute gobful at the conclusion of this Test – a tirade for which he somehow escaped scrutiny – I don’t think he was particularly thinking about this one (Ponting bowls), more a few lbw decisions on the final day, but he should have included it, because it was just as contentious,” he wrote.
He bowled couple more overs after lunch and returned only when Laxman was in 250s, and Dravid approaching 150, the lead around 300, when his interpretation of what panned out offered him some solace.
“It was a bowling change that brought a surprising reaction from Dravid, a batsman who was averaging more than 54 in Tests. It was unbearably hot and Junior (Mark Waugh) and Warnie had been bowling spinners, so it was hardly a shock that Dravid was batting with a wide-rimmed white hat, but when hecsaw I was going to bowl he quickly called for a helmet. Maybe his brain was scrambled after batting for so long, or perhaps he thought one if the quicks was coming back on, but I took it as a bizarre compliment to my gentle medium-pace bowling,” he penned.
“It was about the only good thing to happen all day.”
The state of his batting though, continued to aggravate. Ponting was boggled because he got twin centuries in Tour games, “But I was all over the place as soon as Harbhajan got the ball spinning in Tests.”
In Ponting’s first innings in Kolkata, he played across the line of a quicker, straight ball and was plumb lbw. In the second he played a self-admittedly “awful, premeditated half sweep shot first ball and was caught at short leg once again.”
Things compounded in the third Test.
At , Ponting came down the track and got stumped, and then in the second inning decided to go down swinging. “After I lifted Harbhajan for one big six, he did me for length and I gloved a catch to the finer of the two short legs,” he wrote.
The overall feeling was of despondency bordering on acute helplessness.
“My dismissal in the first Test haunted me – I did everything right but still got out. That thought stayed in my head, and because I felt lonely yet trapped out in the middle, close in catchers all around me, and the ball spinning like a proverbial top, I panicked,” he wrote about his then 27-year-old self.
“I started sweeping and looking for chances to go over the top, but against a bowler as good as Harbhajan, on pitches that were turning, that was never going to work.”
The Aussies apparently had nobody to patch up broken self-beliefs, and Buchanan and Steve Waugh cop it from Ponting for not being too useful as he was falling apart.
“No one in my set up was able to help me sort out my problems against an excellent off spinner on these type of wickets. I certainly wasn’t being helped when my captain and coach told me to back myself and to stick to what had worked for me in the past. In the circumstances, they were mere clichés,” Ponting writes.
He admits to realising that his technique against spin was built on Australian pitches, which are truer, where batsmen can predict where ball will go. “In India where degree of bounce and turn is often unpredictable, batting can be much harder. It wasn’t until Mohammad Azharuddin showed me how their batsmen handle turning wickets that I behan to regain my confidence of batting on the subcontinent,” he writes.
Azhar had explained that Indian batters use their feet to hit the ball before it spins, thus narrowing the margin of error. “Or if that’s not possible they wait till the ball has reached the top of the bounce after it’s spun. They never assume the ball is going to behave in a predictable way,” he wrote.
A key skill was reading the length, and Azhar would ask Ponting to throw hands at the ball, to get it past close-in fielders if using the feet didn’t get them to the pitch of the ball.
“Knowing how much I battled in 2001 ad how isolated I felt was something I remembered for a long time and I made sure when I was captain I was always there for players who struggled. Later in my captaincy, I became a part-time batting coach, a role I never resented. It was a calling almost.”
Ponting, the coach was birthed in that torrid 2001 Tour.
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