Sourav Ganguly was dropped for the Irani Trophy game after a poor showing in Sri Lanka © AFP

Admittedly the Big Four – Ganguly, Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman – didn’t have a good series in Sri Lanka. The batting cost India victory and Ganguly’s form was the poorest. As such, I wasn’t surprised when he was dropped for the Irani Trophy game.

Having said that, we’re about to enter a long and interesting Test match season – and it would be appropriate and fitting for Ganguly to walk out after a gripping innings in an international match, at the peak of his authority, having taken his own decision. Yet, time is running out for that aspiration. He says he has another two years in him, I’m not too sure. A few matches and perhaps part or even all of the coming season is plausible. Two years? Too long. India can’t wait

Having successfully rebuilt its one-day side after the trauma of the 2007 world cup and Greg Chappell’s fiendish reign, India has to willy-nilly effect a gradual generational change in the five-day squad as well.

The batting prospects look good. Sehwag and Gambhir seem settled as openers. Rohit Sharma, S Badrinath and Suresh Raina will be contenders for middle-order slots and, to my relief, the irresistible Mohammed Kaif is back in favour. Kaif should never have been outof favour. He was never given a chance to fail, only dumped unceremoniously even after decent innings. In contrast, Yuvraj Singh had his chances but has become India’s leading ODI game-changer rather than Test match mainstay.

With a new foursome – Kaif, Sharma, Badrinath and Raina – at the edge of the Test team, the selectors would need to calibrate the rejuvenation of the middle order. One by one, piece by piece, the brilliant veterans will have to be replaced. This is a special, delicate moment. India’s finest middle-order line-up is about to hand over responsibilities to a successor generation. It calls for enlightened action and sense of dignity from all concerned – the Old Guard, the Young Pretenders and the BCCI officialdom.

Granted Tendulkar will go only when he wants to and granted Laxman will probably be chaperoning the new middle-order, as the youngest and only survivor from the immediate past, for longer than many imagine. Even so, some harsh decisions will be called for. By the time India begins playing the first Test match in New Zealand at the end of March 2009, at least two names in the batting list should be playing for the future, not batting from memory.

Postscript: Ganguly’s far from done. It’s become a bit of a cliché to suggest that former cricketers or even outgoing cricketers have a lot to contribute but, often enough, it is difficult to find precise roles. Ganguly’s reputation as a fair-minded risk-taker, the rare Indian captain who was not just articulate but non-parochial too, makes him a shoo-in for the chief selector’s job.

Using the special powers now given to him to, essentially, appoint anybody he wants as selector, the BCCI president should fast-track Ganguly, as soon his playing days are over, into the job. He’s too committed to Indian cricket and too unprejudiced a mind to be left writing newspaper columns.

	You had to be there © Getty Images

“What’re you watching so quizzically?” I asked. “It’s Kapil Dev,” she said, “I wonder what he’s doing on television.” “It’s the 25th anniversary of the World Cup victory. It’s probably a silver jubilee special.” “Twenty fifth?” she rolled her eyes, “who cares ...”

I stared back, smiled what I thought was a wry smile and tucked into my chicken tikka masala. It was not that I had nothing too say; it was that I had too much. The welter of emotions that June 25, 1983, triggers within me – or, indeed, a few million others of my generation, give or take some years – is too personal and too complex to adequately convey to someone much younger or from another country or culture. At lunch on Sunday, my niece was another country.

In a sense you have to be English to fully understand what the 1966 World Cup meant for your society. For that matter, you have to be Pakistani to fully appreciate what the 1992 cricket World Cup victory stood for. It would help, of course, if you’d been around to watch those games, or just experience them on radio or television.

I was 14 that summer, and on June 25 my parents dragged me to the engagement of a close family friend’s daughter. It was a quiet, private party – about 30-40 people in an apartment. It was soon apparent that everybody’s mind was elsewhere. The engagement date had been fixed months earlier, well before anybody knew how the Prudential Cup would turn out.

Yet, as it happened, it now coincided with the Big Day. I’d seen most the Indian innings at home, but as the party picked up pace, India began to pick up wickets. The couple was urged to exchange rings double quick, chairs and sofas were moved around, and the party crowded before one small television. Even dinner – an elaborate spread it was, since the girl’s father owned a swish restaurant – was served in between overs, right by the television.

To cut a long story short, the party ended early, and everybody drove home manically to catch the last few wickets, and announce victory. It often struck me in later years that few actually wanted to stay back and watch the whole match at the party venue itself. As victory moved from possibility to probability, people began to reach for their car keys.

It was if they wanted to be in their individual homes when the magic moment arrived. I suppose you can party anywhere, but you have to be home for Diwali, or Christmas or Id. June 25, 1983, was a day vested in sacredness.

For me, the moment was particularly and doubly sweet because justice had been done. Mohinder Amarnath was my favourite cricketer, a boyhood hero who I thought had been treated unfairly by the selectors and the Bombay lobby that then ruled Indian cricket – it still does, but that’s another story. The Prudential Cup completed a dream comeback for him. He’d stood up to Imran Khan in the winter of 1982-93 as all around him crumbled; he had hooked and hit his way to runs and glory against the West Indies – India’s only series in the Caribbean while facing the pace quartet – earlier in the year; and he had made the World Cup his own.

I guess it’s not just age that causes me to remember 1983 more than other years, other victories. Adelaide in 2004 and Perth earlier this year; the Test series triumph in that remarkable tour of Pakistan in 2004; the brilliant burst that took India, after a faltering start, to the 2003 World Cup final – there has been much to cherish in recent years.

Having said that, the 1983 moment still stands out, simply because it was, for that period, so unusual. India rarely won anything significant those days. In the immediate past, we’d beaten West Indies, Australia and England at home, but all of them were second-rate sides, without the Packer players or some top star or the other. The victory against Pakistan in 1979-80 was memorable but came, except for the final two Tests, in the absence of Imran Khan. Imran himself showed up India’s batting as sub-prime in the 1982-83 series.

That was a time when the average, reasonably informed cricket fan could recount which Indians had scored centuries at Lord’s and newspaper writers still saw that, for some reason, as a pinnacle of achievement. Today, even Ajit Agarkar has scored a century at Lord’s.

The 1983 team was not India’s best ever. I would argue that the 2003 World Cup finalist XI had a better batting line-up and, with the exception of Kapil – who I would happily have had for the then tyro Zaheer Khan – a better bowling attack as well.

Yet, the XI Good Men of 1983 were honest cricketers. They had what illustrious predecessors and successors have sometimes lacked – pluck, grit and courage. Kapil hit 175 not out coming in at 9 for 4. Don’t forget, Roger Binny, Madan Lal and Syed Kirmani supported him at the other end for close to 250 runs. Yashpal Sharma and Amarnath were not history’s most elegant batsmen – but I’d want them on my side at Armageddon.

In many ways, the fact that Twenty20 and IPL have taken over cricket in 2008 has completed a circle that began with the Prudential Cup. Starting 1983, the limited-overs game – F50, to use today’s argot – was recognised as one for bits-and-pieces cricketers: those who could bat a bit, bowl a bit, chase the ball hard in the outfield. Madan Lal and Binny were never going to be Test match greats but they were invaluable in an ODI.

Twenty20 has inverted the pyramid. It’s brought back the specialist. Only an outstanding bowler – Glenn McGrath comes to mind – can restrict runs or even hope to bowl a maiden over in this format. As for front-ranking batsmen, they have a huge role coming in at the top of the order. The middle or late order is not always as important in a Twenty20 game – for the most part, either your first four batsmen win the match for you or you lose.

In 1983, it was so different. The mouse roared, the little man punched above his weight. On a Sunday evening 25 years ago, we were all kings for the rest of the night.

On June 25, 1983, India won the Prudential Cup. The run-up to the silver jubilee has been marked by silly controversies and spurious theories. This (June 1) morning in The Pioneer, I looked back at simply the cricket

	For cricket fans of a certain generation, June 25, 1983, remains, quite without question, the date of their lives © Getty Images

Before the Delhi Daredevils, there were Kapil’s Devils. For cricket fans of a certain generation, June 25, 1983, remains, quite without question, the date of their lives. It was the day India won the Prudential Cup and a bunch of nine journeymen and two all-time greats (one of them, Sunil Gavaskar, a trifle out of form) pulled off the biggest miracle in Indian sport.

India has won much since. Especially in the past decade, after the Sourav Ganguly-John Wright duumvirate took Indian cricket into the 21st century, literally and otherwise, and introduced it to a modern idiom, India has reached an ODI World Cup final, won the Twenty20 World Cup, won Test matches in Australia, Test series in England, Pakistan and the West Indies. Yet, a flurry of success and a hyperactive cricket media environment make remembering dates and landmarks impossible.

It began with a sign from the gods, but few chose to read it. On June 9, India took on the West Indies and helped by a plucky 89 from Yashpal Sharma gave the Goliaths from the Caribbean Islands something to chase. Rain interrupted play that day and the match continued on June 10. Incredibly, despite a never ending last wicket partnership of 71, the West Indies lost. It was their first defeat in three world cups, but critics preferred citing it as an early aberration rather than evidence of a maturing of Indian one-day cricket.

The rest of the story is well-known. There was Kapil Dev’s 175 not out in a victory against Zimbabwe that ultimately proved inconsequential. India still had to beat Australia in the final league game, which it did, with Roger Binny and Madan Lal taking eight wickets between them.

The match that showed the new Indian steel was, however, the second one against the West Indies. With Viv Richards scoring an imperious hundred, the defending champions won. Yet, India battled grittily. Mohinder Amaranth scored 80 ignoring short-pitched bowling and blows on the body. Dilip Vengsarkar was hit in the teeth and had to retire hurt. It was an honourable defeat; there was no surrender.

In a strange, pre-modern media age, Indians got to hear of the early stages of the Prudential Cup on the radio and courtesy BBC commentary, but saw none of it. Only two matches were telecast live – the semi-final against England and the final itself. Even here, telecast was interrupted by that old Doordarshan chestnut: “Satellite link is temporarily not available”.

To anyone who watched those two pulsating, drama-filled matches, almost every ball was etched in memory for years afterwards. The 60-overs a side limited-overs match – what would you call it today: S60? – was far closer to Test cricket than, well, sometimes even contemporary Test cricket is.

In the semi-final, England set India a target of 214 in 60 overs, an asking rate of just about 3.50. Today, it would seem a joke. Then, in the cautious words of one television commentator, it was described as “gettable”. After the openers went, Amarnath and Sharma – India’s unlikely middle order heroes in an entirely unlikely ODI tournament – grafted and defended and built their innings.

Then, just as all of those before their television sets felt it was too late, the Indians opened up. An array of boundaries followed. Sandeep Patil came in and hit a 32-ball 50 – yes, there was fast scoring even before M.S. Dhoni! – and India was in the final.

The final itself is, at least for this cricket fan, not so much a match as a blur of images – Balwinder Sandhu’s banana in-swinger that bowled Gordon Greenidge as he shouldered arms; Jeffrey Dujon slapping the turf on being deceived by a slower one from Amarnath (did he ever bowl a faster one?); Amarnath again ambling in to bowl and hitting Michael Holding high on the pad.

Each of those dismissals was meaningful. Greenidge’s departure meant that the West Indies didn’t get the quick, smooth start they wanted. With Dujon ended the West Indies’ last chance – from 76 for 6, wicketkeeper Dujon and Malcolm Marshall had taken the score to 119. In getting Holding, India got hold of the World Cup. It was all over.

Like Tololing or Tiger Hill in another contest, another time, India eventually won the Prudential Cup inch by inch, besting the West Indies lower order ball by ball, run by run. It was a gripping, low-key but epic final hour.

The morning was sunny. Kris Srikkanth came in and blazed away to 38 – it was an era before Virender Sehwag, remember, Indian openers were only expected to defend and play copybook shots. A rasping square drive on one knee, which sent an Andy Roberts delivery to the boundary, was perhaps the shot of the tournament.

Then, as easily as they had dazzled, the Indians imploded. One hundred and eighty-three seemed no score at all. After the match, Kapil Dev was asked what he had said to his team as he led them out to field. “I told the boys, let’s go and play,” said the prosaic captain, who spoke with deeds rather than words. It was left to Sunil Gavaskar to come up with a more inspirational call: “Chalo jawanon, chal ke ladenge (Onward soldiers, it’s time to fight).”

Greenidge’s lucky dismissal – Sandhu tried to explain later that he had deliberately swung the ball six inches but never mind – only brought in Viv Richards. The King smashed Madan Lal as only he could and the commentary team was speculating on the match being done in 30 overs. It was time for the mother of all miracle moments.

Richards pulled Madan Lal, got it a bit wrong but seemed about to get away with it anyway. The ball climbed, Kapil Dev, running backwards, his eyes only on the ball, grabbed it mid-air. Richards was gone; almost as Richie Benaud was beginning to say: “Richards miscues but it doesn’t matter ... Another boundary for the great man, the West Indies on course for a hat-trick ...”

After Richards walked back, there was a sense of urgency and new energy in the Indians. This wasn’t going to be a walkover, no it wasn’t. This was a team supposed to be split between the Bombay and Delhi/Punjabi camps, between Gavaskar and Kapil. Yet, by the middle of the West Indies innings, the collective brains trust of the Indian team was in business. Gavaskar was pointing to positions, advising Kapil on field placing, while Syed Kirmani and Amarnath watched. When it came to the crunch, the Indians didn’t let each other down. It was a fairy tale; and Cinderella did it with time to spare.

Great events lead to great mythology. Immediately after India’s biggest ODI cricket victory, Dom Moraes wrote another of his incomprehensible essays, attributing the achievement to disagreeable “north Indian nationalism”. I’m still trying to figure out what he meant.

Twenty-five years on, the Prudential Cup has spawned thousands of articles, dozens of self-styled experts and even some anodyne PhD theses – this changed the face of Indian cricket, made it an aspirational calling for young people, introduced money and ODI mania to Indian cricket fans and so on.

Actually, the Prudential Cup of 1983 did little of the sort. True, the winning XIV were feted, met by the prime minister, serenaded by Lata Mangeshkar, a custom-written song (the remarkably unmemorable Bharat vishwa vijeta) and given DDA apartments in Delhi.

Yet, India’s one-day cricket binge was at least four years away, and should correctly be dated to the hosting of the 1987 Reliance Cup. Cricket commerce arrived only in 1993-94, when the Board of Control for Cricket in India sold television rights to private channels and began monetising its key properties.

True, the Reliance Cup would not have happened – India would not have bid for the right to host the 1987 world cup – if Kapil’s Devils had not won. Yet, it is perhaps best to remember June 25, 1983, for what happened that day in London, not for peddling spurious, post facto theories. Every underdog has its day; this month, 25 years ago, we had ours.

	Pushing the limits? © AFP

Are love of cricket and love of India synonymous – or are they, in a contemporary context, mutually exclusive? It’s a question that has troubled me often, most recently when a respondent to one of my posts – which semi-facetiously suggested an Indian batting collapse could inject some energy into a destined-for-a-draw Chennai Test – implied I was being unpatriotic.

Since I’ve never measured patriotism or sense of national identity in terms of worshipping dead-on-arrival pitches, I must say I was left bemused. What amazes me even more – and has amazed me for years – is how much and how easily a certain Indian type of Indian cricket fan manages to work himself into a frenzy over fairly inconsequential fixtures.

I’m not going to pretend I’m an ivory tower intellectual who doesn’t scream, shout, wave his fist and manically thump the television at a particularly engrossing stage in a cricket match. Of course I do. I respond as a passionate fan, occasionally as a passionate Indian.

When an Indian player is reported – unfairly in my opinion – for racism, it makes me boil. When India won the Perth Test recently or the limited overs tri-series finals in Austalia, I exulted, felt vindicated like many other Indians did, and was happy to tell everybody within hearing distance, “It serves those Aussies right.”

Having said this, I find it impossible to get similarly emotionally charged while watching matches as deathly boring as the one that’s just ended in Chennai. Aside from Sehwag’s innings – a tribute to fast scoring and stamina in energy-sapping heat – will I even remember this match? Will anyone?

Later in 2008, India plays a tri-series in Bangladesh in June – almost certain to be interrupted by the monsoon – and hosts England for seven ODIs. Unless it’s a particularly exciting game, do I see myself biting nails and praying fervently for India – My Country, My Team! – to win in the fourth match of that series? Can I be expected to treat it with the same importance and emotional investment as the Perth Test, the ICC World Twenty20 or the CB tri-series final in Australia?

Sport can become a channel for nationalism and feeling for one’s country at landmark moments. I still remember Rahul Dravid hitting the winning run and raising his arms at Adelaide in 2004. I was there in Athens when Rajyavardhan Rathore won that silver medal and I was weeping copiously. Yet, can this happen on a round-the-year basis, from Singapore to Sri Lanka, Nagpur to Napier, or wherever the endless and meaningless Indian ODI itinerary takes my television and me?

I know my answer. If you have another one, good for you.

Technology does strange things to us. It has created a generation of cricket cyber-nationalists who are, for the most part, infuriating. India is the best and the damn the rest, goes the mantra; cricket, in these circumstances, becomes less a sport or a human endeavour to savour, more a vehicle for pet dislikes, obsessions and prejudices.

This is a group whose cricket has a limited geography – being focused solely on India, Indian matches, Indian players – but is also essentially ahistorical. The natural corollary to cricket as hyper-nationalism is cricket as anti-contextual. Usually this translates to: the best is now; or rather, the best is the current player I like. He is unprecedented, there was never another like him.

When I was growing up, there were fellows in school who were devoted to statistics, forever quoting one or the other to make their point. I must say I went through my obsession with statistical trivia as well, I still enjoy it at times, but it doesn’t consume my entire cricket. I’ve outgrown that period, as so many cricket buffs do.

Desktop cricket fanaticism, however, is a re-rendition of this belief that record-books and statistics don’t just embellish cricket, they ARE cricket. Statsguru is a very useful tool provided by Cricinfo and while it can be invaluable for research, it can also lead to some fairly moronic analyses.

The other day, somebody wrote in insisting that Srikkanth was only as effective or fast-scoring in ODIs as Rahul Dravid because they both had a strike rate of (if I recall) “71 per 100 balls”; and that by the strike-rate parameter, Sehwag was a greater batsman than Srikkanth. Since the person has obviously already made up his mind, how do you even begin a discussion on batting-bowling equations, pitch conditions, opposition bowling strengths, the evolution of one-day cricket from the 1980s to now?

Sehwag may well be a better batsman than Srikkanth – though that is a subjective call and surely all 10,000 or 50,000 people watching a cricket match have the right to see events their way and, in a sense, to watch different versions of the same game – but is a strike-rate enumerator going to decide that?

A quick response to the negative mail after my previous post. I wasn't comparing Sehwag's batting to Shastri's. The only point I was making was that the two are among the most gritty Indian batsmen ever: hungry, willing to take a deep breath and go on and on. Both want to maximise the gifts they've been given. This is unusual for Indian cricket, which -- from Jaisimha to Sandeep Patil to Sanjay Manjrekar, to pick three random names -- has been a saga of under-achievers.

While statistics don't tell the whole story, Shastri used his limited talent to hit 200 once; Sehwag, obviously a better batsman, used his greater talent to hit 300 twice.

Second, while I'm happy to doff my hat each time Sehwag entertains me and scores big, and scores quickly, it's a little silly to suggest, as one reader has done, that he's better than V.V.S. Laxman. Hayden has hit a triple-hundred and Ponting has not, but nobody suggests the Australian opener is a greater batsman than his captain.

Let's not lose perspective and nuance here.

I still believe it’s a bad, unequal wicket that doesn’t make for a great contest. I still believe this match is likely to be drawn. Yet, nothing, just nothing can take away from Sehwag’s innings. Every time he scores a century – and 10 scores of over 150 bear this out – he goes on to make a big one. He doesn’t throw it away, there’s a hungry, gritty, run-chewing monster inside him.

It’s tempting to compare Sehwag to K. Srikkanth, another hard-hitting batsman with a quick eye and delightful wrists who, if memory serves me right, got only two hundreds in Test cricket. I remember both those innings – one in Chennai itself, against Imran in 1986-87, and one a season earlier in Australia (which I heard on the radio, but didn’t see). So often, he’d blaze his way to 30 or 40 and then get bored, twirl his nostrils, make some silly error and go home – another of a long list of Indian stylists who scored fewer runs than they should have.

Sehwag started off looking podgy – he is much fitter in real life than the photographs do him credit – but today his stamina spoke for him. It’s remarkable that in team with four batsmen who’re all rated above him, he’s the one who refuses to get out. It would be sacrilege perhaps to mention him in the same breath as Bradman and Lara – the others to have hit two triple hundreds in Tests – but look how he’s polished his limited skills set and where it’s taken him to ... He’s a bit like Ravi Shastri in that sense, only more free-scoring.

These past two years have cost Sehwag a lot – his form, his place in the team, his shot at captaincy. He’s lost that slot to Dhoni and if he decides he doesn’t want it, maybe it’ll just free him up for a long innings as India’s most prolific opener since that day in Mumbai in 1987 when Sunil Gavaskar left the crease for the last time. There couldn’t be two more different batsmen; but only one of them ever reached 300.

Tomorrow, could he make it 400?

What a terribly forgettable day of Test cricket – and to think it came right after the rivetting stuff in Australia. If the rest of the series is like this, these matches will be the best advertisement and pre-publicity for IPL and T20. Part of me is already praying for an Indian collapse tomorrow and a follow on. Else, we’re headed for yet another draw.

To bat in these oppressively hot conditions is torture, to watch shoddy fielding is even more so. Since the BCCI is in such experimental mood these days – having taken to IPL with gusto – why can’t it decide that all Test matches in India between, say, March 15 and October 1 (or between the festivals of Holi and Diwali that traditionally frame the Indian summer), will be played under floodlights. The first ball could be bowled at 5.30 pm.

I know it sounds a silly idea, but it’s better than playing in Kanpur and Ahmedabad in April, as the Indians and South Africans will be doing.

On another note, thanks for the welcoming messages in response to the first post. deepak2 warns me I have my job cut out replacing Mukul. Deepak, I’m not competing; if I manage half Mukul’s success I’ll be happy. Actually, if I blog in a year half as good in terms of playing skills and drama as the one in which he did, I’ll be happy.

To more excitement, and to fewer days like this one!