Goodbye Monkeygate
Farewell to Australian domination, welcome to a new era of Indian Cricket

By Gautam Bhimani
Déjà vu. Perhaps the only way to describe Team India’s triumphant touch down at Mumbai’s Chattrapati Shivaji International Airport less than six months after the team brought back the Twenty20 World Cup trophy to the very same chaotic arrival lounge, albeit from a different corner of the southern hemisphere. The similarities were uncanny. A near identical young squad, injected with a generous dose of impish inventiveness and fervent fearlessness by Mahendra Singh Dhoni had been victorious in South Africa and in Australia. The differences were subtle. A different airline. The longer form of the abbreviated game. And on both occasions a few unknown heroes had emerged. A shy youngster who had been bred on the discipline of cleaning his family mosque in Baroda had opened the batting in Johannesburg. An equally reticent, almost tongue-tied all rounder from Meerut, who had cheated destiny and steered away from the path of his family wrestling tradition, was man of the match in Brisbane. Both Yusuf Pathan and Praveen Kumar had sat on the window seat and had gazed incredulously into the endless horizon, partly trying the avoid the incessant gaze of fellow passengers and hungry media sharks, but also trying to come to terms with their new found conquest, as if the answer lay latent in one of the indecipherable cloud patterns at 34,000 feet.

Despite all the similarities, the T20 event, true to the nature of the format, finished almost in the blink of an eye. India’s tour down under was very different. If fast, festive and furious could describe the former, then fatigue, furore and frustration would be more apt in Australia, not only because of the highly charged competitive cricket being contested but because of events off the field that often bordered on the ridiculous.

More than the result itself, the end of the Test Series was all about goodbyes. Goodbye to the white flannels. Goodbye to Australia for three of India’s fab four, VVS Laxman, Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly, who slunk out of Adelaide as the Harbhajan hearing took centrestage. And, once that infamous hearing did conclude in the South Australian capital, it was Goodbye to Monkeygate (or was it!). And, it was Goodbye to Michael Clarke’s single status, as the speculation of his impending engagement to model Lara Bingle did the rounds. But the one goodbye that was hogging all the headlines and was likely to linger for a while yet was Goodbye to Gilly.

Even after the eventful Test series, controversy did not go away. And as India began to put it over their favoured opponents, the distractions began to emerge yet again.

After the first final in Sydney, “Poison Weed” screamed one headline, picking up off what squeaky clean Matthew Hayden had said about the feisty turbanator. No reference in the headlines (or the first seven paragraphs of copy for that matter) to the fact that the home team has gone one nil down in the best of three finals series. One had to turn to a small corner on page 33 to see a report on the game. The maestro Sachin Tendulkar had played a master stroke of a knock and notched his first ever three figure score in Australia, and the photographs dominating the pages were those of ‘Harby’ going bananas.

After the second final in Brisbane, the headlines and lead stories spoke of Gilly’s finale, and again waxed eloquent about the exiting legend. Accompanying the farewell tales, was a photograph of Andrew Symonds shoulder barging a tresspassing streaker, and an editorial take on whether he may or may not be censured for his actions. No reference to fact that yet again, in a space of three days, the world champion cricket team had been thoroughly outplayed.

The tour that had been touted as Gilly’s farewell lived up to its billing. The only difference was that it turned out to be a farewell to Australia’s domination, both in the war of the willow and the war of words. And end of one era, and the beginning of a new one for a young fearless generation of Indian cricket.