Australia had us at “Hello, mate.” It didn’t come to us through books or news or history. It entered our consciousness one morning before school. Through cricket. When we grow old enough to talk of “my days”, we will talk not of the imagined tranquil greens of England. We will talk of loud, unapologetic cricket from Australia: huge banners, Daddles the Duck, zinc cream on lips and under eyes, the inverted scores, the extra bounce, always sundries and not extras, the feeling of vast open spaces, and viewers dressed for summer while we slowly shivered our way into getting ready for school.
The exact moment of initiation might be different for different people. For me it was Ajay Jadeja running in to catch Allan Border to the hysterical commentary of Tony Greig and Bill Lawry. The catch went on to become part of “Bush Classic Catches” along with David Boon’s juggling effort at short leg off a full-blooded flick during the Tests earlier in the “summer”.
The background music for the package was Europe’s “The Final Countdown”. The David Bowie-inspired space-themed lyrics went beautifully with this theatre of dreams. At that time both represented possibility. Australia was our zeitgeist, our pop culture, our aspiration. It was our America.
Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma and R Ashwin, coming up towards the end of their careers now, and MS Dhoni and Yuvraj Singh before them, were adolescents or touching adolescence during this period. They all grew up wanting to be like Australia, wanting to beat Australia. We walked in to bowl our legbreaks like Shane Warne. When the obsessed Yograj Singh chucked balls at his son from half a pitch’s length, he wanted Yuvraj to prepare for Australia. It was the first accent we picked up. Irfan Pathan started saying “Inshallah, mate” unironically.
To Australia we were nobodies, kids who could never muster the money to buy what their glitzy store was selling. After that 1992 World Cup, it took India eight years to be invited to Australia again. When Australia came to India, they travelled with their own baked beans and Foster’s. They nudged awake the homeless people sleeping at train stations to take their poverty-porn photos, as witnessed by Malcolm Knox in this Guardian piece. A considerable improvement in behaviour from two decades before, when Allan Border wrote of how they would throw money out of their Kanpur hotel windows, only to pour water on the poor people who scrambled for the currency notes.
Then India halted their victory march in 2000-01. The kids were teenagers and young adults now. They would soon join forces with the older lone warriors of the ’90s and start stepping up to Australia, seeking to be their equals. Nothing less would do. Also, the BCCI had become rich and started to throw its weight around. It knew, though, that Australia was a success model to emulate, so it created academies on the lines of the Centre of Excellence in Australia, where some of the Indian kids went previously. The first programme was designed by Rod Marsh. The pace academy in Chennai also brought in an Aussie coach, Dennis Lillee.
One element of the rivalry was in place. The cultures were clashing. India, themselves victims of racism in the past, proved they could be racist to the one non-white player in the Australian team. Under fire, Australia’s hard-but-fair cloak began to disappear. Australia were showing themselves for what they were: hard-nosed, win-at-all-costs elite athletes. The new India saw nothing wrong in it. They emulated it.
The contest on the field was still missing, but India made rapid and dramatic strides. Probably without realising it, their system was engineering batters who were at home in Australia. Pace and bounce didn’t fetter them anymore. With the fitness standards improving, India were now able to throw at Australia a combination of bowlers few others could. The other ingredient for a rivalry was not too far behind: the money.
When Virat Kohli plays the Gabba Test, he will have played more Tests in Australia in a 13-year career than Sri Lanka have done in their entire history. And that’s despite the paternity leave he took on the last tour. India are now like West Indies, who made five Test trips to Australia from 1979 to 1992 and never lost a series, only with a bigger TV audience and expat population.
What we have as a result is a contest that features a better cricketing competition than the more traditional nemeses for these nations – England and Pakistan – provide. The Ashes are rarely as competitive and India-Pakistan contests are bogged down so much by the fear of losing that they often tended to produce dull Test cricket.
The series results in India-Australia Tests over the last decade and a half do tip the scales in India’s favour, but the two teams have been much closer to each other than the results suggest. Since 2007, over 39 Tests, India average 34.04 per wicket against Australia and concede 33.78. That’s a difference of about five runs per Test on average. Each of the ten Test series over this period has had the teams alternate as winners or a difference in averages of under ten runs per wicket. The only longer streak of this kind was the Ashes leading up to 1903-04.
In terms of a pure cricketing contest, only South Africa vs Australia starting from late 2008 to now comes close to the Border-Gavaskar Trophy. South Africa lead 11-10, and the difference in averages is just 0.11. It is arguably a closer contest but not as diverse in terms of attacks. Australia and India compete across a wider set of conditions. South Africa registered a lot of their success when Australia hadn’t yet assembled an attack to rival their all-time best attacks. Since the mid-2010s, it can be argued India and Australia have been fielding teams that are among those countries’ best ever.
Over the last eight years or so, only India have challenged Australia in Australia, and only Australia challenged India in India until New Zealand finally put one past the dominant hosts in 2024. Plus, there was the drama, the politics, the pettiness, the gamesmanship and the moolah to go with it. Not to mention the three knockout matches between these sides in the last four ODI World Cups. The 23-25 head-to-head record in bilateral ODIs since 2007. And 7-8 in tournament play.
The Border-Gavaskar Trophy doesn’t have the rich history and tradition or the post-colonial angst that many teams feel when playing England, but in a brief period of a decade and a half it has created a solid bank of memorable matches, performances and controversies. Together these two teams got over the tragic death of Phillip Hughes, agreeing to changes in the schedule, cautiously trying bouncers before eventually and inevitably letting their competitive natures take over. They have mocked each other’s injuries, made accusations of cheating and pitch-doctoring, tried to injure tailenders with bouncers, and have gone from friendship to hatred to begrudging respect for each other.
One look at the celebration and anticipation of the contest in Australia, Kohli in particular, and you know this is no longer the one-sided love affair of the ’90s, when we were smitten even when India were not playing. Now Australia are much more invested in this than India. Not just because of the money but because this is the contest in Test cricket.
And yet so brittle are sporting empires that India go into the latest edition of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy with people silently fearing the worst. They are a team in transition who have just ended their 12-year home domination with a stunning whitewash to New Zealand. There are no niceties these days, what with result pitches and relentless attacks making blowouts more probable. You can’t rule out one in Australia.
This could also be the last time some legends in these two sides face each other in Tests. If somehow, just for the road, India can go into the last Test with the series still alive – as has been the case in all of the last four series between these sides – these two teams will have serious claims to have taken part in the greatest rivalry in cricket.