The Chain-Cutting Past: India’s Triumph at Perth

January 23, 2008

The last week will be remembered for a long, long time in our cricketing history, or call it overall Indian history, because cricket now has a stranglehold over milestones in our cricket-crazy country, because we defeated the Aussies at Perth.

The WACA pitch has seen so many merciless, stampeding triumphs by the number one team that the impervious grains carrying the fastest bounce and exuberance on their backs must still be mulling over the fact about what went wrong this time.

The pitch bears so many kangaroo marks and milestones of triumphs, and still manifold tales of tragedies befalling the visiting teams, that the reversal in roles clashes with mighty impetuosity at the sky.

In beating the mighty Aussies at a place where their brand of cricket is utilized to the hilt, and that too after those agonizing, frustrating and distracting anecdotes during the previous Sydney Test, the Indians proved the glittering fundamentals of success in the face of all adversities.

Well, the fundamentals of the route to success are just the same.

You have to take the strongest of lessons from the past, while at the same time you have to forget all the distracting stuff while putting those lessons into application.

There is a very delicate, sharp-edged, fragile line between remaining lost and mired up in the past, and analyzing the past mishap to churn out a plan of success for the future.

The latter can very easily be replaced by the futile pangs of the former, thus dragging one further and further into the pangs of the past—the deadly snares of losses in the past.

So the past can be deadly cycles imprisoning you forever, as well as the chain-cutting tool to set you free.

What we want it to become, it is for us to decide.

Much to the credit of our almost worshipped cricketers, they acted as per their status of godship that is showered on them here in India.

We have a calmly calculating and stormily applying captain at the ever-busy helm of affairs.

The way Anil Kumble handled the turbulent situation after Sydney will go a long way in defining the role and responsibility of stewardship.

Here was a man whose team had a fantastic opportunity to level up the series, and thus an opportunity of getting the rarest of opportunities—beating the Australians in their own backyard—only to be undone by all the non-cricketing stuff: seemingly provenly biased umpiring, the win-at-any-cost attitude of the opponents, drawing them into the snares of false charges, false appealing, lies, deceit, sledging and many other unsportsmanlike things.

But Kumble has seen too much in his cricketing life.

You don't reach such status and position without the basic fundamentals of greatness in you.

Such qualities are universal, not just limited to the cricketing field.

Put them in any mould, any system, any game—you get champions.

And true champions always come out smiling, triumphant, out of such nudging, testing circumstances.

Kumble, no wonder, a true champion as he is, did the same.

The veteran remained terribly focused.

Even after the humiliating losses and dustings, there is always something to look forward to, to try for victory. At least you play or plan to redeem some pride, to have some final blow, to keep the doors of the future open.