Playing It My Way: My Autobiography (51 page)

When my mother was performing aarti (a flame ritual for good luck) and putting the tika (vermilion blessing) on my forehead (a family ritual in most Maharashtrian families), it seemed that this time I had come back to her having achieved something substantial. I felt as if I had performed my duties as a son and deserved her welcome. My family was delighted with the achievement and I felt a sense of genuine pride at having given them such joy.

There were countless bouquets of flowers waiting for me. Abhishek and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, two of India’s best-known Bollywood stars, dropped by to congratulate me and we happily relived the final all over again.

Looking back on it now, it still feels like a dream. Beating Australia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka in the course of one week to win the World Cup in front of huge Indian crowds just feels unreal. The television audience for our semi-final match against Pakistan, I was told, was the highest ever recorded in India’s sporting history. I must confess that I continue to get goose bumps every time I think about that week.

On a personal note, I was pleased to have scored a total of 482 runs, the highest for India and the second highest in the tournament, at an average of 54 with two hundreds. I felt that I had proved to myself that after twenty-two years of examination at the very highest level, I was still good enough to carry on competing with the very best, that the hunger and the passion were still very much alive.

A number of my friends have asked me why I didn’t retire from one-day cricket after winning the World Cup, as the summit had been scaled and there was nothing left for me to achieve. They may well have a point. It could indeed have been a grand exit. Emotions were running high and the timing could not have been better. But to be honest, such a thought never occurred to me. I wanted to remember the World Cup as a happy moment, and announcing my retirement straight after winning the trophy would have shifted the focus from the cup triumph to my retirement.

The Indian cricket team had stuck together through difficult times to make the world stage their own. Each player had made sacrifices and each one deserved to enjoy the moment. Cricket is a team sport and I feel immensely proud to have been part of the World Cup-winning team.

Finally, I had always wanted one memorable send-off from international cricket that I could never forget in my life. Multiple send-offs can end up diluting the significance of the event and that was not something I had ever wanted.

1st match, Group B. Bangladesh v India at Dhaka. 19 February 2011

India 370–4 (50/50 ov); Bangladesh 283–9 (50/50 ov)

India won by 87 runs

11th match, Group B. India v England at Bangalore. 27 February 2011

India 338 (49.5/50 ov); England 338–8 (50/50 ov)

Match tied

22nd match, Group B. India v Ireland at Bangalore. 6 March 2011

Ireland 207 (47.5/50 ov); India 210–5 (46/50 ov)

India won by 5 wickets (with 24 balls remaining)

25th match, Group B. India v Netherlands at Delhi. 9 March 2011

Netherlands 189 (46.4/50 ov); India 191–5 (36.3/50 ov)

India won by 5 wickets (with 81 balls remaining)

29th match, Group B. India v South Africa at Nagpur. 12 March 2011

India 296 (48.4/50 ov); South Africa 300–7 (49.4/50 ov)

South Africa won by 3 wickets (with 2 balls remaining)

42nd match, Group B. India v West Indies at Chennai. 20 March 2011

India 268 (49.1/50 ov); West Indies 188 (43/50 ov)

India won by 80 runs

2nd quarter-final. India v Australia at Ahmedabad. 24 March 2011

Australia 260–6 (50/50 ov); India 261–5 (47.4/50 ov)

India won by 5 wickets (with 14 balls remaining)

2nd semi-final. India v Pakistan at Mohali. 30 March 2011

India 260–9 (50/50 ov); Pakistan 231 (49.5/50 ov)

India won by 29 runs

Final. India v Sri Lanka at Mumbai. 2 April 2011

Sri Lanka 274–6 (50/50 ov); India 277–4 (48.2/50 ov)

India won by 6 wickets (with 10 balls remaining)

India’s first international engagement after the World Cup was a tour of the West Indies in June 2011. I was allowed to opt out because India had a busy year ahead and I was desperate to spend some time with my family. I had been playing continuous cricket for eight months and realized that if I travelled to the West Indies it would mean I had not spent much time with Anjali and the children for close to twenty months. India had a number of assignments coming up and this was the one tour that coincided with the kids’ summer holidays. I was on ninety-nine international centuries at the time but it never occurred to me that I should try and get the 100th ton as quickly as possible. Then again, I never imagined that I would have to wait for more than a year.

I rejoined the team in July 2011 and was looking forward to playing against a resurgent English side in their home conditions. Under Andrew Strauss they had recently won the Ashes in Australia and were playing some excellent cricket. However, we were still the number-one Test team and it was expected to be a keenly contested series. The fact that our recently appointed coach, Duncan Fletcher, was returning to take on the England team he used to coach with such success also added spice to the series.

For me personally the tour did not start well. My foot started to trouble me on the first day of the tour when we played Somerset in a two-day fixture at Taunton. We fielded and by lunch the pain in my toe was bad enough to make me stay off the field for treatment. When we got to London before the first Test match at Lord’s, I had a few scans done and it was revealed that the problem was again with the sesamoid bone. While there was some inflammation, luckily it wasn’t serious enough to keep me off cricket and I played in all four Tests.

At Lord’s on 21 July 2011 we started reasonably well after winning the toss, with Zaheer picking up Andrew Strauss early on, but we were thrown off-course when Zaheer pulled a hamstring soon after lunch. In such situations you can’t do much but rue your luck. The loss of the leader of our attack undoubtedly affected us for the rest of the series.

I remember that on the very first day I saw Zaheer, way back at the start of his career, I told him he would always have to take care of his body and bowl right through the year to keep himself fit. His physique was such that he needed to do more than others to remain in good shape. Back in 2005 I encouraged him to play county cricket, and when he came back to India after playing his first season in England, there was no doubt he was a more mature performer. Over the years he turned himself into a match-winning premier fast bowler.

To add to our concerns, we lost Yuvraj in the second Test when he fractured his finger, then Bhajji suffered a stomach-muscle tear and Gautam Gambhir fell over and had severe concussion, which prevented him from opening the batting in the fourth Test. What’s more, we didn’t have Sehwag for the first two Tests, as he was still recovering from a shoulder operation. I don’t want to take anything away from England, who played superb cricket throughout the series, but it was a remarkable sequence of disasters and it wasn’t easy to cope with the loss of so many key players.

One unexpected complication at Lord’s was that I found I had great difficulty picking up the ball from the new Media Centre End. England had tall fast bowlers in Chris Tremlett and Stuart Broad and I had serious trouble because the bowler’s hand was sometimes lost against the dark-coloured steps above the sightscreen. This meant I had much less time to react than usual and I had to play the ball off the pitch rather than watching the bowler’s wrist. From the Pavilion End I had no problem at all.

After the game I spoke about the problem with the late Christopher Martin-Jenkins, who was then President of the MCC, and he promised to do something about it for the ODI at Lord’s later in the tour – but in the end I wasn’t able to play in that game. More recently, when I captained an MCC XI against Shane Warne’s Rest of the World XI at Lord’s in the Bicentenary Match in July 2014, I raised the problem again. They couldn’t increase the height of the sightscreen, but I asked them to make the staircase above it as white as possible, which they did. In the end, I didn’t have any problems because Peter Siddle was bowling and he’s not as tall as, say, Broad or Tremlett and that makes a huge difference.

I must also confess that while I love Lord’s, I always found it difficult to cope with the slope that runs across the ground, no matter how much I tried to work out its effect. I remember facing Chris Lewis once when he was bowling from the Pavilion End. He tended to bowl inswingers and I thought I’d worked out that the slope would bring the ball in to me even more, so I played inside the line – and the ball went the other way and I was bowled!

In 2011, on the evening of the third day of the Lord’s Test, I was laid low by a viral infection. My friend Atul Bedade, the former India international and someone who has always supported me at critical times, had come to visit me for the evening, but I realized something was wrong as soon as we got back to the hotel. I asked for a paracetamol from the physio and took it while ordering an early dinner in the room. By 8 p.m. we had finished our meal and I suggested to Atul that he should take off, but Atul didn’t want to leave me in that state and kindly decided to sleep on the sofa, so that he could make sure I was all right.

By the middle of the night my condition had worsened and the next morning I was in no state to get up. Atul called Ashish Kaushik, our phsyio, and he advised complete rest. This was the only time in my career I was not able to join the team on the morning of a match. I slept in my hotel room till well after lunch and it was only when I checked the score on television that I called our team manager and told him I was coming to the ground. I wanted to try and play a part in the second innings, as I thought I was needed.

Although I wasn’t able to contribute much to the team, I forced myself to field towards the end of the England innings, to make sure I would have an opportunity to bat on day five. At the end of the day’s play, I was in a really bad state. To make things worse, when I got back to the hotel I found that the air conditioning in my room had leaked and everything was wet. While I did manage to bat for a while on day five, I was nowhere near my best and found it difficult to maintain my balance in the middle.

England ended up winning the first Test comfortably, thanks to centuries from Pietersen and Prior and five wickets for James Anderson in the second innings. In the second Test at Trent Bridge, starting on 29 July, we came back strongly and Sreesanth and Ishant Sharma helped reduced England to 124–8 at one point in their first innings, but Swann and Broad managed to bail them out, taking their score to 221. It was still not a threatening total, however, and we passed it with six wickets in hand, only to lose them all for just twenty runs, with Broad taking six wickets in the innings, and the match slipped from our grasp.

After failing to win the second Test from a position of strength, things gradually went from bad to worse. The pain in my foot was not going away, and as a team we were outplayed yet again in the Third Test, which did not start in the best of circumstances, with riots in Birmingham creating a very tense atmosphere. The shopping centre next to our hotel was vandalized and there was talk of cancelling the tour. It was only after we were given an assurance that things were under control that the match went ahead.

In fact, this was not the only time that off-the-field events threatened to disrupt the tour. Before the one-day series, a match against Kent in Canterbury caused us all a lot of worry. In the closing stages of the game we noticed a large number of security personnel hovering near the dressing room. We were told that a suspect package had been found on the team bus and the bomb squad were on their way. Then we were asked to go and wait on the field because the dressing room was close to the danger area. We all waited patiently until we were finally told that we could leave by the back entrance of the ground. There was yet another bomb scare at night in the shopping arcade next to our hotel and a number of the players were starting to feel anxious about our security. The following morning we were told that things were fully under control and eventually the tour continued.

In the third Test at Edgbaston, England won the match with their first-innings total of 710, which included a career-best 294 from Alastair Cook and 104 from Eoin Morgan. I was pleased to bat well in the second innings and I don’t think anyone would deny I was unlucky to get out for 40. MS Dhoni had played a straight drive off Graeme Swann and the ball hit Swann’s hand and ricocheted onto the stumps at the non-striker’s end, running me out. With nothing going our way, we headed to The Oval for the fourth and final Test very low on morale. What was worse was that we had also lost our number-one ranking in the process, having lost three Test matches on the trot.

I had scored my ninety-eighth international hundred on 27 February 2011 while playing England in our second World Cup game in Bangalore, but there was no mention of the 100th hundred in the media at that stage. Less than two weeks later, I scored the ninety-ninth against South Africa at Nagpur, but still no one brought up the 100th. The topic did come up on television when I was in the eighties against Pakistan in the World Cup semi-final, but that was no more than a passing mention. It was only after the World Cup win that the media needed a new cause to obsess over and the 100th hundred fitted the bill: it had never been achieved before, it made for good television and newsprint and it was a landmark fans could be proud of. It was a recipe for unprecedented frenzy – without always appreciating the impact it might have on me.