Of Gods And Men

While it has been Foster's beer's mission to teach us "how to speak Australian", Steve Waugh's men have completed the syllabus. It was their native oratory, according to South African casualty Justin Ontong, that "mentally" destroyed the Proteas on their way down 0-3 in a series unofficially called the Test World Cup. Gods are not beings that speak "Australian" but there is a suspicion that Waugh's men may yet belong to the pantheon. Since 1999, they have shown signs, especially in the miracles department. In the last 32 Tests, they lost only four times, drew just five times. So some old questions that V.V.S. Laxman and Harbhajan Singh had briefly muffled have resurfaced. Are these Baggy Green caps the greatest team ever to have played Test cricket?

But weren't Don Bradman's 1948 men the ones who were originally called gods? And where does one put Clive Lloyd's early-'80s Windies team, during whose reign crucial cricket accessories stopped being regarded as optional? Most traditionalists have said that Bradman's post-war Australians were the true lords of the game. But could it be that the way of the world is such that the gods belonged in a realm far away, where there were dragons, mermaids and other lies? If the gods were born today, would they be but mere saints? And if most of our best men were born then, would they have been called gods? First there are questions. Then there are statistics.

Between 1945 and 1948, Bradman's Australia played 16 Tests, won 12 (75 per cent) and lost none. From 1980 to 1986, Lloyd's "gay cavaliers" played 10 series, winning 9 of them, levelling one against Australia. They won 27 of the 46 Tests they played (58.7 per cent), losing only twice. Steve Waugh's men have won 23 of their last 32 Tests (71.88 per cent) and lost four. These are the lies. In the record books.

To find out which of these three teams would have won if they played one another is, as Polly Umrigar points out, "futile because the game was never the same between these periods". One of the main reasons why Bradman's team is remembered by history in huge fonts is the year 1948, when it visited war-ravaged England. "1948 was no time to play cricket," recalls veteran sports writer K.N. Prabhu. To make matters worse for England and other believers in equal opportunities, Bradman resolved not to lose a single match, not Tests, not county matches. When some men resolve, it's called the future. Maybe the dream team played a side selected from a generation whose best men had died on World War II battlefields but what's recorded forever is that the Australians trampled all opposition. Against Essex, they scored 721 in a single day and Essex captain T.N. Pearce was the one who was congratulated after the match. For being the first team in the series to have taken all 10 Australian wickets. It seemed so easy for Australia that day that "Keith Miller vowed he didn't want to score such runs", recalls Raju Bharatan. "He threw his wicket away, letting Trevor Bailey bowl him for a duck." And he collected the bail, which he called "that broken emblem of fate", and gave it to a boy on his way back to the shower. Australians won the series 4-0 (just for the record, England drew a game).

Many believe that Bradman's army was theoretically the best ever. Theoretically, because they have not seen them play. One man has however played against the Don and is alive, and remembers everything clearly. Chandrasekhar Sarwate was in the squad that went to Australia in 1947-48 to unsurprisingly lose 0-4". Bradman was a great captain, better than Waugh certainly. When the fast bowlers were tiring, he would bring in a left-arm slow who would bowl a line slightly more decent than what England's (Ashley) Giles bowled against India recently." And smother the runs till the fast bowlers returned for the feast."When he was batting, he was so hungry for runs that in the Brisbane Test, when his partner McCool wanted to call for bad light, Bradman—who was in 150s—wanted to play on." It has to be said that he was viewed in his times as a selfish man. "Miller accused Bradman of stealing the strike all the time." Waugh doesn't carry that vice.

In comparing Bradman and Waugh as captains, the personality of the Don may overshadow reasoning. Writer Ram Guha rules in favour of Bradman but tries to put the two sides in perspective: "Arthur Morris was an attacking opener who is difficult to compare with after Michael Slater's exit, and his partner Sid Barnes was easily the equal of Hayden or Langer. For No. 3, there is no equal to Bradman. Waugh's middle order looks strong but fades when compared with Lindsay Hasset and Neil Harvey. At No. 6, Keith Miller was equal to Ricky Ponting but Miller also took 170 Test wickets. I believe Don Tallon was a brilliant keeper but for sheer dynamism in batting, Gilchrist will score higher. Ray Lindwall and Glenn McGrath are equals. Otherwise, in the pace section, Bradman had more effective bowlers. But he didn't have Shane Warne."

"I would say Bradman's team was superior to Waugh's but only marginally," concludes Guha. "Clive Lloyd's West Indies will come third, chiefly because they didn't have variety in bowling and were vulnerable against spin." Navjot Singh Sidhu, however, has somewhat more respect for the Windies, having stood all alone on a hushed pitch, facing those hurrying warlords. "Lloyd's team had no contest. Their batsmen were destructive. Look at that team, the kind of people who came in one after the other—Greenidge, Haynes, Lloyd, Richards, and to mop up any semblance of batting resistance, Holding, Roberts, Garner, Marshall. For the sheer number of legends in that team, I would rate it higher than Waugh's boys. I haven't seen Bradman's side play, so I can't tell the difference."

A value addition in Sidhu's analysis of the Windies is that those violent bowlers "devastated a batting line-up without uttering a word". Waugh's famed psychological warfare which includes extempore in "Australian", from the bowler's end, from the slips, from silly point, from short leg, from everywhere but never off the ground, is today often interpreted as permissible aggression. Umpire S. Venkataraghavan himself who had "a conversation" in Mumbai with an ill-tempered Slater, however, endorses Waugh's conventional arsenal. To him, Waugh's side "is complete". The Windies, according to him—and he speaks from personal experience—"could be shaken with spin". If Lloyd's men played Waugh's Australia today, "Warne and Gilchrist will be the ones who would make the difference, everything else balancing out".

So, in an impossible review of the three great sides, it's fair to say that Bradman's men were gods, for rumoured invincibility and, of course, invisibility. But it's up to every man if he wants to be an atheist. The contest between the legendary Windies and post-modern Australia, in general perception among theorists and players, is that things will get very hot and very close but Warne probably will be the Man of the Match. However, it's also true that life is funny: if any of those three teams had played India last summer in Kolkata, they probably would have lost. One certainly did.