2001: A Test relived by Eden’s legends

KOLKATA: Few Tests have aged as well as the one India won at Eden Gardens 17 years ago. No sooner had the audio-visual clip ended, the applause broke out.

“It was a freak Test which we won because of some magnificent cricket and luck,” said Sourav Ganguly, the co-author of ‘A Century Is Not Enough’. Also present at the book launch here on Wednesday were two of the three gladiators of Indian cricket who made that victory possible, VVS Laxman and Harbhajan Singh. The conversations flowed with even Cheteshwar Pujara sometimes looking wide-eyed. “It was such an emotional experience that it left me exhausted,” said Pujara, 13 then.

The joint venture produced many anecdotes.

Sample this: John Wright and Sourav were like husband and wife, said Laxman; Laxman would spend a long time in the shower before going out to bat leaving the one after him very jittery, said Ganguly; even before he went bare-chested at Lord’s, Ganguly wore a towel for a shirt for all of Day 4 when Rahul Dravid and Laxman were batting, said Harbhajan and that it was a chit from his father that got Ganguly to declare on Day 5. India finally declared at 657/7, setting Australia a target of 384 before winning by 171 runs. “And I was thinking we would bat only one hour. Maybe I would have otherwise become the first Indian to get to a triple hundred,” said Laxman, who made 281 of the finest runs ever scored at Eden. Ganguly said the best team usually has the best No 3, and if India are doing well now, it is because Pujara bats at that position. “He is as important as Virat Kohli but sometimes he goes unnoticed,” said Ganguly.

“The era of match-savers is gone because of T20,” said Laxman. Pujara conceded he was influenced by all this to try lofted shots at the nets but would “still prefer old school cricket.”