Impasse helps cricket return to Brabourne after nine years
When Brabourne Stadium last hosted a men’s international game — a Test match against Sri Lanka in December 2009 — Sachin Tendulkar was an integral part of the Indian team. Nine years later, as international cricket returns to Brabourne, Tendulkar would be seen ringing the bell to inaugurate the fourth ODI between India and West Indies on Monday.
Nearly half of the players who took the field in that 2009 Test, including Virender Sehwag, VVS Laxman, Rahul Dravid and Zaheer Khan, are now retired. Some like Harbhajan Singh and Yuvraj Singh no longer fit into the side.
The only exception is MS Dhoni, who was the captain in that game, and is still part of the side that landed in Mumbai.
RICH HISTORY
Though it is by pure luck that the Cricket Club of India (CCI), which owns the Brabourne Stadium, got hosting rights for Monday’s India-West Indies ODI, it used to regularly host top-level cricket and was called India’s Lord’s.
Built on a piece of land that the then Governor of Bombay, Lord Brabourne, gave to the CCI after being persuaded by the BCCI and CCI secretary Neville de Mello, the stadium hosted its maiden first-class match between the CCI XI and the visiting Lord Tennyson’s XI on December 7, 1937.
Brabourne hosted Bombay’s iconic Pentangular tournament matches from 1937 to 1946 and saw the emergence of some of Indian cricket’s greatest heroes like Vijay Merchant and Vijay Hazare. The famous Hazare-Merchant rivalry was at its peak in the final of Pentangular between the Rest and the Hindus in 1943-44. Merchant slammed 250 and Hazare hit a mind-boggling 309 out of the Rest’s total of 387.
The stadium hosted its first Test match when West Indies toured India in 1948-49. Four years later in 1952, Brabourne witnessed India’s first-ever Test series win when they defeated Pakistan by 10 wickets to clinch the three-match series 2-1.
The stadium hosted 17 Tests between 1948 and 1973 before the Bombay Cricket Association (BCA) built the Wankhede Stadium a few miles away and started hosting international matches there.
OCCASIONAL HOST
Though it took 36 years for Test cricket to return to Brabourne when Sri Lanka played a Test here in 2009, the stadium hosted a few other matches during this period — including five games of the 2006 Champions Trophy and India’s first-ever T20I at home against Australia in 2007.
In the subsequent years, the stadium hosted women’s matches and a few IPL games, but men’s international cricket virtually stopped taking place here. However, the impasse between the Mumbai Cricket Association (MCA) and the BCCI over distribution of complimentary tickets ensured that the fourth ODI between India and West Indies, would be shifted to Brabourne. Welcome back, international cricket, Brabourne would say.