On this day: Little Master became the Grandmaster (7th March)
In 1987, Pakistan toured India to play six ODIs and five Test matches. The series started with an ODI at Indore on 27th January. Pakistan defeated India in that match by three wickets. Kapil Dev and Imran Khan were the captains of their respective teams. Ravi Shastri captained India in one of the ODIs due to the absence of Kapil Dev.
The schedule of this series was strange and funny. Both the teams played an ODI followed by two Tests and another ODI. Three Test matches were played next and then both the teams went on to play the remaining of the ODIs. Also, overs were reduced before every ODI in the series. Both the teams didn't get an opportunity to bowl the complete 50 overs in any of the ODIs. Pakistan defeated India in the ODI series by 5-1 and India's only victory came in the 3rd ODI of the series. Pakistan won the toss and elected to bowl first. India scored 212 runs and lost 6 wickets. Pakistan managed to score the same amount of runs but lost 7 wickets. India won the game due to that 1-wicket margin.
Pakistan managed to win the last Test of the series by 16 runs and hence also won the Test series by 1-0. This win came after 11 consecutive draws between the teams. This was Pakistan's first test series win against India. The first Test match of the series was stretched to 6 days. One day was allocated as the rest day for both the teams. During that time teams used to have a rest day in between multiple day games.
The one silver lining
This series was in no way a fruitful one for India. However, the silver lining appeared in the 4th Test of the series which was played at Motera, Ahmedabad. On this day, Sunil Gavaskar, the little master became the first player to score 10,000 Test runs. In 1983, he became the highest run-getter in Test matches after he went past Geoffrey Boycott's tally of 8114 test runs. He reached the 10,000 mark after scoring 58th run in that Test match. Once it happened the spectators ran towards him to congratulate. Due to this, the match was stopped for more than 20 minutes. The fifth Test match of the series was the last one for Gavaskar. He also retired from ODIs later that year.
After Gavaskar, Allan Border became the second man to reach this figure in 1993. They are the only two players to achieve this feat in the last century. It took Gavaskar around 16 years of international cricket to achieve this number.
Apart from them, 11 other players have also achieved this feat. Sachin Tendulkar is also one of them. Tendulkar is the only player to score more than 15,000 runs in Test matches.