VVS Laxman: Australia's nemesis and India's perennial crisis man

VSS Laxman was Australia’s kryptonite

The Australian Cricket team is to arrive in India shortly for a four-match series seeking to avenge the whitewash that India handed out to them in 2013. Going by their patchy and un-Aussie like performances in Sri Lanka (where they were trounced 3-0), it appears they haven’t quite recovered from their woes in the subcontinent.

One name that is synonymous with vintage India-Australia clashes is my old mate VVS Laxman. He conjured up many a sublime batting dig that buried them as if by an avalanche.

To muster the audacity and skill when they ruled the roost like a relentless juggernaut is a huge badge of honour in his career.

I witnessed the early signs of his insatiable appetite to churn big runs and a fondness for an Aussie diet as early as in the 1993/94 season – even when he was just a young ‘ colt’. Representing India U-19, he bled them dry with immaculate precision, soft velvety hands and nimble feet. Champion bowlers like Brett Lee had a taste of things to come in the future.

I was in a mesmeric trance as he lathered the Aussies at Cheapauk with a strokefull 88. It was as if the ground was a vast canvas and his bat a paint brush to express his talent. In the very next match, he was at it again and sent the Aussies on a leather hunt to compile 150. Even at a nascent stage he was never easily satisfied and knew how to ride the crest of a good wave. This was just the beginning of several encounters.

Brett Lee duelled with VVS on several instances but none are as famous as the one in the year 2000 at Sydney. With an innings of magic, VVS countered the pace with an astonishing 167. The romantic love affair of playing fire with ice had begun and lasted till the acrimonious tour of 2008, when he got a hundred in that bitterest of battles at Sydney to make it three in a row.

Right from our U-12 days, when we clashed against each other for the first time, he was destined for bigger things. It was not too difficult to prophesies as he oozed talent and possessed an innate ability to get hundreds. The core foundations of his game had begun to be set in stone and even a layman could see that he was indeed very very special.

I recall a match from our days in age-group cricket. I bowled him around his legs but not before he had scored 94. Hailing from the same zone, I was privileged to witness his blooming talent – his transition from an uncut diamond to one of effervescent beauty – with the passage of time.

Amidst the journey, he has always retained his cool and behaved like a gentleman, whom the founding fathers of the sport had in mind when they invented the game for its genteel folk.

The astonishing aspect is that he has carried the same approach when taming and bringing even "the ugly Aussies”, who can infuriate even a stoic monk with their acerbic and sarcastic comments in their bid to get under the opponents skin and mentally disintegrate the opponents, to their knees.

One’s mind is immediately cast to that famous effort of 281 in Kolkata in early 2001, when he stitched an admirable partnership with Rahul David to sink the Aussies after being asked to follow-on. That knock is still vivid in my memory thanks to the way he pulverised the Aussies with wrists of steel and a big heart which was cloaked by his supreme skill.

As I was the twelfth man in that match, I ran the errands for the famous duo with childlike enthusiasm as it was a particularly humid day. His 281 is the only Indian effort that features in the top ten of the all-time list of 100 greatest innings compiled by Wisden.

Extra Cover: 5 players who have never played a World Cup

He was the quintessential nemesis of Australia as evidenced by his hundreds versus them in many an ODI encounter. It is one of the greatest tragedies of Indian cricket that despite such lofty standards he never played a World Cup match.

To think he was dumped for the touring party to South Africa in early 2003 is nothing short of sacrilege. It is a tribute to his mental strength that he bounced back from his lowest days as a player in the Caribbean during an ‘A’ tour and fashioned a remarkable comeback in the tour of Australia later that year, scoring two centuries in Tests and ODIs on pacey and bouncy pitches.

It was a slap in the face of the management who had bypassed him, reckoning he was a slow mover in the field. It is an irony that he played his last ODI in late 2006, just on the eve of the 2007 World Cup in the Caribbean. Alas, another opportunity to play in a WC had passed him by.

I have never ceased to admire his sage-like calm in the face of adversity, particularly shepherding and playing with the tail. His penchant of lifting his game in the fourth innings, precisely at a time when the pitch was hostile and the situation of the game, grim, was most definitely his signature statement.

His unruffled demeanour, rarely pushed or rushed at the crease, notwithstanding a plagued back, were the works of a genius with an infinite capacity to work hard. He could play strokes all over the dial with an inherent talent to find the gaps. His sangfroid amidst a sea of turbulence always stood out and it is a matter of great shame that he seemed to play for his spot in the playing eleven, despite his apparent skill.

He absorbed it all like a blotting paper and never displayed his irritations as he perpetually dwelled on the positives. It is a sign of his polished upbringing by a set of devoted parents – qualified physicians – who harboured hopes of a career in medicine for their son. So it is no surprise to see him wield the bat like a surgeon's scalpel to dissect the opponents and bisect the fields with surgical precision.

Statistics don't quite reflect the true picture of an individual in a team sport. No one better emphasises this more than VVS with his vast his contributions. That he managed just 17 hundreds in his illustrious career spanning 16 years isn’t an apt reflection of his selfless and peerless service to a team's cause.

He played at No.6, where he was rarely accorded the luxury to craft big essays. Even that was only after he was shunted around the batting order. His ability to tackle the second new ball, coupled with his reading of the situation of the game, was priceless. All of this shone luminously in Mohali and at the P.Sara oval in SL in 2010, where he scripted stunning wins in company of the lower order. These matches are etched in Indian cricket folklore, as object lessons in disaster management.

Much like DB Vengsarkar’s love affair with Lords, VVS, would have dearly loved to have wrapped the pitch at SCG, where he notched three hundreds, in his cricket coffin.

VVS, to me, epitomised pure and rare skill and in a game devised for gentlemen, he trod majestically like a royal officer. And he did so without ever compromising on the high moral virtues the game brought to the table.

One sincerely hopes that the oncoming series is played in the truest spirit which VVS so gloriously embraced.