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It's 1996 in reverse
Wisden CricInfo staff - December 23, 2001
A Test series between England and India. An inexperienced touring team are well beaten in the first Test in alien conditions, and everyone predicts a rout. But the tourists fight back and have the better of the last two Tests, both of which are drawn. The home side take the series, the away side the honours. It's 2001? 1996 actually.
Five years ago England thumped India by eight wickets on a typical Edgbaston seamer. As in the first Test at Mohali, there was a pivotal moment, and as at Mohali it involved Nasser Hussain. At Edgbaston he should have been given out, caught down the leg side, off Javagal Srinath on 14. He went on to make 128 - and to give England an ultimately decisive first-innings lead of 99. At Mohali this month, Hussain's dismissal sparked a collapse from 200 for 3 to 238 all out. Game over, and a whitewash on the cards.
But England had the upper hand from there, just as India had in the previous series. At Lord's in 1996, Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid made memorable debuts with 131 and 95, and England scraped a draw on the final day. The third Test was a slow-moving draw, and the series petered out on a dreary final day. And the parallels don't end there ...
The home side had a virtually brand new bowling attack for the first Test. At Mohali India fielded three debutant seamers: Tinu Yohannan, Iqbal Siddiqui and Sanjay Bangar; in 1996 England gave debuts to Alan Mullally, Min Patel and Ronnie Irani, as well as recalling Chris Lewis after an absence of two years.
And just as the returning Lewis won that first Test with a decisive second-innings haul (5 for 72), so a returning Indian, Anil Kumble, in his first Test at home for almost two years, did so at Mohali with 6 for 81 in the second innings.
In that first Test there were five debutants (Yohannan, Siddiqui, Bangar, James Foster and Richard Dawson); the most in a Test involving England or India (apart from Bangladesh's inaugural Test) since … the first Test in 1996, when there were seven (Mullally, Irani, Patel, Vikram Rathour, Sunil Joshi, Paras Mhambrey and Venkatesh Prasad).
There was a walking wicket in the tour party: in 1996 it was Rathour (20, 7, 15 and 4); in 2001 Andrew Flintoff (18, 4, 0, 4 and 0).
A touring seamer came of age. In 1996 few Englishmen had heard of the debutant Indian Prasad (even though he had already played 36 one-dayers), and this time few Indians had heard of Matthew Hoggard (two Tests before this series). Prasad took 15 wickets and was outstanding, Hoggard nine wickets and no less so here. From relative anonymity at the beginning of the tour, both returned home as Test players.
A wicketkeeper made a hundred. Jack Russell did it at Lord's in 1996, and Deep Dasgupta followed suit at Mohali.
There were curiously anodyne wickets. Everybody expected dustbowls at Ahmedabad and Bangalore - an ominous prospect given the havoc Kumble and Harbhajan had wreaked on the apparently seam-friendly Mohali track - but it didn't work out like that. So English were the conditions that by the end Hoggard was swinging the ball and rain was rescuing India. It was the same in 1996, when, after their trial by seam at Edgbaston, India found two belters at Lord's and Trent Bridge, apart from some extreme first-morning life at Lord's, on which the new boys Ganguly and Dravid, as well as the young master Tendulkar, flourished.
Rob Smyth is on the staff of Wisden.com
© Wisden CricInfo Ltd
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