The Hindu : Sport / Cricket : The Steve Waugh revolution

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Oct 14, 2004

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The Steve Waugh revolution

By Nirmal Shekar

Much has been said and written about the missionary zeal with which the Australian cricketers approach their task as they set out to conquer the Last Frontier.

The stand-in captain of the team which will play India in the second Test at Chepauk on Thursday, Adam Gilchrist, would like to believe that he and his boys have made the sort of start that promises the kind of success no Australian team has experienced since Bill Lawry's men in December 1969.

Thirty-five years is a long time in sport, even in one where countries don't get to play each other in Test matches each passing year. But that is how long it has taken the Australian psyche to come to terms with the Last Frontier.

This is the achievement that was rightly seen as a launching pad to the cricketing conquest by a visionary sportsman many years ago.

If Gilchrist's men are playing well and feeling good — and much more comfortable in their environment than their predecessors were — then they owe so much to the pioneering efforts of a tunnel-visioned countryman of theirs, Steve Waugh.

No visiting Australian cricketer ever made the honest effort that the older of the Waugh twins put in to understand the complexities of this diverse nation. For long the average Australian cricketer flew into India harbouring the same sort of anxieties in his mind as would an errant school kid when called to the Headmaster's room. It was a `punishment' tour.

Punishment to pleasure

Waugh turned punishment into pure pleasure; and he did that simply. All vexing problems in life often have simple solutions. And Waugh solved the puzzle by merely opening his eyes, ears and heart to a vastly different culture.

So long as your mind is closed to new experience and you have pre-judged that experience without actually experiencing anything at all, cultural assimilation is never possible. Waugh was the first Australian cricketer to realise this. And he went about his business of `understanding India' with the Zen master's intensity and focus that characterised his cricket for the most part of his career.

And the process that the great man set off touched almost every member of his team; perhaps even the ones who joined the team later, as was evident in the manner in which Michael Clarke enjoyed himself in Bangalore. While their predecessors came in here thinking anything can go wrong anytime, from the dressing room up to the hotel lift and the bathroom tap, Gilchrist and his men have clearly conquered that sort of negativity, something that can reflect dismayingly on team performance.

In a fast shrinking world that is increasingly inter-connected, you might think that the new Australian attitude to playing and winning and having fun in India is something that has come about automatically, as a part of the process of evolution.

The trigger

But, believe me, it did need a trigger. And Steve Waugh was the trigger. In the larger context he may have contributed more than this, given his connection with Kolkata and the Udayan kids. But as a thinking man and a mature cricketer, his greatest contribution to his countrymen is in coaxing them into getting rid of their negative mind-set vis-a-vis the tours to India.

One of Waugh's big regrets when he retired earlier this year after the India-Australia series Down Under was that he failed to win a series in this country. The story of that failure contains some of the most dramatic moments witnessed in Test cricket in India.

V.V.S. Laxman's once-in-a-lifetime innings of exquisite beauty and the highly improbable events enacted in Kolkata are a part of cricketing folklore and will continue to find a place in the game's Top Ten believe-it-or-not lists. But the fact remains it took that sort of a miracle to deny Waugh.

Yet, at the end of the day, there was no bitterness in the man. He continues to love India; continues to visit his friends at Udayan and elsewhere in this country. And the revolution he set in motion has surely helped the cause of Australian cricket — not the least because Gilchrist and his men are not looking at the new cultural milieu in which they now find themselves as another world but simply as a part, if a little different, of their own world.

It is for this reason it must be acknowledged that Steve Waugh did indeed conquer the Final Frontier, in a spiritual-intellectual sense. He was the first Australian cricketer to do so. That he did not accomplish the cricketing conquest is a tiny failure dwarfed further by the enormity and significance of the other achievement.

Future generations of cricket fans may or may not understand the significance of the Waugh revolution but few visiting cricketers have ever managed to win the hearts of an entire generation of Indian cricket fans as has Waugh.

When the players walk in to do battle at Chepauk on Thursday, many in the stands at the M.A. Chidambaram stadium, and tens of thousands watching on television, will surely miss Stephen Rodger Waugh. An India-Australia Test without Waugh ... that's a bit like Bloody Mary without tabasco sauce. It just doesn't taste right!

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