Partab Ramchand on India’s miserable tour of England in 1974

Partab Ramchand18-Jul-2007

Ajit Wadekar at the start of what was to be a wretched tour © The Cricketer
The abysmal showing and the humiliating experiences of the Indianteam in England in 1974 brought back hideous memories of the 1936tour. On the field the visitors went down to heavy defeats; offthe field there were numerous seamy incidents making it arguablythe worst tour ever undertaken by an Indian team.Sunil Gavaskar put it all succinctly when he wrote in : “It was a totally disastrous series and the tour wasone of the worst I had made. There was no such thing as teamspirit. Instead there were a lot of petty squabbles that didn’tdo anybody any good. The many incidents that gave the team such abad name didn’t help. It was all extremely frustrating.”And yet when the team landed in England in April, there were noindications that the tour would end in such an unmitigateddisaster. The nucleus of the 1971 side seemed very much intact.The captain was still Ajit Wadekar, the spin quartet was at itpeak and the batting remained strong. Sure, the Indians would betouring in the wetter first half and not in the drier second halfas was the case in 1971. This was one factor reckoned to beagainst the visitors. But not even the most cynical Indiancricket follower could have bargained for what really happened.England won the first Test at Manchester by 113 runs. But the endcame in the 13th of the 20 mandatory overs so it was after a gamefight that India went down. But in the second Test at Lord’s,India touched an all time low. They conceded 629 runs, which wasthe highest England total at the game’s headquarters and thehighest by them against India. On the third day, India repliedwith 302. Following on, the Indian batting touched rock bottom.In just 77 minutes, they were bowled out for 42, their lowestever Test score and the lowest-ever total at Lord’s. The marginof defeat, an innings and 285 runs was the second biggest thatIndia have suffered. From one disaster the Indians stumbled on toanother.In the third Test at Birmingham, India went down by an inningsand 78 runs inside three days and after taking only two wickets.This was only the third time that a team was winning a Test afterlosing only two wickets, the earlier occasions being in 1924 and1958. To cricket fans who had seen their team pull off two greataway triumphs in the West Indies and England in 1971 and thenfollow it up by defeating England at home in 1972-73 it was toomuch to swallow. The batting had crumbled, the fielding hadwilted and the famed spinners had been mastered.As if the heavy defeats were not bad enough, stories of riftsbetween players and factions in the team made the rounds. Therewere also unsavoury incidents concerning the team at a partyhosted by the Indian High Commissioner in London. And around thistime, shiplifting charges were made out against Sudhir Naik.In India, the mood was predictably ugly and there were stories ofWadekar’s house being stoned and the 1971 Victory Bat, erected atIndore to commemorate the triumph three years before, beingdefaced. As it to symbolise the lack of team spirit and thefactionalism, the players came back in batches.Predictably enough, there were very few gains. Gavaskar, GundappaViswanath and Farookh Engineer did reasonably well under thecircumstances. Gavaskar’s 101 in bowler-friendly conditions atOld Trafford is considered to be among his greatest knocks.Generally, however, the batsmen came a cropper against theswinging ball, their technical limitations being exposed. EvenEknath Solkar, the eternal fighter, found it difficult to getruns, averaging less than 20 while Wadekar with 82 runs in sixinnings, was a total failure.The bowling too was a disaster with the spin quartet anything butmenacing. Compared to the 37 wickets that Bishan Bedi, BhagwatChandrasekhar and Sinivas Venkatraghavan took three years before,this time the four of them shared just 15 and at enormous cost.The tour results also showed the team in poor light. Out of 18matches, three were won, four lost and 11 drawn. The team alsolost both the one-day internationals at the end of the tourincidentally the first two such games that India played. Gavaskarlived up to his reputation by getting 993 runs at an average of41.37. Naik, Wadekar, Viswanath and Solkar all topped the 700-runmark. But for younger players like Brijesh Patel and Gopal Bose,the tour was a disaster.Bedi emerged as the leading wicket-taker with 53 but Chandra’stally fell from 50 in 1971 to 26 this time and Venkat’s declinewas even sharper 63 to 18. And all of them including Prasanna,were very expensive. Abid Ali’s all-round showing was a minorsilver lining.Against such weak-kneed opposition, England had a whale of a timein the Tests. Mike Denness got hundreds in successive Tests, JohnEdrich, Dennis Amiss, Keith Fletcher and Tony Greig also hitcenturies, David Lloyd hammered an unbeaten 214 in only hissecond Test and Geoff Arnold (4 for 19) and Chris Old (5 for 21)caused the debacle at Lord’s. The rout was total, complete andabsolute and there could not be any excuses for such a feebleshowing.