What happened 25 years ago still haunts the Aussies! And that match really changed the direction of Indian cricket. John Buchanan, who was the Aussie coach at the time, is scarred by the unexpected defeat even today, and he accepts he made a massive blunder in the game that gave India, led by VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid, a great opportunity to get back into the game.
Coming into the match on the back of their win in the first Test in Mumbai, which was their 16th victory in a row, when the Aussies posted 445 and bowled India out for a paltry 171 at the Eden Gardens in Kolkata, the match and series appeared theirs – to all intents and purposes. However, they decided to enforce the follow-on and Laxman (281, highest Test score by an Indian at the time) and Dravid (180) punished them in the second innings.
India went on to win the match after a Harbhajan Singh hat-trick, and later the series after dispatching the Aussies one more time, in Chennai. India had been given an inch, and they ended up taking a mile. Buchanan, in an interview with Sportstar recently, kind of admitted the decision to enforce the follow-on continues to bother him, even after so many years.
What if Australia had decided otherwise?
“I regard it as one of my poorest decisions as a coach, but it was not just about enforcing the follow-on. The game was set up nicely, and we had a big lead [274 runs]. My job was not to get caught up in the emotion of what was going on the field. But I did,” Buchanan, who led Australia to back-to-back World Cup titles in 2003 and 2007, said.
“As the players walked in, my job was to make them sit down quickly and say what our options were. I think they still would have gone there [to enforce the follow-on], but I didn’t take the time to get them to think that if we had batted, we would have batted India out of the game. Our objective was to go there to win the series. But we enforced the follow-on, and the rest is history,” added Buchanan, considered one of the brilliant coaching minds in the history of the game.
