Indian Cricket Team`s glory moments: Comparison of the 1983/ 85 victories with the 2011 /13 victories

All Indian cricket fans are celebrating the Indian cricket team`s stupendous victory in the Champions Trophy (CT`13) at England especially after the World Cup victory in 2011 (WC`11). This has effectively proved that the Indians are the champs in the shorter format of the game and hopefully the team  will regain the numero uno slot in the longer format also with the new look team.

As I look back in history I am reminded of a similar situation in the 80`s when the Indian cricket team after surprisingly winning the world cup in 1983 (WC`83) went on to win the Benson and Hedges World Championship of Cricket in Australia in 1985 (BH`85) in a convincing manner.

Being an ardent student and lover of the game I am inclined to compare the patterns in the 1983 – 85 victories as compared to the 2011 – 13 victories. There are some similarities and dissimilarities.

1.   Captains: The 1983 – 85 victories were achieved with different skippers with Kapil Dev leading the charge in 1983 and Sunil Gavaskar in 1985 whereas the 2011 -13 victories were both achieved under MS Dhoni.

2.   In both the cases, the Indian team had a tough time between the victories with some sparkling performances in between. In 1983 -85 the Indians were thrashed first by the Windies at home and then were beaten by England also at home whereas in 2011 -13 the Indians were subjected to the most humiliating defeats in their history with whitewashes in England and Australia and a home defeat against England. On the other hand, the 2011 -13 team had a great series with a 4-0 victory against Australia while the 1983 -85 team won the inaugural Asia cup in Sharjah. 

3.   Both the Indian teams put in commanding performances in the non – World cup tournaments. In both BH`85 and CT`13 the Indian team didn`t lose a single match. Secondly, in both the tourneys the Indian batting top order put in great performances (Shastri, Srikkanth, Azhar, Vengsarkar and Gavaskar in BH`85 & Dhawan, Rohit, Kohli and Karthik in CT`13) and had to bat down the order in only a single match in tourneys which was coincidentally against England in both the tournaments. In BH`85 the Indian team had to bat till the last in the league match against England while in CT`13 the similar occurrence was in the final.

4.   Out of the Indian team (14 players) that played in WC`83, the Indian team had 8 players , (57.1%) in the BH`85 team (Kapil, Sunny, Shastri, Madan Lal, Binny, Vengsarkar, Srikkanth and Jimmy Amarnath) and from the winning eleven in WC`83, 7 players (except for Vengsarkar) featured in the winning eleven in BH`85 (63.6%). The pattern has been totally reversed in the 2011 – 13 teams. Out of the WC`11 winning team of 15 only 4 players(26.7%) feature in the CT`13 squad( Dhoni, Kohli, Raina and Ashwin) while only 3 players (27.3%) from the winning eleven in WC`11 (excluding Ashwin) featured in the winning playing squad in CT`13.

5.   The highest run scorers in WC`83 and WC`11 were two of the legends of the game viz. Kapil Dev and Sachin Tendulkar while in BH`85 and CT`13, the feat was achieved by two of the openers Kris Srikkanth and Shikhar Dhawan. Its also to be noted that in both BH`13 and CT`13 the Indian team had consistently excellent opening starts with Shastri – Srikkanth and Rohit – Dhawan pairs respectively.

6.   The highest wicket takers in the WC`s were 2 pacers (Roger Binny and Zaheer Khan) while the same was done by spinners in BH`85 and CT`13 (Sivaramakrishnan and Jadeja).

7.   While there was no man of the series award in WC`83, all round performances by Ravi Shastri and Yuvraj won them the awards in BH`85 and WC`11 while his stupendous batting starts at the top of the order won the award for Shikhar Dhawan in CT`13.

8.   The 1983 -85 period and the 2011 -13 periods was marked by rifts between two of the greats players in the team. While the Gavaskar – Kapil rift was the news in the 80`s, the cold relationship between Dhoni and Sehwag caught the headlines in the other phase. However the difference was that Kapil and Gavaskar put aside their differences to play together and lead India to greater heights while Sehwag has lost form, out of the Indian team and only time will tell whether we will see him play again.

While no major conclusions can be derived from these points, one of the future indicators can be that the Indian team after 1985 was seen as one of the best in the game with good performances against all leading teams including the series victory in England in 1986. Hopefully the present Indian team also achieves the pinnacle in all formats in the coming few months.