'It was a dream come true, really!'

Ajit Wadekar remembers his most memorable series as skipper, in a conversation with Ashish Magotra

Before the England series, you said that if India could come back home with a win against the West Indies and a draw against England, it would be good for Indian cricket. Wasn't that a defeatist attitude?

As a captain, you can't talk aggressively for the sake of doing it. England at that time was the best team in the world and we were supposed to be the weakest team to tour there -- it was even said our win against the West Indies was a flash in the pan. So I was very careful about what I said.

But actually, I was pretty confident that if the weather held and we did well in the warm-up games we had a chance. Early in the tour, the team was playing like a single, cohesive unit, fortunately the weather was good as well with hardly any rain, we were in the second half of the season and the wickets were responsive to our spinners. And then there was Chandrasekhar, the architect of our win. It all fell into place.

Now that you brought up Chandra's name, he had been out of the team for over four years, you already have three world class spinners in Prasanna, Bedi and Venkat, so what made you decide to get him back into the team?

Well, Chandra is basically not a leg-spinner, he is a freak bowler. English batsmen, if you notice, play from the pitch of the ball which makes them good against pace, but they don't read the ball out of the fingers. That is why I thought Chandra would be useful, because the batsmen wouldn't know what he was bowling, they couldn't read him out of the hand. And he proved me right.

On a trivial tangent, there is this story that you consulted a doctor in Bombay and he predicted the win against the West Indies, and also said that if you leave on the 17th you were sure to win against England, and that you ensured that the team left on that date?

It was Dr. Chandrashekar, a homeopath who dabbled in astrology. You know how we Indians are superstitious -- for instance, I had this thing of always putting on my left pad first. So, being superstitious, when someone tells you go on a particular day and you can actually arrange to do that, why not? It's like, if you don't do something like that and later, things go wrong,you go through life thinking, if only I had listened. *laughs* Anyway, ultimately what matters is how you play out there in the middle.

Still on the tangent, did you have any other superstitions?

Yes of course, I was always the last man to get into the team bus. If you were late, you were fined, but I didn't mind paying the fine because I thought being last would bring me luck.

What to your mind was the turning point in England, other than of course Chandra's six wicket haul?

Actually, we started winning from day one. We had ten tour matches to go before the first Test and we, the manager Colonel Hemu Adhikari and myself,told the boys that we had come here to win, that warm up games should be taken very seriously and we should try and win as many as possible.

And it happened, we kept on winning, until I realised we were actually becoming over-confident, which happens with Indian teams all the time. So I was actually hoping that we should lose one tour match, to bring the team back to earth, and against Essex we lost. The conditions were bad and though we did lose, I frankly wasn't that serious about the game. Of course, I didn't tell the boys that, though. So when we lost, the boys realised we were getting overconfident.

That got us together even more, and we were very well acclimatized as well. We got very close to winning the Lord's Test. Snow was supposed to be their fastest, I hit him for four off the first ball, that gave confidence to the other batsmen that their pace bowlers could be tackled. We could have lost that match, but we came close to winning it.

Actually, one reason was the weather -- in England, the weather reports are reliable, not like in India. I was told that it would rain on the last day, just after tea. So then I thought, if that session is going to be wiped out, there is no way we can lose ten wickets in the other two sessions. So I thought, since defeat was not really possible, why not try for a win? If things go wrong and we lose wickets, we could always shut down and play for a draw till the rains came.

So I told the boys to go for broke. And we ended up just 19 short with two wickets in hand when the rains came. But that made the boys believe they could beat England.

Now talk us through the Oval win?

Well, the second day was washed out, and we were trailing by 65 runs. Then, when England batted, after the usual formalities with the new ball, Chandra started bowling and the Englishmen didn't know what hit them. I have never seen him bowl like he did that day. That was when we realised we could bowl them out cheap, under 100 runs.

We were really aggressive that day. And sometimes, your instincts work well, too. Derek Underwood came out to bat and he was playing Chandra well, I brought Bedi back on and Bishen immediatley got us the wicket, then I took Bedi off and put Chandra back on and he took care of John Price.

We had to get 173, and I thought it wouldn't be easy, but that we could do it. On the first ball of the last day, I got run out, I came back to the pavilion and told Vishy (G R Viswanath) and Farokh (Engineer), we have to get those runs, I don't care how.

They went out there and got those runs and all the time, I was fast asleep on the massage table. I woke up when their manager, Ken Barrington, came and told me, Hey, Ajit, you've won, and I looked up at him and asked, who asked you to wake me up, I knew we were going to win!

What impact did the win have on your captaincy?

You start feeling more responsible, and at the same time, people start expecting more from you. You start thinking seriously about how to continue that kind of form, continue to get that kind of results. It was easy to get to the top but I knew staying there wouldn't be easy.

And so you stood on the balcony surveying the celebrations, what went through your mind then?

I wanted to lift Chandra on my shoulders! I told him, this is your victory, you are its architect. It was a dream come true, really -- no one thought we could beat England and once we did that, we thought we could beat anyone,South Africa, Australia, whoever.

Among the Englishmen, who did you think would give you the most trouble?

Alan Knott, he was always getting runs against us. We always wanted his wicket early, we would pass comments, other things would happen. It was only in the last match that we got him cheap, though.

Pass comments? You mean the Indians sledged?

Yes, yes of course. We had Ekki (Solkar) saying something in Marathi which the Englishmen wouldn't understand, but even that could be disturbing. He would keep muttering, and the batsman would be aware of it, he would know Ekki was talking about him and that would prey on his mind. Look, all teams did it, we did it quietly, that is all. There were four letter words flying around and sometimes you have to give it back.

If you had to pick the best batsman of that tour and the best bowler, who would they be?

Chandra, without a doubt, was the bowler of the series. Picking a batsman is more difficult, all of them contributed. Perhaps it was Farokh Engineer, a hard hitting batsman, who was also a constant source of encouragement for the bowlers and fielders. He was a typical bawaji, great fun to have around, very inspiring, he would know always what I needed from him.

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