The Nagpur pitch

Australia had not won a Test series in India since 1969. They arrived in 2004 having lost the previous one from 1–0 up, and by the time they reached Nagpur they were 1–0 ahead again with two to play.

The pitch at the Vidarbha Cricket Association ground turned up green.

Two men missing

Sourav Ganguly, the India captain, withdrew before the match with an injury. Harbhajan Singh, the leading spinner, also did not play. Rahul Dravid captained.

Australia batted first and made 398. Damien Martyn made 114 and Michael Clarke 91.

India were bowled out for 185. Jason Gillespie took 5 for 56. Glenn McGrath bowled twenty-five overs, thirteen of them maidens, and took 3 for 27. Figures from a different decade, on a pitch in central India in October.

Australia batted again and declared at 329 for five, Simon Katich making 99 and Martyn 97, and set India 543. India made 200. Australia won by 342 runs and the series with it.

Full scorecard: India v Australia, 3rd Test, Nagpur, 26–29 October 2004 →

Two details on the card cut against the simplest version of the story.

Australia won the toss and chose to bat. That is not what a side does on a pitch it believes is unplayable.

And India were not without spin. Anil Kumble played. So did Murali Kartik, who took three for 57 and two for 74 and was the most economical of India’s bowlers. Harbhajan specifically was missing, not spin in general.

Rahul Dravid, captaining in Ganguly’s place, batted 140 balls for 21 in the first innings.

Two accounts of the same grass

Kishore Pradhan, the curator, has said that Ganguly asked him to shave the grass off and that he refused, with the Vidarbha Cricket Association backing its groundsman against the national captain.

Matthew Hayden wrote later that the two Indian players simply did not fancy the conditions and found reasons not to play. Harbhajan called that a stunt to sell books.

Both accounts explain the same set of facts: a green pitch in India, and two of the home side's best players unavailable for it. Both are told by people with an interest in the version they are telling. There is no third source.

What the pitch actually did

Glenn McGrath bowled twenty-five overs in India’s first innings and thirteen of them were maidens. Jason Gillespie took five for 56, then four for 24 in the second innings. India scored at 2.01 an over across 91.5 overs and were still bowled out.

Chasing 543 on the last day they were 37 for five: Chopra bowled at 1, Dravid bowled at 9, Tendulkar caught at 20, Laxman caught at 29, Kaif caught at 37. Sehwag made 58 and Agarkar 44 not out at the end of it, which flattered the scoreline to 200.

Damien Martyn made 114 and 97 and took the match award. Australia sealed the series with a match to spare.

What should exist and does not

A dispute between a national captain and a state association over pitch preparation is exactly the kind of thing that generates paper. A curator's log. A groundsman's instructions. A match referee's note. A board communication about a request that was refused.

If any of that was written down, it has never been produced. The BCCI held no inquiry. The Vidarbha association issued no statement setting out what was asked and by whom.

There is one more silence. Aleem Dar and David Shepherd stood in the match. Ranjan Madugalle was the referee.

Match officials file reports on pitches. Three of them were professionally obliged to notice this one.

Nothing any of them wrote has ever been made public, which means the only contemporaneous assessment of the most argued-over pitch in modern Indian cricket was made by people whose job was to record exactly that, and it sits wherever such things sit.

Twenty-two years on

The most consequential home Test defeat of the era, the one that ended thirty-five years of Australian failure in India, rests entirely on two irreconcilable anecdotes told by interested parties.

The only document anybody can point to is the scorecard. It records 398, 185, 329 for five and 200, a margin of 342 runs, and the fact that neither Ganguly nor Harbhajan appears anywhere on the teamsheet. It explains none of it.

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No. 8 in Mysteries, a series of 11.

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