The two names that are not there

Two names are missing from India’s teamsheet at Nagpur in October 2004, and the scorecard cannot tell you anything about either absence.

Sourav Ganguly, the captain, withdrew before the match with an injury. Harbhajan Singh, the leading spinner, did not play.

What the match did

Australia won the toss and batted on a pitch that had turned up green. They made 398.

India were bowled out for 185, scoring at 2.01 an over. Rahul Dravid, captaining in Ganguly’s place, batted 140 balls for 21. Glenn McGrath bowled twenty-five overs and thirteen of them were maidens.

Australia declared at 329 for five and set 543. India were 37 for five on the last day and lost by 342 runs.

It was Australia’s first series win in India since 1969.

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

The two accounts

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

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

Both accounts explain the same set of facts. Both are told by people with an interest in the version they are telling. There is no third source and there is no document.

What the card does say

It says India played two spinners. Anil Kumble bowled 46 overs in the match and Murali Kartik bowled 46, and Kartik took five wickets and was the most economical of India’s bowlers.

So the simplest version of the story, that India went into a home Test without spin because the pitch was green, is not what happened. Harbhajan specifically was absent, not the category.

That makes the question narrower and harder. Not why India left out their spinners, but why they left out that one.

What should exist

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 note from the match referee, who was Ranjan Madugalle, or from the umpires, Aleem Dar and David Shepherd.

Officials file reports on pitches. If a Test surface in central India in October was unusual enough to be worth a paragraph, three men were professionally obliged to write one.

Nothing any of them wrote has ever been made public. The BCCI held no inquiry.

How the series moved

Australia had won the first Test at Bangalore and drawn the second at Chennai. They arrived at Nagpur 1–0 up with two to play, having lost the previous series in India from 1–0 ahead.

Nagpur settled it. Damien Martyn made 114 and 97 and took the match award, and Jason Gillespie took five for 56 and four for 24.

Thirty-five years of Australian failure in India ended in a Test that India’s captain did not play in.

What is left

The most consequential home Test defeat of the era rests on two irreconcilable anecdotes told by interested parties, and on a teamsheet with two names missing from it.

Ganguly returned for the fourth Test at Mumbai and India won it. That does not settle anything either, and it is the last piece of evidence anybody has produced.

The full account is on the pitch itself. This is the other half: the eleven that was picked, and the two men who were not in it.

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No. 4 in The Eleven, a series of 5.

NextThe bowler who was not there