It’s the 30th anniversary of the Nehru Cup.
The MRF World Series for Jawaharlal Nehru, to give it its full name, was a mini-World Cup, and a forerunner to the Champions Trophy, that involved six of the seven Test-playing nations. (New Zealand, it seems, were not invited.) The tournament was ostensibly a celebration of the centenary of the birth of Nehru, the first Indian prime minister and an independence activist. In reality, it was designed to help the election campaign of Rajiv Gandhi, Nehru’s grandson – it didn’t work).
The tournament also satisfied India’s burgeoning obsession with one-day internationals. Most of the other boards accepted invitations because of the money, which meant the players were obliged to shut up and get on with the kind of schedule that would be a health and safety scandal these days. The tournament even started without the hosts, who were still playing in the Champions Trophy in Sharjah. Pakistan played 11 ODIs in 19 days in both competitions. West Indies played 11 in 20; one of their team said the squad was suffering from “cricket-lag”.
The British media was especially critical of the brazen commercialism. “I feel sorry for everyone out there,” wrote Matthew Engel. “If anyone, one year from now, has the slightest recollection of it I shall be astonished.”
Ahem. Well, now. Sorry Matthew, but when you are 14 years old and sport is your entire world, you tend to retain the kind of information that serves no useful purpose until you get the opportunity to write about it three decades later.
The Nehru Cup was a Teletext-only experience for the Spin, although at that age the imagination can fill in plenty of gaps – especially when you squint at a 15in screen and it says “W Larkins c Border b May 124” and you wait for the page to come around again and it still says “W Larkins c Border b May 124”.
The lack of detail didn’t matter. We had to wait only three weeks after the tournament had finished for the new issue of Wisden Cricket Monthly to provide chapter and verse on every game.
It was, quietly, a landmark tournament for English cricket – the beginning of the bleep-test years. With David Gower and Ian Botham omitted, the new captain, Graham Gooch, and the coach, Micky Stewart, picked a largely young team – including two future legends in the uncapped Alec Stewart and Nasser Hussain – and placed an emphasis on fitness that would eventually become the norm. Some of their ideas, including an endless series of shuttle runs, were not entirely commensurate with the cardiovascular modalities of experienced players such as Wayne Larkins and Allan Lamb.
England did pretty well in the Nehru Cup, reaching the semi-finals and beating Australia – who had slaughtered them 4-0 in the Ashes a few months earlier – in the round-robin stage. That game, which was the first England match to involve a team huddle, featured two innings worth remembering. Allan Border’s 84 not out off 44 balls, an almost unprecedented rate of scoring back then, demonstrated the savage range-hitting that became the norm in the 21st century.
England’s opening pair were Gooch and Larkins, combined age 71. Larkins had been recalled after eight years because of Gooch’s faith in his natural talent. The night before the game, as a few of the team chatted in the bar (that part hadn’t yet changed), Larkins tried to lift morale by disparaging Terry Alderman, who had tormented England and Gooch in particular during the Ashes. “Goochie, this Alderman is crap,” he said. “He can’t bowl. He’ll have to disappear tomorrow.”
The next morning, Larkins woke with a fuzzy head and a nagging feeling that he had talked a dangerously cocksure talk. But he walked it too, manhandling Alderman and everyone else in the course of a devastating 124. After the game, as he was hailed by his teammates, Larkins lifted his head, smiled mischievously and said: “Terry who?”
It was the innings of Larkins’s life, the only time in international cricket that he demonstrated his rare attacking ability. Try telling him the Nehru Cup meant nothing.
Or Chetan Sharma. He slogged India to victory over England in the round-robin stage with an extraordinary 101 not out. Sharma was a seam bowler and lower-order slogger – his next highest ODI score was 38 – who was promoted up the order, just for one day. In the Guardian, Mike Selvey said it was “indisputably the worst century anyone who was watching could remember”. Micky Stewart said: “One-day cricket is so full of surprises that nothing surprises me anymore.”
There were plenty of surprises in India, especially as most of the squad had never been there before. Derek Pringle’s charming book Pushing the Boundaries, which the Spin unequivocally recommends, is full of lovely details and stories about that trip, including a meeting with a man who was in the Guinness Book of Records for having the world’s longest fingernails.
Our favourite is probably the health warning on a bottle of 8.5% beer: ‘Drinking alcoholic beverages can be injurious to your health.’
England went out to Pakistan in a rain-affected semi-final that became a Thirty30 game. By coincidence, the noses of the press-box purists were elevated at precisely 30 degrees when they found out a rain-reduced game would decide a semi-final.
Pakistan beat West Indies in a thrilling final, when Wasim Akram hit his first delivery for six to seal victory with one ball to spare. The Pakistan captain, Imran Khan, reckoned the Nehru Cup victory was Pakistan’s equivalent of Brian Clough’s Anglo-Scottish Cup , and ultimately empowered them to win the World Cup in such thrilling style in 1992.
If that’s the case, the Nehru Cup more than justified its existence.
- theguardian
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