FAB FIVE, THE PANDAVAS OF INDIA’S BATTING
Author: Aditya Bhushan
Produced by: Global Cricket School
Pages: 217
Price: Rs 799
At the start of the New Millennium, Indian cricket could boast of having the most lustrous batting line-up in the contemporary game. It started with being a quartet and then became a quintet, presenting bowlers the world over with problems galore. After all, if they managed to get one great batsman out, another great would follow. And if they got a second great back in the pavilion, another great would emerge from it, signifying the very difficult task they faced.
Totals of 600-plus were commonplace and even 700-plus was notched up on a couple of occasions. There were double centuries galore and even a couple of triple hundreds. For over a decade, the Fab Four who became the Fab Five constituted the pride and joy of Indian cricket besides providing days and days of immense pleasurable viewing for the Indian cricket follower. Other teams too had formidable batting right down the order but their deeds never measured up to the achievements of the Indian quintet.
The glorious exploits of Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly, V.V.S. Laxman and Virender Sehwag constitute the most successful phase of Indian cricket and this has been admirably captured by Aditya Bhushan in his book, Fab Five, the Pandavas of India’s Batting. The author has adopted a unique approach by naming them after the mythical Pandavas of the Mahabharata. He explains why and, in fact, has named them accordingly – Ganguly as Yudhishtra, Sehwag as Bheema, Tendulkar as Arjun, Laxman as Nakul, and Dravid as Sahadev –while listing his reasons for the same. He also gives quotes at regular intervals from the great epic in both Sanskrit and English to back the choices.
There is a timely chapter on the match-fixing crisis which was unearthed by the Delhi Police in April 2000. The author writes about the sense of shock and disbelief among cricket’s faithful followers as the scandal broke. The immediate task at hand was to restore the confidence of cricket fans and this is where, as the author recalls, the ethereal batsmanhip of the Fab Five played such a major role. Fortunately, the memorable evehts at Kolkata in March 2001 took place within a few months. It was a victory largely shaped by two of the Fab Five – Laxman and Dravid – and paved the way for other notable triumphs that are well documented – Leeds 2002, Adelaide 2003, Multan 2004, Rawalpindi 2004 and Perth 2008, besides several other comparatively lesser known victories.
The great thing about the quintet is that they never failed India as a unit. If on the rare ocassion a couple of them failed, the other three would come up with sizeable contributions. Happily, this did not happen too often and in the course of almost every Test match that they played, their contribution to the Indian cause was vital. The temptation is always there to put Tendulkar as the leader of the pack but he himself aptly summed up the situation best when he said, “The five of us were like five fingers in a hand. And we all had a role to play in the team. Instead of choosing one over another let us look at what we have been able to achieve together along with the other players in the team.”
The wonder of it all was that their reign at the top lasted so long. Ganguly played his last Test in 2008, Dravid and Laxman retired in 2012, and Sehwag and Tendulkar a year later. As long as they were around, Indian cricket fans could rest assured that the team was not just in capable hands but India would go on from one success to another. What Indian cricket owes the Fab Five is immeasurable and that is what is underlined in the book, which has a foreword by Dilip Vengsarkar.
(Reviewed by Partab Ramchand, veteran sports writer who spent his career working for The Indian Express and The Telegraph and Sportsworld. He lives in Chennai.)
from Webdoux