Diss track: Rudraneil Sengupta on Australia, and India’s, history with sledging

Australian cricketers have a long history with trash talk. India has learnt to respond in kind. Now, the banter is friendlier, effective, but more fun.

If there was ever any doubt that cricket’s most riveting tournament for some years has been the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, then the first Test at Perth has blown that doubt away.

Rishabh Pant and Australia’s Alex Carey. Pant’s banter, good-humoured but relent-less, is said to wear batsmen down. (AP)

No World Cup in any format, nor the Indian Premier League, nor even the Ashes can claim to offer the rich blend of cricketing skills, wildly fluctuating fortunes, sharp tactics, fiery sieges, heroic holdouts, all-consuming competition and cultural significance of this series of Test matches in which India and Australia face off at the end of each year.

India has got the better of Australia through the last five series, but this takes nothing away from the intensity of the rivalry. Everyone seems to step up their game. This year, we’ve seen the brilliant young batter Yashasvi Jaiswal come into his own, and Rishabh Pant hit a swept six while falling over (arguably the weirdest stroke in cricket right now, where Pant falls deliberately, using the momentum to transfer more velocity to the ball). There have been the endless wonders of Jasprit Bumrah’s fast-bowling, and Virat Kohli regaining his magic at just the right moment.

Another thing that makes the Border-Gavaskar Trophy special, is the banter. Call it sledging, dissing, trash-talking, or its formal moniker in rap battles, “yo mama”, there was a time when no one did it quite as well as the Australians.

They turned dissing into a skill, a weapon and a form of attack that was inextricably linked to Aussie dominance of the game through the ’90s and Aughts.

Ian Chappell, one of the game’s most accomplished sledgers, even claimed that term was coined in early-’60s Adelaide, when a cricketer who swore in front of a woman was called “as subtle as a sledgehammer”.

Australian sledging involved all the usual psychological games, but also, in the last couple of decades, simple blunt abuse (as when former captain Michael Clarke told England’s James Anderson, over and over, to “prepare to get your arm broken” during an Ashes series). Oddly, they could dish it out, but couldn’t take it. By the turn of the century, the Indian team was responding in kind, and this seemed to throw the Aussies off their game, causing a degree of emotional upheaval that the Indian team learnt to take advantage of.

By the time of the 2016-17 series, when Kohli led the team to its first-ever series victory in Australia, every match and post-match press conference was lit up by verbal fireworks on both sides. (“Do you even respect the Australians?” Kohli was once asked by an Australian journalist. “No, not all of them,” he replied.)

“This team, regardless of whether we are on top or not, we speak,” Kohli said to me, after that win. “I like playing against Australia because it’s hard for them to stay calm. I don’t mind an argument on the field. It really excites me and brings out the best in me, and they don’t seem to be learning a lesson.”

They have since learnt the lesson. Numerous Australian cricketers, speaking before the ongoing series, mentioned the importance of not riling Kohli on the field. During play, the cross-talk is now more banter than sledging. It’s a lot more fun, to be honest.

In the first Test, the Aussie fast-bowler Mitchell Starc, after being harassed by a short ball from Harshit Rana, said, “I bowl much faster than you, you know, and I have a long memory.”

When it was India’s time to bat, 22-year-old Jaiswal picked up the thread for Rana, hitting Starc for a boundary and saying, “You’re bowling too slow!”

Aussie cricketers point to 27-year-old Rishabh Pant as India’s banterer-in-chief. His variety of sledging is good-humoured but relentless, and seems to wear batsmen down. It must feel a bit like being in a car with someone who plays the same song over and over, and it’s really a song you quite dislike.

Every time the stump mic picks up Pant’s banter, he’s saying, in a nasal, bemused voice: “It’s quite hard, quite hard to bat; quite hard, quite hard to survive. It’s not so easy, not so easy to bat; not so easy, not so easy to survive… This guy is thinking of lunch because it’s not easy to be out here, it’s quite hard… He’s dreaming of lunch; it’s getting too hard for him…”

Oof.

(To reach Rudraneil Sengupta with feedback, email rudraneil@gmail.com)