“There are not many things that will come close to when we lost the 2007, 50-over World Cup,” said MS Dhoni, India’s captain, after losing a home Test series to England in 2012. “This is not even close to that.”
When he made that remark, it was taken as further evidence of his lack of regard for the five-day game.
Except that it was not. Ask players from that 2007 squad which was the black-hole moment of their careers, and the answer will be almost unanimous.
India did not just get knocked out of a World Cup in the space of eight days. The defeats to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, at the Queens Park Oval in Trinidad, marked the end of an era.
It meant that several members of Indian cricket’s golden generation, who had lost to Ricky Ponting’s Australia in the 2003 final, would retire without the World Cup winners’ medal that they so craved.
Anil Kumble retired from ODIs after that. Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly would be cast aside less than a year later.
Eight men, including Dhoni and Sachin Tendulkar, would sing the redemption song on home soil four years later, but even that did not allow them to forget the pain, humiliation and torment of 2007.
Only Dhoni remains from that time on the Indian side, and he is not someone prone to living in the past.
He will know, however, that Bangladesh’s trio of survivors from that five-wicket win – Shakib Al Hasan, Mushfiqur Rahim and Tamim Iqbal – will draw inspiration from that occasion as they seek an upset in the biggest game of their lives.
For India, this is another quarter-final. They have played 10 such knockout games in World Cups – winning seven and losing three.
For Bangladesh, though they reached the Super Eight stage in 2007 after eliminating India, this winner-take-all game represents a step into the unknown.
It is not inconceivable that victory at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in front of a crowd of nearly 90,000 could do for their cricket what the World Cup win of 1983 did for India.
That Bangladesh are here at all has come as a surprise to even their most loyal followers. Their form in 2014 was not poor, it was wretched. Five wins against Zimbabwe and a washout aside, they lost each of the 12 matches they played.
Coming into the tournament, there was genuine fear that they might even slip up against Afghanistan and Scotland.
India’s form, too, has surprised those that saw them struggle for coherence in the Tri Series leading up to the World Cup.
Their renaissance can be put down to players rediscovering form, and also to a team environment that has allowed them to stay focused and relaxed even as those around them – fans and the media, in particular – go crazy.
In Bangladesh’s case as well, the coaching staff deserve immense credit for the turnaround.
Chandika Hathurusingha once harboured ambitions of coaching the team for whom he played 26 Tests and 35 ODIs in the 1990s. When he worked in the Sri Lankan set-up with Trevor Bayliss and Stuart Law, one of his admirers was Kumar Sangakkara.
In a letter to the board, he had written: “Hathurusingha’s technical and strategic knowledge was second to none of the foreign coaches I have worked with before. He has out-worked, out-thought and out-shone the foreign coaching staff within the system.”
Now, less than a year after he was again overlooked for the top coaching job at home, Hathurusingha stands on the threshold with Bangladesh. But in Dhoni, who knows a little something about what it is like to see a World Cup dream crushed, they might come across an opponent who simply does not care for the romance of the occasion.
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