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Cricket: How Bumrah, Shami, Siraj, Ishant and Co are rejigging the great Indian dream
If you were growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s, when India and Pakistan were still regularly playing against each other in international cricket, one of the favourite fantasies was to make a team comprising of both Indian and Pakistani players.
This was the era of the all-conquering Australian team which was sweeping every competition and format in front of them and it wasn’t really odd to try and dream up a team that would have been able to beat them. India had the batting but not the bowling. Pakistan had the bowling but not the batting. Cricket fans on both sides of the border would invariably think of what might have happened if partition had not taken place and the cricketing riches of both countries could be pooled together.
The decisions were never easy to make but we would invariably look at Indian batsmen to fill the opener’s slot and most of the other positions in the top order. Hanif Mohammad, Javed Miandad and Zaheer Abbas would get into the mix as would Inzamam-ul Haq but it was Sunil Gavaskar, Sachin Tendulkar, Virender Sehwag, Dilip Vengsarkar, Mohammed Azharuddin, Gundappa Viswanath amongst other Indian batsmen who would invariably dominate the conversation….