2010 could not have begun on a better note for lovers of cricket’s traditional version. The Australians came from nowhere to beat Pakistan at Sydney, and England’s last pair hung on for dear life against South Africa at Cape Town. And then came THAT match. The Ranji Trophy final between Mumbai and Karnataka, played at Mysore in mid-January 2010, was an encounter for the ages. Even as the game went down to the wire, many of us ‘Mumbaikars’ could not help but remember the cracker of May 1991. Those were different times. Rajiv Gandhi, if memory serves me right, was alive, the country was about to confront a seminal mid-term poll, we were still a closeted country and economy, and Bombay was yet to be officially renamed 'Mumbai.' More significantly for me, the post-SSC exam holidays were on, and there was this gift in the form of the Ranji final between Bombay and Haryana, which DD had ‘consented’ to telecast ‘live.’ That year, the season had extended all the way upto May, thanks to some legal wrangles. Not that all the cricket-loving ‘vacationers’ were complaining, but the cricketers themselves would have had plenty to say, having to play in cauldron-like conditions at the Wankhede Stadium. It was one of those rare occasions when ‘WE’ stood for Mumbai rather than India, and I was determined to make the most of it. What a team ‘WE’ had! Even in the absence of the skipper Ravi Shastri! The openers were Lalu Rajput and Shishir Hattangadi. Then came acting skipper Sanjay Manjrekar. And Dilip Vengsarkar. And Sachin Tendulkar. And Vinod Kambli. And Chandu Pandit. And Raju Kulkarni. And Salil Ankola. Then there was the left-arm spinner Sanjay Patil, and a debutant named Abey Kuruvilla. Class, consistency, composure, excellence, elegance, experience - WE had it all. Haryana, as we saw it, began and ended with the great Kapil. True, Chetan Sharma was there, as was a teenager called Ajay Jadeja, but we didn’t think they would be too much of a bother. But trust cricket to take the piss out of you, when you try to take the piss out of it. Haryana batted first and rattled up over 500, with opener Deepak Sharma, an unsung follower of the ‘Allan Border unattractive-yet-effective’ school of batsmanship, scoring 199. Our response with the bat was patchy, but WE weren’t unduly flustered, for the fall of every wicket seemed to bring another legend to the crease. The cat attacked the pigeons only when Kapil bowled Vengsarkar with a ripper. The wickets tumbled rapidly thereafter, and Haryana gained a century-plus first-innings lead. The fourth day had dawned by then, which meant that all the visitors had to do was draw the game. Bombay on the other hand had to get ten Haryana wickets as quickly as possible, and then go for the target. I guess some straight-talking must have been done in the Mumbai dressing-room, as the hosts took the field like men possessed. They bowled Haryana out early on the final day. The target was 355, with two sessions and a bit left. We expected the best, but got the worst, as three wickets went down before lunch. The third was that of Manjrekar, who had taken 377 off the Hyderabad bowlers a few days previously. The Haryana dressing-room must have been one hell of a ‘happening’ place during the lunch interval. A few feet away, TV commentator Milind Wagle requested Madhav Mantri, then BCA President and one of the city’s cricketing Grandmasters, for an interview. “Will you play for a draw, now that you have lost three early wickets?” Wagle asked. It was like asking Maneka Gandhi to eat tandoori chicken. “This is the Bombay team,” Mantri replied. “Do not forget that Dilip and Sachin are there!” Years later, a colleague told me that Ajit Tendulkar rates the 96 runs that Sachin scored that afternoon as one of his three best knocks of all time. The little champ was awesome, flailing the ball away to every nook and corner of the Wankhede playing arena, and occasionally, stands. Vengsarkar complemented him splendidly at the other end. For people like yours truly, who had grown up relishing and cherishing the exploits of the great Kapil, it was unreal to see him being blasted over his head for sixes. It must have been at tea that Kapil, with the tide having swung in Bombay’s favour, apparently made his way to the other dressing-room and said in jest to Vengsarkar, “Humko ek baar to jeetne do!” A century seemed imminent for Sachin, when he hit a full toss straight to Jadeja in the covers. The tension was back. Kambli and Pandit did their best, but Sachin’s dismissal had given Haryana a shot in the arm. They kept attacking, and it seemed all over when the ninth scalp went down with forty-odd needed. In came Abey Kuruvilla, who had bowled decently on his debut. What would the Lord of Lord’s, who had kept things going at one end, do in that situation? We got the answer soon enough. Off-spinner Yogendra Bhandari was bowling, and Vengsarkar went MAD. Three or four sixes in one over, and the pressure was back on Haryana. The Wankhede, which had started filling up in the afternoon after the news spread of Sachin’s innings, fell silent when Kuruvilla found himself having to block an entire Kapil over. For probably the first time, the whole of Mumbai wanted THE KAPIL to fail!!!! Kuruvilla played his part to perfection, and Vengsarkar took us closer and closer to the target. With only three needed and fourteen balls left, it seemed all over for Haryana. Bombay, it appeared, had handled the pressure brilliantly, and come through. However, there was a misunderstanding between Kuruvilla and Vengsarkar’s runner Lalu Rajput, and that opened the floodgates, as far as the eyes of the Bombay supporters were concerned. Vengsarkar, watching from square-leg, wept all the way back to the dressing-room, and in the process, gave Kapil a sneak peak into the psyche of the Mumbai cricketer. “We had played together for India for several years, and won and lost quite a few matches, but I had never seen Dilip cry ….”, he would recollect later. Of course, he and his young team deserved all the credit for beating the lion in its own den. And it was an ‘alpha’ lion; Hattangadi and Patil apart, every member of Bombay’s playing XI in that game had played, or went on to play, for India. Bombay at that stage hadn’t won the Ranji Trophy since 1984-85. The drought finally came to an end in 1993-94 when Ravi Shastri led a team of apprentices to the title. That triggered off another golden age. At a time when every non-Mumbaikar who has held a cricket bat at some point in his life is going on and on about the ‘decline’ of Mumbai cricket, it is important to note that post-1991, Delhi have won the championship twice, Karnataka thrice, Railways twice, and Mumbai a modest nine times. There were some absorbing games in the 1990s and the new millennium – like the 1999-00 semi-final against Tamil Nadu, wherein Sachin revisited his Sharjah-sandstorm heroics, and the 2006-07 final, wherein one of the TV commentators started backing Bengal so blatantly that it was embarrassing. But no game was as dramatic as the 2009-10 final at Mysore. A lively pitch and animated spectator-support produced some exhilarating cricket. With Mumbai bowled out for 233 on the opening day, the initiative was for Karnataka to lose. And lose it they did, being bowled out for 130. The wrecker-in-chief was Avishkar Salvi, who will take the new ball in a ‘1990s-2000s UNLUCKY MUMBAI CRICKETERS XI’ (no prizes for guessing that Amol Muzumdar will lead). He took five wickets. Karnataka responded aggressively with the ball, and had Mumbai tottering at 51-5. It was then that the turning point was reached, with Dhawal Kulkarni showing just why Mumbai had won the title 38 times. Frankly, I did not know he could bat, and was as astounded to see him come in ahead of Agarkar and Powar as the commentators were. He proceeded to score 87, and at the risk of coming across as ‘melodramatic,’ one could imagine Ramakant Desai, a fast bowler who always put a price on his wicket, beaming from the heavens. Karnataka needed to create history in order to win, for no team had successfully chased as many as 338 in a Ranji final. We had started visualizing the presentation ceremony, only to return to reality, with Manish Pandey essaying the kind of innings you don’t mind watching even if you are in the opposition. Hindsight can be really handy, but the fact of the matter is that at no stage did WE believe that the game was lost, even when Karnataka needed less than a hundred with seven wickets in hand. WE knew that it was a matter of getting THAT one wicket. As WE saw it, there were only two teams that were capable of snatching a win in the most hopeless of situations – Australia and Mumbai, in no particular order. Pandey fell, and Wasim Jaffer duly tightened the screws. It was cricket at its very, very best. The forty year-old Sunil Joshi had an opportunity to exorcise the memories of the 1999 Chennai heartbreak, but he didn’t take it. Agarkar kept striking, and Dhawal produced two beauties that sent the off-stump flying. It soon came to a stage when Karnataka needed seven runs and Mumbai one wicket. The entire office had gathered in front of the TV set by this time. Standing at the top of his run-up was Agarkar, who had shattered my cricketing dreams by sending my middle stump for a walk at the college trials in 1993. I never held that against him of course, but like many others, I have over the years been irritated at his inability to realize his potential to the fullest. A collective prayer went up as he began that over, followed by a groan when Ajinkya Rahane missed a catch at gully. Had we thrown it away? But Ajit kept his cool, probably figuring out that the batters were tenser than the Mumbaikars. The fateful ball was a bit slower than what the batsman anticipated, and it probably rose a bit more than expected as well. The ball ballooned off the bat, Agarkar completed a return catch, and all hell broke loose in the Mumbai ranks. The last time I felt so elated was when we (India) beat England at Chennai in December 2008. A few words had been exchanged during the game, but they sort of evened themselves out, with both sides being equally vocal. The losers were upset with a couple of umpiring decisions, and the winners with the groundstaff. The long and short of it was that Karnataka lost because they did not know how to win (they had last made it to the final in 1998-99), and Mumbai won because they knew how to. The champions had done it again. They were epic games, those two. I will conclude with a memory that encapsulates everything that is extraordinary about Mumbai cricket. It’s February 2007. A day after they have won the Ranji Trophy for the 37th time, the Mumbai team has gathered at a function at the CCI. Amol Muzumdar, the victorious captain, and his teammates, are summoned on the stage. A champagne bottle is uncorked, and just when every onlooker is expecting Amol to take a gulp and pass the bottle on to his teammates, he descends the stage, makes his way to where Ajit Wadekar, Bapu Nadkarni and Dilip Sardesai are sitting, asks them to raise their glasses, and pours the bubbly into them. I say no more.