Test Match Special - Death, Disaster and Redemption: England in India 84-85 part 1

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

In the first of a three episode mini-series, Daniel Norcross is alongside Vic Marks, Peter Baxter and Prakash Wakankar to look back at England's turbulent tour of India in 1984/85. Just hours after the England team had arrived India's prime minister, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated. What did this mean for the England team? What was it like to be in New Delhi? They discuss everything from restlessly staying in their hotels, to where they were when they were told the news, and whether this meant that any cricket would be played at all.Hear the first person accounts of Vic Marks who was part of the England squad, Peter Baxter who was producing TMS from India, and Prakash Wakankar who was celebrating his birthday in Pune.

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from BBC Radio 5 Live Hello I'm Daniel Norcross Welcome to the TestMount Special podcast And to what I think we can call a mini-series A three-episode special Looking back at England's Tour of India in 1984-85 Now you could be forgiven for thinking That this is a typical nostalgic look back to yesterday year

But this wasn't a typical test series There was not a typical backdrop To the two and a half, three months of cricket In fact, there wasn't anything too typical about any of it Mrs. Gandhi is assassinated. Her son takes over. As he now goes on to the backwood and pushes the belt with the father and that will be trapped in first-post family. Already tonight the tensions between the majority Hindus and the Sikh community are spilling over into violence.

Buses have been burned and Sikhs attacked and many have gone into hiding. Listen now, goes that first ball to Azarudin who cuts and gets that. In India, more than 600 people are now known to have been killed by the escape of poison gas, and it's feared the final figure may be over 1,000. There's both again to Paola and Paola. Edge is this one, a thick outside edge. It is along the ground to Cardman, and that is Fowler's double hundred. Gatting raises his battle off and acknowledges the cheers of the crowd and their generous cheers.

And once again a nice touch, Aramana comes across and shakes hands with Mike Gathing. Just hours after the England team arrived in India on Wednesday, the 31st of October, 1984, the Indian Prime Minister Indiraigandi was assassinated, sending the country into riots and ethnic violence. Then, some weeks later, 24 hours before the first test in Bombay, Percy Norris, a UK's deputy high commissioner who had just entertained the team at his apartment, was also assassinated. And one of the worst industrial accidents struck in Bo Pard. at least 3,800 people were killed

and thousands more suffered morbidity and premature death. We're going to hear firsthand what it was like to be in the country at that time, close to these events and involved in the occasional game of cricket across a few months of England toured India in the winter of 1984 and 85. Our journey begins on the 31st of October 1984 when the England team first arrived in India and joining me to help tell the story is former TestMount Special producer and commentator. Hello, Peter. Hello, Dan.

A Testback Special regular and member of the England touring party for that 1984-85 tour of India. Vic Marks. Hi, Vic. Hello, I'm here and trying to remember what happened. I'm sure it'll all come back to you. Test-Bat Special Commentator, Prakash Wakanka. So good to have you aboard. Hello, Prakash.

Hi there, and hi, everyone. Well, let's begin with you, Peter, because you and the team arrive in India in the early hours of the 31st of October. and it's not long before you discover the assassination of the Prime Minister. Indeed, yeah. I see from my diary that we touched down at 4.30 in the morning. And, of course, you then get all the garlands and everything else and off to the hotel. So almost dawn by the time we actually got to sleep. And it seemed to be as soon as I'd shut my eyes that my phone was ringing.

And it was the BBC Newsroom in London saying, it's about this Gandy business and I said what Gandy business Elvis because I'd been asleep and they said aren't you in Delhi? And I said yes of course I am

so they had to tell me and unfortunately the BBC's man in Delhi who was Mark Tully of great fame in those days was out of town following Princess Anne who was visiting the country

and he was up country somewhere and so they said, can you get down to the BBC office? And that was where I was for the next few hours, helping Mark Talley's assistant, Satish Jacob, putting reports, endless reports on the Today program at first and then on other news programs. So you effectively have become the BBC's India correspondent almost in one fell swoop. How did you verify the circumstances?

Well, yeah, it was difficult. We were operating on, I mean, Satish Jacob had a lot of contacts, obviously, and he was getting phone calls in, and we had the Telex machine was chattering away as well. That's how we got our news in those days. And eventually a call came through to Satish from somebody he knew saying, Mrs. Gandhi is dead. And I was conscious of the BBC's dictum that you must always have two independent sources

before you announce something like that and a few minutes later we got a Telex message saying the same thing so I consulted Satish who was a bit nervous about announcing it and I said well if these are two reliable sources I think we can probably go with it so I rang the news desk in London

and said we're getting the news that Mrs Gandhi has died and he said I was looking for a bit more authoritative than this. He said, well, if you're happy with that old boy, go for it. So I announced it, and I was a bit worried later to find that it hadn't been announced in India at all anywhere. Well, you went to the hospital, didn't you? Where she was being treated? I did. Well, yes, the instruction came through. One of you stay by the phone,

and the other one go out on the streets and interview Indian politicians. That was our brief. And they said, you can sort it out between you. Well, Satish wasn't going anywhere, And so I said, I'm afraid I have to tell you that my, the number of Indian politicians I could recognize by sight has just taken a bit of a bash. And so, anyway, however, I went out and couldn't get anywhere near the Prime Minister's residence, of course, it was all sealed off. So I went to the hospital and walked in amazingly easily and asked if I could speak to any of the doctors who'd, who'd been attending to Mrs. Gandhi and was told that they were still trying to save her life, which was a bit worrying

because we'd already put out on the BBC that she was not with us anymore. So anyway, I joined a line of Indian journalists I found outside the front of the hospital, and they sort of alerted me to the various dignitaries who were coming and going. But their feeling was that the announcement was awaiting the return of the Indian people,

president who was at that time, I think, on a state visit to Yemen. And so they had to wait for him to get back in the country before it was made official. Now, Prakash, this is your 21st birthday, amazing to behold, the 31st October, 1984. Can you tell us a little bit about Indira Gandhi? She was a colossal figure in Indian politics. Can you sort of put her into context for us? Very happy to, I mean, Mrs. Gandhi, other than the fact that, of course, she was the late Prime Minister Pandey Javala Nairu's daughter had almost grown up in that political environment

post-independence and from being someone who was infamously once called in Hindi mom-ki-gudia which meant a doll of wax who couldn't speak she went on as the world

knows now to be called and compared with Mrs. Thatcher as the, for lack of a better word, the Indian version, if you will, of the Iron Lady. The 1971 war, which was fought on both fronts, the east and the west, the liberation of Bangladesh that followed the very sort of amazing amount of leadership and qualities that she displayed in finally releasing over 100,000 Pakistani prisoners of war and letting that

sort of episode move, if you will, forward and away from being front and sent. after many, many years, international relations, her famous retort to Henry Kucinger when he tried to push her during the 71 conflict to do A or B. And her comment famously was, well, I don't take orders from any man. So tell us about your memories of that, because it is your 21st birthday. Presumably you were out and about gallivanting, weren't you? Yes. Well, it's a funny story, actually, on a rather point on occasion. The, I had actually had a girlfriend who I had kind of thought at the time would be someone that I would consider spending the rest of my life. And I'd actually asked her out on a date, but in the

afternoon for lunch, because she came from a fairly conservative family. I don't think her dad was going to let her out in the evening. Remember, there's 1984. And we went out to lunch to a restaurant here in Pune, which is called Quality. Fairly expensive for a student, but I did manage to save up. We went, we ordered, I remember, we ordered soup and waited and the soup arrived and we started and we were chatting and everything was going well. There was no, the ball wasn't moving around anyway. It was everything perfectly straightforward. And then suddenly the owner, who was a Sikh gentleman, and this must have been around maybe 1, 1.30 thereabouts in the afternoon, came around to all the folks who were sitting in the dining area and said, you've got to leave. I'm

I'm shutting down. And obviously the question was why, what happened? And he said there is news that Mrs. Gandhi has been shot. Mind you, he said she'd been shot. He wasn't saying anything more. And he said, there's the danger of riots. I am going to shut down. And so we all trooped off, having had half a bowl of soup each without having paid for it. But that was the end of it. As you know, Dan, I ended up marrying someone else just as well. But it was a very strange sort of a situation that the city started coming to a grinding halt. We had classmates, two of them, I remember in my class, who were Sikhs. And as the news started filtering, you know, some of the horrible stuff that was happening in Delhi, because the official announcement came out,

if I recall right, about 10 to 12 hours after the event. She was shot apparently around 9.30 in the morning, and it was only late at night that the official announcement by the government media started filtering through. But yes, it was a strange, strange day. So many different things were happening around that time. It was a tough, tough period for a lot of people. And it sort of tore apart the fabric of the Hindu and the Sikh, which was something which was never, ever imagined. Now, Victor, you've arrived in the country. You're not presumably charging around gathering important news reports for the BBC. What are you up to? at this stage? Well, I think I remember us getting up probably mid-morning because we had that

4.30 arrival, all bleary-eyed, thinking, well, we'll tuck into our nice tage breakfast. And then somewhere else in the restaurant, we look at this group of English pressmen, experts on cricket, who were in a very animated huddle, panicking about what to do. And then we soon realized what had happened. And we're kind of looking on as they were trying to turn themselves into sort of foreign correspondents like Peter had already had to do. So that was our first sort of awareness. And then we would look out, I remember seeing, she was shot, I think, only about two miles from where the hotel was.

And there would be fires billowing up. And our imaginations started to sort of wander and think, what's going on here? What are we doing here? How long are we going to stay here? It was tough. It was a very young touring party, actually, about a lot of new tourists. So it was a fairly traumatic start for them. I guess we just speculated what's going to happen.

Are we going to go home? We couldn't go out of the hotel. We were locked in the hotel for about four days, except we had one, I think, one or two trips to the British High Commission. We actually tried to have a net on a couple days afterwards on a concrete net and a bit of fielding practice. And all I remember about that is that my first contact with the cricket balls it came towards me in the air was with my eye

rather than my hands. So I've got a black eye there. The British High Commission in Delhi has got really quite wonderful grounds, hasn't it? So was that your sort of refuge? Because I know that the High Commission advice was that you don't leave the hotel or go out into the city. Because you're in Delhi here,

and that being the capital, that's probably the epicentre of protest and reaction and all sorts. Yeah, I mean, we still didn't really know what was going on. We were probably watching the television or people in England probably knew more what was happening than if you were two miles away in Delhi. But we couldn't go anywhere except to the British High Commission for a couple, one bit of practice and one, we went to the bar one night and just had drinks and met a few people

and asked them what they thought was going on. And I suppose after about three or four days, we're starting to get restless. What are we doing here? And we wanted to have a word with a management. Tony Brown was our manager it wasn't a big number of people managing a tour like that was Tony Brown there was Norman Gifford our assistant manager

a scorer and Bernard Thomas the Visio that was about it but we started to get a bit restless and I remember on about three or four days in we had this quite stormy meeting I mean Tony Brown was

could be quite a forceful individual he's the manager to be clear he's the team manager he's the team manager we've been stuck in Delhi for three or four days not being able to do anything the cricket is clearly as a 12 day period of morning so we're starting to think what's going on

what are we doing just staying here while everything is burning outside and it was a stormy meeting in which I think dear old Alan Lamb was really quite forceful about well we shouldn't be here perhaps we should be going home and Tony Brown who had charge of all our passports

we'd give them to him as soon as we'd Right. I remember him brandishing Alan Lamb's passport and saying, well, here it is. If you want it, you can take it and you can, let's say, go home if you want to. Which was quite a moment. The TMS podcast from BBC Radio 5 Live. To embrace the impossible requires a vehicle that pushes what's possible. Defender 110 boasts a towing capacity of 3,500 kilograms.

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No passion, no point. Listen, whenever you like on BBC sounds. Now, Prakash, I heard where the England team were at this point. Where were the Indian team? Well, the Indian team were, believe it or not, in the one place that nobody would have wanted them to be, which was in Pakistan. They were playing in one-day international,

mind you, a 40-over game, which was the norm because of the early setting of the sun at that time of the year. And they were playing in Sialcote, which is a border town, not very far at all from the line of control

as the international border between India and Pakistan is referred to. And that was another amazing story, really, because as the news came through, and I think it was Mr. Rishi, who was the deputy commissioner of Sealkot at the time, who was the one tasked with the job

of now taking a decision on A, what to do, B, when to inform the Indian captain, who was Sunil Gaviska, and Raj Singh Dungarpur, who was the manager, and what indeed to do with the crowd, because they feared that obviously if they called off the game, they would actually be serious problems. And so he chose to wait for the first innings to be completed. India had won the toss for batting. And having lost the test series earlier, and I think it lost the first one day international as well, there was an opportunity for them here. Weng Sarkar, I think it was with top scored unbeaten. By those day standards, India had got a decent score to 30, 20-40-odd, which was very, very good at the time. And as the players came off, Gaviska, who had been informed

probably an hour and a half or so before the end of the innings and who'd concurred with the deputy commissioner of Sealkot that we should not interrupt the innings, then got everyone together. They were told that they were going to be put on a bus and driven off so that they could fly back or drive back depending on where they wanted to go. There were people in that team, of course, who belonged to Delhi, Madan Lal in particular. And as the news had started filtering in. Many of them were very apprehensive. There are reports that Ravi Shastri actually broke down and sobbed almost inconsolable. Gavaskar was very shaken. Raj Raj, who was a very close connect with the political establishment and the Gandhi family obviously was very shaken. And once

the Indian team had been whisked off and the spectators were still sort of having whatever a lunch or whatever it was at the time, then the public announcement was made, and this is where the remarkable thing happened, that the crowd who they expected, the local authorities expected, would react negatively, cheered and clapped and happily went away peacefully from the stadium. Obviously, their cheers and claps were driven by the fact that they were very, very unhappy with Mrs. Gandhi, understandable from their perspective. Being a border town, they would have born the brunt of the 71 war in many, many different ways. It was only 10, 11 years before that that war had happened.

And clearly, Qureshi was recognized by the Pakistani authorities as being someone who was very competent and capable. So there was cricket happening, which was stopped. The Indian players came back. And Madhnalal later on actually talked about the fact that he was very, very scared coming back into Delhi because there wasn't a soul at the airport. he had a police escort that was going to take him home, but he wasn't sure because Madhantpa used to live in an area

which was fairly sick dominated in the sense that there were large sick communities around and already reports of all the horrific things that were happening in Delhi and around the country had started filtering through. So yeah, it must have been a traumatic experience for the Indian cricket team to get back from quote-unquote enemy territory 10 years ago to playing a cricket match halfway through and finding their way back to a country that was unfortunately on fire. So there's turmoil on the streets and the England team have decided they're going to leave.

They're going to go to Sri Lanka. Starting with you, Peter, when did you hear of this decision being taken and how were you able to follow them out? Yeah, it was fairly last minute, I think. All sorts of rumours went on. But the offer from the Sri Lankan board had come in. And then it was a case of how to get there. team were offered a flight in the President's plane, and we were offered a berth on all the

press party on a fairly large airbus, which had been brought in to carry the crew making a television miniseries called Mountbatten the Last Viceroy, Mountbatten being played by Nicol Williamson, and a splendid Nairu was Ian Richardson. and we went in that plane the day after the funeral 4th of November and I remember Ian Richardson sitting there

in a white linen suit with a Panama hat and I seem to remember he had a Malacca cane as well he just looked the wonderful sort of the Englishman abroad really anyway we all trooped off to the airport

where the man playing Gandhi who was a chap called Sam Dasta had altered his appearance so much from what he normally looked like on his passport in order to play Gandhi. I mean, for a start, he'd lost a lot of weight and taken his hair off, that he was held up at immigration until they realised why he was looking like that,

and then he was treated royally and taken off to the superintendent's office for tea and cakes. Meanwhile, the press were lined up for the American director to inspect. as if she was not sure whether she was going to allow them on her plane mind you she took quite a few US dollars off us for the privilege so yeah and so we arrived

we arrived just ahead of a thunderstorm in Colombo well this is the thing we're going to come back to but the fact that all the press are together and the England team although on a different plane Vic you and the press sort of get into Sri Lanka around the same sort of time and before you know it you're actually playing cricket we are there's

hastily arranged, I think, three-day game where a young Aravinda de Silva gets hit on the head by Neil Foster and then produces a brilliant hundred and then we've also played a one-day game and we have a couple days of practice. I mean, it's an interesting tour and I'm sure we'll touch on it later

in terms of press player relationship. It really was an old style tour. They may have travelled on... They didn't get on the president's plane to Sri Lanka but throughout that tour my memory is that in a way that would never happen now that the press got into our bus

in the mornings once the tour resumed in India and travelled with us to and from the ground partly for security reasons but also it was not a huge press corps and we were all in such a weird situation that no one could have possibly

envisaged that it kind of brought the press pack such as they were and the players together and there was one other factor that made that possible that my dear old friend Ian Botham was not on the tour and there had been quite a lot of anxiety between press and players on the previous tour

following Ian, drugs, sex, rock and roll, all that stuff. I was to New Zealand, yes, in 83, 4. Yeah, anyway, so Ian was big news beyond cricket. But there wasn't that pressure on the press corps to have to follow Ian's every move. I'm not talking about the BBC, of course, but some of the others. So this combination of factors meant that that tour was one of the last where you would automatically be staying in the same hotels,

you'd be on the same bus, you'd go to the same bar and a lot of friendships were made. And we were all kind of in it together and the cricket was important, but suddenly there were other issues about our own safety that were common. And we spent a lot of time with the press in a way that wouldn't happen now. Well, you mentioned very briefly in passing the one day, International that was paid. It's sort of incredible to me that you arrive in Sri Lanka

on the 5th of November. They managed to schedule a three-day game against the board presidents 11 from the 7th, 8th and 9th. And then a one-day international on the 10th. There's an enormous deluge. Peter, did you not end up conducting your interview in the changing room? Yes,

when eventually the game was called off, because it was, the crown was underwater, but it wasn't just the ground that was underwater. The England dressing room was underwater. I went I went. I mean, that underlines what Victor says that usually the best place to do

an interview with whatever player of the day you were interviewing was actually in the dressing room. And that applied to both teams. I interviewed Sunny Gavaskar more often than not inside the Indian dressing room. We can't imagine that

now. You just imagine knocking on the Indian dressing room and saying excuse me, Virat, do you mind if you're giving me a five-minute interview in the dressing room. Yes, but the players, I remember going into the dressing room, which was literally underwater, and the players were sitting on tables.

And Gaia said to me, probably the best place to go is the bathroom, which is a little bit drier. So we did our interview then, and there in the bathroom. And thereafter, for the rest of the tour, David would also always say to me if we wanted an interview, let's find a bathroom.

you go back to India so soon after and the dating of this is extraordinary really so that one day international was on the 10th of November by the 13th you're in Jaipur and you're already playing so Vic what were the conversations about going back to India why did everybody feel that it was okay now well because we were also brave but it was also what we were told to do

Well, I don't remember there being a huge amount of antagonism, a decision to go back. I do remember that feeling that they're very keen in India to have us back, to demonstrate some form of normality had returned. And I also remember the fact that they looked after us. They were very keen to, not exactly, pamper us, but make sure everything was okay. and there was suddenly there'd be more security, obviously, than we would have experienced beforehand. But I haven't any memory, partly because, I mean, we weren't,

it was an odd tour party, this, an England tour party, in that there were a lot of fresh tourists. There were a lot of old lags, except for dear old Pat Pocock. But he was never a sort of cynical old pro. He just loved the game, and he would have probably wanted to go back to India for all sorts of reasons. so I don't remember much resistance about the idea of going back to India

we were assured by one and all that no one's got a beef with you that's England touring team you'll be fine and we kind of went along with it I think now we come to Percy Norris because you go back to Bombay

and I guess you're familiar with Percy Norris he's a cricket lover he loves to host the England team We went there. He's a deputy high commissioner in Bombay. And, I mean, we all remember going to his flat. In those days, there would be functions and functions, masses of functions. And we didn't mind them mostly because there was not so many alternative modes of entertainment. But there would be lots of functions.

And some would go on for hours and you thought, when are we going to get away from here? But this one, we all remembered, it was as well as small. affair in his flat there are a few old Indian test cricketers there but we'd had a great he obviously knew his cricket too he was relishing the event it wasn't sort of a duty core for him and we all remembered having a really great time we had a team photo at 9 a.m and phil edmunds was one of the ones who didn't keep time particularly well on that tour and he was late and I think Tony Brown was furious and David Garrow wasn't, even David Garrier, who was on time,

was not because they'd already heard the news, but the rest of the players hadn't. So you've got this tour photo, probably taken by Graham Morris, where the tour party are either looking bleary-eyed or extremely grumpy. And it was just after having had that photograph that we got together and we were told by David or Tony Brown what had happened which explained why they were looking so

wretched and it was that point we thought well we're going home now because it presumably because that felt so close to home now yeah and you know Percy Norris is the British High Commissioner he's English and he was why was he under threat what you know why would this happen to him

and it was a cumulative effect too we've had okay we've had all happen at the end of October. Now we've got our Deputy British High Commissioner, who he happened to have got to know the previous evening, has been assassinated. We just assumed that... And I remember huddling around with, again,

the press were there, chatting away, what's going to happen, what's going to happen? And most people thought, well, we'll be going home now. So what was it that changed that? Was it the proximity of the first test? Because the first test would do the very next day. So is that really what's... sort of forced everyone's hand?

Well, I don't know how the decision was reached but we were mulling around for two or three hours and probably with the press calls I say and then at some point David Gower and Mike Gatting did a kind of quick tour

of the rooms and to our amazement he said right we're going down to Nets in about an hour in preparation for the test going to practice to which dear old Graham Fowler piped up, what, target practice,

because, you know, he's, we're taken aback by this. We don't think it's going to happen. You know, we think we're going home. But they were insistent that, you know, that's what we're going to do. And it's what we did. To our surprise, really, we thought that would be it as far as this tour was concerned.

But the powers at B thought, Well, you can't have been in the very best frame of mind for a test match that began the next day and it didn't go well for England to Laksman Shibra-Arma-Christian when he took 12 wickets in the match on his debut just 18 years old. England bundled out for 195.

India replied with 465. The game was pretty much gone. Chris Cowdery made a debut. He took a wicket. Not actually the delight of his father, Peter Baxter. Yes. He came on to Butterball and apparently Colin was driving through the streets of Lewisham for some reason

and listening to the radio and he heard the fact that Gower had brought Cowdery on to Bull and in his delight he gave a yelp and drove the wrong way down a one-way street and just as he was explaining to the policeman who'd stopped him what was going on the policeman was looking very doubtful the wicket of Capaldave fell to Chris Cowdery and the policeman and Colin Cowdery both yelped with delight and Cadry Senior was let off

Well it was the seventh of not enough wickets for England as India won the game comfortably but crucially in the second innings England showed some resistance and Mike Gatting who had been I guess would it be fair to say Vic a slightly controversial figure almost a sort of Zach Crawley esk figure in so far as he just couldn't buy

he couldn't get a hundred and this was his 54th innings I think I saw somewhere that he'd played the 54th innings so he's probably played about 30 test matches and he's averaging 24 and but this was a watershed

innings for him it was a brilliant innings in the second he was a great player of spin actually and it was the watershed and I've always had the theory about Gat is that he functioned better when he's the top man, when he's in charge. And for most of his test career, he'd never been the top man because there was always Ian around who kind of overshadow him.

So he couldn't be the top man. But Gower, quite shrewdly, really, A, definitely wanted him on this tour. And B, made him vice captain, or wanted him as his vice captain. So Goward suddenly goes from a sort of slightly peripheral, frustrating, exasperating talent to the main man who's going to bat three who's who is the sergeant major

to you know John Le Missouri is David Gare and he's suddenly he's got confidence and this innings kind of cemented that and he would you know

it was a superb inings in very strange circumstances I mean I'm going back to Foxy I mean we got off to quite a good star actually we were 46 for no wicket and Foxy hit a sort of high full toss from Civa armour back to him. And I remember him saying afterwards that ridiculously, and it sounds ridiculous

now, but when he was out, there was just a scintilla of relief that he was no longer exposed in the middle. You know, there was still that unease that he felt that, you know, I'm the English opening batsman out there. I'm quite a prime target. And the other bit about that, that first day, going back to Graham Morris, is that, and this is true, I think, that he was one of the three snappers on the tour and he turned up wearing a jacket crammed with all his hardware as they do Founded Gateman

And his best Irish accent He said, hello there, I'm from the IRA Could you tell me where the English dressing room is And he was politely showed the way You know Anyway Not overly encouraging sign that Well no

So India win that game by eight wickets And I suppose the fear From an England point of view Is that they might have been looking at a repeat to their previous series in India where a six-matched series began with an Indian victory and then there were five

pretty boring draws played out and so England had seeded disadvantage Prakash from an Indian point of view on the other hand utterly cock a hoop getting that early lead

and also doing it and uncovering Laxman Shivaama Christian an 18 year old taking 12 wickets on debut Oh absolutely I mean I think to win against the

England team which with the kind of performance that Siva had put in. He was a absolute hero. Of course, it was a very different era, as we can all imagine. There wasn't great hype, but we felt that India might actually be able to do a repeat of the previous time England were there. There was a lot of hope only, of course, to be dashed later on. But the fact is, for those few days, I think cricket once again might have just served as a bit of a distraction from everything else that was still simmering and the pain and the hurt of what had happened in the aftermath of Mrs. Gandhi's assassination.

That's it for this episode of the TMS podcast, looking back at England's Tour of India across 1984 and 85. This is only one part of a three-part mini-series where we speak to Vic Marks, former TMS producer Peter Baxter, Prakashuukkah and Jonathan Agnew. In the next episode, we look at the Bhopal disaster and the effect that that had on the players, the atmosphere around the games being played,

as well as the second and third test of the five test series, plus Vic Marks making his debut on TestMAT Special. Make sure you're subscribed to the TestMat Special podcast on BBC Sounds so you don't miss any episodes. The TMS podcast from BBC Radio 5 Live. Grab your VIP pass. We're delving into the secretive world of Formula One. Behind the scenes with two of the sports biggest names, Mercedes and Williams.

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