So goes the story, and it comes straight from the horse’s mouth. India’s win at the 1983 Cricket World Cup messed up the honeymoon plans for at least one of its stars. If you believe the man in question, Krishnamachari Srikkanth, as many as eight other players had already booked themselves a holiday in the US, fully convinced they were never going to make it to the finals. What happened next is the stuff of legend, now immortalised through the Ranveer Singh-starrer 83.
'Let's enjoy the free holiday'
Kris Srikkanth enjoys telling this story at every opportunity, as he did recently while promoting the film. “I got married on 30 March, 1983,” he says. A few days before the team was to leave for England, Srikkanth says, I got a call from Sunil Gavaskar. ‘We are going to America for a holiday. We will play the World Cup in England on the way. So please book your tickets from Bombay to New York with a stopover in London,’ is what Gavaskar apparently told Srikkanth, if you believe Srikkanth, i.e. Those familiar with Srikkanth’s sense of humour know well to take his stories with a pinch of salt.
Embellished as it may be, the story doesn’t seem outlandish. India were cubs in the cricketing world back then. Srikkanth sets the context. “Before 1983, we had played two World Cups... and beaten only one team called East Africa, which was a bunch of Gujjus put together,” he jokes. “There is no country called East Africa, you know that right!”.
In 1979, India were punched out by Sri Lanka, a team that didn’t even qualify as a Test-playing team. And so the expectations from the team in 1983 were very low. Half the team didn’t believe they could win. “When I got to know that I have been selected, Jimmy was in Lancaster and I was in Lancashire,” Kirti Azad recounts. "I called him and jokingly said: I am coming there, let's go together to the hotel and enjoy the free holiday we have got for a month.”
“After the team was selected, I told my wife Vidya: ‘Come, let’s go to America for a honeymoon’. I had taken her for a short honeymoon to Sri Lanka. I said, you will have a second honeymoon in London and the third and main honeymoon in the US. So that was the plan, honestly,” ‘Chika’ says, swearing upon Lord Narayana, Lord Krishna–lest someone question his integrity. Srikkanth then names and shames his mates. “All of us were there in the US plan. (Sunil) Gavaskar, (Syed) Kirmani, Ravi Shastri, Sandeep Patil… all of us were happy.” But one important man was not in on the plan.
The best laid plans…
At the team meeting before the clash with the West Indies, Kapil Dev told the boys that they could win. “We thought our captain had gone mad,” Srikkanth says. But Kapil’s self-belief coursed through his team. “We realised that the captain was serious. And if we won the World Cup, it was because of one man: Kapil Dev,” Srikkanth says.
“Then, suddenly we won the World Cup. We had to come back to India to meet Mrs [Indira] Gandhi. My ticket got cancelled. I had to rebook my tickets for August. Rs10,000 in 1983. Kapil, you have to reimburse those ten-thousand rupees, da,” he says. Legend.
