The deja vu series…

Sunil Rajguru

History is full of amazing co-incidences and the world of cricket is no different.

Take India’s tour of Australia for example.

A scene that happened 4-5 years ago…

2007. India wins a World Cup and is on top of the world. It wins a Test series at home to gain a lot of confidence before heading to Australia, a country where it has never won a series in the longer format of the game.

In the first Test at Melbourne, Australia bats first and puts 300+ runs on the board. India concedes a lead in the first innings itself. While chasing a stiff target in the second innings, it shows no fight at all, losing all its ten wickets for 160 odd runs to a crushing defeat. No Indian manages to score a century.

The Aussies continue their dominance and record a comfortable win in the second Test at Sydney. Indian openers fail to even give even one half-century stand across all four innings hurting India’s chances.

India heads to Perth staring at a whitewash with all the focus on unnecessary controversies.

Now here’s the interesting part.

Read the whole thing again, but this time, replace 2007 with 2011.

You’ll find that exactly the same thing holds true!

The above first-half series report is the same for both 2007-08 and 2011-12!

As Karl Marx had famously said: History repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as a farce!

It seems that we have learnt nothing from our mistakes!

In 2007, Ricky Ponting was trying to take over from the mantle of Steve Waugh and this time it’s Michael Clarke. Then Monkeygate was the flavour of the media and this time it’s Fingergate and go-karting.

Interestingly more than half of the Playing XI of Perth is still in the Indian team. The question is, can they come back again like 2008 and do a 1-2 to at least keep the series alive?

In Image: A lot will depend on this Indian troika

Images: AFP/AP/Reuters

Full Coverage: India vs Australia​