Sourav Ganguly

Calcutta: Brett Lee and Mitchell Johnson were expected to turn the heat on Team India, but that job is actually being done by retired gloveman Adam Gilchrist.

Marketing strategy or whatever, but Gilchrist’s comments on Sachin Tendulkar and the Monkeygate affair (January this year) in his just-released autobiography, True Colours, caused a furore and the icon was himself forced to react.

Usually, Sachin lets his bat do the talking.

Of course, Gilchrist had to issue a clarification, a damage control exercise really, but he’d achieved what Ricky Ponting and his men couldn’t in the first two Tests of the current series: Get under Sachin’s skin, partly at least.

While the Sachin-specific stuff was leaked before the book’s release, at an impressive function in Sydney this week, an agency has now quoted extracts relating to the controversial Nagpur Test (2004-05 season) which question the-then captain Sourav Ganguly’s commitment.

Harbhajan Singh too has been targeted by Gilchrist, who’d been standing-in for an injured Ponting.

“When I got to the middle, Ganguly was not there. (Rahul) Dravid was in the blazer, ready for the toss... ‘Where’s Sourav?’ I said. Rahul couldn’t answer definitively. Between the lines I perceived that Sourav might have pulled out from fear of losing a home series.

“Harbhajan was out of the Nagpur Test with a ‘flu’, which he seems to have contracted when he saw the grassy wicket... I still don’t know to this day what was wrong with Ganguly and Harbhajan...

“There was speculation that Ganguly was quarrelling with the head of cricket in Nagpur and a rumour that a spicy pitch might be prepared out of spite or revenge against the captain...”

Adam Gilchrist

Sourav, who was contacted in New Delhi on Friday evening, declined to react till he’d “read” the bit about him. Harbhajan, though, almost exploded when The Telegraph got through to him in Jalandhar.

“Gilchrist shouldn’t be using fellow cricketers to sell his book... I’m sure there are other ways of doing that… It’s time somebody asked him to shut up... I suppose Gilchrist needs to get his head examined,” Harbhajan, who had to miss the ongoing Kotla Test owing to a left toe injury, said during the one-on-one.

Harbhajan, incidentally, is at home and not with Team India in New Delhi owing to his nana’s demise.

While Sourav’s withdrawal from that Nagpur Test did raise eyebrows then (despite an injury in the right groin-thigh region), eyebrows had also been raised at the conduct of the hosts, the Shashank Manohar-headed Vidarbha Cricket Association.

Manohar, who is now the Board of Control for Cricket in India president, had been smarting from ‘leader’ Sharad Pawar’s defeat (in the Board elections) at the hands of Jagmohan Dalmiya’s casting vote.

Pawar triumphed at his second attempt, some 14 months later, in November 2005.

The buzz was that Manohar wanted to get even with Dalmiya through Sourav, at that time seen as his blue-eyed boy. And, so, a wicket to suit the Glenn McGraths was prepared.

Belatedly, an effort had been made by some to take the sting out of the wicket, but Manohar didn’t budge.

“Nobody can order us to remove any grass,” he’d insisted.

Clearly, it was intra-Board feuding at its worst — one which hit national interest for a six — and it’s no surprise that the Australians made the most of home-like conditions and thrashed Team India by 342 runs.

That win, in fact, gave Australia the series.

Much water has gone down the Nag, Swan and Hooghly rivers since, but it’s probably pertinent to recall that Sourav had missed the next Test (Mumbai) of that series too.

Four years on, the fourth and final Test of this series will be in Nagpur, from November 6.

Given the spicy stuff in his autobiography, Gilchrist won’t only be unwelcome in the vicinity of the Indian dressing room, but in Manohar’s fiefdom as well.