Cricket’s had plenty of wild moments; rain-ruined championships, bitter clashes – yet none match how strange things got during India’s 1984 contests with Australia. Meant to honour 50 years of Indian cricket, the series devolved into such a mess it barely resembled actual sport. It’s a tale of continual mishaps, a comical unravelling of plans.
The invitation that sparked a storm
Back in 1984, Indian cricket officials, the BCCI, decided to celebrate 50 years of the Ranji Trophy tournament. They wanted to do something special; a short limited-overs series against Australia, kind of like a bonus celebration. The idea was nice on paper: show off India’s home-grown talent while keeping things friendly and festive.
However, the truth is the complete opposite and the whole thing was a colossal failure. The perfect example of what not to do when organizing a cricket tour. It felt as though everything was just thrown together without any rhythm or order, just this chaotic mixture of travel, confusion, and exhaustion.
Australia landed in India already tired and jet-lagged, and before they could even unpack properly, they were out there playing the first ODI barely 36 hours later. It sounded like a simple plan, fly in, play, celebrate, but in reality, it was exhausting.
A schedule that defied logic
Following their Delhi contest, the squads faced a quick trip down to Trivandrum for another one-day international, just two days to get there. Then came Jamshedpur, way over on the other side of India, practically back-to-back with only one day between games. Getting from one place to the next proved tricky because there were no direct flights.
Getting to Jamshedpur meant a series of plane switches for each team, first from Trivandrum to Madras, then Madras to Calcutta, and Calcutta to Jamshedpur. The plan appeared to be straightforward but it turned out to be utterly draining.
Finally, by the evening of October 2nd, 1984, both teams got to Calcutta after running late for over two hours and were absolutely dead tired. The kind of exhaustion where you stop worrying about your luggage and only think of a bed.
And when they stepped out? Nothing. No one was there to receive them. Not a single person from the BCCI, not from the Cricket Association of Bengal, not even someone to sort out basic transport. The two managers, Erapalli Prasanna for India and Bob Merriman for Australia, were left standing there, figuring things out on their own like stranded passengers at a forgotten airport.
The Australians took taxis to the airport hotel, but Sunil Gavaskar and his men refused to pay Rs. 30 for the short ride (of 2 km) and decided to walk instead. When they reached the hotel, they discovered that the rooms were booked only for the Australian squad. The Indians had nowhere to stay.
Indian cricketers finally found places to stay, thanks to the hotel folks alongside the opposing team. Nevertheless, Prasanna wrestled with a larger issue, hauling his squad together with 1500 kilograms of gear to Jamshedpur by 9:15 AM before game time.
A night of panic and improvisation
A worried Prasanna desperately reached out to both Jagmohan Dalmiya at the BCCI and key people at Tata, yet nobody knew what was happening. Eventually, Daljit Singh, once a wicketkeeper for Bihar, informed him that the squads would have to be airlifted to Jamshedpur.
But there was a problem with the aircraft. A tiny Fokker Friendship with just 44 seats caused trouble. With everyone on board, there wasn’t room for baggage unless people disembarked. Realizing what might happen, Prasanna opted to ship kits and gear via truck instead.
Durga Puja had Calcutta buzzing, and getting transport at four in the morning was no easy task. Yet the hotel manager, refusing to give up, managed to locate a mini lorry. The driver warned it would take about six hours over bumpy, unpredictable roads. And before dawn, around 4:10 a.m., the old lorry started crawling forward, carrying not just bats and pads and gloves but the weary hopes of two international sides who were just trying to survive the chaos.
The missing kits and rising chaos
By morning, both squads arrived in Jamshedpur, tired and disoriented. The Keenan Stadium was buzzing with thousands of spectators under a rare patch of clear sky. But there was a glaring problem: the players’ kits were still somewhere on the road.
As time passed and the lorry failed to appear, frustration grew. Umpires inspected the wicket, Australian players began tossing baseballs to stay loose, and organizers fed the crowd vague announcements about “technical delays.”
By 11 a.m., with no sign of the kits, the Bihar Police were dispatched in multiple jeeps to locate the missing truck. The scene turned absurd. In the middle of a packed international venue, police vehicles were racing along rural highways in search of a lorry carrying cricket gear.
Finally, word arrived that the truck had been spotted near Ghatshila. It reached Jamshedpur soon after, greeted like a hero arriving in the climax of a Bollywood film.
The match that barely happened
After all that madness, the match itself was barely a match. It started late, cut down to just 24 overs a side, and kicked off around 12:30 p.m. Twenty minutes in, rain showed up and said, “Not today.” Play stopped, and that was that.
Everyone got their money back, though. What should have been a ₹11 lakh gain for the Bihar Cricket Association turned into roughly a ₹7 lakh deficit.
Following the debacle, Sunil Gavaskar didn’t hold back, declaring the BCCI should feel embarrassed by such mismanagement. Meanwhile, Dr. J. Irani, President of the Bihar Cricket Association, delivered a particularly harsh assessment:
“How can a country that can’t even move a team’s kit from one city to another think of hosting a World Cup?”
Even the Australians looked shaken. Later, while still in Mumbai, Australian wicketkeeper Wayne Phillips remarked,
“If we hadn’t gone through all that in Calcutta and Jamshedpur, maybe Rodney Hogg wouldn’t have fallen ill. Now I understand why Greg Chappell and Lillee didn’t want to tour India.”
A journey without direction
The teams in 12 days only managed to zigzag nearly ten cities — Bombay, Delhi, Trivandrum, Madras, Calcutta, Jamshedpur, Ahmedabad, Indore, and back again to Bombay. It hadn’t been a cricket tour; it was like a never-ending train journey through the world of the tired and frustrated. While the schedules of the teams and games were constantly in clash, tempers were flaring and bureaucracy was doing what it is best at, making things more complicated.
At the end of the day, the players had all the reasons to be terribly upset, the journalists were fed up, and the officials were experiencing shame. What was supposed to be a joyful celebration of Indian cricket turned into a case study of how bad planning can turn your dream into a disaster.
Legacy of the 1984 Fiasco
Almost forty years on, with India versus Australia set to play once more, the ’84 series still feels like a really odd, important bit of cricket lore. It revealed just how easily things could fall apart within the sport, how swiftly bad arrangements might eclipse the actual matches.
It was meant to be a tribute to Indian cricket’s journey. Instead, it became a tale of missed connections, sleepless nights, and a lorry that carried not just equipment but the reputation of an entire board. It is worth remembering that extraordinary slice of history when cricket somehow survived despite everything that went wrong.
Because in 1984, chaos didn’t just visit Indian cricket. It opened the batting.