Former India left-arm spinner Dilip Doshi revealed how legendary Australian cricketer Richie Benaud had said India would go on to win the Test against Australia in Melbourne in the 1981 series if Doshi played to his full potential.
Doshi was talking about the third Test match against Australia in Melbourne in 1981. After losing the first Test match by an innings and four runs in Sydney and drawing the second match in Adelaide, the pressure was on the visitors to win the final match to save the series.
“I believe that we should have won the series let alone drawn it. Having lost the first Test in less than three days and drawn the second test,I had full confidence… If you look at the highlights, Richie Benaud kept on saying that if I bowl to my potential India will, that meant a lot of pressure on me. When somebody like Benaud, who kept on saying If Dilip Doshi bowls to potential and all… Those were very kind words. He didn’t realise what I was going through. But it put an enormous pressure on me that please god let go through this game without having to leave the field. That we won was a great bonus,” Doshi told former India spinner Murali Kartik on his show ‘Spin Talks’.
Doshi, who was playing in that Test match with a broken foot bowled went on to bowl as many as 52 overs in the first innings – the most – and picked up three wickets. In the second, he bowled another 22 overs and picked up two important wickets as India managed to win the match by 59 runs.
Doshi who represented India in 33 Tests and 15 ODIs between 1979 and 1983, said he had bowled an arm ball in that Test to dismiss Australia’s Kim Hughes in that Test match.
“In that game I got Kim Hughes clean bowled with an arm ball. I never used to bowl arm balls. It was a sllow wicket. Kim went back and cut me for two fours in the last three overs. And I knew he would do that again. He was a great player of spin bowling. He was a key. So What I did was for that perticlular delivery, I opened the axis of my palm and undercut the ball deliberately and it really did the work. His wicket was crucial for us to change the course of the match on Day 5,” Doshi said.
