This day, 40 years ago: ’Bloody hell! It’s your 29th!’ When Sunil Gavaskar equalled Don Bradman’s 29th hundred in Delhi | Cricket News

Forty years to the day, on October 29 1983, Sunil Gavaskar entered the folklore for equalling Don Bradman’s 29th hundred. Not just the record-equalling feat but the manner of his hundred, brutally walloping the pacy West Indies bowlers made everyone gasp.
Such were his powers of concentration that he didn’t even realise he had reached the landmark. In his mind, he had thought he had entered the 80’s. “I thought I had gone to 82 from 78,” Gavaskar would say then. It was left to the non-striker Dilip Vengsarkar to yell out, “Bloody hell, it’s your 29th!”.
The moment is immortalised in YouTube. Gavaskar shuffles across to stylishly whip a full ball from Malcolm Marshall through wide mid-on and has just turned for the second run when the ball whooshed past the boundary. And Vengsarkar cuts across the pitch to shake him out of his reverie, remind him about the significance of the moment, shakes his hands, and a puzzled Gavaskar looks around even as the crowd go berserk. It was his 12th ton against the West Indies. Even before he could raise his bat, the West Indians would run over to congratulate – the wicketkeeper Jeff Dujon, the King Viv Richards, and the captain Clive Lloyd. He then raises his bat, turns presumably to the dressing room to lift his left hand in acknowledgement.

Richards would chime in later: “Every time you watch him you learn something. Just the other day he batted at Kotla and I learnt that he does not even look at the score-board. Such are his powers of concentration … It was a proud moment on the field. It was a fitting knock with which to reach such a landmark. It is a pity we had to be on the other side of it!” The Prime miner Indira Gandhi was at the Kotla that day and offered her congratulations to Gavaskar.
That Test series was part of the Gavaskar folklore and also for West Indies crushing India after the world cup loss winning three Tests and five ODIs. Malcolm Marshall’s lifter knocked Gavaskar’s bat off his hands in the first Test at Kanpur, casting a dark pall for the moment but would eventually be talked up his fans for years as the moment that triggered his thrilling counter-attacking knocks that followed in the series.
How he roused himself in the next Test in Delhi, hooking and pulling Marshall and Michael Holding – the fifty came in 37 balls, and the 100, the Bradman-equalling 29th, in 94 balls. A Test later, he was in Ahmedabad at the new stadium in Motera, which has now re-shaped into world’s largest stadium, where he hit 90 that earned the raves from Vijay Merchant. In the next two Tests, Marshall took him out three times for 12,3,0 and Holding took him once for 20. He batted at No. 4 in the final game in Chennai, but walked in at 0 for 2 and smashed a double hundred, his highest Test score of 236.
Years later, in an interaction with the ABP group, he talked about that Bradman-equalling ton and also on his batting philosophy.
“The prize that I put on my wicket was invariably a 100. I always wanted a century; that’s the minimum I wanted to get. Obviously, that was impossible, even Sir Donald Bradman couldn’t do it in every inning. So, my whole idea was to bat sessions. I didn’t look at the scoreboard because every batsman has his own way of setting targets.
“I didn’t have any idea [about the Bradman-equaling hundred] till (Dilip) Vengsarkar came and told me”.Most Read
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The man whose record he broke, Don Bradman would offer him a great compliment in his congratulatory message: ”You’re an ornament to cricket”
Years later, at a function at the CCI club, Gavaskar’s Mumbai team-mate and friend Shishir Hattangadi would tell a story about Gavaskar and the West Indian pacers.
“It was at Ravi Shastri’s house where during some charity tournament… all the fast bowlers had come in, and they were having a few beers at Ravi’s place. Sunny walks in his pyjama-kurta, a little late. The moment he walked in through that door, all four (bowlers), over six feet, got up saying ‘hi master, how are you’. I mean that (is the kind of) respect and reverence the four great bowlers (had for Gavaskar) and they were all great – (Micheal) Holding, (Joel) Garner, (Malcolm) Marshall, (Andy) Roberts.”