For every visiting side bar none, India has loomed as the Final Frontier — as the eloquent Stave Waugh put it — for a long time. Even when they ruled the world with an iron fist, most teams with the exception of West Indies, irrepressible and unmatched, found India impossible to conquer. Nations went years, sometimes even decades, without so much as sniffing a victory on Indian soil, beaten as much in the mind before they even set foot on these shores as on the park, where India’s cricketers made the most of gremlins in the opposition camp, their own familiarity with demanding conditions and their unquestioned skills to cut a swathe through all comers.

A dominance that started in the early 1990s when, under Mohammad Azharuddin and spearheaded by Anil Kumble, India brooked no stopping spil

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