No TV, Just Heart: Reliving India바카라™s 1983 Cricket World Cup Win

In 1983, we came to Muscat, the capital of the Sultanate of Oman. My father was posted in the Indian Embassy. Nobody played cricket in the desert city then, the few hours in the evening when the sun was somewhat tamed, was for football. But the mates in my class (must have been seventh or eighth grade as I was around 15 then) in the Indian Central School were quite cricket-crazy, if not as much as in Delhi. It had a cricket team of which I was part of the batting unit. We did have a few inter-school matches, I think with the English and Pakistan school teams.

In Delhi, all of us boys were fanatics, discussing and dissecting every shot, every ball by our icons. We used to be obsessed with cricketers바카라™ cards바카라”photos of cricket stars on thick paper cards a little smaller than the standard playing cards. We would take these to school every day, guarding them jealously, showing off the new, rare ones we had acquired. I remember the common ones would be of a clean-shaven Gavaskar with a tilted smile in a white cricket hat; of Vishwanath with his trademark bushy horseshoe moustache; of Kapil Dev in a jump about to release the ball over the wicket; of Sandeep Patil with a wild swing, the invisible ball probably flying out of the stadium; of Kirmani, also with a horseshoe moustache but not as bushy as Vishy바카라™s, crouching behind the stumps. And then there would be the rarer ones, of Derek Underwood, Gordon Greenidge, Dennis Lilee and for some reason of Larry Gomes, though he was not of the same league as the other greats.

There would be offers to exchange these cards with friends; say, someone who had two of Underwood would want to exchange it for a Kim Hughes (who was also very popular in the card universe way beyond his stats). I would spend sleepless nights weighing the offer, and would be left distraught after the deal, doubting if I hadn바카라™t sold too cheap. None of my classmates knew of these precious cards in Muscat and my stack of nearly a hundred of them, collected with much sweat and a hundred yes-no, so well-thumbed and yellowing on the edges, lay hidden in some trunk. With no audience even the biggest cricketing stars vanish into oblivion.

Canned Commentary

Those days, Oman Times used to run a quiz sponsored by Pepsi, and the coveted prize was a transistor radio shaped like a Pepsi can. I cracked one of these quizzes, mailed the answer to the paper, and voila, won the Pepsi-can shaped transistor. It was my prized possession which I would display to my friends with both pride and trepidation, for fear one of them would drop it or turn the dials too hard. I remember listening to all the 1983 World Cup commentary on this radio. There was no live telecast of the matches in Muscat and this radio was my only link, my Sanjaya to the cricket Mahabharat taking place in faraway England. It would be a scratchy transmission with often just static for many agonising minutes. Besides, I couldn바카라™t follow the accents of many English, Australian and West Indian commentators. But I hung on to every word that came out of the transistor.

The matches would go way beyond my bed time and nobody else in my house was interested in cricket. I would hear the commentary in the dark bedroom, on low volume, sitting beside the bed where my siblings were sleeping. The first upset was the India-Zimbabwe match which we had all but lost in the first few overs, till Kapil Dev came to bat and turned to beast mode. I remember praying more for the tail-enders Roger Binny, Madan Lal and Syed Kirmani not to get out because Kapil was so possessed he would have gone on for another 60 overs. But all the cheering and praying I had to do under my breath as everyone else in the house was in deep sleep.

Freedom at Midnight

Before the famous final, India had had terrific wins against the West Indies and Australia. We beat an England of Bob Willis, Ian Botham, David Gower and Allan Lamb in the semi-final. Most of us in my class were satisfied with that, the fact we had reached the final. We had beaten the West Indies in an earlier game, but they had avenged it, thrashing us convincingly in the next game, with some vicious bowling my Malcom Marshall and unbelievable batting by Viv Richards. For most of us, it was a foregone conclusion we would lose in the final against the resurgent Windies.

But on match day what was my Pepsi radio saying! The openers gone cheaply. Viv Richards looking dangerous but he too gone soon. The keeper Jeff Dujon putting up a fight but Amarnath cleaning him up. Was the unthinkable going to happen? It was late into the night, but this was too much excitement to take alone. I remember waking up my parents, brother and sister and all of us cheering when Amarnath got the last wicket and the radio roared with delight.

Satish Padmanabhan is the Managing Editor, Outlook magazine.

This article appears in Outlook Magazine바카라™s June 21, 2025 issue, Innings/Outings, which captures a turning point in Indian cricket 바카라”from retiring legends to small-town stars reshaping the game바카라™s power map. It appeared in print as '1983 World Cup'.