For eminent cricket writer Vijay Lokapally, who covered the match for Sportstar and The Hindu, the story begins without ceremony. The assignment was not obvious. There were senior reporters around, but it came to him. “My senior told me, grab it and deliver,” he says on the sidelines of the launch of Miracle At Eden, Sportstar’s book commemorating 25 years of that iconic Test. That was enough.
What followed was work of a kind that now feels distant. There was no instant archive to lean on. Preparation meant reading, revisiting, piecing together context on India and Australia. “I did a lot of research,” he says. “It wasn’t easy.”
And then, the daily act of filing. Back at the office, the sports editor would wait, reading only after Lokapally’s copy had come in. “He would leave only after he had read my report.” The pressure was clear, but so was the expectation. “I learnt a lot. I can never forget those five days.”
Kolkata moved with the game. Lokapally stayed at what was then the Quality Hotel, now the Peerless Inn, close enough to walk across the Maidan each morning. From his window, he could see the city gathering early. “People would be trying to reach Eden from morning. Not all of them had tickets. They just wanted to be there, to talk about what might happen.”
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There is admiration in the way he recalls them. “To me, they were some of the greatest experts you would come across.”
His own routine was spare. A quick breakfast, then out. He preferred returning to the office to write, separating observation from articulation. Evenings settled into a rhythm. Arnab Ghosh, a senior scribe in Kolkata, would arrive with jhal muri. “We would have that with a cup of tea and then I would sit down to write,” Lokapally says.
The details matter because they hold the piece together, the walk, the window, the food, the wait before the first sentence. They place the reporting alongside the match, not outside it.
What also defined that time was clarity of role. Access existed, but it came with its own demands. “You can’t fool the players,” Lokapally says. “They read what you write, but when you speak to them, they know whether you understand the game.”
He was close to many of them, Sachin Tendulkar, VVS Laxman, Rahul Dravid, Harbhajan Singh, Sourav Ganguly, but the line between familiarity and judgement held. “If I’m criticising you, I have a reason.” There is an anecdote he returns to. After a sharp piece on Venkatesh Prasad, a young Ganguly, newly captain then, approached him and said, half in jest, half in appeal, that this was “your team too” and could do with some support. Lokapally smiles at the memory, but the principle remained unchanged.
That assurance did not emerge on its own. It was shaped in the newsroom. Lokapally speaks of K. P. Mohan with a clarity that suggests lasting imprint. “I was very lucky. K. P. Mohan taught me a lot. All the discipline is because of him. He would scold me if there was a bad report.”
The work, then, was not only to record what unfolded at Eden, but to meet a standard that did not shift with the drama of the game. His reports, appearing in The Hindu and Sportstar, carried that weight each evening.
Looking back, Lokapally does not reach for large claims. The match is not reduced to a single moment, nor his role within it overstated. What remains is something quieter and more exact.
“I was very privileged, very fortunate,” he says.
It is perhaps the most accurate way to hold that Test. Not as something to be concluded, but as something that was worked through, carefully, over five days that asked as much of the observer as they did of the players.
Published on Mar 30, 2026
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