Bandon Mein Tha Dum review: While comprehensive, series falls flat in capturing glory & drama of India’s win

In the sports documentary Bandon Mein Tha Dum, Neeraj Pandey tries to weave in all these threads, deliberately or accidentally, into a single, organic whole. The end product is a comprehensive yet clunky four-episode, 180-minute ride. The documentary succeeds in reliving the moments, through footage, voices of some of the protagonists and observations of cricket journalists.

Some buckle under pressure, and some welcome it.
In this story, Ravi Ashwin and 19 others thrived under pressure, and rewrote history with it.

Neeraj Pandey’s Bandon Mein Tha Dum – The Baap of all Fightbacks, streaming from 16th June, only on Voot Select pic.twitter.com/AXEHec49pl

— Voot Select (@VootSelect) June 14, 2022

Where it falls short, however, is in its ability to keep the audience hooked to the screen—especially in the first two episodes, where it labours and drags on, reproducing what has been said, read and reread, and over-dependent on Ravi Ashwin’s wit and tales to redeem the parts.

The off-spinner, a natural in front of the camera, gifted with spontaneity and screen presence, was the single most redeeming feature of the documentary. Again, these facets of him were not a revelation, as his Youtube shows have been quite a rage.

If the documentary-series were a movie, Ashwin would have been the undisputed superstar dragging the whole venture on his shoulders. There is the analyst you know. He spins a thrilling analogy on Steve Smith’s batting. “He has got too many moving parts. He has got a flow to his batting. It is like dancing. If your hips don’t move, you look like a terrible dancer. He needs certain spaces of his batting to flow to make those runs. He loves batting in those particular dance motions.”

You rely on him for humour too, like when he refers to an overturned lbw due to its height: “Only if Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh were to climb on each other and deliver the ball from that height could the ball have missed the stumps. Or when he describes trapping Steve Smith lbw on the front foot: “The probability of that is rarer than that of an asteroid or meteor hitting the earth.” Or in character analysis: “It’s difficult to stand in someone else’s shoes and understand that he is going through a tough time. He has that ability.”

Maybe, Ashwin stood above the rest because he was the most articulate among the dramatis personae. Cheteshwar Pujara was the usual sturdy self, his narration, like his batting, without frills. There is a sequence during the final episode, featuring the brutal blows he took on the body. The shots and angles feel so real that you feel as though the ball has cannoned onto your chest. Rahane is, in many ways, projected as the protagonist in chief, but Ashwin relegates him into a sidekick, Joe Pesci to Robert de Niro.

The frame of the run-out involving him and Virat Kohli, when both were batting smoothly in Adelaide, recurs like a painful flashback. “The moment it happened I somehow got a feeling that it would cost the game,” says Rahane, who is forcing himself to be more emotional. The frame appears immediately after Rahane’s redemption hundred in Melbourne. Later, at the end of the final episode, he is shown trying to wipe a tear, a frame that looks at once forced.

Rahane indeed is the first among the equals in the series, but he comes out as self-effacing and it’s through other characters that we get to know more about Rahane, his persona, and style of captaincy. It’s a staple technique in cinema, where the hero’s virtues are extolled by his accomplices.

Some buckle under pressure, and some welcome it.
In this story, Ravi Ashwin and 19 others thrived under pressure, and rewrote history with it.

Neeraj Pandey’s Bandon Mein Tha Dum – The Baap of all Fightbacks, streaming from 16th June, only on Voot Select pic.twitter.com/AXEHec49pl

— Voot Select (@VootSelect) June 14, 2022

The rest of the Indian players —Mohammed Siraj, Washington Sundar and Rishabh Pant—try to be earnest, but without being engrossing. There is Pant admitting that he was quite sad that India drew the Sydney Test. “A draw is a draw and win is a win. A draw is never the same as a win,” he says.

There is teary Siraj walking out onto the ground in tears, just days after his father’s death, then looking heaven-wards, after snaring his first five-for at the Gabba. Hanuma Vihari says that his mother told him that the “purpose of his life is served” after the Sydney rearguard for ages.

Thus, in bits and parts, the interviewers manage to depict the persona of the players. The series has struck a fine balance at that—the equilibrium between events and characters, nothing shades out the other. That perhaps is the most appealing facet of the series. And it reaches its crescendo towards the end of the third episode as Ashwin and Vihari are battling on for a draw, batting through extreme pain in extremely torrid conditions. “If it meant dying, I would rather die,” says Ashwin, in a tone of defiance. Again, Ashwin could modulate his tone according to the match situation.

On the other hand, an early effort is made to project then Australian captain Tim Paine as a pantomime villain. It works in the first episode, where he is countering everything and anything an Indian player has to say. Ashwin says he called a ball manufacturer to study why the pink ball behaves differently. Paine quips: “A cricket ball is a cricket ball.” Or when some of the Indian team fusses about hotel rooms and quarantine, he retorts: “You shouldn’t be thinking about such minor stuff.” But in the end, his villainy fizzles out and even the “See you at the Gabba” is not dwelled on elaborately.

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Maybe, it was the docu-makers’ conscious effort to not make it too melodramatic. Though, sports, at its dramatic apex, is melodrama. The lifeless and stilted tone of narration was a tempo-dampener too—and at certain junctures made the good old Doordarshan narrators feel like an upgrade. The staid background score—the Caribbean drum beats sound so out-of-place—doesn’t make the experience any bit delightful. Rather, it kills the mood.

The series, though, succeeds in reliving the drama and thrill of the series, though it’s not a vindication of the director’s docu-craft or the script-writers’ improvisational genius, but the inherent quality of the natural script, penned perhaps by the cricketing gods themselves. Worth a watch, but not rewatching, like the best of this rich genre.