Brash, fearless and smart. Robin Uthappa is quintessential modern Indian cricketer. Some of his statements like ‘we will fight fire with fire’ seemed a bit over the top when India were actually getting walloped at the hands of Ricky Ponting’s men during Australia’s soujourn of India. But after having conquered the Australians in their own den, the youngster, not surprisingly, gives a look that is so ‘I told you so’.

Given little chance in the tri-series, Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s young guns blazed their own trail as much with bat and ball as with their ‘lip service’.

“We were not just going to cop everything they threw at us. I can speak for myself and I can tell you I gave it back as good as I could get,” Uthappa told Deccan Herald on Saturday adding there were a lot of exchanges between the rival players.

Narrating an exchange between him and Matthew Hayden, Uthappa said:  “When I walked in to bat in the Melbourne match, Hayden was saying ‘this guy has just 20-plus average after close to 40 matches, so he won’t be a big problem’ and I told him back ‘if only you had played in the number of positions I have, you would have been averaging much less than me’.”

Uthappa said he didn’t deliberately go after anyone but spared no one who spoke to him. “I don’t think they expected this kind of reaction from us. They are so used to only giving it to others and not getting it back... But the moment you start giving it back to them, it kind of unsettles them,” he reasoned.

The right-hander said the team’s basic plan was impose themselves on the Aussies right at the beginning of the series. “We didn’t win the matches initially, but our bowlers were bowling them out for cheap totals.
“That gave us a lot of confidence. All we needed was to get our batting click which eventually happened,” he remarked.

It was a battle fought as much  on the field as in the news rooms. “The number of things they wrote about us and particularly about Bhajji (Harbhajan Singh) were too much. It was really surprising to see them say nothing about their players’ poor form, their defeats... All they were doing was write us down. But it backfired, the more they tried project us badly the more it helped us come together,” he said.

The dashing right-hander said that it was also of great help that the Indian media backed the team to the hilt. “We were secure in the thought that the travelling media was with us,” he admitted. “It was such a comforting thought for us. It gave us the much needed confidence that people in India know what’s happening with us in Australia. We needed that kind of support under such extreme provocations. To be honest that made a lot of difference to us,” he explained.