Back in July 2003, about a week before Bangladesh’s first-ever Test against Australia, former Australian batter David Hookes did not hold back.

Previewing the two-Test series in an opinion column for The Sydney Morning Herald, he showed how Steve Waugh’s side can end the first Test at the Marrara Stadium in Darwin in a day.

"Steve Waugh should send them in to bat, bowl them out before lunch, bat until tea and declare, then send them back in and roll them again before stumps," Hookes said.

"It could be all over and done with in a day. The reality is that Bangladesh doesn't deserve to be in Test cricket and they certainly shouldn't be given any favours out on the field." He added that, if Australia were being true to the Baggy Green, their aim should be to annihilate Bangladesh.

At the time, Bangladesh had played only 14 Tests since gaining Test status in 2000, and had a 100 percent losing record in 10 away Tests.

That record didn’t get any better in Australia as the hosts comfortably won both Tests by an innings margin. Hookes’ wish to see a one-day Test remained unfulfilled but it was an annihilation nonetheless.

Hookes never got to see Bangladesh Test team’s progression, passing away in January 2004, aged 48, getting struck by a hotel bouncer in St Kilda after a confrontation, hitting his head on the pavement and never regaining consciousness.

Had he still been around, it would have been priceless to see his reaction to what unfolded at that same venue 23 years on, how the team that didn’t belong in Test cricket, bossed around the baggy greens for four days and complete a nine-wicket win.

Darwin: Bangladesh’s home away from home

Darwin itself has always sat at the periphery of Australian cricket.

Bangladesh, arriving for their first Test tour in over two decades, being sent there rather than Sydney, Melbourne or Adelaide, was, in a sense, a backhanded insult, which did not go unnoticed.

The just-concluded Test was the third Test to be played at the Marrara Stadium, the last one happening in 2004 against Sri Lanka.

The ground is not a hub for domestic List-A and first class cricket either.

Australia usually play Test cricket exclusively in grand coliseums like Melbourne Cricket Ground, the Sydney Cricket Ground, the Adelaide Oval, the Brisbane Cricket Ground, not in the idyllic Marrara Stadium.

Australia's own explanation for the venue choice was logistical rather than symbolic: winter scheduling, a domestic football calendar dominating the major southern venues, and a packed international window meant Darwin and Mackay were simply where the fixtures fit.

Whether it was a scheduling issue or slight, the decision to play in Darwin turned into an unlikely advantage for the Tigers.

Bangladesh's High Performance squad had toured the Northern Territory twice in the past two years at the invitation of local cricket authorities, playing extensively in Darwin's Top End competitions while most of Australia's own cricketers had barely set foot there.

Tanzid Hasan Tamim was among those who had played in the city before, scoring 134 runs across eight matches in a T20 tournament there, while Hasan Mahmud had turned out for Bangladesh A in a four-day match against South Australia at the same venue only last year.

Australia captain Pat Cummins, by contrast, could barely recall whether he had played there at all, vaguely recounting a possible appearance for an Australia A side.

In a strange twist, it was Bangladesh, not the hosts, who arrived in Darwin with something resembling home advantage.

That familiarity showed from the very first hour. Bangladesh bowled Australia out for 198 on the opening day, the lowest total by any team batting first against Bangladesh, and also Australia's lowest total against them in Test cricket in any conditions.

The stats behind the triumph

Hasan Mahmud claimed career-best figures of 6-55, the third-best innings figures for a Bangladeshi pacer in Test history, as Bangladesh's quicks took all 10 wickets in the innings, only the second time they have managed that feat.

Tanzid then produced a maiden Test century in only his second appearance, becoming the first Bangladeshi to score a Test hundred on Australian soil, an innings so admired that the Darwin crowd rose to applaud a young visiting batter they barely knew, a moment Tanzid later remarked as “the beauty of playing Test cricket in Australia”.

The innings swelled to 426, Bangladesh's second-highest total against Australia in Tests, behind only the 427 they made at Fatullah in 2006, built partly on Mehidy Hasan Miraz's defiant 65 alongside the tail, which pushed Bangladesh to a 228-run lead, the largest first-innings deficit they have ever inflicted on Australia in Tests.

Miraz's five-wicket haul in the second innings, his 15th in Tests, helped bowl the hosts out for 284 and made him the second Bangladeshi bowler to reach 100 wickets in the World Test Championship (WTC) era.

He also became the first Bangladeshi to combine 100 Test wickets with more than 1,000 Test runs in the WTC, amassing 1,436 runs and 100 wickets across 32 matches.

He became the first visiting spinner to take a five-wicket haul in a men's Test in Australia since Kuldeep Yadav at the SCG in 2019, and only the second visiting off-spinner to do so since 2000, after England's Graeme Swann in Adelaide in 2010.

His half-century and fifer in the same match was the fourth time he has managed the double in his career, and only the second time away from home, matching Shakib Al Hasan's own record for Bangladesh.

Bangladesh's fast bowlers took 14 wickets across the match, the joint most by Bangladeshi quicks in any Test, with Hasan's match figures of 9 for 111 standing as the second-best by a Bangladeshi pacer in a Test, and the third-best match haul by any visiting bowler on their maiden Test in Australia, behind only Wasim Akram's 11 wickets at the MCG in 1990 and Maurice Tate's 11 at the SCG in 1924.

Set just 57 to win, Bangladesh strolled home by nine wickets, losing only Tanzid for a duck, with Mominul Haque and Shadman Islam completing the chase inside 15 overs. Hasan was named player of the match.

The scale of the win

Stripped of all its emotional weight, the bare arithmetic of the result still tells its own story: Bangladesh had won a Test in Australia at only the third attempt, having lost their previous two by an innings back in 2003, and it was only Bangladesh's second Test win over Australia in seven meetings, following their victory in Mirpur in 2017.

Among visiting nations, only England needed fewer than three attempts to win a Test in Australia, with South Africa also managing it at their third try, placing Bangladesh in select company by that measure alone.

It stands as the second-biggest victory by wickets in Bangladesh's Test history, behind only their 10-wicket win over Pakistan in Rawalpindi in 2024, and across the match's eleven sessions, Bangladesh did not surrender control of a single one.

Australia's defeat was also only their third home Test loss after winning the toss in the past 15 years, following two defeats to India at the MCG and the Gabba in 2020-21, and their first defeat after winning the toss anywhere since the 2023 Ashes Test at The Oval, having won the toss in nine Tests in between and won every single one.

Recognition at last?

The scale of the result was not lost on the wider cricketing world. West Indies commentator Ian Bishop wrote on social media that the achievement demanded recognition long overdue. "Momentous achievement for Bangladesh Cricket, and the people of Bangladesh," he said.

"Surely they're deserving of their flowers and just recognition now from those from whom it has previously been too sparse."

Bishop's framing, that recognition for Bangladesh has always been too sparse, cuts closer to the truth than any single scoreline can. This was never only about SENA countries (South Africa, England, New Zealand, Australia) treating Bangladesh as an afterthought.

India, the neighbour with whom Bangladesh share a border, a language family and an enormous cricketing audience, have hosted them in a Test only five times, and have never invited Bangladesh for a bilateral ODI series.

If the cricketing world is to take Bishop's call for flowers seriously, that imbalance, not just the distance between Dhaka and Darwin, is the one that needs addressing first.

Sri Lanka are yet to win a Test in Australia across 15 attempts, and Pakistan's last victory there dates back to 1995.

India needed 12 Tests to record their maiden win in the country, Pakistan needed seven, and Bangladesh have now managed it in three, the fastest of any Asian team, and only the second Asian nation other than India to beat Australia at home in this century.

Since December 2014, Australia had won 34 of 49 home Tests and lost only six, a fortress that has proved close to impenetrable even for the game's traditional powers, and only five visiting sides had won there after losing the toss in the past 15 years before Bangladesh joined that list on Sunday.

Bangladesh's relationship with the sport's traditional homes has been thin for years. Their last Test in England came in 2010, when Tamim Iqbal scored a century at Lord's and Manchester, and their most recent Tests in New Zealand and South Africa both date back to 2022.

The eight-wicket win over New Zealand at Mount Maunganui that year, remains one of the defining results in the Tiger’s cricketing history, and until Darwin it stood as their finest away performance.

Mushfiqur Rahim, Bangladesh's only player with more than 100 Test caps and a fixture in the side for over two decades, was still a 16-year-old schoolboy when Bangladesh last toured Australia in 2003.

It took him 21 years of international cricket to finally play a Test on Australian soil.

If this result means anything for the players who follow him, it is that the next generation of Bangladeshi cricketers should not have to wait two decades for the same chance.

A win that belongs to the fans too

Miraz, who barely had time to celebrate before being pulled into a broadcast interview, put the win down to belief carried through the tour, even after that chastening warm-up defeat.

"We had the belief. After losing the warm-up match, we had to think about what could be done and how. There was only one message for everyone, we had to believe in ourselves, otherwise we would not be able to go very far."

He thanked the travelling Bangladeshi supporters who filled sections of a ground more used to empty stands. "A lot of Bangladeshis have also come here, and I thank them for coming. I think they also believed that we could win the match."

There is something worth pausing on in that gratitude. Bangladeshi cricket fans have spent years absorbing more ridicule than almost any other set of supporters in the sport, mocked for their team's mediocrity, their short-lived victories against weaker sides, their inability to translate promise into anything lasting on the biggest stages.

Every batting collapse, every innings defeat, every humiliation like the warm-up match that preceded this very tour has been held up, at home and abroad, as proof of a ceiling the team could never break through.

For those same fans to watch their side dismantle the number one team in the format, in conditions built to punish exactly the kind of team Bangladesh were once assumed to be, is vindication two decades in the making, for a team and a support base that has rarely been given the benefit of the doubt.

The win has also sharply improved Bangladesh's prospects of reaching the final of the World Test Championship.

Currently ranked fourth with 40 points and a 66 per cent points percentage, four wins from their remaining seven Tests, one against Australia, two each against South Africa, England and West Indies, could potentially be enough to keep them in contention.

What a story it would be, given everything this team has had to fight through just to be taken seriously, for that road to end with Bangladesh walking out at the Oval for the World Test Championship final in June 2027.

The second Test of the ongoing series begins in Mackay on August 22, a ground with a Test history barely older than Darwin's, having staged only three Tests of its own.

Bangladesh travel there no longer as the team nobody wanted to host, but as the side that turned a forgotten outpost of Australian cricket into the stage for the most glorious day in their Test history.

A Test that began in a city few Australians had ever played in and ended with a team once told it did not belong, standing over the ruins of the best side in the world.