The League

Cricket has always had sledging, boorish behaviour and cheating but generally, the sport, while tough, is associated with fair play and gentlemanly conduct, however fictional. “It’s not cricket” is a phrase used even in America where there is hardly any cricket played and the phrase means that something is not fair or kosher. While “flannelled fools” abound in Cricket, there have been a bunch of cricketers who have played the game in its intended spirit and while not giving an inch to the opposition in terms of rivalry, tenacity and grit, invested the game with exceptional skill, decorum and grace. They are the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

 

Like everything else concerning cricket, this list also has to begin with the one and only Don Bradman. Nelson Mandela, anti-apartheid leader and later President of South Africa, was released in 1990 after 27 years in prison. In 1986, Australian Prime Minister Malcom Fraser visited him in prison. Mandela’s first question was, “Tell me, Mr. Fraser, is Don Bradman alive?” It wasn’t as though Mandela played cricket or was a cricket enthusiast. He was in awe of the extraordinary integrity that was Don Bradman.

 

In 1971-72, South Africa was the best cricket team on the planet. They were invited for a tour of South Africa and Don Bradman was the Chairman of the Australian Cricket Board. In Australia, there was agitation against a Rugby team of South Africa visiting Australia because of racist selection policies. Bradman met South African Prime Minister, John Vorster and asked, “Why don’t you choose blacks in the team? I want to know.” Vorster’s reply, dripping with racism, “Blacks understand Rugby but they don’t understand the intricacies of Cricket. The blacks can’t handle it mentally and physically.” To which, Bradman simply queried, “Have you heard of a gentleman called Gary Sobers?,” came back and cancelled the invitation to the South African team. It would be 22 years, much bloodshed and abolition of apartheid before a South African team was invited back to Australia.

 

Bradman played his last test in the Ashes series at the Oval, England in 1948. Going into his last innings with 6996 runs at a staggering average of 101.39, he needed to score just four runs to complete 7000 test runs and an average of exactly 100 but was out on a duck. While the whole stadium stood up to applaud the batsman who had just scored a duck, he is supposed to have remarked, “How did I do a damned fool thing like that?” Extraordinary. Gentleman. League. Take three!

 

Which brings us to another extraordinary gentleman – Sir Gary Sobers. Bradman called him the “five-in-one cricketer.” Apart from being an outstanding batsman and fielder, Sobers the bowler was so versatile that he could bowl three different styles - left-arm seam and swing, slow left-arm orthodox, and left-arm wrist spin.

 

In Australia, in the series Bradman was referring to, Lillee was peppering Sobers with bouncers. One evening, Sobers went to the dressing room where Australian captain Ian Chappell was sitting and said to him, “You’ve got a boy here called Lillee. Every time I have gone in, all I have got from him is bouncers. I want you to tell him that I can bowl quick too, and I can bowl bouncers.”

 

Lillee came in with the score reading 285 for nine. He was welcomed by a bouncer from Sobers. Lillee slogged the next ball straight up in the air and was caught. Sobers had gone in to the Australian dressing room yet again and Ian Chappell confided to him, “I’ll tell you something: when Dennis (Lillee) came in, before he reached the room, the bat hit the wall, and he said, ‘That little so-and-so, I will show him. I haven’t really bowled quick at him yet’.” Sobers replied, “Well, he’s got the ball, I’ve got the bat. Let’s see.” 

What followed was carnage. By the end of the day, Sobers was on 139. Ian Chappell trudged into the rival dressing room that evening. “I head over in his direction to congratulate him … just the two of us are in a quiet corner, and after I pour him a beer, he has a sip and then says, ‘Prue’s left me.’ Prue being his wife who lived in Melbourne in those days. I said: ‘Sobie, if that’s the bloody thing that’s annoying you so much, give me her phone number, and I’ll tell her to get bloody home straight away.’ You know, he just laughed. And it didn’t make any difference — he came out and belted us again.”

The crowd stood as one to applaud each time he reached a milestone — hundred, hundred and fifty, double hundred, two hundred and fifty. And when he finally fell, lofting Greg Chappell down the throat of mid-on, he had scored 254. The Australian fielders clapped him all the way back to the pavilion. Lillee looked at Sobers and said, “I’ve heard about you and now I’ve got my tail cut properly.”

Sitting in the stands was the great Don Bradman, who thought it was the greatest innings he had ever seen in Australia. And he had seen quite a lot. And played some.

While I was growing up, the Indian Cricketers were no-hopers, both at home and abroad. There was no pace attack. There was wibble-wobble batting as a unit except for occasional or individual brilliance. The better players from the big teams, England, Australia didn’t visit India and New Zealand much. Even their second-string teams used to trounce India in India. When India toured, it was usually disastrous.

 

Once, while preparing for my MBA/ job interviews, I was trailing our Princi, the redoubtable B.M. Bhatia who was hurrying along for some important work but casting pearls of wisdom now and then my way. Suddenly he stopped mid-stride and asked a passer-by whether Gavaskar was batting or out. When told Gavaskar was batting, the sheer joy and relief on his face was indescribable. In the pitch dark of a matinee show in a movie hall, even during tense scenes or titillating dances, a whisper will go around, ‘Gavaskar got his century’ or ‘whoosh, Gavaskar got out.’ Every good batsman in the world fancied getting a good score against India. Gavaskar, on the other hand, played for India and got big scores. And, as long as he was at the crease, India always had a chance for a draw (which was mostly counted as a win then) or even an improbable win.

 

Sans helmet, hip guard, thigh guard, chest guard, you-name-the-body-part guard, and against the fearsome, out-of-the-world West Indian attack, in West Indies, Gavaskar scored an astonishing 773 runs in four tests in his debut series, the scores reading 65,67 not out, 116, 64 not out, 1, 117 not out, 124 and 220 at an average of 154.80. The guy was the first to break Don Bradman’s record of 29 centuries (considered the Mount Everest then), scored 5 more centuries, was the first man to cross 10,000 test runs (an unknown peak till then) and hung up his boots with still a bit of cricket in him, people asking “why” rather than “why not?”

 

Gavaskar grew up idolising a West Indian batsman, Rohan Kanhai. In the 1960 tour of Australia, in the first test, Kanhai was belting the bowlers all around the park. The fast bowler, after trying everything to no avail, served up a lethal bouncer accompanied by a choice epithet and a “Take that, you b@#$%!” And Rohan hooked it for a six! In that debut series of Gavaskar, every time Gavaskar played a loose shot, Rohan Kanhai would grunt his disapproval from first slip and during the change-over, walk up to Gavaskar and chide him, out of the wicketkeeper’s earshot, “Concentrate, don’t you want a hundred? What’s the matter with you?” Gavaskar recalls, “It wasn’t that these great cricketers did not want their team to win. It was just the fact that they had supreme confidence in their own ability and believed that helping an opponent only produced good cricket and was good for the game.”

 

Gavaskar named his son Rohan after Kanhai, and wrote of Kanhai, "To say that he is the greatest batsman I have ever seen so far is to put it mildly." Bob Holland, the Australian spin bowler, also named his son Rohan, in honour of Kanhai. There is a Wetherspoons pub in Ashington, Northumberland named after him due to his three seasons playing for Ashington Cricket Club in the 1970s.

 

“I like to think that people are building these West Indians up, because I am not really sure they’re as good as everyone thinks they are. Sure, they’ve got a couple of fast bowlers, but … you must remember that (if) the West Indians get on top they are magnificent cricketers, but if they’re down, they grovel. And I intend, with the help of Closey and a few others, to make them grovel.”

 

This was Tony Greig, England captain on the eve of the first test of West Indies tour of England in 1976. This was also the greatest motivational speech anyone could have given to fire up that once-in-a-planet West Indies team bristling with talent and acute historical wrongs. Their star batsman, Viv Richards declared, “Nobody talks to Viv Richards like that.” Their opener Gordon Greenidge said, “This guy needs to be put in his place.” Meanwhile, there was one gentleman, Michael Holding, 22, who didn’t say anything. He got the ball in his hand and let the ball do all the talking. In one of the tests, on a dead pitch at the Oval, he took 14 wickets for 149. He bowled exactly two no balls in the entire series of five tests and took 28 wickets. Geoffrey Boycott said of him upon a 1981 series, “He was the fastest, and then some.” Dickie Bird christened him, “The Whispering Death.” And guess what, in his entire, brilliant career, he probably never sledged.

 

That’s it. I didn’t put Sachin Tendulkar in the list. This is a league of extraordinary gentlemen. Sachin was a gentleman all right. And with great ability. But this league has people who had a lively chutzpah, a particular attitude and a certain grace. Immense grace. They didn’t just build records and score centuries in dead causes.