Howzat?!

 

When I first thought of starting a blog, I didn’t know whether anyone would be interested in reading my little outpourings. On April 23, 2022, I put up a tentative, hesitant piece on Cricket - my first blog. In this 44^th blog, I return to Cricket, my favourite game to watch, especially the Test variety. 

Cricket is a game which builds character, so goes the saying. But then, there are some “characters” who make cricket what it is.

 

While growing up, our hero was B.S. Chandrasekhar, the legendary leg spinner who also was then the only bowler in the Indian team who could bowl a bouncer. There was nothing more glorious than watching him run in to bowl, shirt tail flying and the batsman’s expression of pure terror! Before the era of neutral umpires and India acquiring serious cricketing financial heft, Indian players used to be victims of abject racism, from the players, from the crowd, and most of all, from the home umpires when they visited some of the white-skinned countries. In Eden Park test at New Zealand in 1976, India managed a lead of 148 runs in the first innings and were anticipating a favourable result. In their second inning, the hosts were reduced from 161 for 2 to 182 for 8. Then their umpires came to the aid of the party. Chandra was beating the bat regularly and having his appeals turned down again and again and getting increasingly frustrated at the blatant umpiring bias. Finally, he bowled Wadsworth and the stumps were flattened. Although a truly gentle cricketer, Chandra went up in vociferous appeal. The umpire was confused and responded with, “He’s bowled.” To which Chandra came back snarkily with, “I know he’s bowled, BUT, is he out?!!”

 

During his playing days, Imran Khan, the captain of the Pakistan Cricket team met Australian captain Allan Border in an informal meeting in Sydney. During a chat, Imran told Allan Border “AB, give me Sunil Gavaskar and B.S. Chandrasekhar from India, we will beat Australia.” In a shocking reply, Allan Border said “Imran, just give me those two Umpires from Pakistan and we will beat the whole world. Imran Khan was left speechless and furious. It is believed that Border later apologised to Imran.

 

One hears about bowlers terrorising the batsmen but there was one batsman who used to terrorise the bowlers – Viv Richards. Just his walking in to the crease with that swagger and the exaggerated gum-chewing used to make nervous wrecks out of bowlers. In a county match in England, a bowler called Greg Thomas was bowling to Richards and getting a few to whizz past the bat. After Richards played and missed another one, Thomas said: "It's red, it's round. Now try playing it!" Richards proceeded to hit the next ball out of the ground. Richards: "You know what it looks like, now go and get it.”

 

Viv Richards again, Swansea 1993. Viv was on strike to Malcom Marshall in a county match between Glamorgan and Hampshire. Malcolm sprinted in, but at the split second of his delivery stride Viv pulled away, very angry. Everyone was quiet. Viv marched forward, smouldering, and screamed, "Hey!" He was most of the way down the pitch now, marching faster with each step, luckily past Marshall and also past the umpire. "You!" Again, nothing, except the horrified look on the spectators either side of and above the sightscreen. "That's you! " He was close to the boundary now and pointing to a spot just above the sightscreen, at a man who was sitting alone, lost in the newspaper hiding his face. "You!" Nudged by those around him, the man looked up from his newspaper and, startled, pointed at himself with, "What, me?". "Yes, you!!!" You've got David Gower and Robin Smith at slip; you've got Malcolm Marshall, the greatest fast bowler in the world, bowling to Vivian Richards. And you reading the ***ing newspaper?!" Priceless. 

Gavaskar looked a staid guy but post-retirement, the more I see of him, the more amazed I’m about his deadly sense of humour. In a TV interview, the anchor was asking him about the “switched at birth theory.” Sunny replied, “What do you mean ‘theory’? It’s a fact.” The anchor said, “But you were too young. How would you remember?” Gavaskar showed a small hole on his left ear. The day he was born, his uncle came to see him and noticed that his nephew had a ‘holey’ ear. The next time he came to visit his nephew at the hospital, he couldn’t see the hole in the baby’s ear. He reported this to the hospital management. They went around the general ward and found that baby Gavaskar was switched at the bath. Gavaskar, who would go on to be one of the greatest batsmen ever, was found next to a fisherwoman. After this narration, Gavaskar said, “That one incident affected me my whole life. The number of times I got out fishing outside the off-stump …”

Dilip Doshi bowling to Javed Miandad in a Bangalore test. After every delivery, Miandad kept asking Doshi, “Ei, ei, tela loom number kya hai?” Doshi kept avoiding any verbal engagement until the questioning became unbearable and asked, “Tujhe kyon chahiye mera room no.?” Miandad, “Taki tele loom mein chhakka maaroonga …” 

During India’s tour to Pakistan in March 2004, Virender Sehwag was blazing away with the bat in the first Test at Multan. A frustrated Shoaib Akhtar was unable to trouble him so he began to bowl short-pitched deliveries and Sehwag kept ducking under them. Exasperated, Shoaib began to suggest Sehwag to hook – with exaggerated miming, gestures and action demos. After his third such “suggestion,” Sehwag loudly asked him, “Tu bowling kar raha hai ki bheekh maang raha hai?” (“Are you bowling or begging?”) The Pakistani fielders burst out laughing and Shoaib did not offer any more “advice.” Sehwag went on to score 309 and earned the sobriquet, ‘Sultan of Multan’ for his efforts.

 

Thomas William George Goddard, right-arm off-break bowler of England, once bowled 42 consecutive overs under heat wave conditions in a county match. Finally, he complained about his unthinking captain, “Why the hell doesn’t the bloody bugger take me off?!” raved he. At that moment, it was gently pointed out to him, by amused team-mates, that skipper Basil Allen had left the field  a good few hours earlier. Allen had in fact asked a colleague to lead the side in his absence, the colleague being Goddard himself!! 

Melbourne Cricket Ground, 1921. A certain Mrs. Parks was sitting in the VIP enclosure, smugly knitting away. At one point, her ball of wool fell down. She bent to pick it up, dusted it off, and looked up. In that blink of an eye, she had missed the entire international career of her husband, Roy Parks! The poor bloke debuted in that game between England and Australia, was bowled by the first ball he ever faced in international cricket and never got to play for Australia national team again!

In the days when a Nottinghamshire batsman George Gunn used to play, the game usually began at 11.30 AM with the players withdrawing for lunch at 1.30 PM, but occasionally there might be a change to the schedule with the game starting at noon and lunch being taken at 2 PM. In one of these games, Gunn started walking towards the pavilion at the stroke of 1.30 but the umpire restrained him and said, “For today, I’ve changed the lunch time to 2.” George Gunn came back to the crease, deliberately got out to the next delivery, tucked his bat under his arm and headed towards the pavilion, muttering to the umpire as he passed by, “George Gunn lunches at 1.30.” 

I'm always there

 

Recently, there was an article on the Net regarding Ravi Shastri’s Audi being restored:

https://www.rediff.com/cricket/report/how-shastris-iconic-audi-was-restored/20220604.htm

The article and the pictures took me back to my callow youth. That Audi and I are old friends, but let me not get ahead of the story.

In 1983, at about six in the morning after the World Cup final evening, we, the Bombay summer trainees of IIMB, had to board the train from Bombay to Bangalore so I landed at the Bombay VT railway station waiting room the previous evening to wait out the night at the station so as not to miss the train. After a score of 183, no one in his wildest dreams seriously expected India to win. No TV either in that locked-in waiting room. As the West Indies wickets started tumbling, that microcosm of India in the waiting room celebrated as one and how. None of us there slept that night.

Cut to 1985. I was sitting at my desk in an office hall in the Shipping Corporation of India, Bombay, as usual gazing into the horizon thinking about nothing at all, when suddenly Sunil Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri landed up at my desk. They must have spent exactly a minute and a half there. They had come to ask when that ship carrying Ravi Shastri’s Audi (won as Champion of Champions) was docking. I gave them the info and offered them a cup of tea but they declined and left. After that, I looked around and there was a sea of humanity (Shipping Corporation staff from all 12 floors of the building, mostly females) crowding the aisles and corridors and ogling/ gaping at me. Most of them had missed seeing Ravi Shastri in person by a whisker and I was THE NEXT BEST THING since he had talked to me. That brief period when I was allocated the Australia desk (basically two ships, Ramdas and Ravidas operating in the Australia – India sector) had its uses.

Then came the day when the ship actually docked. The General Manager and I went to the docks to hand over the car to Ravi Shastri. Ravi Shastri strode in, tall and lithe, a few dock worker types following and growing in numbers. The car was unloaded from the ship and ready to go. The GM handed over the keys ceremonially, posed for the cameras and left. I was waiting for Ravi Shastri to drive off into the sunset and me to come back to the office. One small problem – he didn’t know how to drive and that day, Gavaskar (who knew how to drive) had not accompanied him. Meanwhile, the crowd – mostly dock workers – had begun to swell to huge numbers. Those days, there wasn’t any police arrangement for cricketers, especially in restricted areas like docks. I hid Ravi Shastri inside the ship where the crew plied him with tea and biscuits and went out and told the teeming masses that Ravi Shastri had left. After about two hours, the crowd dispersed and then and only then, a by then thoroughly bored and fed-up Ravi Shastri emerged from the ship and managed to go back. Long years later, when I met him at Tolly Club in Calcutta, I tried to jog his memory but clearly he had forgotten. As per the above report, he still has that car, now restored to its pristine glory.

In 1996, I was SP, Calcutta Airport. During that World Cup, there was an intelligence input that a specified terrorist group would carry out an attack, probably targeting a particular team. All the teams were landing up in Calcutta for the inaugural ceremony. I made an arrangement with the airlines so that the teams would sit at the back of the planes. While the other passengers were disembarking through the aerobridge, the players would get down from the back into the tarmac and be taken away by buses through other and secure gates. That way, they would be insulated and avoid possible problems. All the teams and the consuls, especially Australia, appreciated this arrangement. Meanwhile, there was the Indian team big-wig who shall not be named. He refused to sit at the back of the plane. Just because of this, the Indian team was delayed by about an hour, the passenger flow and the players moving in opposite directions inside the plane. Anyway, the inaugural ceremony bit went off okay. Problems arose when the Indian team landed up to play the semi-final, after beating Pakistan in the quarters in Bangalore. 

Mob hysteria inside the airport. Azhar was travelling with Sangeeta Bijlani – they were not married then. The mob was touching Sangeeta’s feet, calling her Sangeeta-di. The next day or the day after, India lost badly to Sri Lanka. Some cute guys tried to light bonfires inside the stadium. The following morning, I landed up at the airport at about 5 AM. The first person who met me was a dishevelled Srinath, practically in tears, “I know why you wouldn’t like to help me but please, please help me find a seat on a plane, any plane, going to Madras…” A little later, good old Azhar came in with Sangeeta in tow. The mob hysteria, now the lynch-mob hysteria, almost went through the roof. Sangeeta and Azhar had to travel some distance inside the airport to get to a particular gate. The mob was charging menacingly, shouting “Kothay achhe (beeped out) Sangeeta?” meaning “Where is (beeped out) Sangeeta?” They thought she was the reason for Azhar and the team’s indifferent performance. “How dare they go around like this without even being married? Think of Azhar’s poor wife…” And so on and so forth. Almost the same guys who were touching Sangita-di’s feet so affectionately the other day! I tried to divert the crowd by separating Sangeeta and Azhar and channeling them through separate routes but they were not keen on it. Later, they separated for good.

I think, in June 1996, Sourav Ganguly scored a century on his debut test at Lord’s. He followed it up with another century in the next test. After the series, he came back to the home, sweet home, Calcutta. I had told the Additional SP to supervise the police arrangement at the airport. I was not planning to go but some sixth sense prompted me to give it a once-over. When I reached the VIP gate at Calcutta airport, I saw a crowd of about 20,000 at the VIP gate, chanting “Maharaj”, “Maharaj.” The police cordon was broken through and in disarray, the Additional SP was nowhere to be seen and a large guy with several gold chains around his neck was proudly holding court and directing “this vehicle will go into the tarmac, this vehicle will be stationed here, this is the reception party for Sourav at the plane” and so on. I sent for reinforcements and walked up to the guy and told him hang on, not a single person or vehicle would go inside the tarmac as it was a protected area. Sourav would come out and have fun. He screamed that he was such-and-such and didn’t-I-know? I also screamed back. Things got pretty hairy because the mob and the press were clear about who they were with and indicated it in no uncertain terms. When the reinforcements came and I threatened to arrest “the” Big Guy, finally, tempers cooled down. [Incidentally, Sourav himself, when he came out, was grace and humility personified.]

In 1999, during the inaugural test of Asian Test Championship at Kolkata (India – Pakistan), I was on duty at Eden Gardens stands. It was a pretty see-saw match. It was also the debut test of Shoaib Akhtar who announced his arrival to the world by getting Dravid and Sachin out off successive balls. The first time both of them and all of us saw those particular deliveries was on TV replays – he was really fast and probably gave it his all. After a hectic three days of hard work in the blistering sun, I thought I’d take it easy on the fourth day (second innings) and went to the upper stands (shaded) to sit down and enjoy a bit of fascinating cricket. The moment I sat down, Sachin got run out under controversial circumstances (colliding with a Pakistani fielder) and all hell broke loose. I had to again rush around and somehow the day passed off. The next day, there were about one lakh people in the stands and it was madness. On an earlier occasion, there was a police lathi charge at Eden Gardens and several people had died in the stampede. Keeping that in mind, we were told to “persuade” the people to kindly leave. If anyone has seen a sports loving crowd, he would have an idea how little persuasion counts for in such a situation. Anyway, I was trying my best – persuasion, cajoling, threats – when suddenly one water bottle hit my Commissioner. Something snapped in me and I went to action with the Rapid Action Force and emptied those particular stands. Other stands followed suit. Luckily there were no casualties. For the first time in the history of Test Cricket, almost a full day of a Test match was played in a completely empty stadium, that too Eden Gardens. I read in the papers the next day that Azhar had described it as an eerie feeling.

As I keep telling the wife, I’m always there. Whether India wins the World Cup, whether India crashes out of the World Cup, whether Ravi Shastri becomes the Champion of Champions, whether Azharuddin and Sangeeta Bijalani are matched or detached, whether Lord’s bows to aamader chhele Sourav, whether Cricket is played to packed houses or empty stands, whether Ravi Shastri gets to renew his affair with his recandescent Audi, whether anything at all to do with Indian cricket or cricketers, I’m always there.

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.