The best of them all

The off spinner to catch my fancy after Jim Laker was Ghulam Ahmed. If my memory serves me right, the Hyderabad and India off-spinner had a slightly round-arm action but spun the ball viciously from a height. Because he went bald early in life, he always seemed like a veteran to my young eyes, as I watched him in action against New Zealand and Australia at the Nehru Stadium. Much of my knowledge of his bowling however came from reading about him and my captain ML Jaisimha’s descriptions. According to Jai, Ghulam was an even bigger spinner than Prasanna: “you could hear the buzz of the ball as it left his hand and travelled towards the batsman in a sharp trajectory.”

The first time I saw EAS Prasanna in action was in the final Test of the 3-Test series between India and West Indies at Madras in January 1967. Test cricket was coming back to Chepauk after its banishment to the Corporation Stadium 15 years earlier. The Garfield Sobers-led visitors had won the first two Tests at Bombay and Calcutta, where Prasanna’s rival Venkataraghavan had bowled well—without great success, if you did not count Gary Sobers’s scalp, which he captured in Bombay.

The Chepauk Test, made memorable by Farrokh Engineer’s near-hundred before lunch on the first day and some second innings aggression by Ajit Wadekar and V Subramanyam which served to book their berths to England in the following summer, was the first time the trio of Chandrasekhar-Bedi-Prasanna came together.

Prasanna was impressive in that game, though not incisive enough to cause a collapse in either innings. In the first innings, he accounted for the wickets of Butcher and Hall, while in the second he fared better getting Hunte, Butcher and Hendricks out. The bouncing run-up and tempting were very much in evidence, and so was a happy optimism as if he expected a wicket every ball in his approach to bowling. For someone who was making his comeback to Test cricket after a hiatus of five years, he looked comfortable in his shoes, as though he never doubted he belonged in the company of his seniors in the side. A lot of it must have been the result of the confidence he enjoyed from his captain and South Zone teammate Pataudi as well as South Zone captain and Test teammate ML Jaisimha, on the reserve bench for the match.

That Test match which ended in a draw thanks to dogged post-tea resistance on the last day by Garry Sobers and Charlie Griffith had raised hopes of a resurgent Indian team, with some exciting batsmen in Ajit Wadekar, Pataudi, and Borde and a brand new spin combination promising much. The tour of England that followed soon afterwards proved a great disappointment, with India receiving a massive drubbing despite some isolated instances of defiance. The spinners did nothing of great note, and we had to wait till the third and final Test for Prasanna to run into some form. He took 3 for 51 and 4 for 60 in the best of his outings in the series. In fact, Prasanna never did spectacularly well in England, the weather in the first half of the summer perhaps preventing him from bowling at his best, with the ball retaining its shine for long periods and the grassy wickets inimical to turn.

Prasanna was at his best on the 1968 Australia-New Zealand tours when he took as many as 49 wickets in eight Test matches. Like thousands of other Indians, I was glued to the radio every morning during that wonderful tour when India were gallant losers in Australia and deserving winners in New Zealand. Prasanna was hailed as a world-class spinner by the Australian critics and even some of the Australian batsmen.

The real moment of magic was to come soon. It was in the Chepauk Test in January 1970 that Prasanna almost single-handedly landed India at victory’s doorstep—only for a missed stumping chance and fighting batting by Ian Redpath and the tail took Australia to a total which proved way beyond India’s fourth innings capability. In their second innings, Australia were tottering at 24 for 6 before their miraculous recovery. Prasanna’s share of victims up to that point had been four, to Mohinder Amarnath’s two—incredibly, Keith Stackpole and Ian Chappell, both for duck. Prasanna finished with six wickets in the innings, and I was permanently hooked on his bowling, though I was away in Dharwar playing university cricket and only heard the match!

I remained his fan throughout the rest of his career, and had the pleasure of playing against him in the Ranji Trophy. He had a lean patch after that wonderful spell against Australia, when Ajit Wadekar took over the captaincy and led India to historic victories in the West Indies and England in 1971. India’s maiden triumphs in the two continents meant that Prasanna’s relegation to the background was hardly noticed. His bowling against England in the 1972-73 season and again in the 1976-77 season was outstanding, though against Tony Greig’s men his spin seemed to have lost some of its sting. Jaisimha and Pataudi, my seniors, however believed he was still as good as ever, when I suggested to them that he was past his best. In between, in the 1975-76 season, he had a successful tour of New Zealand and a less successful tour of the West Indies, where he lost his Test place to Venkataraghavan after the first match.

I realised that Jaisimha and Pataudi were probably right about the continued high quality of Prasanna’s off-spin when I played against him in the Ranji Trophy, which featured some outstanding spells by him. In what was perhaps his last Ranji game, he took seven wickets against Hyderabad, in a match at Bangalore. I was one of his victims, caught at short-leg while trying to drive on the offside. The ball was a perfect beauty, flight, dip, turn, bounce and all. I had hit him the previous ball for a four to square-leg, a shot he actually applauded. How he had me fooled! Around the same time, I remember the way pressmen waxed lyrical over the way he dismissed Sunil Gavaskar with a perfect straight delivery in an Irani Cup match. I had to wait for some 15 years to witness a repeat of that scene, when he bowled Gavaskar after he hit a flurry of boundaries with a similar delivery that clipped the off bail during my brother Sivaramakrishnan’s benefit match (in April 1993) at Chepauk, between two teams of veterans. Prasanna was all of 53 then—and Gavaskar 40-plus.

Prasanna was perhaps the most confident bowler I have seen, certainly the most aggressive off-spinner. Short of stature, and generously built, even plump at times, he had a springy run-up to the wicket, whose momentum he used to great effect. At his best, he was perfectly side-on, and brought his right arm down quickly to maximize the spin he imparted to the ball. His variations were subtle—including intelligent use of the crease, changes of grip ranging from fingers loose and far apart to tight and close together to control the amount of turn. He could bowl a flatter, quicker ball with fingers close together or a floater angling away from the bat by rolling his fingers over the seam. All these variations were marked by the invariable magic of the ball dropping short of the length the batsman anticipated.

I was fortunate to play alongside the great spinners of the time. Prasanna may not remember it, but he came over to watch me in action at the State Bank of India nets in Hyderabad (where he had moved for about a year from Bangalore), at the request of my teammate P Krishnamurti. When Murti told me Prasanna had been impressed, it did my morale a world of good, as I was not yet the first choice off-spinner in the bank’s team. (Syed Abid Ali was another “guest” Murti invited to assess my bowling. In a cricketer’s life, these are unforgettable gestures of kindness).

My subsequent encounters with Prasanna were as a rival player, and those are not quite the same. Once, when we were playing at the Chinnaswami Stadium, the umpire ruled AV Jayaprakash not out caught behind off my bowling, and Prasanna shouted from the pavilion: “That was off the middle of the bat, not an edge.”

Yes, Prasanna was an outspoken man. He proved it again that day, as I returned to the pavilion at lunchtime, with a couple of wickets in my bag, by telling me I was bowling too fast, I should give the ball more air. I didn’t take too kindly to that unsolicited piece of advice. (Well, you can talk, you have a batting line-up that gives you runs to bowl with, I thought).

It was only in hindsight that I realised he was absolutely right, though there was precious little I could have done, as I was only playing the role my team expected of me.

Naturally, as a competitive sportsman, one tried to be as good as one’s rival, even if he was the world’s best off-spinner, as it happened to be in this case. It was indeed a tall order, as in addition to his formidable bag of tricks, Prasanna had one advantage over taller off-spinners—the extra height to which he could flight the ball.

It was an honour to merely try to compete with him.

Maverick

(First published on 12 June 2005 in The Sunday Express)

Anil Kumble has earned his place in the pantheon of the greats of the game by sheer perseverance and longevity—not to mention his superb qualities of head and heart which have enabled him to triumph over the trials and tribulations besetting him through his long and distinguished career. There is no doubt that in a different time and place, his exceptional intelligence and man-management capabilities would have won him the captaincy of his country. He is a man to be admired and respected, and not one for whom tears are easily shed, because he meets every adversity with courage and determination—and usually succeeds.

This preamble is necessary to explain the greater partiality many of the 70s generation have for the unorthodox Indian leg-spinner to have attained cricketing immortality—BS Chandrasekhar, who turned 60 a few weeks ago. If Kumble is the perfect professional, Chandra was in many ways the antithesis, a genius with nothing workmanlike about him. If Kumble is all intellect and mental toughness, Chandra was frail and vulnerable, in both a literal and a metaphorical sense. A polio-afflicted limb gave him the unusual arm-speed that enabled him to whip googlies, flippers and the occasional leg-break at ferocious velocities. There was the air of a tragic hero about him as time and time again misfortune struck him when least expected.

His physical attributes too contributed to this less-than-aggressive image that stayed with him through his career. He remained slim, almost thin, throughout his 15 years in top-flight cricket, his intermittent beard serving to heighten that impression of forlornness.

Of the celebrated quartet (or trio, to be truthful, as only once did all four play together in a Test) of Indian spinners, none was more spectacular than Chandrasekhar. Bishan Singh Bedi’s bowling action was deservedly described as poetry in motion, Erapalli Prasanna was a spinner’s spinner with his classical flight, sharp spin and delightful variations, and Srinivas Venkataraghavan was a probing wielder of a surgeon’s scalpel, but none of them could accelerate the pulse rate of excited spectators in the manner of a fast bowler as Chandra did.

As he measured his paces, marked the start of his bowling run, walked the first couple of steps cupping the ball in both hands, ran in with a purposeful stride, and then delivered in a perfectly side-on finish, left arm raised high, right arm coming down in a rapid whir, thudding on to his left thigh, the crowd exploded in a burst of feverish anticipation.

Slip fielders and short legs, not to mention wicket keepers belonging to any other generation would have dreaded the prospect of the fierce edges that Chandra’s fizz and bounce induced. But that high noon of Indian cricket was lit by some extraordinary close-in catching fireworks, ignited by such champions as Ajit Wadekar, Venkat, Abid Ali, and the incomparable Eknath Solkar. Despite that magic ring of fielders, streaky boundaries abounded when Chandra was on song, as the edges flew through the gaps at supersonic speeds towards the boundary.

Today the pundits mock Kumble for his lack of turn. Back in the 1960s, they called Chandra the fastest bowler in the Indian XI. It was like saying that Indira Gandhi was the only man in her cabinet—sometimes it was actually true. Some of Chandra’s hand grenades, which sent stumps cartwheeling, were no more than a blur to the spectator. Worse, from a batsman’s point of view, he did not see them much better either. What caught batsmen unprepared was that the lead-up to a sensational Chandra spell could consist entirely of full tosses and long hops. One moment, he would be muttering to himself and working himself into a nice temper to bowl better, and in the very next, he would be firing down an unplayable yorker or flipper. Like a man in a frenzy, he would wait impatiently for his next victim, chafing at the leash.

Unlike Kumble, Chandra was not a cerebral bowler, but it would be a fallacy to state, as many self-styled experts did, that he did not know what he was doing. If his general bowling style was fast and faster, he introduced subtle changes as he grew in age and stature as a bowler. When he held one back, it presented a much more difficult proposition to the unsuspecting batsman than the well-flighted delivery of an orthodox wrist spinner. There was only an imperceptible change of trajectory in this change of pace, which more often than not fooled batsmen into spooning return catches.

Yet another major difference between the two great leg-spinners of Karnataka is that the senior could not bat to save his life, while the younger man has on occasion shamed his frontline colleagues with his determination amidst the ruins of a collapse. Chandra is perhaps the only Test bowler in history with more wickets than runs to his credit. I believe he once made 22 in a Test innings and played two memorable supporting roles at No. 11—the first while V Subramanyam, his Karnataka captain, went from a hundred or thereabouts to 200 against Madras at Chepauk in 1967, and the second as an admiring spectator at the non-striker’s end while GR Viswanath raced to an electrifying unbeaten 97 against the fire of Andy Roberts & Co. at the same venue seven years later.

Everyone knows that Chandra’s greatest moment was the Oval Test of 1971, when he bowled India to an improbable first Test victory in England. Yet it would be folly to single that magical performance out in a glittering career, which included many acts of derring-do in India and abroad—against England, Australia, New Zealand and West Indies. In one memorable spell at Bombay, he took eight wickets in the first innings and four in the second. The Hindu’s PN Sundaresan, not known for flowery prose or sentimentality, wrote perhaps his most inspired prose describing the lump in his throat as he watched the frail young man soldiering on against a West Indian batting juggernaut led by Garfield Sobers.

Personally, though never a close friend, I, like other cricketers of my generation, was witness to Chandra’s tragedies and courage in adversity. We all knew of his weakness to Mukesh’s hauntingly nasal voice and his guru Saigal’s favourite beverage. I also had occasion to learn of his fondness for another brew—rasam, without which no south Indian meal is complete. In Chandra’s case, it could be the meal to the exclusion of the rest of the menu, I once found out.

I wonder if Kumble would have been possible without Chandrasekhar. Were it not for Chandra’s match-winning exploits in the 1960s and 70s, would any selector have dared to blood an unorthodox wrist spinner in the mould of Anil Kumble in the 90s? Would he have been dismissed as a freak bowler, unlikely to succeed on the world stage?

Jim Laker

By V Ramnarayan

His autobiographical “Over to Me” was not a book meant to inspire a young cricketer. It was  a continual rant against his skipper Peter May, manager Fred Brown and other cricket personalities of the time, but I read it from cover to cover because at age ten I was already an ardent fan of his bowling.

Jim Laker was my role model as an off-spinner. I never saw him in flesh and blood because he did not play Test cricket in India, never watched him in action elsewhere in the world, because we had no TV then, leave alone satellite telecasts. My only acquaintance with him was via radio broadcasts in the voices of Norman Yardley, John Arlott, et al, and photographs. 

His immaculate bowling action captured by still cameras was forever etched in my mind. I had a perfect image of his easy run-up, high-arm action, viciously spinning fingers, and perfect follow-through imprinted permanently in my mind’s eye. Growing up in a complex of three independent houses with no compound walls separating them, I never walked between them, always bowling imaginary but unplayable deliveries in my hero’s action, getting imaginary batsmen bowled, caught or leg before innumerable times every day. Years later, I was to admire his dry, laconic wit as a no-nonsense broadcaster, but reading about his incredible cricket exploits (193 wickets in 46 Tests at an average of 21.24, an economy rate of 2.04, a strike rate of 62.3,best innings figures of10.53, best match analysis of 19/90) in real time gave me a high never equalled afterwards.

A Yorkshireman by birth, James Charles Laker started his career in his home county as a batsman, but by the end of it, he had been acknowledged as arguably the best off-spinner of all time. It was Surrey that recognised his bowling potential, and invited him to join the county staff, after a sore 'spinning finger' had prevented his playing a 'trial' match for Essex.

What made Laker such a great spinner? According to John Arlott, English cricket's golden voice, "There have been off-spinners though few - who spun the ball as much as Jim Laker; some of them had comparable control. But no one has ever matched him in those two departments and had also, such a quality of intelligence.

"Physically economical of energy, he walked back six paces to his mark and came in up a short-stepping run which he deliberately varied from ball to ball, changing its pace or number of steps, a subtlety which made it difficult for the batsman to time his approach.

"Without any apparent change of action he bowled a topspinner and a ball which ran away a little off the pitch but, equally dangerously and far more unusually, he could and did, control the width of his break."

Often a batsman would find Laker's first ball pitched on a length and turning relatively mildly. The next ball would look innocuous enough, quite easily defended. Nothing much would happen off the next ball either, and the batsman would, if he did not already know Laker, conclude that here was just another off spinner. 

The next delivery would look no different from the earlier ones but bite, turn, hurry through and hit his stumps even before his bat came down.

Laker was a good bowler on all types of wickets. He spun the ball really viciously and ran through sides on turning pitches at the lowest possible cost. On good wickets, whether in cool England or in tropical conditions, he could bowl over after over of perfect length and line. On those, he set problems of length and flight.

Like all great spinners, he achieved flight by spinning the ball hard.

The ball left his hand and travelled towards the batsman in a perfectly controlled parabola, thanks to the spin imparted by strong and determined fingers that gave the ball and themselves - a fair rip. The flight of the ball was tantalising. Like a mirage that fools a thirsty traveller until he gets there, the Laker delivery was almost always not there for the batsman when he reached for it in defence or attack. Listen to John Arlott again: "He paid a painful price for his bowling. Like most men who spin the ball really hard, he often wore away the skin from the inside of his index finger. If he bowled on, it would harden, a corn would form and then, as it grew too hard, it would tear away, leaving the flesh exposed once more. (He) lacked the unusually long fingers of the savage off-spinners and to gain a similar degree of purchase, he had to take a grip which stretched his first two fingers to an exceptional and painful extent."

As a result, Laker's fingers became distorted and he developed an arthritic condition that ended his career sooner than expected. Yet, in only 46 Tests, he took 193 wickets at the meagre average of 21.23.

This is what a young spin bowler can learn from a great spin bowler like James Charles Laker or our own great slow bowlers. When you are told to flight the ball, it doesn't mean you toss the ball up in a gentle arc. Buying wickets doesn't mean giving away free runs. The idea is to fool the batsman into believing that free runs are to be had. And that, you can do, only if you genuinely spin the ball, only if you tear the skin of your finger by rubbing it hard against the ball to make it spin like a top, only if you practise so long and so purposefully, that in a match, good line and length are automatic, and you have the confidence to try variations at will. If you have never had spinning finger problems, you have never had blood oozing from that finger, you have never spun the ball. Forget spin bowling then, and switch to something easy like batting!

Gyan from cricket nawabs

By V Ramnarayan

Rarely do we read sensible writing on spin bowling. A very popular—and completely nonsensical—cliché is the description of a slow bowler that he "varied line and length intelligently". Nothing could be more absurd. Unless you are express fast and can bowl a good bouncer, you never vary your length except to modify it to suit the reach and footwork of the batsman. A tall batsman demands a slightly shorter length than a short one or a predominantly backfoot player; otherwise a “good” length is sacrosanct, though a halfvolley is always a better delivery than a rank short ball.

As an off-spinner who began his career in the 1960s, I had partly intuitively been following precisely these bowling fundamentals. Both length and direction were unvaried in your arsenal of sharp off spin, faster deliveries, floaters and leg-cutters, not to mention the occasional outswinger, and this is something you learnt very early. My first mentor (excluding my cousin Venkatachalam who had often shared his cricket wisdom during conversations indoors when I was still in my arai nijar) had been medium pacer VV Rajamani, my senior in the Presidency College cricket team.

The one aspect Rajamani stressed was arm-speed from the top of my delivery stride to my finish (“that doesn’t mean you push the ball through; you whip the ball as if you were spinning a top; the arm comes down fast, but the ball travels in a parabolic loop”), with my left leg ramrod straight and right arm falling to the left of my left thigh. A pivoting action was essential on your delivery stride, and for this your left foot needed to grip the ground firmly. In all these years of cricket reading, I have not for decades come across a reference to arm speed, the Rajamani gem that helped me so much in my development as a spinner. (Among world class spinners, Shane Warne provides an exceptional example of this factor, his strong back and shoulders compensating in this regard for his short run-up; a longer, quicker run-up would normally provide the the necessary momentum).

In my adult life, I learnt some of my best bowling lessons from Hanumant Singh, the Rajasthan and India batsman under whose captaincy I played for State Bank of India for a couple of seasons in the 1970s. I made my debut for the bank’s all India team when he was captain; he softened the blow of my being dropped for the next game and final to make way for Rajender Goel, by complimenting my efforts and giving me some great insights into the game, spin bowling in particular. This is when he confirmed the correctness of my instinctive understanding of the game. “Whatever you are doing, bowling at your normal pace and trajectory, flighting the ball a little extra, pushing the ball through quicker, or bowling the wrong ‘un, make sure that the ball invariably lands on the same spot—same length, same line. This way the batsman is always in doubt, while you are giving nothing away by way of width or poor length.”

“Length is mandatory, while line is optional,”  EAS Prasanna one of the best off-spinners of all time, has been quoted as saying. This could easily be misunderstood to mean that you can change your direction from ball to ball, over to over—unless you grasped the proper import of Prasanna’s words. No captain can set a field for you if you bowled on both sides of the wicket all the time. I believe Prasanna has  other ideas: that you decide your line on the basis of the nature of the wicket, the amount of turn it is yielding, on whether you are attacking or defending, and on whether a right hander or left hander is batting. Once you decide your line of attack for the day (or the session in case conditions have suddenly changed), you pretty much to stick to it.

I played under a great captain for Hyderabad. Though there was not much  spoken communication on the field between ML Jaisimha and the bowlers, all of us knew his cricket thinking and quickly learnt to bowl to his plans. For one thing, the field—sometimes extremely attacking—that he set for you clearly demanded a certain line of attack. Even on a typical first day wicket, he always gave the off-spinner two short legs—forward and backward. We would start with a slip, point, cover, mid-off , deep square leg, mid wicket and mid-on besides the two short-legs, with square leg the only deep fielder, some three quarters of the way to the boundary. All the other fielders except those in the close-in cordon were at single-saving distance from the bat. After a few overs, when he was confident I had settled down, he’d say, “All right, Ram?” and then proceed to bring in point to silly point, leaving that region totally unprotected. The field would then be slip, silly point, cover, mid-off, mid-on, mid-wicket, forward and backward short-legs and deep square leg. (You had to be absolutely accurate around off-stump; you simply could not afford to stray outside it the way you could with a less attacking offside field).

Once the batsman settled down, either slip or silly point was removed and only much later would a deep midwicket be added to the onside field, with the offside field reduced to point, cover and mid-off. Unless the batsmen really flourished and some 400 runs were on the board, the two short-legs were a constant. Even when one of them withdrew into the outfield, it was rarely the forward short-leg or bat-pad fielder that left his post.

This was a standard field deployed for a good off-spinner by the leading captains of the day, say Tiger Pataudi for India, Jaisimha for Hyderabad, V Subramanyam (succeeded by Prasanna) for Karnataka, or Venkataraghavan for Tamil Nadu.  I have a serious suspicion that this kind of attacking field placement originated in the south, perhaps when Subramanyam was leading Karnataka, and evolved through brainstorming among all these greats of the period. And if I am not mistaken, this broadly speaking, is what Prasanna means when he says length is mandatory, line is optional).

On a turning wicket, you not only tried to spin the ball from outside the off-stump, but often went round the wicket to make the batsman play, once he started using the pads with no fear, thanks to the abundant deviation, of lbw. The trick was to still bowl around the same spot from round the wicket, the straighter angle forcing the batsman to play and increasing chances of leg before at least slightly. And a well-directed straight or away-going delivery from round the wicket could get you one of three kinds of dismissals: lbw, bowled, or a slip catch.

Playing in that era, you also learnt some superb lessons on how to bowl to left-hand batsmen from the aforesaid nawabs of cricket. Contrary to what many of today’s experts advocate, our seniors encouraged off-spinners to bowl over-the wicket, and maintain a strict leg-and-middle line, thus cramping the left-hander. You often had a forward short-leg to grab the bat-pad snicks, while you could still force an outer edge to slip, especially if the pitch offered some purchase.

In part two of this series, I hope to describe in some detail the great spinners of my era that I watched from afar as well as those I was fortunate enough to follow from very close quarters.

‘What do they know of music?

(First published in SAMAHIT, the Natya Kala Conference souvenir, 2012)

The day after Priya Govind and Akhila Ramnarayan asked me to write on cricket and music—unfortunately not as separate topics, and therefore complicating my life no end—came a telephone call from Carnatic vocalist Unnikrishnan, a call that straightaway lightened my burden considerably. As many of you know, Unni is a good sportsman who continues to play recreational tennis but also someone whose cricket is of a very decent standard. His phone call had nothing to do with either cricket or music, but my thoughts immediately went back to the time some years ago when our paths in these two fields intersected. Unni and I played some cricket and less tennis together. He is of course much younger than I, so much younger that I have also played cricket with his father Radhakrishnan, who, besides being a qualified Ayurvedic physician, was a pretty useful batsman in the 1950s and 60s, even into the seventies.

To cut a long story short, Unni’s quite promising cricket career started when mine was already over, though I continued to play from memory, to enjoy the perverse pleasure of competing with men half my age. By the time we first played against each other, I for Alwarpet CC and he for Madras CC, I had heard him on the concert platform, starting with a recital at the wedding reception of a fellow cricketer. I still remember the pride with which Radha informed me that the singer of the evening was his son, and the resemblance I noticed in the early Unni voice to that of Yesudas. Later, by a strange quirk of fate, I was invited to first play for and later captain the Parry’s Recreation Club when well into my 40s, though I had nothing to do with the Parry group. Unni, a business management graduate, was by then a management trainee in the company, and a leading member of the cricket team. During one of our matches, I told Unni how much I enjoyed listening to his first film song (a fairly straightforward rendering of Venkata Kavi’s Alai payude in a Malayalam film). Unni’s response was quietly modest: “I’ve sung some 50 film songs already, Ram.”

My most memorable Unnikrishnan experience was to follow in about a year’s time after this episode. I had organized a chamber concert of his at home (the second or third such occasion) one Sunday, when we came to know that the programme was clashing with a league game for Parry. As captain, I could not relieve Unni from the match, nor did he, as a competitive sportsman, want any such privilege. I toyed with the idea of postponing the concert, but too many people had already accepted our invitation with great anticipation, as Unni was at the very peak of his popularity. Domestic discord was a serious possibility, even a probability, if I did anything so foolish as to call off the performance. To complicate matters more, it turned out Unni had a wedding concert at Nagercoil the previous night.

The match was at distant Pallavaram, at the English Electric ground, which proved to be a small mercy, as Unni was able to get off the district bus (after travelling all night) very near the ground. I lost the toss, and the good soldier he was, Unni fielded in the hot sun with the rest of the team. He was a dependable no. 3 batsman, perhaps our highest run-getter that year, but I asked him to open the innings—a role to which he was not a complete stranger—so that he could go home early and rest after his batting. Unfortunately, Unni was dismissed for zero or thereabouts, but simply refused to go home, waiting for us to complete the match in the evening. We happened to win the match, so we all went home in a happy frame of mind, but poor Unni had to go all the way to his Royapettah home, shower, change and come to my Kottivakkam home on the East Coast Road. We started the concert half an hour late, but it was a superb performance by Mr. Dependable.

Unni was not quite the first professional classical musician to have played competitive cricket I personally knew. That honour went to the late Ravi Kichlu of the Hindustani vocal duo the Kichlu Brothers. Ravi often entertained me with snatches of alap standing next to me in the slips on the maidan of Calcutta. We were both playing for Rajasthan Club in the 1969-70 league season.  I almost forgot wicket keeper Sivakumar my Mylapore Recreation Club teammate, mridanga vidwan, son of DK Pattammal and father of Nithyashree Mahadevan.

At the national level, I knew or knew of a few musically inclined cricketers. The great Vijay Manjrekar was a good singer and so is his son Sanjay. Padmakar Shivalkar was another Bombay player who gave vocal performances on stage. Some of us have heard Bapu Nadkarni do a more than passable imitation of KL Saigal. The late ML Jaisimha, under whose captaincy I played for Hyderabad in the Ranji Trophy, had an impressive voice with which he belted out popular songs. He brought the roof down at a restaurant at Bangkok back in 1978 when the resident band handed him the microphone and he gave a few lusty samples of his Frank Sinatra repertoire and Louis Armstrong’s When The Saints Go Marching In.

Also seated at the same table was an accomplished vocalist in Shanti Hiranand, disciple and biographer of Begum Akhtar and sister-in-law of former India captain GS Ramchand. Mr and  Mrs Ramchand were the gracious hosts that evening and Jaisimha, Ajit Wadekar, Murtuza Ali Baig and I the lucky guests during a Hyderabad Blues cricket tour (Thailand has some cricket and on our way back from Australia, we played a game at The Royal Bangkok Sports Club). We even got Ms Hiranand to sing a song for us.

Jai was the life and soul of the party during cocktails after my brother V Sivaramakrishnan’s benefit match in 1993, which was between two star-studded teams of veteran India players of the past. After my daughter Akhila sang a few songs at the request of the family, Jai took over totally from the band of the evening at the Connemara that night. My own personal highlight was to be part of an improbable trio of MLJ, Sunil Gavaskar and I. Only cacophony resulted, but nobody in the audience seemed to mind.

Jaisimha’s friend and teammate MAK ‘Tiger’ Pataudi, whose last season for Hyderabad in the Ranji Trophy was my first, had a keen ear for music, and could play the tabla, according to some of his close associates.  I had this habit of whistling constantly in the dressing room, and Tiger caught me whistling a song from the film Jahan Ara—which had some exquisite music by Madan Mohan—and gave a stentorian interpretation of Phir wohi shaam in sharp contrast to Talat Mahmood’s dulcet tones. Another verse he was fond of bellowing in a voice that threatened to shatter the windows went Gulshan, gulshan, shola-e-gul ki. I was intrigued and curious to know the rest of the song, but I had to wait for quite sometime before I solved the mystery. It turned out, of course, to be the opening line of a gentle, romantic Mehdi Hassan ghazal, the first I was to hear from that master of the genre.

The ubiquitous two-in-one dominated the recreational needs of the cricketers of the 1970s, and thanks to the great leg-spinner BS Chandrasekhar, the Hindi film songs of Mukesh were the most popular choice of a whole generation of cricketers. Chandra must have been all of 18 or 19 when he first heard a Mukesh song wafting in out of transistor radios in the crowd during a match. ‘Tu kahe agar’ I believe was the song to cast a spell on him, and he actually mistook Mukesh’s voice for KL Saigal’s. That Chandra became a diehard fan and later a close friend of Mukesh is part of the cricket lore of the period.

If the reader is left wondering why I chose this topic or what my credentials for the task of writing on it are, let me explain. I was an active, sometimes semi-professional cricketer for some 30 years, and have been writing on music and editing a magazine on the performing arts during the last decade or so. People sometimes ask me to explain how a cricketer like me took to writing on the arts, and I tell them that I was dropped on my head as a child—which sometimes causes startled, incredulous responses.  The real answer is that if you were born in the Madras of the 1940s in a middle-class brahmin family (even if you are a bad brahmin like me), chances are that you grew up in the midst of much music and much cricket. This is probably still true of most households that come from similar backgrounds. Add to that a love of language and you can end up writing on both music and cricket, as I did after failing at several other vocations!

There have been a few—though all too few—great writers through history whose gaze focused on these two great arts and sciences. You may raise an eyebrow or two at my inclusion of cricket in the category of art and science, but you would then be indirectly doing that to possibly the first writer to excel at both—Sir Neville Cardus, who described the batting of Sir Garfield Sobers thus: His immense power is lightened by a rhythm which has in it as little obvious propulsion as a movement of music by Mozart.” Yehudi Menuhin once said, Cardus “reminds us that there is an understanding of the heart as well of the mind… in Neville Cardus, the artist has an ally”. 

According to writer, broadcaster and biographer Robin Daniels, Cardus  believed in the power of great art to change lives from within. “Genius is a miracle to be revered whether in fashion or not,” Cardus said, and he did revere genius in cricket as well as music. Daniels also said that Cardus fought the good fight for Gustav Mahler when the composer was largely unknown. He rated him as a great critic “because he combines deep feeling and imagination with an eye that saw symbolically”.

Cardus was known to exaggerate, even accused of writing on matches and concerts he did not attend, but he brought literature to  cricket writing as much as to music criticism. “To go to a cricket match for nothing but cricket is as though a man were to go into an inn for nothing but drink,” he said

He described CB Fry, the great English all rounder, as “a national gallery and a theatre and a forum”. Of the inimitable KS Ranjitsinhji, the Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, he said, (or was it AG Gardiner ?) “he never played a Christian stroke in his life”, in praise of his delightfully unorthodox ways.

One of the most remarkable personalities of English cricket was the radio commentator John Arlott, the man responsible for Cape Coloured cricketer Basil D’Oliveira’s entry into English cricket and eventual ascent to world fame. Arlott had an unconvetional voice for BBC, "a sound like Uncle Tom Cobleigh reading Neville Cardus to faraway natives", according to Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, his drinking buddy.

Arlott was a most unusual all rounder whose career included stints as a policeman, in a mental hospital, as a wine-taster, poet and hymnist, and above all a humanist of the best kind.  He was the epitome of the ultimate cricket person whose breadth of vision extended far beyond the boundary.

In more recent times, John Inverarity, former Test cricketer and chairman of selectors for Australia has such impeccable academic and artistic credentials that the John Inverarity Music and Drama Centre in the city of Perth has been named after him in honour of his sterling contributions. (A side story is that he was once recalled after being bowled by Greg Chappell, because the umpire realised the ball had hit a sparrow on its way to the batsman. Unfortunately the sparrow did not live to watch the rest of the match).

Tony Lewis, the last cricketer to captain England on his Test debut, and an ace rugby player, was also an accomplished violinist (he was once a member of the Welsh Youth Orchestra). He later distinguished himself as a man of letters and a broadcaster who came to be known as ‘the face of BBC’.

Did not CLR James, the West Indian author of Beyond a Boundary say, “What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know?”

And indeed may we ask, ‘What do they know of music, who only music know?”

A cricketer and a gentleman

Balu Alaganan who led Madras to its first Ranji Trophy triumph against Holkar at Indore in 1954-1955, was a popular captain, with an impeccable pedigree in the game. After his high school education in Colombo, he came back to his native Madras state, where he captained the strong Madras Christian College team at Tambaram. Alaganan was an all round sportsman, who won singles and doubles titles in state tennis, and played golf as a keen amateur.

The sad news of this gentleman cricketer's death was announced today. 

A conversation with Balu (circa 2000)

In a free flowing conversation about Tamil Nadu’s maiden Ranji triumph, Balu Alaganan revealed some unusual facets of that famous victory “I was a member of the selection committee that made me the Madras captain the year we won the Ranji Trophy!” he said. “It was a bombshell to me. I had been in and out of the side, had done nothing of note, though I had a hundred against Mysore in a junior match under the captaincy of M S Shastri, uncle of Ravi Shastri. M J Gopalan, C Ramaswami and R T Parthasarathi were the other selectors who persuaded me along with ‘Ghanta’ Srinivasaraghavan (the Madras Cricket Association secretary). Ghanta promised he would be there to watch us when we won the Ranji Trophy, but while we were playing Hyderabad we received news of the air crash that claimed his life. 

 

About his dream run,  culminating in a match-winning innings in the final, Alaganan recalls: “The players were more motivated than I. They kept on encouraging me. On the night before the last day of the match, A K Sarangapani had a dream in which he scored 74, the exact number of runs he made in the second innings. M K Murugesh came up to me at no.11 and said: “Don’t treat me as a tailender, I’ll stay with you”, and our partnership proved vital. The 50 runs we put on were in the end the margin of our victory”.

“In the semifinal, C D Gopinath plotted Pankaj Roy’s dismissal on the hook shot off the bowling of BC Alva with his fastish offbreaks. We had a fielder about halfway to the boundary, Alva bowled short and Roy could not resist the temptation.”

“Kripal played a great role in our win. He was writing his exams and we wanted a postponement, which was granted. The star-studded Holkar team captained by Mushtaq Ali, put us in on jute matting, perfect for batting, thinking they would finish the match earlier as their main bowler Dhanwade wanted an extra day in Bombay on his way to the English league.”

As it turned out, Madras made 479 and took the lead. Holkar had heard of Gopinath, but not of young Kripal Singh who played two wonderful innings and bowled superbly. Alaganan wanted to drop himself, as he hadn’t been among the runs. True to form, he scored a zero in the first innings, the only batsman to do so.

After that memorable victory, Alaganan retired and was nominated as a Vice President of the Madras Cricket Association, but was found to be underage, and had to wait until he was 35!

“One year, we all had to resign from the committee when S R Jagannathan sued the Association, but I was determined to become president after that, which I did,” says Alaganan, who was the popular choice it seemed, whenever unpleasant  tasks had to be carried out.

He it was who had to inform skipper P K Belliappa he had to stand down as Tamil Nadu skipper in favour of Venkataraghavan, because the off spinner was being groomed for the South Zone captaincy and India vice captaincy.

Years later, when some players went up to him to express their unhappiness with Venkat, again it was Balu who had to convey their feelings to the captain.

A memorable match as manager of the state team was when Tamil Nadu beat Maharashtra in the Ranji Trophy semifinal at Poona. “When Maharashtra went into bat for the last time in the match, we led only by 120 runs, but I told the boys not to give up. Skipper Venkat said: ‘Don’t worry, we will win the match’. There was some great bowling by Venkat and VV, and we bundled Maharashtra out for 96, to register an incredible win.”

Balu was a lucky manager. At least that’s how he describes himself, though players who have toured with him think of him as a thoughtful official who really cared for them and contributed meaningfully to team strategy. The Indian teams that visited Sri Lanka, New Zealand and West Indies in the seventies thoroughly enjoyed touring with him.

Balu also did a fairly long stint as radio and TV commentator. One unforgettable incident involved the late P Ananda Rau, who invariably summed up the day’s proceedings for the benefit of overseas listeners who tuned in just after teatime on Test match days in Madras. On one such occasion, even as Ananda Rau was summing up, a few wickets fell, and the commentator went on with his resume, paying no heed to current happenings. The crowd was roaring all the while, and the noise level was quite deafening. Acting on phone calls from worried listeners, who feared some mishap at the ground, the police landed there. Balu nudged Ananda Rau even as the police were making their way towards the commentary box, and Rau woke up from his trance to announce: “As I was talking to you, dear listeners, three more Indian wickets fell.”

The veteran administrator recalls with a chuckle an instance of attempted match fixing from his own experience. It was an intercollegiate match in the forties between Loyola and Madras Christian College, Alaganan’s team. Loyola’s captain Fullinfaw wanted an outright win, as otherwise Engineering, who had star players like Aruldoss, B C Alva, and G Ramanathan, would become the league champions. He asked the MCC captain to lose the match intentionally. “Our captain G Zachariah said, ‘No, I am a true Christian, and won’t throw away a match under any circumstance,’ and we drew the match. The Loyola College crowd, obviously in the know of things, booed us.”

West Indies cricket: the golden years

Proudly wearing the rosette

of my skin I strut into Sabina,

England boycotting excitement

Bravely, something badly amiss.

Cricket. Not the game they play

at Lord’s, the crowd (whoever saw

a crowd at a cricket match?)

are caged, vociferous partisans

quick to take offence. England

sixtyeight for none at lunch.

‘What sort o battin dat man?

Dem caan play cricket again, praps

Dem should a borrow Lawrence Rowe!’

And on it goes, the wicket slow

as the batting and the crowd restless.

‘Eh white bwoy, ow you brudders dem

does sen we sleep so? Me a pay monies

fe watch dis foolishness? Cho?’

So I try to explain it in my Hampshire

drawl about conditions in Kent,

about sticky wickets and muggy days

and the monsoon season in Manchester

but fail to convince even myself.

This poem, ‘At Sabina Park’, by Stewart Brown, poet and professor of Caribbean studies, is a sample of the joyous impact of West Indian cricket on its crazy, partisan spectators, but long before Boycott and Amiss had arrived on the scene to appear wooden by unfair comparison with the gifted Lawrence Rowe, thousands of fans had been hooked—by the Three Ws, Ramadhin and Valentine, Sobers and Kanhai, Atkinson and Depeiza (if only for one heroic stand that went into the record books), Hall and Gibbs.

The first time I followed a Test series involving the West Indies was when Australia toured the islands in 1954-55 and Clyde Walcott lit up Sabina Park with two outstanding innings of 155 and 110 yet Australia won by an innings and 82 runs.  That was the fifth and final Test and Walcott had made 110 and 39 in the first Test too, on that same, lightning fast pitch, against the pace of Lindwall, Miller, Johnston and Archer and the wrist spin of Benaud. Incredibly, Walcott also scored a century in each innings at Port of Spain, Trinidad (with Everton Weekes contributing 139 and 67 not out), amassing 827 for an average of 82.7 in the series, yet West Indies lost the series 0-3. It was at Bridgetown, Barbados that Atkinson and Depeiza put on 347 for the seventh wicket and forced a draw.

A young lefthander named Garfield St. Aubrun Sobers made 35 not out and 64 in the final Test, compiling in all just 231 runs and taking 6 wickets in the rubber, in what was a modest beginning to the greatest all round Test career of all time. Notice of his greatness had already been served, the very first time he batted against the Aussies. Richie Benaud was to recall years later that, fielding at gully, he had to run for cover, seeking protection from Sobers’s fierce square cuts!

Those were still the Dark Ages of West Indies cricket: no dark-skinned player could captain the team yet. That had to wait until Frank Worrell was handed the reins from FCM Alexander for the 1960-61 tour of Australia, the historic series that brought the crowds back to Test match grounds, after the chucking and dragging controversies between England and Australia and dull county cricket had driven them away to other sport. Worrell and Benaud were the rival captains involved in what was to be a major diplomatic victory for cricket—for the spirit in which the series was played—but also in the game’s first tied Test match at Brisbane. The West Indies were gallant losers of a closely fought series and might have fared better but for a contentious umpiring decision that cost them a victory in the fourth Test. In the event, Australia scraped through with a two-wicket margin in the final Test, to emerge as a 2-1 winner of the series.

Two grand innings of 125 and 168 confirmed Sobers’ burgeoning stature as the world’s leading batting talent, after his world record 365 against Pakistan, but he was yet to achieve the phenomenal success that prompted John Arlott to declare: ‘No aspect of his cricket has been more amazing than his capacity for combining quality and quantity of effort; it is as if a single creature had both the class of a Derby-winner and the stamina of a mule.’ He was also still some distance from burying the ghosts that haunted him after his dear friend and co-star in the firmament of West Indies cricket, Collie Smith had died in a car accident with Sobers at the wheel. In his autobiography Sobers has confessed that after that shocking loss, he steeled himself to bat and bowl and field for both of them. And how the cricket playing nations of the world had to pay for that resolve!

Worrell was the great binding force, the calming influence on a team of brilliant but mercurial individuals. He took Sobers under his wing and groomed him to be his successor. And by the time Sobers led his team to India in 1966-67, he had been unofficially crowned the greatest all rounder in the world, and we in India were treated to some wonderful samples of his genius. Wes Hall was a fading colossus and so was Charlie Griffith, but Lance Gibbs was still a force to reckon with, Basil Butcher, Seymour Nurse, David Holford—Sobers’s cousin and partner in a couple of historic rearguard actions—Clive Lloyd and Jackie Hendricks, made up a powerful combination.

Another crowd favourite in India as elsewhere was Rohan Babulal Kanhai, the man who matched Sobers knock for knock in daring strokeplay that disguised technical excellence of the highest order. There was a keen rivalry between these two heroes of West Indian cricket, but it was tempered by a chivalry natural to both of them. It helped them to come together to make common cause on several occasions. If Sobers’s run as captain came to an unhappy end after his sporting declaration resulted in a series defeat against the touring England team in 1972, Kanhai’s reign began with a series defeat to Australia despite great personal form, aided by the brilliance of Clive Lloyd. One Garfield Sobers was sorely missed, as he was out of the series mysteriously injured.

Sobers and Kanhai combined briefly to post huge personal and team totals in the 1973 English summer, but the new generation was already upon them, with the elegant lefthander Alvin Kallicharran playing several delightful innings and the massive Clive Lloyd launching murderous assaults against the world’s best bowling attacks.

The Indian tour of 1974-75 was Lloyd’s first as captain. A batting sensation answering to the name of Isaac Vivian Alexander Richards was unveiled on this tour and Lloyd himself gave evidence of his enormous power in the final Test at Bombay. West Indies won the series 3-2, but not before India put up a hard fight levelling the series 2-2 at Madras. Noone noticed yet, but the greatest battery of fast bowlers in the history of cricket was in the process of being assembled. It took an abject whitewash in Australia –after Roy Fredericks played a pulsating innings in the second Test at Perth, the only one West Indies won on that tour—and a magnificent win by India chasing 404 at Port of Spain the following season, for Lloyd to marshal his fast bowling resources in a fearsome quartet, an unprecedented combination in Test cricket.

It is precisely the manner in which the fearsome foursome concept was first developed that took away for me the lustre and gallantry of West Indies cricket. Michael Holding, Wayne Daniel, Bernard Julien and Vanburn Holder unleashed a barrage of short balls on the hapless, helmetless Indian batsmen, often bowling round the wicket on a ridge around leg stump and traumatizing them with viciously intimidating bowling. The tactics showed Clive Lloyd in a poor light, desperate to maintain a winning record. It was the start of the total dominance of world cricket for over a decade by Lloyd and his men, the great fast bowlers backed by the greatest batsman in the world, Viv Richards, and the captain himself, still as destructive as ever. Gordon Greenidge, Desmond Haynes, Alvin Kallicharran, Larry Gomes, Derryck Murray, Jeffrey Dujon, Malcolm Marshall, Bernard Julien, Andy Roberts, Joel Garner, Colin Croft and Keith Boyce were some of the names to etch themselves permanently in the memory of the West Indies cricket fan.

An ugly side of West Indies cricket was to be revealed, at least in the eyes of ‘the victim’, when Kerry Packer’s coup de tat in 1977 resulted in all the leading west Indies players joining his ‘circus’. Alvin Kallicharran refused to toe the Packer line and was rewarded with the West Indies captaincy but he was unceremoniously axed when Clive Lloyd and the other Packer men returned to official Test cricket. Kallicharran cried foul and even claimed that his Indian origin worked against him in the inter-island politics of West Indies cricket. Similar murmurs had been made by the other great east Indian icon, Rohan Kanhai, in his playing days. During the Vivian Richards era, the murmurs were louder and clearer, with the captain charged with racial prejudice in the team composition he favoured.

This was a far cry from the early days of West Indies cricket, when it was a disadvantage to be black, as in West Indian society. According to C L R James, for the dark man, “the surest sign of … having arrived is the fact that he keeps company with people lighter in complexion than himself.”

To me, the golden period of West Indies cricket was not the era of Clive Lloyd, Viv Richards and the four-man pace battery, but the journey that began with Sir Frank Worrell’s historic tour of Australia with his gallant men, and ended with Rohan Kanhai and Sir Garfield Sobers bowing out in style, or almost doing so, with individual scores of 157 and 150 not out in the Lord’s Test of the summer of 1973. (The next Test series was their last together—at home—an anticlimax for both).

It was a time when the West Indies team was united as never before, and set the pattern for Clive Lloyd and men to follow. Under Lloyd too West Indies played their cricket fair most of the time, though harder than any team before or after. The blot on their record of sportsmanship was provided by that ugly Test match at Kingston Jamaica against India, and the tantrums of their bowlers in the face of poor umpiring in New Zealand. Vivian Richards ranks with the best batsmen of all time, as does Brian Lara. Richards was part of a champion side and Lara of a struggling, loose conglomeration of no-hopers most of the time. As captain, neither has succeeded in inspiring a West Indies combination to great heights. That honour goes to Sir Frank Worrell, Sir Garfield Sobers and Clive Lloyd.