V. Ramnarayan
Madras cricket of yore was a far cry from its combative, sometimes ill-tempered avatar of today. For instance, I remember this rare sight of the first ball of a match being imperiously flicked over midwicket for six on the Marina ground. Even as the crowd roars its approval, the bowler runs to the batsman and pats him on his back, shouting, ‘Great shot, da!’ True, such extreme acts of sportsmanship were not a daily occurrence, but most of the cricket of the time was played in a spirit of friendly competition.
Cricket was initially an elitist pursuit, learnt originally from the British by the landed gentry and educated upper crust, and then percolating to the middle class. It was Buchi Babu Naidu, well-versed in the ways of the ruling British at the turn of the century, who first assembled an Indian outfit capable of beating the European at his own game. Soon, the game spread far and wide in Madras – from Purasawalkam to Perambur, Triplicane to Mylapore, and beyond.
I started playing club cricket in the early 1960s, and we were often scornfully dismissed as ‘curd-rice cricketers’. It was a sarcastic reference to the soporific effect of the staple diet of the majority of cricketers back then. We were said to lack the steel for stern battle, our artistry and skills no match for the aggression of cricketers elsewhere.
Brilliant stroke-makers and spin bowlers in local cricket, we often faltered against our less stylish but more determined opponents from Delhi or Bombay. Fielding was at best an unavoidable nuisance and the slips the preserve of seniors, with the babies of the team banished to the distant outposts of long leg and third man. Fast bowling was too close to real work, best left in the hands of those endowed with more brawn than brain.
League cricket then was relatively informal. You could walk in a few minutes before the toss and join the eleven. Fielders and batsmen often traded jokes or gossip, with the umpires sometimes joining in. The action rarely approached the frenetic, and the accent was on style rather than substance. The spinner who did not turn the ball and the batsman of dour defence or crude power were treated with contempt by players and spectators alike. The general air of camaraderie extended to umpires taking a benevolent interest in your progress. One of them, M.D.S. Murthy, a virtual stick of a man, who habitually stole a quick puff or three of his Berkeley cigarette during drinks breaks, once refused to give decisions in my favour, sternly warning me, ‘You won’t get an LBW or caught behind from me today if you don’t flight the ball.’
On most grounds, the shade of a large tree served as the dressing room and facilities were generally primitive. Lunch involved a hurried dash to Ratna Café, Udipi Sukha Nivas, Shanti Vihar, Udipi Home or Dasaprakash and back, depending on the venue of the match. The effects of the blazing sun were countered by glasses of unboiled, unfiltered and often multi-hued water stored in mud pots or brought in buckets that resembled relics dug up by archaeological expeditions. ‘When will you stop bringing water in a kakkoos bucket?’ my teammate Mukund once thundered at the ground staff.
Most Madras cricketers were unable to afford high-quality gear. In fact, you needed contacts abroad or access to visiting Test cricketers to buy bats and other gear from them at fancy prices. A Gunn & Moore, Gray-Nicolls or Autograph bat could cost upwards of a hundred rupees, and that was a lot of money for the average cricketer. The gloves, leg guards and shoes worn by most of us often performed a psychological rather than protective role. At the lower levels of cricket, it was not unusual for batsmen to wear a single leg guard rather than a pair because that was all the team could afford. The bats could be handcrafted things of beauty, but they did not possess the carry of contemporary bats that can send a top edge out of the ground.
Despite these constraints or possibly because of them – for they served to make playing cricket seem an adventure, a privilege earned by the worthy, not something handed to you on a platter as it is today – the enthusiasm for the game was plentiful and infectious among players and spectators alike, not to mention the men behind the scenes like club secretaries, scorers and markers. Of humour, there was never any shortage, and the spirit of competition was always softened by a sense of camaraderie that went beyond team loyalties.
Everywhere in the city, there were cricket-mad children, their fancy fed by radio commentary and newspaper reports, and the occasional visit to the cricket ground to watch their local heroes. Kids had charcoal stumps drawn on walls, and every corridor and hallway was a makeshift ground when it was too hot outside. In my extended family, we had rough, mud pitches in our compound. These were cow-dung sprayed by our helpful domestic workers, but the crowning glory was a vast ‘ground’ nearby, empty plots of land still to be swallowed up by residential buildings. Usually, the wicket was a beauty, levelled by humans and cattle using them as shortcuts from one street to another. The ground was often manicured by grazing buffaloes. Only when it rained did the playing surface pose problems, challenging the technique and courage of the barefoot batsmen while transforming military medium pacers into demon fast bowlers. The hoofmarks of the buffaloes on wet soil hardened into dangerous ridges from which the ball reared up steeply. Batting then became largely a matter of survival of the luckiest.
Cricket did not stop even in the classroom, where boys played ‘book cricket’ by opening pages at random and affixing runs or dismissals to the two imaginary batsmen – they could be Mankad and Roy in one generation and Gavaskar and Viswanath the next. If, for example, you opened page fifty-four, the second digit was the reference point for the scorekeeping, and the batsman got four runs (or two, under a different set of rules), if the page number ended in a zero, the batsman was declared out, and so on.
Our cricket threw up characters galore. Opening batsman Balu sat up all night reading Don Bradman’s The Art of Cricket with every intention of putting precept into practice, only to be run out first ball next morning, his partner’s straight drive brushing the bowler’s fingers on the way to the stumps, and catching him out of the crease. ‘Clubby’ Clubwalla, stonewaller of an opener, and alleged off-spinner with the bowling action of a contortionist, once made 37 runs in a whole day of batting.
There were other unforgettable characters. Probably the best known was K.S. Kannan. The veteran all-rounder was a much-loved coach, more famous for his original English than his undeniable cricket skills. Fluent in Tamil, he could barely pass muster in English, but loved to express himself in the Queen’s language, with hilarious results. ‘Give me the ball to him,’ he would tell one of his wards, and ‘ask me to pad up one batsman.’ ‘Thanking you, yours faithfully, K.S. Kannan’ were the famous last words of a speech he made at a school function.
The late T.E. Srinivasan, a stylish right-hand batsman, was famous for his wit and eccentric behaviour. On an Australian tour, his only one with the Indian team, he allegedly told a local press reporter, ‘Tell Dennis Lillee, T.E. has arrived.’ On the same tour he persuaded a security guard at a Test match to warn innocent Yashpal Sharma that he would be arrested if he continued to stare at the ladies through his binoculars. Yashpal’s panic and the resultant roar of laughter from the Indian dressing room caused a stoppage in the middle as the batsman, Gavaskar, drew away, annoyed by the disturbance.
For a Madrasi, T.E. was an unusually good batsman against fast bowling. In this, he was entirely self-made. He had a concrete wicket laid, perhaps at his own expense, at the Nungambakkam Corporation School, where he practised diligently against some local pacemen bowling at him from 15 yards rather than the full 22. He played some spectacular innings against quick bowling in his career.
League matches often attracted crowds in excess of a thousand and the thirty-overs-a-side Sport & Pastime (later The Hindu) Trophy final invariably drew five or six thousand spectators. Many finals were played at the Marina ground on Beach Road, now Kamarajar Salai, which wore a festive appearance on such occasions, with every seat in the gallery taken, every bit of tree-shade occupied, and dozens of cars and scooters parked on Beach Road, providing a vantage view of the match from just beyond a low wall. If you were patrolling the boundary line, you could eavesdrop on some knowledgeable cricket conversations among spectators who knew not only the finer points of the game but also the relative merits of all the league teams and their players backwards. You could even receive some useful advice gratis, but god save you if you misfielded or dropped a catch!
A Ranji Trophy match between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka or Hyderabad could draw a crowd of 20,000-30,000 paying spectators. A match at Chepauk, with all its historic association with the ‘Pongal’ or Presidency Match of yore, was a most enjoyable spectacle, watched by somnolent vacationers seated under the trees surrounding the ground. That was before the concrete cauldron that effectively reduced cricketers to dehydrated invalids in a matter of hours came to dominate the landscape. Luckily, the current stadium allows the sea-breeze in.
It was an occasion to pack your puliyodarai and thayir sadam and set out on a day-long excursion to catch up with old friends, and in their company, dissect the doings of the protagonists of the drama being enacted before you, to applaud or barrack bowlers, batsmen and fielders.
Madras crowds are not only knowledgeable but generally hard-to-please as well. They will never accept Anil Kumble as a better bowler than their own V.V. Kumar, a wrist spinner in the orthodox mould unlike the Karnataka express googly specialist. Gundappa Viswanath of the steely wrists and the nonchalant artistry ranks higher with them than Sunil Gavaskar, for all the Little Master’s achievements and peerless technique.
Old-timers recall a magnificent innings of 215 played at Chepauk by the Ceylon stylist Sathasivam in 1940. According to them, no better innings has ever been played at Chepauk, but post-War cricket enthusiasts rate Viswanath’s unbeaten 97 against West Indies in January 1975 as the greatest innings in living memory, better than the best Gavaskar and Tendulkar knocks played at the same venue – and there have been plenty of those at Chepauk. The Triplicane crowds still wax lyrical about E.A.S. Prasanna’s deadly spell in 1969, when he had Australia reeling at 24 for 6.
This wonderful spectator support for cricket is bolstered by passionate corporate enthusiasm for the game. Chennai is one of the last centres still practising the uniquely Indian form of industry–institution cooperation to promote sport, especially cricket. Companies like India Cements, Chemplast Sanmar, SPIC, India Pistons and MRF have ‘adopted’ colleges and spent fortunes on developing and maintaining world-class cricket facilities, with superb turf wickets and practice facilities. Institutions like Southern Railway, Integral Coach Factory and Sri Ramachandra Medical College (SRMC) also maintain similar grounds. These patrons as well as the public-sector banks SBI, IOB and Indian Bank have traditionally ensured the livelihood security of sportsmen by offering them jobs or professional contracts, though the banks are now no longer the safe havens they used to be. The MRF Pace Foundation, the Spin Academy of the MAC Foundation and numerous private initiatives serve to supplement the coaching programmes of the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association, still regarded as one of the better-run cricket bodies in the country, despite the unsavoury revelations that have dogged the BCCI, Chennai Super Kings and the IPL.
The considerable investment in players and infrastructure in the last couple of decades has helped transform the Tamil Nadu cricketer into a professional, physically and mentally tougher than his predecessors. The state frequently enters the final rounds of the Ranji Trophy and more Tamil Nadu players than before have been gaining international recognition. Yet I, for one, miss the flavour of curd-rice cricket, and the flair of the amateur cricketer of my time.
I mentioned the superior cricket knowledge of the Madras crowd. It is also one of the most sporting crowds in India, able to transcend regional, even national, bias and appreciate true sporting endeavour and artistry. This sportsmanship was never more in evidence than at the end of a pulsating match against Pakistan (under Wasim Akram) which India almost won in 1999. The crowd had been roaring its approval all morning as Sachin Tendulkar led an incredible assault on the rival bowling, supported by the gallant Nayan Mongia. Unfortunately, with victory seemingly within easy reach, Mongia fell, and Sachin succumbed to the strain of the painful back injury he had been carrying throughout the innings, and soon it was all over for India.
There was a stunned silence, as if the huge crowd was still waiting for a signal from the small but significant saffron brigade in the stands that had been shouting anti-Pakistan slogans on the last day of the match (Bal Thackeray had earlier called for a ban on the tour). Like many others on the pavilion terrace, I looked back, anxious, at the leader of the group, who, after what seemed like an interminable wait, gave the thumbs up to his followers. At once, they burst into applause, and the rest of the stadium joined in thunderous ovation as the Pakistanis did a victory lap around the ground. It was a moment to make every Indian proud.