TWENTY-FIVE YEARS IS a long time but it all came back to me in one forward-defensive shot. I’ve hardly played any cricket post retirement, but in 2014, a quarter of a century after I had toured Pakistan, I padded up to face Wasim Akram for a TV show we were doing on biomechanics. It was during India’s tour of England. The shoot was for a segment on what biomechanics experts brought to cricket. I was going to face an over from Wasim in the indoor nets, during which my technique and body movements would be recorded and studied by a biomechanics expert.
In came Wasim, the same easy run-up, the energy through the crease, the quick arm. I let my natural batting style take over, and moved forward to the first couple of deliveries. There it was – in a flash it all came back to me. It was 1989, the memorable tour of Pakistan played out all over again in front of my eyes as I got on to the front foot and played Wasim comfortably. The words of Imran Khan, the generous Pakistan captain, rang in my ears: ‘Why did you play Richard Hadlee off the back foot?’ he had asked me after I struggled on the 1990 tour of New Zealand, a year after I had done well in Pakistan. ‘You played Wasim so well in Pakistan because you played him off the front foot.’
Later, the biomechanics expert came back with his analysis. They had installed a camera right on top of me, inside the net. The findings revealed an exaggerated movement of my back foot towards the off stump leaving me off balance, thereby hampering my strokeplay on the off side, especially the cut shot. I was just getting too close to balls to unleash the cut shot. This man was not even a cricket expert – he only studied my body movements – and even he could see I was doing something wrong. I was not balanced.
That front-foot forward movement of 1989, without any self-doubt, with the mind free of any demons … oh, it felt so good. The ability to cut and cover-drive to keep the runs coming – it seemed from a time so long ago. I wondered if a biomechanics expert or a personal batting coach could have helped me during the torture that the last five years of my cricketing career were. The years of struggle that defined my Test career: 21 Tests for an average of 29, after a promising start of 16 matches for an average of 48, with only two of those matches played at home.
Then I rationalized. One tip from a biomechanics expert or a personal coach could not have possibly ignited the spark that I was waiting for. It couldn’t have been that easy. My problems were deeper. How could a biomechanics expert change the person I was? There is a Marathi saying: ‘Swabhavala aushad nahi.’ There is no medicine for nature.
As was my nature, I kept working on my technique. A bit of a perfectionist looking for ways to eliminate flaws that had infiltrated my game. Every day I went to the nets to try to sort some issue out, but I felt like a boat with holes: I covered one, and water would enter through the other. I kept hoping I would find the missing piece to make it all fall in place. A big score that would secure my place in the Indian team. And then I could just bat without worrying about failure and the various technical issues. Just watch the ball and react without thinking, like I did in Pakistan in 1989. Bat the way batting is meant to be.
*
When you are in form, there isn’t much to say or write about. It is like being on autopilot. Good things happen without even trying. After the ball is halfway towards the boundary you realize you have just played a beautiful cover drive right from the middle of the bat. It’s a brilliant feeling.
People say you can psyche yourself into feeling that way every time, even when you are out of form, that you can visualize yourself being in top form. Not me. I could never fool myself into feeling on top of the world when my confidence was at rock bottom. I was too rational and too much of a sceptic to be able to do that.
That analytical side of me had made be believe in the first place that I was good enough to be out there. When I went to Pakistan, for example, I knew I could handle Wasim Akram and Abdul Qadir. This came from the deep-rooted self-confidence from having scored a hundred against West Indies in the West Indies. Even when I had made my debut against that all-conquering side, there were no demons from any recent bad experiences against them.
My first Test, the big jump from first-class cricket to international cricket, was at Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi. Dilip Vengsarkar, the India captain then, was feeling a little let down by other batsmen who didn’t quite stand up to the West Indies quicks. He always supported me, thought I had what it took, but he wanted some reassurance before giving me the big break.
‘Ghatta, you’ll do it, no, if you get a chance?’ Vengsarkar asked me. I used to be called Ghatta by my Mumbai team-mates. It means ‘tight’ in Marathi. I used to carry myself very tight and stiff, they thought.
West Indies were imposing, but my slate with them was clean. So I said, ‘Mee zaaoon ubhaa raheen [I will stand up to them, don’t worry].’
Vengsarkar said, ‘What’s the point of just standing up to them? Who will get the runs?’
I did not have an answer to that. I really didn’t. I knew I had the defence but I was not sure yet if I had the shots against this kind of top-class fast bowling. We were bowled out for 75 in the first innings, and I was retired hurt for 10 in the second, but not before I had faced 63 balls. I drew a lot of confidence from that little exposure. That I could face up to these guys in an intense Test-match atmosphere with a degree of comfort.
The next time I batted in a Test again was in the West Indies, in Barbados, and without thinking about it too much, I had found an answer to Vengsarkar’s question. I had found a way to score runs, 108 of them. My first Test hundred. I left the bouncers alone because nobody hooked then, and they bowled about three every over. I remember cutting a lot, hitting short balls over the slips or through point. I also went on to the back foot to work balls through square leg a lot. It would get me only a single on most occasions, but it was an effective shot. It could get me off strike. Kiran More later told me how much he liked that shot.
I brought up the hundred with a straight drive when Courtney Walsh pitched one up. During the innings, I drove Curtly Ambrose over extra cover on the up, and I remember feeling, ‘Shit, that’s great. I can even play this shot against these guys.’ I was an international player now. My mind had the evidence right there to think of myself as an international-class player.
When I came back, I went to the Wankhede Stadium for a session at the nets. It is usually lively there early in the morning. I was facing the Mumbai seamers. The first time they pitched short to me, I was in position on the back foot well before the ball arrived. They seemed gentle seam bowlers to me now.
I was feeling great about my game, and I carried it into the tour of Pakistan where I scored a double-century and a century, top-scoring with 569 runs at an average of 95 in four Tests. I did all this without having to think too much about my game. Reverse swing was a bigger threat back then because the swing was more pronounced, and Pakistan were masters of it, but I got all those runs not knowing a thing about the shiny side and the rough side on the old ball. All that came much later in my life, when Sachin Tendulkar planted the seed in my head in one Ranji game about how you can get early indication of which way the ball was going to swing by watching the two sides of the ball closely. Until then I just watched the ball as a whole – I watched it till late and reacted late.
That was my strength. I played the ball late, never committed, and hence swing was never difficult for me to play. With Wasim, I could tell how the ball was going to behave by just watching his wrist. The ball travels the twenty-two yards in a fraction of a second, but there is still enough time for a trained batsman to see what is happening.
When we went into the last Test of that tour, we were put in on a green top in Sialkot. I was in great form and top-scored in the first innings with 72. It was a Test affected by rain, and there was no chance of a result when we batted the second time around. Our coach Chandu Borde noticed that I didn’t take a knock that morning. He asked me if I wasn’t going to do it, and I said no. I got out for four.
Borde said to me, ‘It always helps if you take a knock.’
This was me just taking things for granted a bit, being casual about a Test innings, something I never saw Sachin Tendulkar do.
I was now being spoken of as the future of Indian batting, and I had earned that tag through runs in difficult conditions and against the two best attacks in the world. When I came back from the West Indies, I got a lot of attention, being the only success story on that tour. My mother and my family had kept clippings from all the newspapers. I read them and dismissed them because the praise was exaggerated. I knew I was good but not that good.
However, during this phase people close to me also saw me get a bit cocky, not necessarily on the field but off it. I would throw tantrums if things didn’t go as per plan. I might have taken some Ranji and company games in this period lightly since it didn’t matter how many runs I got in them. Tendulkar, again, was a study in contrast: Whenever he was out there in public view, he always gave his best no matter the magnitude of the game.
Brimming with self-confidence, I also enjoyed making others look small by exposing their weaknesses. In one inter-company match in Hyderabad, as captain I went out of my way to target Mohammad Azharuddin, now the India captain. I wanted everyone to see his weakness as a batsman, and how I was the smart one to expose it despite his other exceptional gifts. I learnt later that Azhar was unhappy with me for what I did. I had developed a habit of getting under people’s skin.
Captaining gave me a great high right from the time I led my school to its first Giles Shield title. Surely there was nothing wrong with exposing an opposition player’s weakness? Then, again, did I really need to do that to an India team-mate in a nondescript company match no one cared about? My sister fleetingly mentioned to me during this time that I came across as a bit arrogant in an interview she had watched on TV.
Today, I am a bit older and wiser. Whatever little success I have had in the media and in broadcasting, I have never let that get to my head. Back then, though, I was on top of the world.
*
When we went to Australia for a gruelling four-month tour in 1991-92, to play five Tests, a triangular ODI series and the World Cup, I was upbeat and really looking forward to the trip. I knew I was going to do really well there. I had the game for it. I was told I was a good player of pace and the short ball. I had also just been named the Man of the Series in the ODI series that welcomed South Africa back to cricket after the apartheid boycott.
I remember a conversation with Shivlal Yadav, who had a good record in Australia despite its reputation for being a graveyard for finger spinners. I was a bit concerned about being away from home for so long, and his response was, ‘Homesick in Australia? What?’ He seemed to have had a great time there. I intended to do the same.
I was with my friends Tendulkar and Venkatapathy Raju. Another friend, Vinod Kambli, was to join us for the World Cup. Life could not have been better at that stage. There we were, in a wonderful country, blissfully unaware – at least I was – that this tour could make or break careers.
What’s more, at the start of the tour I helped us win a side game, a 50-over match. Our next assignment was a first-class match against New South Wales in Lismore, just before the first Test. Feeling I was in good form, I didn’t take the match seriously even though New South Wales fielded Mark Taylor, the Waugh twins, Geoff Lawson, Greg Matthews, Mike Whitney and Michael Bevan.
I played loose shots in both the innings to get out on low scores to a really quick bowler, Wayne Holdsworth. Vengsarkar caught hold of me, and said, ‘You batted like you were carrying on from the previous innings.’ We lost the ‘side’ game by an innings.
The twin failures didn’t bother me one bit. I couldn’t wait for the first Test to start and resume my terrific international form. Cricket, though, had other plans in mind. I scored only 197 runs in nine innings. It was a strange series because I still faced the third-most balls in that Indian side. I reached 25 five times but couldn’t convert even one of those starts into a fifty. I never felt out of form, but kept finding ways to get out after getting my eye in. I even ran myself out, on 45 in Adelaide when we threatened to pull off a 372-run chase in the fourth innings but fell short by just 38 runs.
It was that run-out that rankled me the most. I had just started having visions of winning the match for India with a hundred. I was run out six times on that tour. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was down to my lack of peak fitness. Mumbai cricket was more about skills; fitness was an afterthought. My legs weren’t strong enough to carry the burden of a long Australian tour. Sometimes at the non-striker’s end, I would be preoccupied with how I was batting and not concentrate on the running, but mostly it was the tired and weak legs. I would take off for a quick run only to discover I didn’t have the explosive strength in my legs to complete that run. And the big and soft outfields of Australia expose any weakness in your legs quite easily.
The fascinating part of that tour, though, was that my self-confidence never took a dive. The positivity in my mind was unshakeable. Excitement kept me up at nights. I would just lie in the bed thinking how all this was going to change next morning when I’d get a hundred, and how good that feeling would be. I felt exactly how I did as an eleven-year-old, unable to sleep, thinking of the certain Giles Shield century, and the excitement of seeing my name in the newspapers. Coming back to form was an inevitability in my mind. Going into the last Test in Perth, the excitement was almost unbearable. ‘Fastest pitch in the world. What a place to get a hundred and come back,’ I told myself.
I got 31 and 8 in that match.
My self-confidence began to erode slowly now. The first response was to take the frustration out in the dressing room. Often, I would blame those batting with me for my dismissal, especially in run-out situations. I would call them names to let off steam. I was told later to watch my language because whatever one said could get conveyed in a different way to the other person. It was an important lesson: The dressing room, although private, was still a very public space.
Right through that tour, I played exactly the same way. I didn’t change anything. Much of this was because my confidence was still intact, and because I was getting out in a variety of ways – so there was no specific weakness to work on. Also, I was consciously not overreacting to failure – there was more the history of success that was etched in my mind until then.
On the 1990 tour of New Zealand, at a nets session Kapil Dev remarked to me that I was moving too far across when trying to get in line with the ball. ‘Your leg stump shows,’ he said. Manoj Prabhakar countered him, saying my back lift was quite low so I would be able to adjust; it’s no big deal, he said.
But I reacted to Kapil’s observation. I wish I had the clarity of Prabhakar, but instead I moved my guard to four inches outside the leg stump. In the Auckland Test I thought I left Danny Morrison alone outside off only to find the ball crashing into my off stump. My instinct had not kept up with my changed technique.
During that phase, Vengsarkar told me not to bother about technique too much and just go out and score runs. I managed to grind my way to a century against Zimbabwe immediately after that tour, but the obsessive analyst in me had now been woken up.
Frank Tyson used to do a lot of coaching at the Cricket Club of India in Mumbai at that time. So I sought him out. He noticed that as I got ready to face the ball my back lift would remain low. I was picking my bat up with just my wrists, and not arms. Therefore my bat wouldn’t get high enough to play the short and bouncing deliveries. Someone like Brian Lara, on the other hand, would have his bat close to the height of the short ball even as he prepared to face it. From there, it was just about coming down on the ball as opposed to start raising the bat with the ball halfway down the pitch.
Tyson’s logic convinced me. In the Zimbabwe and South Africa tours that followed, people would have seen a distinct change in the way I lifted the bat as I prepared to face the ball. This change didn’t bring any dramatic turnaround I was hoping for; I got a 100 versus Zimbabwe, a match-saving one, but my batting struggles had not diminished. I was batting unnaturally now. Like how English batsmen do.
In Australia, I looked good even when failing, but in South Africa I was well and truly out of sorts. My whole game was about reacting naturally to the ball not knowing what was happening to my bat. Now I was focusing on the bat more than the ball.
Colleagues like Vengsarkar sometimes mocked my changed back lift, but out of respect, perhaps, he didn’t press the matter. He knew I was serious about this change, that I was convinced it was going to solve all my problems.
I was dropped from the side when India were hammering England and Zimbabwe at home. I was given a chance to impress the selectors in a side game for Rest of India against the touring England side in 1993, in Visakhapatnam.
Facing Phil DeFreitas in that game, I punched one down the ground and shouted ‘no’, expecting mid-on to slide sideways and stop the ball, like it had happened in South Africa for the last two months. Here, Phil Tufnell started to run after the ball and soon gave up the chase. It had suddenly all become easy again, at home and against an average England side. Even when I was out of form, I scored a fluent 96 without any trouble. India, though, just slammed England in the Tests. There was no need for a new batsman.
Had I played that series, I might have got that big score that I was looking for. England at home were perfect opponents to come back into form, like Azhar did at Eden Gardens in 1996, but I was rightly dropped. That patch of low scores justified my exclusion.
I got my chance later against Sri Lanka and then West Indies. In those series I scored two 60s, a 50, a 40, a 30, but, again, that innings which I hoped would turn it all around eluded me. In Mumbai, against a red-hot West Indies attack of Courtney Walsh, Kenny Benjamin and Cameron Cuffy, I scored half-centuries to rescue India from 99 for 5 and 88 for 5, setting up the win. In the second innings, my anxiousness got the better of me. I had had a big partnership with Tendulkar, India were in the clear, but wickets were falling and I was on 66 with only three wickets in hand. I was eager. I wanted that hundred, and I did something uncharacteristic. I played a lofted shot off Walsh in a Test match, and picked out the tall Cuffy at mid-on.
After the match, Sunil Gavaskar tapped me on my head and only said, ‘Tchah.’ He knew I had missed a great opportunity to get a hundred. I could sense that a lot of people around me wanted me to do well and make a strong comeback. In their books I was still a fine batsman. I was disappointed, of course, but I had still played two crucial innings in a Test win, and it was a very nice feeling.
After that Test, the late Hemant Waingankar, a real well-wisher of Mumbai cricket and its players, took me to the city’s famous Siddhivinayak Temple to thank the gods, to sort of pray that the worst was over now. Anil Joshi, who has been my loyalist for over thirty-five years, was there too. Hemant even got me something to wear around my neck for good luck. In the next Test, at Nagpur, I got scores of 0 and 5. I removed that thing from my neck immediately.
Something more significant happened. I got out fending off a short ball from Benjamin. That hurt my pride. People considered me one of the best players of fast bowling, especially the short ball, and now I had got out to it, that too on an Indian pitch. I began to think, ‘Is this another little chink entering my game?’
I analysed video replays of that dismissal, and it irked me that my weight was back as I gloved the short ball. It made it appear as if I was scared of the short ball, which I was not. I had conquered that fear of the short ball when the other Benjamin, Winston, had hit me on the eye in my debut Test. There I had got into a great position to play that short ball but it beat me off the seam. There was no technical issue, no fear, the weight was not going back. The ball just beat me.
In those days, I wore a helmet without a grille and it was a nasty injury. The ball had hit me straight on the eye. I had to be stapled up. I made a comeback immediately, against the same guys in a side game because I wanted to prove myself. I represented the Board President’s XI against the West Indies in Visakhapatnam on one of the worst pitches I’ve played on. They bounced me again, but I always kept moving forward. One length ball rose and hit me on the helmet grille – the grille flew off. I had incorporated it as part of my protective gear after my facial injury on my debut. I still fought and survived, and went to the West Indies and scored a century.
So, fear was not my problem. My problem was the weight going back and the position of the gloves in front of the face. It was almost beyond your control. You know you can’t be getting your gloves that high. As the fast bowler runs in, you tell yourself to keep your hands low and try to get out of the way of the short ball. You are well protected in case you get hit, I would tell myself. In that phase, though, I just could not prevent those hands from getting in front of my face. They seemed to have a mind of their own. It was like I was willing for one thing to happen but something else would happen. I was down in the dumps now, especially on the 1996 tour of England. This was not just about failures – I was getting out to the short ball just like the batsmen I enjoyed targeting as captain.
During that tour, I went up to the media centre to meet Gavaskar, who was there as a commentator. He advised me to get into a position to hook or pull the moment I saw the ball coming in short, and to leave it alone if it was too high. It was good advice because it got you to look at the short ball as one to attack – like you would a spinner’s short ball. Because the intention is to attack, you are in a good position to leave it too.
The advice didn’t work for me, though. I could get into good positions on occasion, but at other times the hands would still come up to fend.
The analyst in me also thinks maybe it’s all due to that injury I kept to myself and didn’t tell anyone about – the stress fracture on my lower back. Vishwas Raut, a well-known orthopaedist who incidentally was on that 1989 tour to Pakistan as team doctor, had diagnosed it but it wasn’t paralysing or serious enough to make me unfit to play; I would have to just manage somehow, he’d said.
In my latter years as a player, I would get a rub-down from the physiotherapist just as I went in to bat so that my lower back could become more supple. Else it would stiffen up and hinder my reflexes.
But here’s the thing about fitness. When you are young, you react quickly. The moment the ball was short, I would wait till the last moment before reacting, and then I’d either duck or sway. As I grew older, this movement became slower. This brought some vulnerability in my play against fast and short bowling and unfortunately it started to bother me mentally. The moment the ball was pitched short, something inside me would make me get my gloves up to protect my face. Was it my facial injury on my debut that was triggering this instinct?
It was through sheer grit that I had conquered this immediately after my debut, a time when the instinct to protect my face should have been at its strongest. I remember managing to rein it in through my sheer self-confidence at the time. Now that I was older and filled with self-doubt, was that protective instinct raising its head again after so many years?
Players such as Steve Waugh, who had issues with the short ball, would just drop the hands the moment they saw the ball short. They didn’t mind getting hit. M.S. Dhoni did that in England in 2014. You can hurt your body by this approach, but in most cases, you don’t get out.
I guess I was too proud a batsman to do that. I was self-conscious; I was not willing to look ugly. I wanted also to get good-looking runs. I was not ready to be an ugly survivor. It was all about perfection, right?
That is why I admire greats like Steve Waugh, even Brian Lara. They were okay to look ordinary for a while despite their stature and reputation in the game to eventually play a great innings.
They focused on the final goal of getting runs and winning matches for their team. But I – I had to look good while getting there. That was my problem. My natural game was like a very sophisticated fine-tuned machinery that would tolerate no tampering. So every time I tried to make even the slightest of changes, it felt like too much of an adjustment mentally, and my whole game got out of sync.
Often it introduced new flaws. When I took Gavaskar’s advice, to get into a position to hook every time somebody pitched short, it meant I had to make an exaggerated movement towards off stump and sometimes outside off. For me this was a big deal. Many batsmen make such changes without any fuss, but for me it was a big deal – to steer away from my natural game.
I also thought I’d managed fine with my original technique, so I didn’t commit myself too much towards making this change.
But now that the virus had entered the system, I began obsessing about it – I was making very subtle changes almost every day. Even the keenest observers of my game would have seen nothing amiss, but there I was, making small but significant modifications to my game to get it in perfect harmony.
It was perhaps around that time that Ajit Wadekar showed me an article written by Raju Bharatan. He wrote: ‘Sanjay Manjrekar’s game is going from one weakness to another.’ I agreed completely with him.
Interestingly, the fault spotted by the biomechanics expert in 2014 was something Navjot Sidhu had made a passing comment about during my days of struggle, but I hadn’t given it much consideration. (The Sidhu of those days, by the way, was nothing like the Sidhu we see on TV nowadays. He was a serious man, generally quiet, but an astute observer of the game.)
My front foot was moving across towards the off stump along with my left hand far too early – it meant I was getting close to balls that were wide of the off stump too. So, in my head I never saw those balls as wide balls outside off to be square-cut for four, like I did in West Indies and Pakistan. It meant that my biggest ally, the square cut, the stroke that had seen me through all my travails against tough oppositions, had deserted me.
With my main weapon lost, it became even more of an effort to score runs. This began to take a toll on me: spending so much time at the crease and not getting runs. Mentally, it would exhaust me. It began to show in my behaviour. After my comeback series against West Indies in 1994-95, I was not picked for the triangular ODI series in New Zealand, and I had to go back to playing Ranji Trophy because the road of any international comeback was through domestic cricket.
When I captained Mumbai against Maharashtra in Solapur in early 1995, I was an angry, frustrated ‘India discard’. My pet peeve in domestic cricket has always been the umpiring. Coming back from having seen the umpiring standards in international matches, I got even more frustrated. In that match, umpire Vinayak Kulkarni warned Abey Kuruvilla for running onto the danger area in his follow-through. I began to have a go at the umpire. I challenged his interpretation of the danger area.
Kulkarni held his ground. What infuriated me was the line of reasoning. While I quoted the law, he told me, ‘I am the umpire, and this is my decision.’ The umpires in domestic cricket looked like statues of authority to me, refusing to engage with the players. I was by now used to having a word with international umpires and reasoning things out.
Out of frustration I crossed the line. I began to mutter under my breath – but within Kulkarni’s earshot – that he had no idea what he was doing out there. All my pent-up frustration – against all those umpires, all my wasted starts, all my run-outs, all those short balls – was now being directed at poor Kulkarni. He finally warned me that if I continued behaving like that, he would have to send me off the field.
I walked away, play resumed, but I was still fuming. I didn’t think it would make a difference. ‘Who cares about this silly Ranji game anyway?’ I thought. So I told our wicketkeeper Sameer Dighe that I was going to have another go. Dighe panicked, and warned me, ‘Don’t do it, Sanjay, he will definitely send you off the field and report you.’
I stretched it until it snapped. I went up to Kulkarni and needled him again; he didn’t waste a second and sent me off. Being sent off by the umpire should be the worst humiliation for a cricketer, a captain no less, but somehow I felt peaceful in the pavilion. I had unloaded all my toxins for the moment on poor Kulkarni.
This episode made headlines. I was officially reported to the BCCI. Jagmohan Dalmiya, always a players’ man, let me off with a warning. The next time I met Kulkarni, I was back in the Test side, playing against New Zealand in his home town, Bangalore. He saw me and didn’t know how to react. I went up to him, greeted him warmly, shook his hand, and had a chat. I ended up respecting him for doing the right thing. I deserved to be sent off the field. It was not right of me to behave like that just because I had played for India.
My frustration wasn’t limited to umpires alone. As Mumbai captain, my team-mates too had to sometimes face the wrath of my misdirected anger. Once, on the field, I swore very badly at Sairaj Bahutule, one of the loveliest persons you could come across. I felt so bad later that I sought him out in his room. He was sitting with a few other junior players in the team, looking downcast. I apologized to him, unconditionally, in front of the juniors. I said I had no right to abuse him. Reprimand yes, but abusing is unforgivable.
Thankfully, this frustration never manifested itself in front of my family or friends, but it was clear that being denied a place in the Indian team was making me desperate. And my game was, as Bharatan wrote, going from one weakness to another. In the desperation to extend my career, now that the likes of Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly were securing middle-order spots, I began opening the innings.
So I made one final comeback – as an opener against Allan Donald, Fanie de Villiers and Brian McMillan in 1996, despite the fact that by then their bowlers probably knew I could get slightly rattled by the short ball. Nevertheless, I still went ahead and opened against Donald, bowling at the peak of his career.
I got 34 in the first innings, and then got out just before lunch to Paul Adams, of all people. That infuriated me because despite my low confidence I had backed myself to open in a Test and had played the new ball and their best bowlers for two hours. I felt really confident this time facing a quick spell from Allan Donald. I kept telling myself to get on to the front foot, not worry about the short ball, because that way I would handle the short ball, my nemesis, really well and I did exactly so in that innings. I had confronted the short ball head on, opening the innings against the fastest, perhaps the most aggressive bowler in the world. It was like marching into a house on fire but I did it.
I survived Donald and the South African pace attack but got out to a rookie spinner. On 34 at the stroke of lunch.
That dismissal made me even more cynical – I began to tell myself that perhaps it was not meant to be. In the second innings, I got out to the short ball again. It proved to be my last Test innings. Caught fending.
That day, standing at the urinal next to me, Azhar made a telling statement – he had this way of nonchalantly saying something quite deep – ‘Happens. When you start to age, it happens.’ Azhar was thirty-three. He must have known. I was thirty-one. Azhar fought on. I couldn’t. At thirty-three, I had already played my last Test for India.
*
What is batting, really? Is it scoring runs or scoring runs the right way? What is the right way? Who decides what is the right way?
When you are growing up, you don’t think of these things. My game was completely natural. If I became a technically proficient player or a good player, it wasn’t because I tried to become like anyone. The way I played was the way I played naturally, and people started saying I am technically good and all that. My strength was defence. I could never ever attack my way out of trouble.
I felt superior to a lot of batsmen around me because I felt comfortable in defence against good bowling on difficult pitches. When the team saw the green pitch in Sialkot, for example, I could see the blood drain from some of the faces. Me? I was happy because I knew now the team would know my worth a bit more. On this kind of surface only good defence works, and I had one. There weren’t too many others, barring Tendulkar, of course.
I would feel pressure on flat pitches because I knew now that the more attacking flamboyant batsmen would come to the fore. I would feel my value was diminished. Even when out of form in Australia and in South Africa, it didn’t bother me much that I was batting for two hours to get 30 runs. I enjoyed my time out there even if I was not scoring runs or hitting boundaries.
I guess it suited the team in those difficult conditions where I was playing off the hard new ball. Numbers 5 and 6 in Australia and South Africa are great numbers to bat at because the Kookaburra ball gets really soft and stops moving around after a while. I got first-hand experience of this when I suggested to coach Wadekar that captain Azhar bat higher in a chase at Wanderers. The idea was that Azhar was struggling, too, and I wanted him to have a go at the 318-run target on the final day. If it didn’t work, I was confident I could save the Test. I ended up defending for three hours against the older ball for 32 runs without any trouble.
I never realized how long I was batting like that, defensively, on those pitches. It was like someone meditating and not realizing that an hour had suddenly passed. I was just proud of my defensive game. It was an era where people admired defensive players. When you left a swinging ball alone, the coach would applaud from behind the nets. As if you had hit a six. ‘Well left’ was a common compliment heard in nets and matches.
Even during the dark days of struggle, I could pull off a defensive innings. I scored that hundred against Zimbabwe after they racked up 456 in their first Test. Ian Chappell still ribs me about striking at under 25 per 100 balls against Zimbabwe, but I am proud of that innings because my team needed it to save the Test and avoid humiliation. Chappell even keeps naming the attack – Eddo Brandes, Mark Burmester, Malcolm Jarvis, Gary Crocker and John Traicos – to rub it in, but I don’t budge. We agree to disagree.
Back in 1992, though, I will concede that Chappell did have a point. I was doing a radio interview after the day’s play with Harsha Bhogle, and he waited for me to finish. After the interview Chappell grabbed me by the arm and said, ‘Why aren’t you pulling? Just pull one short ball from Merv Hughes, and watch the fun.’
‘The problem is,’ he went on, ‘you are a good back-foot defensive player. You have to become more attacking.’ Just imagine this legend waiting for a twenty-five-year-old upstart and giving him advice to overcome bowlers of his own country – that man stood for cricket. As I spoke to ABC that day, I overheard someone in the background prophetically say, ‘We know what career he can have after he retires.’
Chappell knew that batting the right way without scoring enough runs was no good. Before Rahul Dravid played that breakaway innings – with V.V.S. Laxman – at Eden Gardens, Chappell had made the same observation about him: He was paying far too much attention to defending well rather than scoring runs. Dravid was still better than me – at least he would get in position to pull the short ball and get the odd boundary. My 38 not out would be Dravid’s 54 not out, and that completely changes the whole scenario. I had lost those shots to the short ball.
I just enjoyed batting defensively. It didn’t bother me much what my score was after an hour, as long as I was playing flawlessly. I focused so much on playing correctly that sometimes I lost sight of what my real purpose at the crease was: to get runs. So if I scratched around while getting a score it did not please me. I am my harshest critic. Even in a double-century, if I played a couple of bad shots, I would think more about that. The next morning, people would be praising the double, but I would be thinking about those shots and practising to correct them.
I had to look good to all those who were watching me. Tendulkar, to an extent, was the same, but because of his prodigious talent he could not help but hit a good ball for a four every now and then. Unlike me, who would be stuck on 20 for almost two hours. This was the Mumbai school of batting. How you got your runs and against whom you got it mattered a lot. Just runs were not enough for Mumbai cricket.
One simple change that amazingly was never suggested to me by anyone during my struggle was to keep looking for singles while defending. I was content defending correctly instead of defending the ball in the gap and picking a single. On the contrary I would be so happy with a defensive shot that at times I wouldn’t even notice that the ball has gone to the right or left of a fielder. I wouldn’t even look for that single. If I had incorporated this aspect of batting at that time, I think my career would have turned out quite differently.
Instead, I went through a phase where I thought I should start hitting from ball one. But for that to happen, one needed a particular kind of bat swing. I could never do that. I tried it at a Challenger Series, a domestic one-day triangular tournament, and every time I tried to hit the ball in the air it got caught at midwicket. I got frustrated with my own game and its limitations.
I spoke to Dravid about this once. I told him, ‘If I had to play a lofted shot – and for me it was a huge risk because I didn’t have the game for it – I had to be absolutely right on top of the ball and play it to perfection for it to sail over the fielders. So I had to plan in advance.’ Dravid agreed. He said, ‘Yeah, for me also it used to be about planning to hit a big shot … that I would take a particular bowler on in the third ball of his over.’
I could feel my heart race whenever I decided that I was going to play the big shot the next ball because it was so against my nature.
I’ve seen Murali Vijay play like me sometimes, focused on playing correctly instead of trying to turn the strike over. Then, suddenly, in the next innings when he starts looking for some sharp singles, I tell myself that somebody gave him the right advice. Also, if he gets stuck on one score for too long, Vijay can just hit the ball out of the park.
My game wasn’t like that, though, so picking up singles and rotating the strike was my only salvation, which I realized long after I had retired. Nor did I have a coach who could keep working on my game with me. We had the likes of Wadekar and Abbas Ali Baig as coaches. They were well-meaning former cricketers, but I never thought they were the kind I could talk to about what was going through my mind or what was going on with my batting.
At any rate, in those days we had just one coach – ‘manager’ is the more apt term – and one physio as support staff. A team coach has too many things on his plate to worry about one individual. Also, the approach of most coaches in those days was to be around the most successful player in the team when it was the man out of form that needed their attention the most. Players out of luck with their game were generally alone during our time, left to find their own solutions to their problems.
You did get good advice sometimes; Chandu Borde, for example, opened up my stance a little bit when he managed us on the tour of Pakistan. He found me getting too open when the ball was aimed at the middle stump. This was because I had become a little too rigid with my side-on stance. Not only did he open up my stance, Borde freed me up to explore the world on the leg side that I had forgotten in trying to play straight.
It was sheer luck that this even happened. Cricket was completely amateurish back then. That’s where I respect Tendulkar. He thrived despite such an environment. Perhaps I needed a personal coach. Someone I could trust, someone who knew me well as a person, someone I could open up to. I admire young cricketers today who use the money they’ve earned from the IPL to employ personal coaches who can sort out some of the sensitive issues they go through, both technical and temperamental.
I remember this on the visit to South Africa in 1993. It was right towards the end of that tour where I hadn’t scored many runs. An old man watched me bat from behind the nets. After the session, he came up to me and asked me to change my grip. He sounded like he knew what he was talking about. My grip was a typical Mumbai grip: the top hand on the bat handle is positioned in such a way that the V of the hand on the handle was in line with the outside edge of the bat.
This gentleman demonstrated how my arms could go no further than a certain height because of this grip. I was getting locked and could go no higher than a certain point to a rising delivery. He said that in South Africa you needed a grip where the V of the top hand is in line with the middle of the bat instead of the outside edge. He demonstrated it to me to show how easily my bat could go higher while defending a short ball if I had to.
Peter Kirsten saw me with this man, so later I asked him if he knew him. Kirsten said the guy knew his cricket so I could trust him. I never found out what his name was but it was a great tip. However, I didn’t change my grip. It was a drastic change, I thought. It would have helped if I could discuss that piece of advice with a personal coach.
I wish I had the clear thinking of someone like Prabhakar. A bouncer is not that difficult a ball to negotiate if you think logically. It’s the good-length ball that can get you out in more ways. When Prabhakar opened the innings, he would deliberately needle Devon Malcolm or Brian McMillan to bowl bouncers. ‘If he bowls the bouncers, I can’t get bowled or lbw,’ he would say. They’re bowled halfway down the pitch so one can see the ball a bit better. And at the Test level you can sometimes tell when someone is going to bowl a bouncer. When they run in, something changes in the last couple of strides, and you can almost predict there is a bouncer coming.
All you need is a clear mindset. When you hear stories of G.R. Viswanath and Virender Sehwag, you realize that their simplicity was a big reason for their success. For example, when an out-of-form Viswanath was advised by his well-wishers that he should stop playing the square cut because it had got him out early a few times, his response was, ‘So where do I get my runs?’ He stuck to playing his square cut, and came back to form. If the same advice had been given to me, I think I might have considered using it.
Sehwag, meanwhile, was intent on making the most of every ball bowled to him before one with his name on it came along. Matthew Hayden believed that batsmen were always way smarter than bowlers, so why worry about them too much?
True, it is a bit simplistic to think that way but I now feel it helps to be simplistic when you are playing. Thinkers by nature don’t usually make good cricketers because a lot of cricket is about letting instincts take over. It pays not to ponder too much. All exceptional cricketers that I have got to know are people who didn’t give their cricket excessive thought and brushed off their own failures. It is for this reason many of the greats of the game won’t be able to give you much insight into the game.
There are exceptions, of course. Rahul Dravid is one. I spent a year with him in the Indian team. He used to dwell too much on every detail of his game, especially his failures and weaknesses. I worried for him then. He later told me that he developed a mental antenna of sorts, to warn him of the danger of overthinking. He knew his intensity as a player had the power to consume him. During India’s tour of England in 2011, when he got three hundreds in the series when all others had failed, I joined him a couple of times for a quiet dinner. He made the effort to seek people out with whom he could spend an enjoyable evening with and take his mind off the game. We didn’t talk cricket over those dinners.
As a commentator, I am older and more mature, so I have managed to keep this self-destructive side of me at bay. Also, as a player I had more weaknesses than I have as a commentator. Most importantly, though, commentary isn’t as dear to me as playing cricket was. I don’t obsess over it. It is just a job that I happen to enjoy.
I think if commentating meant as much to me as playing did, I would have self-destructed long ago. I have reserved that obsession for singing. Even when I am singing at home, it’s the same. I make my wife, Madhavi, hear a little change I make sometimes while singing. Often, she sees no change, but I keep thinking about the important correction I’ve made from my earlier renditions. I keep hearing my recorded samples, and it’s only rarely that I am happy with the outcome. I am a better singer now than I was ten years ago but I am less pleased with my singing now than I was then.
I recently cut a Rabindra Sangeet album in Kolkata. Madhavi was with me on that trip. This happened to be one of those rare instances when I was quite pleased with my performance – I’d recorded six Bengali songs in just three hours, and I liked the way I’d sung them too. I could see the surprise on her face when she saw me pleased with my own performance. It’s something she is not accustomed to. Neither am I.