MID-WICKET TALES
From Trumper to Tendulkar
S Giridhar and V J Raghunath
Sage Publications
246 pages; Rs 525
In the days when our bones were less calcified and our muscles not as atrophied as now, we played cricket matches and then discussed our performances threadbare. My dad, the old-school type who abhorred wasting time on something that produced nothing, would glower at us and remark, "You play for six hours and then spend every minute of the next 48 hours discussing a result that you can do nothing about."
Today, our limbs and responses are no longer supple, but the argumentative mind remains young and raring for action after every cricket innings on television. And we will, whatever the views of disapproving fathers, debate the results for hours on end. But that is the beauty of cricket in India. It engages minds as nothing else in India - save perhaps politics. Every Indian is an expert deconstructionist of the game. And among them we can count S Giridhar and V J Raghunath.
Messrs Giridhar and Raghunath, like most of us, like to discuss cricket. And to show for it, they have Mid-wicket Tales - From Trumper to Tendulkar. The book's cover - a bland collage of an old black-and-white cricket picture and uninspiring typography with a ham-handed endeavour to represent the "M" in the title with three stumps and a ball - is notable for two inclusions. At the top is an endorsement by Rahul Dravid who says, "It [the book] makes you fall in love with cricket, all over again." The second is a bolder allurement placed right above the title. "Foreword by Harsha Bhogle," it says. Are these desperate attempts to draw attention to an inferior product that no one will consider without the crutch of two famous names?
Released by Sage Publications, whose reputation is built on stodgy, well-researched tomes on topics that appear on university syllabi, and written by two cricket fans known but to a limited circle of their friends and relatives, you are prone to judge the book by its cover. You would be surprised.
The duo makes you see things you hadn't thought about. Did you know, for instance, that Kapil Dev, whose natural instinct you would swear was to dispatch the cricket ball into the stadium seating, was a judicious batsman for whom rotating the strike was as crucial as hoicking the ball for a six? Messrs Giridhar and Raghunath, through meticulous data crunching, provide the evidence. Kapil Dev, among 13 greats, has the highest rotating strike rate of 61.2 per cent, ahead of one-day successes such as Michael Bevan (56.3), Mahendra Singh Dhoni (56) and Virender Sehwag (42.9). What this means is that if you took out the fours and sixes, these figures would represent their strike rate. Kapil Dev was not only a scorer of big runs without boundary hits, but also a judicious runner, with a run-out per cent of just 5.1 among his dismissals.
Perhaps because they are not professional cricket commentators - Mr Giridhar is registrar and chief operating officer at Azim Premji University in Bangalore and Mr Raghunath is a retired chemical engineer and now a consultant at Azim Premji Foundation - the writers can afford to trawl data for information you wouldn't see flashed on TV screens. And being amateurs they also lace their writing with wisdom culled from less demanding geographies than Test venues. Discussing captains (they are in awe of Mike Brearley, but then, who isn't), they recall how the skippers of first division leagues in Mumbai and Chennai are prone to taking reckless decisions. Yet their derring-do is actually a meticulous strategy aimed at winning four points for a win instead of a measly one for a draw. They lose some matches with their all-out attack, of course, but make up by winning more points in the remaining matches.
The book is well worth reading for some unexplored insight into India's world of celebrity cricket. There is, for example, the authors' comparison about how two sets of stalwart foursomes ended their careers. Of Bishan Bedi, Erapalli Prasanna, Bhagwat Chandrasekhar and Srinivas Venkataraghavan, they say, "… In a matter of weeks, just three Test matches to be precise, the quartet would hurtle from the twilight of their careers to oblivion … No newspaper devoted columns to discuss the imminent demise of the quartet." For Sourav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid,
V V S Laxman and Sachin Tendulkar, they have this to say: "We live in noisy strident television rating point times, but surely we can lower our tones, stand aside, and salute them as they go back to the pavilion one last time." In juxtaposing the two events, the writers silently comment on how cricket has metamorphosed within a generation's time.
And if you have called yourself Tendulkar or Dravid in a colony match, read the endearing story about the authors' chance meeting with a magnificently humble Salim Durrani at Delhi airport. Don't you wish you too could meet your idol and tell him that as a schoolboy whenever you batted, you pretended you were him?
