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| courtesy newsleaks.in |
There have been many rose-tinted versions of cricket in the sixties in the last couple of days. This is an attempt to rectify that.
Cricket was then just coming out of the shadows of the Merchant-Hazare-Lala era. With hardly any money in the sport, it was natural that royalty played an important role. The prime example was Vizzy, Maharajkumar of Vijayanagaram, whose influence over the game was completely disproportionate to his ability as a cricketer. The mess that cricket was in was best exemplified by the ’58-’59 series against the West Indies in which we had four captains: Vinoo Mankad, Ghulam Ahmed, Polly Umrigar and Hemu Adhikari.
But ’59-’60 also saw the beginning of some major changes. Beating Australia in Kanpur was a huge thing but the real story in hindsight was the emergence of players like Contractor and Borde to support ‘seniors’ like Polly Umrigar and Vijay Manjrekar. Those were days with limited ambition. A batsman aspired to make a 40, which would ensure his place for 3 tests. A bowler aimed at bowling maidens.
Into this scenario walked in a rakish Nawab of Pataudi. He brought in a breath of fresh air with his fielding, his attractive if risk-laden batting and the ability to look a white man in the eye. Remember, those were the days when even a West Indies with 3Ws, Sobers and Kanhai thought only a white man like Alexander, much less talented than any of the others named, could be a Captain.
The Indian Cricket Board mind set, with the huge Vizzy influence, was not much different and this school of nobility-born-to-rule ensured the elevation of an inexperienced Pataudi to Vice Captaincy for the West Indies tour. There was much heart-burning among seniors like Umrigar, Manjrekar and Borde, all three with more proven talent than the Nawab. And then fate took a hand by way of the Charlie Griffith bouncer which almost ruled Nari Contractor out of all cricket.
The Nawab went on to rule the Indian cricket for almost a decade. He evolved the 3 spinner strategy which certainly saved India some blushes. Apart from the spinners, he also got the backing of players like Jaisimha. But with the big guns like Manjrekar and Borde or the hugely talented Salim Durrani, it was always an uneasy co-existence.
The Board Selection Committee changed just before the West Indies tour of ’71. Commoner Vijay Merchant, perhaps resentful of his being treated shabbily by the Board by making Pataudi Senior India Captain in days gone by, named Ajit Wadekar as the Captain, using his casting vote. Wadekar’s team had two key players: Dilip Sardesai, whose monumental 212 in the first test of the series must rank as the first game-changing innings of Indian cricket, and Sunil Gavaskar whose ambitions and ability went far beyond the one-40-in-3-matches norm of Indian cricket till then.
How did contemporary writers rate Pataudi as a Captain? Zonal cricket was big those days and people like Raju Bharatan held both Borde (W) and Jaisimha (S) in greater esteem as captains, with the latter ranking a notch higher for his flair for risk taking. Pity he never captained India.
So how does one summarise the contribution of the Nawab of Pataudi to Indian Cricket? For a man who played most of his cricket after the loss of one eye, his accomplishments as a batsman must rank as staggering, although the stats can’t bear comparison with even his contemporaries, leave alone the galaxy of 50+ averaging stars of today. As a captain, with the benefit of hindsight, one can say that the dice were loaded against him. To expect too much leadership or strategic acumen from a handicapped 21 year old thrown by fate into the deep end of the pool with some big sharks lurking around was extremely unfair, although he acquitted himself reasonably well. But most important of all, perhaps, was the way he forced international cricket powers to grudgingly grant Indians some cricketing space. That people like SMG then forced the cricketing world to treat India as an almost-equal is best left for another day.
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