Cricket isn’t always about the big stage and shrill patriotism. It is also about freshly cut grass, maidans with multiple games, the club game, street rivalries, summer sweat and monsoon puddles. The sport is personal and universal, its mother tongue is English but even the Anglo-Saxon language cannot match the Tamil equivalent of the forward defensive block — ‘lottu’ — a perfect word for the block that deflates the bowler.
Every language has woven sub-cultures around the game and the latest ‘Wisden India Almanack 2015’ mirrors this facet. The seek-local, scan-global theme is evident right from the cover. The front flap has the Karnataka players in a joyous leap and you can almost hear the favourite Kannada phrase of R. Vinay Kumar’s men — barathe, barathe (it will come, it will come, be it wickets or runs). Karnataka has been the domestic champion of two successive seasons winning the Ranji Trophy and Irani Cup. It secured six titles across 2014 and 2015. Inside, batting coach J. Arun Kumar offers a glimpse at the off-field warmth: “We had a few get-togethers at Robin’s (Uthappa) flashy apartment and one at my place, where the boys bonded over beers and hookahs. Being a family played a big role.”
The back cover has the Indian women’s team waving the Tricolour after a Test victory over England in its backyard. This wide gaze at all encompassing-cricket, from the provincial to the leap across the gender divide, sets the tone for the revered tome. Yes, a retrospective look at events both international and national over 2014, the relevant score-sheets are all there but the 859-page book is primarily a celebration of the game while its warts too are scanned.
There is romance, indulgence and mild cynicism but above all, the book is about the delicately placed phrase, the right word, the pithy observation and the wry humour because the game lends itself to literature. Editor Suresh Menon has captured these nuances and under his wing are the veritable who’s who of cricket reportage, be it the stalwarts at his home base Wisden India — R. Kaushik, Anand Vasu and Dileep Premachandran — or the legends outside, be it R. Mohan, Lawrence Booth, Osman Samiuddin, Vijay Lokapally, Neil Manthorp, Stephen Brenkley, Sandeep Dwivedi and Clayton Murzello, to name a few.
Menon, with an eye for the lyrical line, has a fondness to nudge fiction writers to disclose their cricket-crush. If Pico Iyer surfaced in the previous edition, Ruchir Joshi steps in now and while dwelling upon his boyhood in Kolkata, writes: “A proper cricket field was a thing of the imagination — magical, magisterial, unattainable, reserved for the gods who were old enough and good enough to actually play this game that came to us at such a remove.” The six cricketers of the year — the Indian trio Mithali Raj, Ajinkya Rahane and Rishi Dhawan and Sri Lanka’s Angelo Mathews, Pakistan’s Umar Akmal and Bangladesh’s Mominul Haque — have insightful features penned about them. Aren’t we glad that Mithali preferred cricket over Bharatnatyam or coach Pravin Amre sensed that his shy ward Rahane would not call him after a Test debut failure and instead dialled his disciple!
The retreating giants — Jacques Kallis, Graeme Smith, Mahela Jayawardene, Kumar Sangakkara and Graeme Swann — are also highlighted. Sample this from Anand Vasu’s tribute to Mahela and Sanga: “... Kumar when pressed, before adding a rider. ‘The relationship won’t be as vibrant if a person were perfect, you can’t be as close, you need those niggling, annoying traits because they piss you off at times, but also allow you to laugh.’ And that sums up their friendship perfectly. Why would you want to tempt fate by changing something that has endured, grown and shows no signs of wilting?”
The greatness arc is complete with the ‘Hall of Fame’ housing Vijay Hazare and Bishan Singh Bedi. Besides this Menon directs his writers to peer at cricket’s roots — clubs and the way it is described in the vernacular, ranging from Kannada to Bengali, Tamil to Hindi. He gets us to appreciate the colonial guest, who is now family. There is also the Eureka moment of Prashant Kidambi penning about Parsees and cricket while fresh insights are gleaned about the game’s most powerful man — N. Srinivasan — through Mohan.
But perfection is elusive and a few quibbles remain, the old one about dates of birth popping up in profiles and a new grouse about Mithali’s picture placed without a caption or Anand’s piece on Jayawardene and Sangakkara being termed solely as an appreciation of the former while the headline rightly says ‘Brothers in arms’.
These are minor flaws, pick the book, open any page and you would be delighted. Perhaps you might even recall that phase of clouting the 10th standard bully for a six! Cricket is intimate and the Wisden India Almanack distils that essence.
Disclosure: The writer has contributed a feature to the almanack.
Wisden India Almanack 2015: Edited by Suresh Menon; Bloomsbury Publishing India Pvt. Ltd., Vishrut Building, DDA Complex, Building No. 3, Pocket 6 &7, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi-110070. Rs. 699.
