There are some things you expect to change over the years and it’s surprising when they don’t. As a kid, I got interested in cricket when India hosted Bill Lawry’s Australia at home. The first colour photos of the players appeared in The Illustrated Weekly of India and the serious write-ups were to be found in the black-and-white Sportsweek . Commentary came weeks later on radio, with the Film Division newsreels showing clips of actual play. Defeat was a given, or so it seemed. The highlights were the odd bunch of wickets taken by an Indian spinner or a century by an Indian batsman, the greatest of joys. I still have a memory of my mother picking me up from school, transistor glued to her ear, informing me that in Kanpur, a young batsman, Vishwanath, had passed a hundred, something also called a ‘century’.
In terms of triumph, things were soon to get (briefly) better. Incredibly, we won in the West Indies and then, even more unimaginably, we also won in England, claiming our first series win with a victory at the Oval. I remember the nail-biting and the nervousness while listening to the radio as we inched forward, and then the release of tension when Abid Ali cut the ball away for the winning runs.
Heroes in flesh
Soon I would actually get to see some of my heroes in an Irani Trophy match at Eden Gardens, Bombay versus Rest of India. My friends and I had seats next to the boundary. Not more than a few feet away were legends in flesh, knocking up. All their movements seemed casual and lazy, graceful in slow motion: the arc of the arm as the bowlers dropped balls at the same spot again and again, the bats by Gray Nicolls and Gunn & Moore coming down, somehow just in time to middle the ball and tap it away. There were no pads, and the cricket gear was clean, crisp and clearly imported — the wicketkeepers’ gloves were of a quality that a wannabe keeper like me had only seen in photographs. My two great memories from that match are of a straight six off a spinner by Salim Durani, which is still the most graceful, nonchalant-looking straight six I’ve seen, and a square cut by Ajit Wadekar which rocketed straight towards us and had us ducking even through the ball had hit the ground a few yards away.
After Wadekar passed away last week, someone posted a piece on him by an English cricket writer who described the great man’s stance with “the feet wide apart”. This is completely wrong. Wadekar’s stance stood out precisely because the feet were so close together he seemed to be standing to attention, with the bat almost touching the left foot. It is from this seemingly over compact position that all the strokes unfurled — the cuts, the drives, the merciless pulls. Watching the old footage, one marvels at how economical all the players’ movements seemed to be. This is partly because of the way the footage is slowed down (or not) in that era. The backlifts seem shorter, the movements of both bowlers and batsmen more unfussy and quick, every action somehow more to the point. But there is something else as well: when you watch the players moving ‘outside’ the delivery time, whether changing positions between overs or celebrating a wicket, there seems to be more grace, or, rather, less of a projection of oneself and one’s athletic body. Not that there was any absence of chauvinistic pride in those days but the men’s normal non-playing movements seemed to be more feminine. No doubt there was rub between the sides and some level of sledging, but the way in which batsmen just turn and walk upon being given out, or when there is a clear wicket, is also more endearing when compared to the dramatics that today accompany almost every departure from the crease. It’s as if in those days the player was ‘on-stage’ and was in his ‘role’ only as long as he was batting, the role ending with the innings, whereas today a batsman almost has to keep acting till he disappears into the dressing room.
Soon after Wadekar’s passing I was watching Kohli & Co. take the field at Trent Bridge, comparing both playing styles and body language between now and whatever YouTube clips one can dredge up from 1971. It was as if I was watching a different sport which had only some superficial overlaps with the scraps of cricket that had kept me hypnotised in my childhood. Most of our batsmen couldn’t bat the long hours the old greats had managed and our pace attack was stupefyingly quicker than England’s to the point where our slowest pacer started where their fastest one finished on the speedometer.
Towards the finish
But the only thing that hadn’t changed was the nail-biting and the nervousness. Even as the last-ditch stand between Buttler and Stokes began to take on scary duration, younger India supporters here were laughing at me and saying, “We’re winning this, stop worrying!” I remained unconvinced till the 9th wicket fell, but Wadekar, who slept soundly in the pavilion as Abid Ali took us through at the Oval, might have approved of my young friends.
