The Picador Book of Cricket

by Ramachandra Guha

  Australia’s dependence on fast and fastish bowlers in 1948 kept Tallon mostly in the backstop position and limited British crowds’ opportunities to see his close-up mastery, his stumpings of camera-shutter speed and precision – often only one bail flicked off. In the third Test, still worried about his little finger, he and the fieldsmen at square leg and point all were convinced that he stumped Compton (35) off Ian Johnson in England’s first innings. Umpire Frank Chester’s decision went against them. Disconsolate as a bear with a sore paw, Tallon squirmed down into position again: in such a moment he missed the absent McCool’s calming ‘Take it easy, Joe’, from first slip. Twice in the last three-quarter-hour that evening and once next day he dropped Compton; two of them were little more than finger-end touches, low and wide, in dull light, but Tallon was savagely self-critical.

  When the stumping of Compton was disallowed I looked through binoculars from Old Trafford’s rooftop press box but could see no clear line on the pitch; the crease was a dark mass of roughened turf, cut up by players’ boots. It would ease the umpires’ task if the creases were repainted at every interval. Not that this would guarantee freedom from error. Keeping wicket for Brighton (Victoria) between the wars, Roy Hayball appealed for a stumping but was refused. Chatting after the match, he said to the umpire: ‘That must have been a very close thing.’

  The umpire: ‘It was. His toe was on the line.’

  Hayball: ‘But on the line is out!’

  The umpire: ‘Ah, but this was a very wide line.’

  After his unlucky Test at Manchester Tallon’s left little finger, injured in another plunge for a fast ball in the Middlesex match, was so painfully puffy that he could not play in the fourth Test. On his reappearance in the final Test one of his three catches gave Londoners something to marvel at: his rapid sidesteps and falling capture of Hutton’s leg glance, with the back of his left glove to the ground.

  When the fast bowlers swung the ball too far to leg for his footwork and dive to reach it, Tallon often lay outstretched in disgust, on his left elbow, seemingly heedless of how the ball was retrieved from the boundary. Sometimes, through glasses, he appeared to be easing his feelings with pithy comments which a lip-reader might have identified as predominantly in words of four and five letters.

  A memory of Worcester is McCool’s cold hand letting slip a leg ball which was still a high full toss when it came to Tallon’s gloves, all aquiver with surprise. Next, a wide to the off took the keeper on to his knees; he stared at the bowler with the air of one who would demand an explanation later. Next over McCool lured Kenyon forward to a flightier leg break and Tallon stumped him in a manner showing that all was forgiven.

  In readiness to take returns from the field he stoops behind the stumps, every time. He motions with his hands (like a conductor calling his orchestra to their feet) to request outfielders to throw above the bails – but not when the fielder has been Neil Harvey, Hassett or Archer. In Test matches he has grumbled at Loxton for shying at the stumps; he has even had the temerity to rebuke his captain, Bradman, for this – in front of the Lord’s crowd, too.

  Tallon was not available for the 1949–50 tour of South Africa. On the shorter trip to New Zealand he saved Australia in the unofficial Test by getting 7 wickets and making 116 (seven sixes) with batting few men could equal. What pleased him more was that his hands came through unhurt.

  For all his high-pressure intensity in the fight, Tallon has humour. Only three of the seventeen Australian players bound for England in 1948 took part in the ship’s fancy-dress parade; Tallon was one, a villainous Arab with wide-apart teeth. In his first Test at Lord’s he fooled Compton into running hard by preparing to take a return when nobody was throwing. At Aberdeen his response to an inaccurate leg break was to signal a wide (overriding the umpire) and to insist on being given a chance himself to show how leg breaks ought to be bowled. At Derby, on the morning after the team celebrated having won the Ashes outright, freakish hot weather had many tongues hanging out as left-handed Denis Smith made a new record for the county against Australia in a century partnership with Arnold Townsend. Seldom have eyes been cast more longingly at drinks than at the tray which Don Tallon, as twelfth man, carried on to the ground. Like survivors of a cross-desert trek by the Foreign Legion, the players drooped listlessly about the wicket, too far gone to take a step towards the approaching succour. Halfway out Tallon stopped, laid the tray on the grass, knelt behind it and beckoned: ‘Come and get it.’ The crowd of 10,000 saw the humour of it, but the captain was not amused. He sternly commanded the grinning twelfth man to bring the tray to the middle, and reproved him with ‘This isn’t a circus.’

  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆

  Lord Harris, an English aristocrat who once played a bit of cricket, claimed that ‘it is in the matter of patience that the Indian cricketer will never be equal to the Englishman’. This remark, offered at a time when India was still undivided, was calculated to produce both Sunil Gavaskar and Hanif Mohammad. The little Pakistani’s classical technique and monumental patience are analysed in this essay by Ray Robinson. Note that it was published before the most remarkable of all defensive innings, Hanif’s 337 against the West Indies at Bridgetown in 1957–8. That knock was spread over 970 minutes of playing time. Watching Hanif bat from a palm tree high above square leg were a group of Bajan boys. As the afternoon sun rose higher, one of them could no longer stand it. Delirious from the heat, from Hanif’s relentless thook thook and doubtless from a steady intake of palm wine, the boy fell off the tree and landed on his head some forty feet below. He was taken to hospital, recovering consciousness twenty-four hours later. Inevitably his first words were ‘Is Hanif still batting?’ The answer, alas, was in the affirmative.

  RAY ROBINSON

  The Original Little Master (1956)

  When Hanif Mohammad comes in to bat for Pakistan there appears to be little more of him than a sun helmet, a pair of pads and a dark shadow in between.

  Hanif is only sixty-three inches high but, like the girl in South Pacific, every inch is packed with dynamite.

  Somewhere in the darkness under the helmet’s brim two brown eyes focus with burning intensity on the ball approaching through the heat-shimmering air. The helmet tilts forward as his head goes down to watch the last feet of the ball’s bounce from the baked wicket to the bat. Every line of his neat figure denotes the concentrated attention to the ball necessary to score a double-century at seventeen or any other age.

  By habit, Hanif Mohammad touches his helmet, crouches and goes through the motion of making a cross over his chest before he stoops to face the bowler. Pakistan’s captain, Abdul Hafeez Kardar, reads these signs as evidence that Hanif’s mind is engrossed in batting. Whenever the lad misses this routine his skipper becomes apprehensive. Hanif’s boyish good humour is silenced by the serious business of staying in to make runs. His mien is studious yet not laborious. Nothing the ball does seems to disturb his manner of taking his time in all things on and off the field.

  Before he had a helmet, Hanif Mohammad wore a red cap with a camel crest, the emblem of the high school, Sind Madressah Tul-Islam, in Karachi, on the delta of the River Indus. A pitiless sun would be turning the school’s red tile roof into a griddle as a dozen pupils emerged from the black oblong which the doorway’s shade formed in the yellow stone wall. They played cricket on matting spread over a mixture of gravel and clay. In one game Hanif batted nearly seven and a half hours for 305 not out – an inter-school tournament record which stood for only a year before wristy Ikran Elahi surpassed it by dashing off 317 before tea.

  Hanif is the youngest of three sons of a Junagadh hotel keeper. He was born in Manavadar on the fourteenth day of Ramzan, 1353 AH (or 21 December 1934, by the white man’s reckoning). Manavadar is in the Ranji country but Hanif’s father, a member of the Sunni Muslim sect, migrated to Pakistan after the separation from India. Hanif’s eldest brother, Wazir Mohammad, also played for Pakistan in England in 1954 and two years earlier made 10
4 not out against India’s West Zone at Ahmadabad. The middle brother, Raiis Mohammad, nineteen, just missed selection for the same tour.

  Hanif’s coach was Abdul Aziz, a former All-India wicket keeper, who played against Jack Ryder’s Australian team in the unofficial Test at Calcutta in 1936. Abdul Aziz believes in coaching from the feet up – to encourage a youngster to move to the line of the ball to make his stroke. He noticed that Hanif played back too much and tended to spoon the ball to the on side. Abdul showed him how to defend his wicket playing forward as well as back. The shy boy said little, just looked at Abdul and listened closely to every word. For an hour each morning Abdul taught him how to place his feet to drive and to hook. At thirteen Hanif learned how to change from an intended forward stroke to a square cut. His off strokes, notably his drives, are now his best and are likely to improve further when he has more than nine stone to put behind them and has perfected their placing.

  At 16 years 10½ months Hanif Mohammad appeared in first-class cricket. Without preliminary, he found himself representing his country and wearing the green blazer with the golden crescent, star and eagle on the pocket. He was opening batsman and wicketkeeper against England on the park-like Lahore ground, in the Punjab. It was the first of two games against N. D. Howard’s team touring the Indian subcontinent. Hanif would have been the youngest Test player ever, but for the fact that Pakistan had not then been granted Test status by the Imperial Cricket Conference. Unused to a grass pitch, Hanif was up against a varied attack by English Test bowlers – the pace of Statham and Shackleton, Tattersall’s off spin and the left-arm bowling of Watkins (medium-pace), Hilton (slow) and Carr (googly). For two and three-quarter hours the methodical little Muslim kept them out as he made 26 of an opening partnership of 96 with Nazar Mohammad. As the youngster left the field shouts came from the crowd: ‘Bahut khoob!’ (Urdu for ‘Well done!’) As wicketkeeper in this drawn match Hanif stumped opening batsman Jack Robertson off portly Amir Elahi, the comical slow bowler with the antics of a light-hearted Othello.

  In Pakistan’s second unofficial Test the batsmen walked in across Karachi’s outfield of sunbaked mud to the inner grass square around the matting-covered gravel wicket. Instead of covering the pitch only, the brown matting stretched like a runway for the length of the bowler’s approach and Shackleton looked like becoming airborne any minute. From the central strip to the boundary the ground sloped more than two feet. The ball flew nastily for the first two days of the match and Statham was at his fastest. When Hanif went in to bat in the last innings the Pakistanis needed 285 to achieve the longed-for glory of their first win against another country. For four hours he bent his young back to the task. His top score of 64, before Howard caught him off Tattersall, ushered his team to victory with four wickets and half an hour to spare. This success – the only defeat inflicted on the Englishmen during their tour – rammed home Pakistan’s claim for admittance to the select circle of Test countries. All Pakistan hummed with such delighted remarks as:

  ‘Sab tareef Khuda ki!’ (Urdu for ‘Allah be praised!’)

  ‘School ke larke ke liye bahut bari bat hai!’ (‘How wonderful for a schoolboy!’)

  The enterprising Pakistanis followed that up by sending a party of young players to England for coaching at the cricket school run by former Surrey fast bowler Alf Gover. Hanif had fifteen days at the school. After seeing him at the nets Gover said, ‘I am not going to try to coach this boy and my tip is that you don’t let anybody else try it, either. He has got everything. He is a natural.’ Hanif watched all the leading English batsmen, and must have taken an extra-long look at Hutton.

  Not in the least surprised by Hanif’s triumph on Pakistan’s tour of India in the last months of 1952, Gover said, ‘All I did was advise him how to make the best of his perfect technique in the middle.’ Hanif led off with a century in each innings of Pakistan’s first match against North Zone at Amritsar, ancient holy city of the Sikhs, with its beautiful Golden Temple. Batting 4 hours 50 minutes for his 121 in the first innings, he hit 14 fours. He was an hour quicker for his second innings of 109 (13 fours). With those innings, this shock-haired son of the Prophet made himself the youngest cricketer (17 years 42 weeks) ever to score a century in both innings of a first-class match.

  On to Delhi for Pakistan’s first match as an accredited Test country. India’s greatest statesman, Prime Minister Pandit Nehru, was there, watching the greatest bowler to come out of the East, Vinoo Mankad. The sturdy Indian left-hander used all his wiles of flight and spin to send back eight batsmen in Pakistan’s first innings of 150. Hanif Mohammad was among them, but not before he had held out four hours and topped the score with 51 on his first appearance in an official Test. Mankad’s 13 wickets in the match enabled India to win by an innings. That indignity stirred Pakistani policeman Fazal Mahmood to an answering feat on Lucknow’s matting wicket in the second Test. Using his leg-cutters as effectively as handcuffs, Superintendent Mahmood removed twelve Indian batsmen in the match. (Fazal likes dealing in wickets by the dozen, as he showed in bowling Pakistan to their first Test victory in England in 1954.) Hanif’s opening partner at Lucknow, Nazar Mohammad, became the first Pakistani to carry his bat through a Test innings, with 124 of a total of 331.

  By the Islamic calendar it was the eighteenth day of Safar, 1372 (otherwise 8 November 1952), when Hanif Mohammad walked on to the spacious Brabourne Stadium to open Pakistan’s innings against Bombay. Below the airy tiers of the towering concrete stands he looked tinier than ever. In only his fourth innings on a turf pitch, he put in the foundation of a double-century with the care of a stonemason laying the bottom course. An hour went by before he allowed himself the liberty of a late cut for his first four. His only miscalculation was just before lunch, when at 28 he gave a hard slip chance off Bombay’s fast-medium bowler, S. W. Sohoni.

  For most of the day Hanif quietly backed up three aggressive partners – two hours with stylish Nazar Mohammad, fifteen minutes with brother Wazir (about five years older than Hanif, no bigger, though more daring) and an hour and a half with Imtiaz Ahmed. Imtiaz Ahmed’s smile and forceful stroke play have made him a favourite everywhere south-east of the North-West Frontier. Two years earlier on the same ground he hit 31 fours in his 300 not out for the Prime Minister’s XI against the Commonwealth XI. At the age of seventeen, Imtiaz and Kardar, twenty, scored centuries together against Australian Services at Lahore in 1945. Some of the fieldsmen, unused to the heat, sank into a torpor during a quiet spell. Vultures soared overhead, as if waiting to pick the bones of the bowlers when they dropped in their tracks. A sudden hit skied the ball and a shout of ‘Charlie!’ roused Price to action at mid-off. He ran twenty yards the wrong way before he found he was chasing a bird’s shadow, while the other Australian fieldsmen collapsed in gurgling heaps.

  As Hanif’s third partner against Bombay, Imtiaz Ahmed raced to 96 at a run a minute before Rajendra Nath stumped him off a flighted leg break from S. G. Shinde. The sight of his partner missing 100 by four failed to infect Hanif’s play with the paralysis of overanxiety as he sought the eight runs needed to complete his own century. It seemed to disturb him no more than the Bombay crowd’s barracking of his slow scoring before the tea interval. Soon he off-drove a boundary to raise his hundred, drawing cheers from the throats of his hecklers. At the day’s end, five hours of calm concentration had brought him 102 of his side’s 303 for 3 wickets.

  On the second day Hanif Mohammad replayed himself in with as much care as Australia’s Sid Barnes used to take when he set his mind on a big innings. In the first three-quarters of an hour his score crept up by 21 while his fourth partner, all-rounder Maqsood Ahmed, made 61. From the pavilion Kardar twice sent out messages to go for the runs, but Hanif felt he could not do so without risking getting out – the thing he hates most of all. When the second message was delivered he asked, ‘Before lunch?’, indicating that he regarded the pre-lunch period as one for settling in. Little more than one-third of Pakistan’s 36
6 runs had come from Hanif’s bat when Shinde had Maqsood caught at cover by Irani.

  Not even a cracked bat could make Hanif leave the crease. He would not change it, for fear of breaking his concentration. When, with the insight of a born record-breaker, he felt the bowling was ripe for plucking on the easy-paced pitch, he hit more fours with the faulty blade than he had before it split. Though the field spread wider, he took the shine out of Shinde, leaving little remainder. In the lunch interval, while devout players spread their mats after noon and prostrated themselves toward Mecca in prayer, Hanif lay relaxing on the massage table.

  After lunch Bombay’s captain, Rusi Modi, called on the third new ball. Instead of being checked, the run-getting became even faster until Hanif and acting captain Hussain raised the score by 150 in 90 minutes. For the first time his team saw Hanif hooking fast bowling. He raced through his fourth fifty in half an hour, like a schoolboy dashing off the last lines of an imposition, with only one blot – a slip chance at 161. Thanks to his last eighty in 70 minutes he added his second hundred in less than half the time of his first-day 102. Up the pitch raced Anwar Hussain to shake the hand of the young double-century scorer and say: ‘Shabash, abhi aghai aur buhat score karna hai’ (meaning, ‘That’s the beginning. There are lots more to come’). The innings was promptly closed at 517 for 4 wickets, a record for Pakistan. Hanif had rebuffed Bombay’s bowlers for 7 hours 25 minutes, punctuated by 23 fours, chiefly drives through a wide arc from cover to long on.