The Picador Book of Cricket

by Ramachandra Guha

  Gavaskar had to play the exorcist as well. The West Indian fast bowlers, led by Malcolm Marshall, gave India a thorough working-over during their innings victory in the First Test of this series. It was Gavaskar’s duty to lead the riposte; and counter-attack he did too, from the first over after Kapil Dev had won the toss, quickly hooking Marshall for four and six.

  This was the young, attacking Gavaskar born again, not the careworn defender weighed down by the frailties of his colleagues and the responsibility of captaincy which he held for so long. He was helped by the pitch of course. Delhi’s groundsman works for a brewery and knows how to concoct something flat.

  So Gavaskar achieved it in style, hard though it may be to define exactly what his style is. He favours neither off side nor leg, front foot nor back. To watch him practise of an evening in the Brabourne Stadium in Bombay, the Lord’s of India, where members recline in basket chairs around the boundary safe from the city’s din, is to be reminded of the old photograph of W. G. practising in a net in his garden. Both are at home, and monumentally assured. Perhaps it is best to say that, if all living things in India are incarnations, Gavaskar is technical orthodoxy made flesh.

  The Indian has taken 166 Test innings to make his 29 centuries (only 13 of them in India), against Bradman’s 80. It should be borne in mind, though, that Gavaskar has never had the chance to bat against India’s gentle bowling (Bradman did and scored four centuries). Nor did ‘The Don’ have to face a four-man pace attack, except once, whereas yesterday was but one of many occasions when Gavaskar has had to do so.

  Gavaskar reached his fifty off 37 balls, giving his only chance en route to the keeper Dujon off a mishook. He slowed down in his fifties, attained the solid base camp of 62 by lunch, and set off briskly afterwards for the summit.

  There was one nervous moment when Holding appealed for lbw but umpire Gothoskar was unmoved (in fact only five Indian umpires have ever been moved to give him lbw – and five abroad). Then Marshall tried to ruffle him with three bouncers from round the wicket: the first was hooked high and safe for four, the second along the ground to the squarer of two long legs, and the third straight between them to tumultuous shouts.

  Soon it was his record-equalling century. He doffed the white hat that is his trademark, now fitted with a Brearley-type skull-protector inside. It was only the thirty-fifth over of the innings. Having pulled Larry Gomes for a second six, he was bowled off stump by his arm ball for 121, made off 128 balls in 224 minutes. It was his twelfth Test century against West Indies – Bradman’s preference was for England, against whom he made nineteen.

  More records are sure to go Gavaskar’s way. He now has 8,017 Test runs. Sobers scored 8,032; Boycott has 8,114. By the time Yorkshire’s special meeting is convened on 3 December, Boycott is likely to have been knocked off that pedestal too by the insatiable Indian.

  JOHN WOODCOCK

  Kapil’s Devil (1993)

  An epic climb has been going on for some time in the cricket world, an attempt on one of the great summits of sport. It involves the Indian all-rounder Kapil Dev and his ambition, before the years overtake him, to beat Sir Richard Hadlee’s wonderful record of 431 Test wickets.

  In the second Test match in Madras, while making merry against England’s toiling attack, Kapil scored his 5,000th Test run. In the Bombay Test he took his 417th Test wicket. From all accounts his spell of seven overs at the start of England’s second innings in Madras was much the best piece of quicker bowling in the match.

  From this it might seem that only some sudden and serious injury can stop Kapil from reaching the goal he has set himself. The other possible snag is the amount of Test cricket India are likely to play in the near future. They have Zimbabwe coming for one Test next month and are scheduled to tour Sri Lanka and Pakistan later this year; but India and Pakistan must have about as much chance of playing cricket against each other in the present political climate as the Serbs and Bosnians have of enjoying a friendly game of football.

  It is no help to Kapil, either, that India have remembered at last that their best way of winning Test matches is, and always has been, through spin. Happily, though, Kapil’s form remains good and he is thinking in terms of taking 500 Test wickets, not 432.

  He was, by three years, the youngest of the quartet of all-rounders who so embellished the 1980s. Of the others, Hadlee and Imran Khan, now both past forty, are in honourable retirement, and Ian Botham, who is thirty-seven, has accepted I fancy, that even his Test days are done. Kapil, thirty-four last month, has become the father figure of the Indian side.

  It would be wrong to see him as a typical Indian cricketer. He is anything but that. Coming from Punjab, he is taller and stronger than the average Indian. He is a Jat, a sect to which the Indian army looks for recruits. This influenced Kapil’s developments as a cricketer in two crucial ways. It bestowed on him the build of a fast bowler, and gave him the height and power to drive a cricket ball as lustily as anyone ever did. He bats not so much like an Indian – all eye and magic – as like Keith Miller or Botham, all pomp and derring-do.

  Nobody at Lord’s for the first Test match of 1990 will forget the manner in which Kapil saved India from following on, though not from defeat. When he was joined by Hirwani, the last man in and no sort of a batsman, 24 runs were needed to make England bat again. After Hirwani had blocked his first ball, the last of an over from Angus Fraser, and before he was bowled by his second, the first of Fraser’s next over, Kapil drove four successive balls from Hemmings straight for six, strokes of unimaginable disdain.

  In the corresponding Test match eight years earlier, Kapil had scored 89 in 55 balls with hitting of extraordinary violence, whereupon, after being last out with less than an hour of the fourth day left, he took 3 England wickets for 8 runs in 4 overs. Last month in Port Elizabeth, his eighth Test hundred (129 in 177 balls) enabled India to recover from 31 for 6 to 197 for 9 and was described as electrifying.

  Kapil is the most explosive batsman India have ever had. It was C. B. Fry’s opinion that Indians make the most natural batsmen of all. Sunil Gavaskar, the Pataudis, Ranji and his nephew Duleep, the prolific Vijay Merchant, the elegant Rusi Modi, the intrepid Gundappa Viswanath and countless others bear him out. But they have invariably done so with a gentle, wristy touch, and not savagely in the way that Kapil has: That he has performed such wonders as often as not in a struggling cause, and in an age when the game as it is generally played does few favours to the Indians’ innate qualities, enhances his record.

  Of his 123 Test matches, 58 have been in India, mostly on pitches that have had little to offer bowlers of his type. Of his 417 Test wickets, 210 have been taken at home, 51 in Australia, 43 in England, 43 in Pakistan, 35 in West Indies, 13 in New Zealand, 11 in Sri Lanka, 8 in South Africa and 3 in Zimbabwe.

  For those who like to read something into such statistics, 29.5 per cent of those in India have gone to leg-before decisions and 20.8 per cent of those in other countries. The equivalent figure in Australia is 11.8 per cent.

  In pace he has never been up with the Hadlees and Imrans or the Thomsons and Lillees; his success has had much more to do with movement and accuracy than with oppression, and that made it more worrying for him when, two or three years ago, he lost his outswinger. Kapil puts this down to too much one-day cricket, where the narrower interpretation of Law 24 led to his being called for wides that would have passed muster in the conventional game. When he stopped bothering about this, in Australia last winter, the outswinger came back and in five Test matches he took 25 wickets.

  In the recent Test at Madras, it was off outswingers, pitched in just the right place, that Kapil had Smith caught at second slip and Gatting missed at the wicket at the start of England’s second innings. It was another chance in Bombay, which Gooch edged to the wicket-keeper. Kapil knows, as England’s new-ball bowlers seem to have forgotten, that in India it is where you bowl that matters most of all, not how fast.

  Already Kapil is the only crick
eter to have scored 5,000 runs and taken 400 wickets in Test cricket. It is an astonishing achievement. Wasim Akram, the only other seriously good all-rounder playing Test cricket today, is alone in faint pursuit.

  As of now, Kapil’s batting and bowling averages are almost identical (29.74 and 30.99, respectively), a state of affairs that nobody could possibly sniff at.

  He has the appeal of Severiano Ballesteros, the looks of Omar Sharif, prolific talent, a fine reputation as a sportsman, and a beautiful wife, who runs Dev Features, a syndication agency and their own business.

  He is camped within sight of Hadlee’s New Zealand flag and destined, I am sure, to plant India’s alongside it, and he will do it with style.

  We should make the most of Kapil while we can. India have never had another cricketer like him, and quite conceivably they never will.

  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆

  During the same period, the Pakistanis were also making major strides. It was the English game that contributed most to the rise of Pakistani cricket. The recruitment of overseas players by the counties, which started in 1968, allowed such players as Mushtaq Mohammad, Zaheer Abbas and Majid Khan further to develop their technique and tactical skills. They were followed by such men as Javed Miandad, Imran Khan, and Wasim Akram. By the 1980s the Pakistanis were winning Tests and series with some regularity. The pinnacle of their cricketing success was, however, the conquest of the 1992 World Cup.

  The great strength of modern Pakistan cricket has been their bowling. Imran Khan and Wasim Akram were two splendidly hostile swing bowlers. Rather different in style was the moody muezzin’s son, Abdul Qadir, who resurrected the dying art of leg break bowling. Qadir (who, unusually, never played county cricket) is profiled for us by the South African journalist Donald Woods. This is followed by an essay on Waqar Younis and his famous inswinging yorker.

  DONALD WOODS

  Twist Again (1982)

  Many old gentlemen of England will have a smile in their hearts today because of the revival of an art they had thought lost for ever.

  For years they had lamented the passing of leg spin bowling. Where were the successors to Bosanquet, Mailey, Grimmett, Tich Freeman, Peebles, Faulkner – or even that young feller Benaud? Gone and forgotten, it seemed, was the wristy, back-of-the-hand delivery so hard to control that it was too expensive in this era of limited-over cricket.

  Now the lament is no longer necessary, thanks to Abdul Qadir, of Pakistan, who proves with the essence of the risky art of leg spin that he can weave spells around England’s best batsmen without squandering runs to buy victims. But never mind the figures. It is the way in which he does his devious work that makes Qadir the embodiment of all the composite characteristics of classical leg spin.

  It is, after all, the most subtle and sinister of all the cricketing arts, and it is not for your open-hearted extrovert. To go to the unnatural trouble of screwing the ball out of the back of the hand over a cocked wrist requires a nature both complicated and contrary, as well as a readiness to wrench the shoulder, elbow and other parts of the body into unconventional positions.

  Action pictures of the great leg-spinners give some idea of the sheer inconvenience of this method of delivery. Douglas Wright’s action was once described as a cross between the barn dance and the swallow dive. Roly Jenkins, by all accounts, did a sort of hornpipe. ‘Tiger’ O’Reilly grimaced as if in agony, and perhaps he was.

  But it gets to you. Dabble in the dark arts of leg spin and your whole approach to life is affected. I knew a schoolmaster so addicted that he seemed unable to walk an ordinary pavement very far without going compulsively into the tangential foot-shufflings and shoulder-shruggings apparently inseparable from preparation to bowl a leg break.

  Yet the real leg-spinners are the true princes of cricket, and if they have to do a sort of Mephistophelean deal to reach the top orders of the mystical rite they certainly pay the price.

  It seems that Qadir could not be other than a leg-spinner. He even walks like one between deliveries, with his feet apparently magnetized to the turf for preparatory purchase (remember Colin McCool?) and he has the right face, too, one of calculation and conspiracy.

  The eyes narrow ominously and the fringe of dark beard hints at brigandage and plunder, not at all like the straightforward yeoman growth of Gatting.

  You could imagine that face emerging from the mystic gloom of a Karachi bazaar to whisper dread tidings of deceit in high places and intrigue in the back streets, and the name Abdul is somehow appropriate, hinting at the mystery and magic that is about to be worked on some poor plodding Englishman at the crease.

  As is fully to be expected, Qadir goes into a most complicated set of movements to begin his bowling action. He holds his left hand high as if in final salute to the doomed batsman, while his right hand twirls the ball urgently to appraise it of future rotational requirements, then squirts the ball into the upraised left hand while his feet begin a ritual dance on the spot.

  The left hand brandishes the ball momentarily, then transfers it back into the right, which is already beginning a series of small circular sweeps as he bounds and gambols into his curving (of course) approach run.

  In all this activity his entire body is the mere servant of the cocked right wrist as it sweeps over out of a flurry of wheeling arms to float the buzzing ball at his victim, and so complete is all bodily involvement that even after releasing the ball Qadir twirls after it up the pitch as if urging it on to work its own wickedness, and his bowling arm repeats an echo motion of the delivery to quench itself of every last vestige of spinfulness.

  What the ball then does is variously astonishing. Taking on a life of its own, it loops and dips, pitching to spin vastly to left or right or to spear straight on with topspin, and if it raps the batsman’s pads Qadir has a range of appeals for lbw – one supplicatory, one accusatory, one challenging and one slyly inquisitive, then the major one, the total and ultimate appeal.

  With this one he dances an angry tattoo upon the turf, jumping up and down and uttering fierce cries of the sort that surely terrified whole generations of marauders clear out of the Khyber Pass. At such times Qadir makes John McEnroe seem like a calm exponent of reasoned remonstration.

  But ultimately it is his superb art that one remembers, and it is a fitting irony that the torments of the googly which he now inflicts on innocent Anglo-Saxon lads had their origin not in the mystical regions of the East but on the playing fields of England.

  Bosanquet knew not what he was visiting upon later generations of his countrymen, but Abdul Qadir certainly does, and as a worthy custodian of the rescued art of leg spin he will surely continue to delight millions with his magic.

  MARTIN JOHNSON

  A Man with a Secret (1992)

  A game of cricket, as any Wednesday-night park player who has almost had his nose torn off by a middle-aged slow-medium dobber will confirm, is entirely dependent upon the prevailing conditions. It can take place on a strip of concrete, or twenty-two yards of suet pudding – but for Pakistan’s twenty-year-old phenomenon Waqar Younis it matters little whether it has been prepared by McAlpine’s or Mrs Beeton. If Waqar does not care for the pitch, he merely dispenses with it.

  Waqar’s trademark is a ball that takes about a third of a second to travel from launch pad to target, and swings and dips wickedly late in towards the base of the right-hander’s leg stump. In terms of working conditions, England’s batsmen are not only entering a hard-hat area, but one that demands a pair of steel toecaps. With this delivery, Waqar not only renders the pitch redundant, but the fielders as well. In one and a half seasons with Surrey he has taken 170 championship wickets in 32 matches, and over 60 per cent of them have either been bowled or lbw. Bowled is the preferable option, as it at least guarantees a batsman a semi-dignified walk off, rather than a hobble back on a set of crushed toes.

  The romantic version of Waqar’s discovery is that Imran was lying at home in bed with a viral infection when he spotted an unknown young
ster on television bowling for United Bank in the annual fixture between the domestic champions of Pakistan and India. Imran, so the story goes, leaped from his sickbed to attend the game, and immediately insisted on Waqar joining his squad for the forthcoming one-day tournament in Sharjah. A more prosaic account comes from Intikhab Alam, the current team manager, who says that the United Bank captain, Haroon Rashid, invited him to watch Waqar bowling in the nets. ‘It took me six balls to realize he had everything,’ Intikhab says, ‘and I immediately told Imran that we had to get him into the squad for Sharjah.’

  What is certain, however, is that Imran and Intikhab were instrumental in getting Waqar into the Pakistani squad at the earliest available opportunity. It is their way to throw youngsters in at the deep end, just as it is the English way to issue their own young players with rubber rings and lead them gently into a paddling pool. ‘It’s mostly to do with the system,’ Intikhab said. ‘It’s amazing, really, but most of our players start learning about cricket at Test level. When we see natural talent, such as Waqar’s, we leave it alone. If faults creep in, we put them right, but we never try to coach them into doing things that don’t come naturally.’

  Cricketers being the suspicious characters they are, there are quite a few around not totally convinced that Waqar’s talents are God-given. Mutterings about ball tampering are never far from the surface when one of Waqar’s missiles abruptly changes direction at 90 mph. At a press conference on New Zealand’s last tour of Pakistan, Martin Crowe produced a ball that, so he intimated, bore not so much the evidence of contact with a cricket bat as a combined harvester.