The Picador Book of Cricket

by Ramachandra Guha

  However, nowhere does a ball get roughed up so quickly as on the parched, grassless turf of Pakistan, and it is a legacy of learning his trade in such conditions that makes Waqar (like Wasim Akram) prefer bowling when the ball is older. There is even a theory that Pakistani sweat (rubbed in to provide the polish on one side) has different properties. Intikhab, as you might expect, will have none of this: ‘We know why Waqar swings the ball so late, and at such pace, and it is all to do with the bowler. It is, I’m sure you’ll understand, our secret.’

  Waqar’s talent first came to light as a schoolboy in Sharjah, where his parents were living, although he was not smitten by the game until he watched Imran bowling for Pakistan in a one-day tournament there. He went away and studied Imran’s action on video, and their master–pupil relationship is still strong today. Imran attempted to get Waqar fixed up with his old county, Sussex, who probably do not care to be reminded that they went instead for the Australian Tony Dodemaide. Later that year, in 1990, Imran bumped into his former Sussex colleague Ian Greig, then captain of Surrey, and after half an hour of his bowling to Alec Stewart in the Oval nets, Surrey rushed through a special registration to get him into their side for a Benson and Hedges quarter-final the following day.

  Waqar’s potential to become one of history’s finest bowlers is illustrated by his record after only 16 Test matches of 79 wickets at an average of 19.97. Wasim has 154 in 41 matches at 24.37, and by any standards they represent a lethal partnership. David Gower, back in the England squad for Old Trafford, says of Waqar: ‘When the ball is so close to a batsman before it starts to move, it is horribly difficult to adjust – and the way he races in to you gives you a hint that something less than friendly is on the way.’ Robin Smith, just about the only England batsman who would rather face Waqar than Mushtaq Ahmed, describes Waqar’s inswinging yorker as ‘ . . . the deadliest ball I have faced. However well you might be playing, this ball is always at the back of your mind, and you can never relax against him.’

  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆

  One of the most enduring friendships in modern cricket was that between Ian Botham and Viv Richards. This was a friendship that stretched across the cultural and racial divide. They played together for Somerset and against one another in the international arena. Both brought to their sport a spirit of joyous aggressiveness. Not for them the safety-first tactics so beloved of many of their fellow players.

  Botham and Richards hit numerous hundreds in Test cricket. Several of these have been much written about. However I have chosen, for each, a relatively obscure knock, the manner of whose making does nonetheless reveal the personality behind the player. It is hard to think of any other post-war cricketers who contributed as much to spectator satisfaction.

  SCYLD BERRY

  Botham’s Fastest Hundred (1982)

  The Nehru Stadium at Indore is typical of the grounds on which England played outside the Test matches. A multi-purpose stadium, it was built with government funds in the early 1960s in order to replace the old sports ground attached to the Raj’s principal social club. The same is the pattern throughout India. The private ground that belonged to the British and native elite, where other members of the public were allowed in as much on sufferance as on payment to watch the big matches, has been superseded by a new stadium for the many. It is a transformation which might not be regrettable at all, were not the old grounds such verdant, restful havens of retreat, like country-house estates amid the dust of cities: the Bombay Gymkhana, the Roshanara Club in Delhi, the Poona Club, and in Indore the Yeshwant Club, named after the last Maharajah of Holkar. Some of these clubs have become sad old places, going to seed as gently and imperceptibly as the prince drinking to his memories at the club bar. The paint and whitewash haven’t been touched since 1947; photographs and the billiard table grow dustier year by year . . .

  Two elements, however, about this Nehru Stadium were distinctive when Ian Botham staged the most outstanding innings of the tour there. One was the statue outside the main entrance. Made of stone and inscribed in Hindi, it aims to immortalize the GOM of Indian cricket, Colonel C. K. Nayudu. In the time of the old princely state of Holkar, Nayudu was Indore cricket. Crowds would follow him down the street. He was the first Indian cricketer to have charisma in the eyes of his own people (whereas Ranji had been all the rage in England). His physical toughness is a legend: once he was hit in the mouth by Dattu Phadkar; he swept two of his front teeth off the pitch and carried on batting. Botham did likewise when hit by Andy Roberts during his first season in the Somerset side. Nayudu, having been trained on the erratic surface of coir matting, lived adventurously as a batsman in search of sixes; so does Botham. When Nayudu faced foreign bowling for the first time, that of MCC in 1926, he hit it for 153, including 11 sixes, in 115 minutes. The statue to his memory, a fine one as cricket art goes, does not by all accounts capture him in a characteristic pose: C. K. is allowing a ball to pass by his off stump. But it serves as a reminder of the presiding genius of Indore.

  A second peculiarity about the game was that when Botham walked to the wicket on Friday 22 January it was the first time since the tour began over two months before that England had not been watched by a virtual capacity crowd. The Nehru Stadium was less than half full, with barely 10,000 spread out around the terracing. Local officials advanced the reasonable explanation that the succession of four drawn Test matches had taken its toll of spectator interest. Thus there was no great clamour of expectation when Botham went in. A striped squirrel sat on top of the sightscreen undisturbed. The surroundings were relaxed. So was he; and he had already made the promise that he would hit.

  When Botham walked out to bat thirty-five minutes after lunch, at 1.25, England had just lost two wickets with their score on 87, as if to prove it was one of the game’s misfortunate numbers. Geoff Cook, urgently needing plenty of runs if he was going to make the Test side in Kanpur, had been caught at midwicket for 39; or so the umpire had decided. The fielder Sanjeeva Rao had dived forward at the ball, and the batsman clearly believed he had picked it up on the half-volley. Cook, however, apart from waiting in his crease for the decision, made no sign of dissent, although his partner, Fletcher, shrugged his shoulders and pointed at Rao with his bat. After an idle morning the game had sprung alive. With no run added, Fletcher drove an off break from Gopal Sharma to mid-on, who dropped it. At the next ball Fletcher cut and was caught by the wicketkeeper, who for good measure also knocked off the bails.

  Picking up his 2 lb 12 oz bat and jamming on his sunhat, Botham called out to the next man in after him, Taylor, ‘You’d better get ready.’ On his way to the wicket he had no need to look up at the sun because the sky was its usual cloudless self. He could see in front of him, beyond the stadium, a six-storey hospital donated by the former Maharajah of Holkar. Beside it was the old medical college, with a couple of red-tiled turrets that would not have been out of place in Oxford, next to Keble. To his right through some trees was the squat tower of a brightly whitewashed church: that of St Ann’s, built in thanksgiving for the suppression of the Mutiny. The plaques inside still poignantly commemorate: Captain Francis Brodie, Commandant of Cavalry, Malwa Contingent, ‘killed by Mutineers at Mulharghur on June 12th 1857 whilst in the fearless discharge of his duty’; ‘Ross MacMahon esquire, Civil Engineer . . . whose valuable life in its very prime was cut short in the outbreak at Indore on July 1st 1857’. But not all those commemorated were casualties of war. There is also a plaque to one ‘who died from the Effects of a Fall at Polo, aged 29. Erected by his brother officers of the Central Indian Horse.’ A cavalier: that is more Botham’s style.

  He began by playing out the two deliveries remaining of the over by Gopal Sharma, a manifestly keen young off-spinner who had been included in India’s twelve for the Madras and Kanpur Tests. At the other end was Gatting, who had replaced Cook and had yet to get off the mark. Bent on a good score to make sure of his place in Kanpur, Gatting saw out a maiden over from Anil Mathur, a left-arm medium-p
acer who had swung the new ball sharply and had returned for a second spell at the main-stand end.

  Each batsman opened his account with a single in Sharma’s next over; then Botham unleashed an off drive that sent the ball skidding through mid-off for four. From this stroke it was obvious, as it had not been before during England’s hesitant start, that the outfield was exceptionally quick. Constant games of football and hockey on it, combined with a local scarcity of water, had reduced all but a few tufts to hard-baked earth. Ten runs to Botham off that over, followed by another five off Mathur, confirmed impressions that the going was good, the pitch ideal in pace and bounce, and the batsman intent on belligerence.

  Then Botham made the first of only two serious mistakes. Trying to cut Sharma he was dropped by slip, who also could not quite reach the rebound. With 15 to his name at that stage, Botham played out the rest of the over for a circumspect maiden. Thus Botham and Gatting, in their partnership of 137 off 12.2 overs, could afford to allow two of them to be maidens.

  In the following over from Mathur Botham stepped down the pitch and lofted the ball far above the height of St Ann’s tower, more to that of a steeple. It was like his shot at Old Trafford against Terry Alderman the previous summer, when he was nearly caught from the skyer to end all skyers by mid-off running desperately back (‘I got my angles wrong’); this time too the ball went up even further than it carried. Nonetheless it went for six, a few feet to the on side of straight. Fifteen runs off Mathur’s over took Botham’s score to 30. Whereupon drinks were brought out, to account for almost five of his fifty-five minutes at the wicket. Botham drank some of the green ‘staminade’, and repeated the message that the next batsman should be ready to come in any minute.

  He did not feel so hot as to remove his sleeveless MCC sweater. Yet the day was warm, though fresh because of Indore’s altitude of 1,800 feet; and he was about to perform one of the great feats of hitting. He cut the first ball he received after the drinks interval – an off break from Sharma – to the third-man boundary, off-drove the second for four more and swept the third for six. Like all his sixes it was a minimum seventy-five-yard carry. Off the fourth ball he pushed (in anyone else’s parlance ‘drove’) another single; but here he may have miscalculated as the first ball had been a no-ball, which left Gatting with three balls of the over to play out.

  With Botham now on 45, the Central Zone captain Parthasarathy Sharma decided on a bowling change. Removing Mathur from the firing line, Sharma brought on a left-arm spinner, Rajinder Singh Hans, at the main-stand end. Hans was once rated a potential successor to his fellow Sikh Bedi. But his bowling, at least in this match, was poor in direction and suffered from a scrambling delivery. Hans ran up and pushed the ball through enthusiastically: Botham reverse-swept him for four. A single from the next ball brought up Botham’s fifty. Given the strike again one ball later, he hit Hans over extra cover for six, then pinched the strike with a single: 61.

  At the far, hospital, end Gopal Sharma was still spinning the ball sufficiently to make it drift in the air away from the batsman and maybe turning it, except that Botham had dispatched it towards the boundary long before it had any chance to turn. He swung the first ball of this new over for two, and reverse-swept the next for four more. At the other end Gatting laughed in his beard. His mind went back to the one-day international in Ahmadabad, when he had shared a match-winning partnership with Botham. The joint plan then, as proposed by Botham on his arrival, had been to push the ball around and steadily accumulate the 31 runs required. Thereupon, far from suiting his action to the word, Botham had reverse-swept Doshi and hit two sixes over long on. Now here he was again cheerfully breaking all conventions, but so monstrously gifted he was getting away with it. So Gatting contented himself with giving Botham his head and the strike, which the latter was in any event so intent on keeping that once during this over, after scoring a two, he ran thirty yards past his stumps lest he be called for a third.

  Botham, his score 70 when Hans began a new over, made the second of his mistakes when he came down the pitch to the first ball and missed it. So did the wicketkeeper, Ved Raj, as it ‘went with the arm’ and shot past leg stump for four byes. Nothing daunted, Botham swung a four to square leg and half-mowed, half-carted the next ball for his fourth six, falling away to leg as he did so. It pitched around leg stump and kept going, first with the bowler’s arm, then with the bat. At this point Hans, as a Sikh, might have remembered that he carried a dagger with him to deal with just such an attack.

  And the fielders all this while? Faced with this hectic activity both on the field and the scoreboard (which was forced to confine itself to registering the tens and forgetting about the digits), they remained enthusiastic, if within certain limits. They did not dive after the ball because it is not the Indian custom to dive on hard bare outfields. But if retrieving the ball from the wire fence around the boundary was their primary function, this they did well.

  One fielder, however, made the elementary mistake of straying in a few yards from the boundary at long off when Sharma the captain tried his own occasional off breaks instead of Gopal Sharma’s. Botham sent the first ball like a tracer bullet to where long off should have been, only to land safely over the line for six more (safely for the fielder perhaps more so than for Botham). Sharma’s next rather stiff and portly off break was swung away to square leg, where two fielders stood politely back to allow each other the honour of catching it; four more. These two incidents apart, the Central Zone fielding was by no means as poor as it might have been under the assault. A cut for two and another single took Botham to 94.

  When Botham embarked upon the next over from Hans, the only unexpected feature of it was that he did not reach his century with a six. He certainly tried to by stepping inside a leg-stump ball in order to swing it over square leg, but it took the bottom edge and ran down to fine leg for a mere four. Botham 98, and the next ball was identical in both its delivery and dispatch. Botham therefore had reached his hundred off the forty-eighth delivery he had received. Only Robin Hobbs and Lance Cairns are known to have reached three figures off fewer deliveries in a first-class match: 45 in both cases. Two centuries by Gilbert Jessop may have been quicker still, but that is conjecture; and with early scorebooks lost the matter can never be verified.

  In terms of time Botham had taken 50 minutes. That put him into equal tenth place among the fastest century-makers (and at least two of those above him had not made their runs in serious circumstances). The drinks interval too had wasted several minutes for him.

  If there was any scope left for Botham to open out, he did so immediately on reaching his century. He drove the third ball of Hans’s over to long on for six, and heaved the fourth over square leg for another six, his seventh. Hans, shifting his line, pushed his fifth ball through on off stump but Botham stepped back, drove, and with a huge grin sliced it through the absent slips for four more. Twenty-four runs had come off the over so far; Botham might have made it 30, but tried instead to keep the strike by pushing a single on the off side. The ball, however, struck his pad, and the keeper was too quick for him to scuttle through for a leg bye. To this point, off the last seven overs, Botham had personally scored 103.

  Gatting meanwhile had done his supporting role immaculately by scoring three singles, to Botham’s 118 in all. Then he too hit Sharma the captain for a six over long on, prompting Botham to clap him, not in any way sarcastically. A single to Gatting left Botham with three more balls to face: another four, a miss, and finally a pull drive which sent the ball suitably far into the stratosphere before it descended into deep midwicket’s hands.

  As he walked off, the Nehru Stadium rose. Gatting led the applause of every player on the field. Suddenly, as Botham reached the edge of the playing area, a piece of orange peel landed and rolled towards him. But even that he scooped up and hit away with his bat, bang off the middle. And he was still wearing his sweater.

  Gatting afterwards rated it ‘a great, great innings’
and thought Botham would never surpass it because ‘in England the bowlers would be familiar with him, and anywhere else the fielders are going to be a bit keener’. Underwood, amazed, said that a bowler had to attack Botham’s stumps ‘but even when he mistimes the ball it could still go for six because he hits the thing so hard’. Willis however, whose sardonic exterior could not quite disguise admiration, felt that Botham could exceed even this effort. ‘The Megastar,’ he grunted, ‘he could do anything, within the next four or five years.’

  Nayudu was born in Nagpur on 31 October 1895, so he was already thirty-one by the time he had his first taste of any international cricket. At the age of fifty he made 200 in a first-class match. At the age of sixty-one he was asked to come out of retirement to assist Uttar Pradesh in a Ranji Trophy match against Rajasthan. The Rajasthan attack included Ramchand and Mankad, proven Test bowlers both; but Nayudu still agreed. The story is concluded by Raj Singh Dungapore, who captained Rajasthan in that match:

  The Old Man came in when his side had lost four cheap wickets and Vinoo Mankad was bowling. Now there had always been rivalry between them. It was Vinoo who had suggested to Phadkar that he bowl the bouncer which hit C. K. in the mouth. And in 1952 Mankad had been refused a tour guarantee by C. K., then chairman of selectors, which resulted in Mankad not being a member of the touring party to England.

  Vinoo’s first ball to the Old Man came in with the arm and had him absolutely plumb leg before, except that the umpire wouldn’t give him out. Second ball Vinoo was so furious he bowled a beamer which nearly took the Old Man’s head off and went for four byes. Third ball he pitched up and C. K. swung him away for six; Vinoo just stood there and glared, and the Old Man stood there too, his back ramrod straight as it was until the end of his life. Fourth ball C. K. again swung him away for six, another seven-iron shot. He made 84 that day before he was run out, after he had dropped his bat going for a third run.