That was cricket

When does one generally get started in a particular game or sport that gives a sense of joy and fulfillment?

Looking back to three scores and more of years in my life I wonder when I really got started in cricket. While yet at school, we played cricket with rubber balls and a two foot long wooden plank tapering at the top for bat. Three little sticks drawn from the nearest tree, at one end and one at the other made our stumps.

But the rules of the game were impeccable. The distance between the captain’s big toe and the small decided the space between our three stumps. The distance between the wickets was to be the 22 normal steps measured with religious seriousness by the captain that moment.

He also measured out a bat and half from the stumps on each end to mark the batting and bowling crease. The captain was privileged to perform all the pre-game rituals because he was big enough to be a big bully and rich enough to buy the ball and the plank of wood called bat.

The captain divided the available boys into 2 teams and the process of selection was strict .Each team should have at least 4 batsmen – boys who could hold the bat correctly and take a good looking stance and of course the ability to hit the ball with a straight bat, because a cross-batted shot would ‘break the bat ‘.

It is immaterial that few of us knew at that age what it is to play straight or across. A rule is a rule. When you don’t like someone you declare that he plays cross-batted shots and that was the ultimate cricketing insult.

The definition for a good bowler was very simple. One who could swing his arm around without a jerk and release the ball above the head level was a bowler. If it is done with some velocity then he was a great bowler. Usually there were at least a Lindwal and a Miller on one side and a Truman and a Statham on the other.

The no-ball rule was the same as the back foot-behind the bowling crease rule of those days. The ways to get a batsman out were the same as in standard cricket but an additional clause was needed to bring order in the field.

Generally we carried one ‘bat’ and the runner usually carried a 3 foot long stick in his hand in lieu of the ’ bat’. When a single was taken the two should exchange bats. For this they had to move out of the safety of the crease.

Then both should declare in an audible if not loud voice ‘B.C’ (the short-form for ‘Bat Change’. If either fails to follow this rule, they do so at the risk of losing their wicket ‘run-out’).

The game started (on all weekdays) only after all players (dear to the captain) are on the field. If it becomes known that one or more of the chosen ones should come late they shall notionally be included in a team. The less than mortals who dared to come late shall be consigned to the team fielding first with the stipulation that they should bat last, if the light didn’t fail, by then.

The game could start only by 5 pm everyday and there was hardly an hour of good light condition. As an insurance against some players not getting a chance to bat at all, a fair rule was in operation that a batsman in this crease for twelve balls or till he makes twenty runs whichever came earlier.

Some batsman could misuse the rule by playing out the full quota of twelve balls a sub-clause to the rule was made that if a batsman plays three consecutive defensive shots (balls left alone were also construed as balls played defensively) shall be declared out for time warning.

We made a thousand little laws that day outside the rule, but each new law added had some innocent logic behind it. Now looking back to the cricket we played some 60 or more years, we can only lovingly admire at the inventiveness of the child’s mind. Amid all the sick hurry of the game as it is played today, a mental transportation of the self to an age of innocent joy is blaming. I would say ‘That was Cricket’.

by M Rajagopalan
A self made wicketkeeper & opening bat, he was one of those early cricketers in South India who was paid for his bus fare and food to play in a far off town.

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Megha's last stand.

So it started off as just another day. I had just started my 2nd year at college. I was in my hostel room calculating whether it was worth showing up for classes that day or not. R suddenly came in and asked me to get ready for a cricket match.

"You mean go watch a match?" I asked.
"No, we gotta play" she said.

Apparently the Management-types (Them) and the Techies (Us) were playing a "friendly" match on Uni campus grounds. Yes, a match that was as friendly as an Ind-Pak match. The kind where if you lose, it is just a stupid match, and if you win then "there is nothing like a friendly match"...

"Hold on", I said, "I'm not so sure R...I...actually....I mean, I really haven't played any real cricket, like ever. And you know what, I am terribly short on attendance for D Ban's subject anyway, so..."

She ignored me, of course, and before I knew it, I was on my way to the ground.

The teams were mixed..2nd and 3rd year students, girls and guys. Since the match was being played on short notice, they were short on players. Which explains why R and me were asked to pitch in. I have never been the sporty kinds...par izzat ka sawaal tha and there was only one thing do.

So, on my way to the ground, I devised my game plan. I would be one of the close-in fielders. That way my throwing arm would not be tested and I would not be required to run around that much as well. For bowling, I would simply look the other way if I saw the captain looking around, trying to decide who should bowl next. Batting would be a bit trickier. My only hope there was that the other guys play so well that I should not be required to bat at all.

Now the actual match details are a little hazy. I don't know who top scored, who the best bowler was or what the target was. What I remember is this -

We fielded first.

I fielded at Silly Mid-On. I kid you not! (For those who don't know, Silly M(a)id-on is my blog)

I managed to fluff two catches, a close run-out chance and my fielding effort in general was a bit shoddy.
When required to bat, I lasted 4-5 balls, could put bat to ball just twice and scored 2 runs (I think).

Yeah, we lost. And I was never asked to play a match again!

by Megha

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10Ten – Nineteen Eighty Nine

Summer holidays came once a year, how disappointing (they still do I am told). The disappointment can’t be described in words, I always wanted a minimum of 2-3 summers an year. And obviously the summer holidays too. In fact those were days when I was upset with Jesus Christ, for he came back to life on a Sunday every year, on Easter. I wanted to ask him why he wouldn’t select a working day for that, for it would become a holiday for me.

And those were also the days when I used to think about cricket all the time, including my sleep. The days when “The Hindu” was read from the third back page on, when I played book cricket all the time when it wasn’t a break, played French cricket using a paper ball and the physics record notebook during those times the bell rang before 4.30p, then came the time I played cricket in my gully and then after the sun had set I talked about anything that is cricket. It could be international, Ranji, district level, schools, street level.

Those were the days when I insisted that my father bought me an SS Ton, a bat I had seen many international players carry (Symonds and Duncan Fearnley were the others seen frequently) to play the cork ball and rubber ball cricket versions. But whatever the versions, summer and 10Ten always have a special place in my heart.

That was when my younger cousin Deepak from Madras used to vacation with us. While as any other cricket crazy Madurai street my street was as mad about cricket, there still was a window when nobody played cricket in the whole town. At noon when the sun used to shine or rather blast out with vengeance, all the boys would disappear for their lunch at 12.30p before regrouping by 3p for the next game. These three and a half hours was when this spectacle called 10Ten used to happen.

Deepak used to stay at his maternal grandfather’s house which was opposite to my house. Outside the house was a narrow concrete ally which was approximately 5 feet in width and about 40 feet in length where there was a concrete fencing separating two houses. This became our cricket stadia during those three and a half hours.

We had a stone next to the gate of the house that would turn our stumps, and roughly 8-10 feet from it was a line on the floor which became the 2 line. For, any ball that crosses this line accounted for two runs. A further 4-5 feet away was another stone which marked the bowing crease, any ball that crossed it entitled three runs to the batting team and then came the fence that demarcated the boundary of the house. This became our boundary, the final frontier of the stadia. Any ball that went aerial route to hit the concrete wall was a six and one that rolls in a four and if it flew out (be it any direction outside the fence demarcating the alley) you are gone.

Now that we know some rules and the topography, let us see what a game of 10Ten actually is.

It is a one player versus another variation of cricket. As the name suggests one person bowls 10 overs to the other. Each chooses his favorite team and gets 10 wickets to bat. So the innings ended once those 10 wickets were out or if the 10 overs had been bowled. The other beauty of this form of cricket was that two teams played and not two people (as it would be), it could be international or local, one person would represent a team. Deepak invariably chose the Indians of 80s. So for him every time, Srikanth and Gavaskar opened his innings and Maninder Singh was his last man. Another amazing thing was that the batsmen used to change ends as it happens in cricket normally. For example if the ball crossed the 3 line the person batting had to spell out who would bat next. There used to be a fight most of the time Deepak crossed this line. For, most of the time Deepak tried to cheat me by getting a Lalchand Rajput out instead of a Kapil Dev, when Lalchand had just scored a three in the previous ball and it was Kapil who should have faced.

And this is an underarm variant of cricket.

Underarm was a misnomer those days (80s) in most parts of cricket playing India. For many, any ball that was thrown (overarm) was underarm. That was wrong, the pedigreed me reasoned with two clinching advantages to prove that the average cricket player of those days wrong. The first that I was an English professor’s son (so I exactly knew what underarm meant) and I also came from a Tambram family (to who statistics, cricket, Hindu paper, coffee and a centum in every mathematics test were mandatory to prove their parentage). So I (rather we, me and Deepak knew what underarm was, and then we also had Tevor and Greg Chappell to thank for letting the world see what underarm actually meant) knew very well that a ball is underarm only as long as the bowling hand doesn’t get up above the bowlers hip. And this form of bowling formed the base for the 10Ten games.

Those days I used to always think out of the box, for those were the days when I didn’t know there existed a box. I always preferred Andhra Pradesh as my team. The reality was that they were one of the weakest Ranji trophy teams those days, who always used to fight with Goa tooth and nail to determine who the worst team was in the south zone. But what caught my fancy was their captains name, it was V Chamundeshwaranath. I don’t know why, he used to be my favorite Indian cricketer and Andhra used to my favorite team and therefore they played against Deepak’s mighty Indians in every single 10Ten match we played.

2 out of 5 times Andhra won against the mighty Indians of Deepak. Of the other three, one match definitely ended when Deepak took the ball away and walked out of the match because I had got either his Azharuddin or a Vengsarkar out and he wouldn't accept that.

My Andhra line-up used to be something like this…

Vinod Kumar and Prasanna used to open, Rehman followed them. Then you had Kamaraju who preceded Chamundeshwaranath the captain. Then came Murthy and Ravi Kumar and Krishna Mohan, who used to be their wicket keeper in the previous season. This season, if I am not wrong (now!!) Prasanna was their wicket keeper. Their last man was Chakradar Rao who if my memory hasn’t failed me was a left handed spinner who was to be told before every time he ventured out to bat, how to hold a bat. I prided the moment when Chakradar scored some useful runs and won matches for me against the mighty Indians of Deepak. I would never forget a particular over which an over when a confident Deepak made Gavaskar bowl to Chakradar and Chakra like a true man responded with a four, a three and two in four balls to win the match for Andhra Pradesh.

Memories that would be for life time, those days. I wish I and Deepak could travel back in time or at least we travel back to Madurai, to that same place and had a rematch. With our kids and folks in full audience.

As Brian Adams used to sing when I was 17*, “Those were the best days of my life”.

* I have graduated henceforth to other (good) music

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An 'unmentionable' story.

Image via Wikipedia by Ottayan

Have you ever been hit on the unmentionables?

Any self- respecting cricketer would have at least one story to recount. However, my favourite story does not involve me, but a friend who invariably wore a lungi while playing and had the gumption to ignore our pleas to wear trousers.

So here is the story of how my 'lungi' friend learnt a lesson.

That day due to strained financial circumstances we were playing with a totally bald tennis ball. BTW, there was also a light drizzle which invariably made a bald tennis ball heavy. As you all know an experienced chucker can make a wet tennis ball talk. We decided that it was the right sort day to teach our 'lungi' friend the ill- effects of wearing it.

Therefore, when it was the turn of our lungi friend to bat we brought on a bowler who specialised in bowling off-breaks. Not only did his off-spinners turn it also had an unerring capacity to find the batsman's thigh.

The conditions were just right for some cherry picking.

As luck would have it, the very first ball cut back sharply, caught the inside edge and somehow found its way inside the lungi.

You can easily imagine the mayhem it caused. The 'lungi' player lay writhing on the ground and despite our best efforts we had a tough time separating the 'man' from the tennis ball.

Needless to add he learnt his lesson.

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Match fixing in book cricket

By Scorpicity

After VM's take on paper ball cricket and Ankit's guidelines on gully cricket, I decided to let out the last version of cricket which I played, thus completing all the nostalgic action on cricket from my childhood days.

Ta.da... Presenting the unassailable book cricket!

It all goes back to my childhood studying in the 6th grade where boring math classes forced us to indulge in our favourite pastime. Our math teacher was a good teacher, however she was very fast in her didactical progress and therefore I often got lost to a point where I gave up listening to her. She assumed that since the brighter lads had it figured out, the rest of the class also did. My maths teacher could have been a great cricket player for one valid reason. She could wield the cane with deft precision and power. There are many teachers who often miss with the extended hands (ball) of some students being whisked away on time anticipating the pain but oh no, not this one! Her backlift could put Brian Lara to shame and when it came crashing down, there was never a miss nor an edge... sweetly timed onto the meat of your palm.... reverse swing, inswing, whichever damm way someone tries to move his hand (ball) away, she always watched it like a hawk.

So now that leaves us with the thickest textbook available at that point in school... the dreaded maths book. I don't think there is any need to explain book cricket in detail. In short, it worked on probability and the player has to randomly open the pages of the book. The last digit of the page numbers were considered the scoring runs with numbers like 5, 7.8 and 9 being 'no runs' and with 0 being the dreaded ball where you are out. This game was a rage in school and the first corrupt seeds of match fixing prevailed on me at an early age, where soon I became the undisputed champion of book cricket.

How I fixed it was simple... after the first 50 odd pages, I tore away all the pages with 0 in it and that gave me the leverage of playing extremely well because of the knowledge of the conditions. It got my classmates pissed off because they could never figure out how I kept winning all the time and they never would have imagined anyone tearing off key pages of a textbook! So I lived to become a book cricket legend!

Phew... now that's a whole lot out of my chest!

I never got caught playing this game during the maths class and I closest I got was when one day while she was correcting the submitted homeworks, she caught me rapidly opening my math text book and scribbling something on my notebook. So she came to be and said

Teacher: “What do you think you are doing”

Me: (no response) (gulp!)

She examines my notebook and see it filled with different scores, numbers all over.

Teacher: Are you taking a random problem from your book and solving it? Rapid maths practice?

Me: yes ma'am.

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Happy Teachers' Day - Lessons from gully cricket!

By Ankit Poddar

As kids, perhaps, we had all dreamt of being a cricketer - and that led to my introduction and affection for gully cricket.

And there has been no better teacher than gully cricket.

Lesson 1 - There is no better way to fight a bunch of egoistic and arrogant kids than to hit some quick runs against them and help your team win.

Lesson 2 - There is nothing more strategic than making a not-so-good bowler bowl against "their" best batsman, and the look on his face after the six he hits, then a four and then clean-bowled.

Lesson 3 - and the most important at that - There is no sport that teaches you taking defeat so sportingly than gully cricket, because, in gully cricket, you always know, tomorrow will see the start of a new match.

And there are some more, but then i am not sure, if everyone has gone through the same brand of gully cricket as I have.

I thought this is the best place to share my views on gully cricket, come forward and reply with what your teacher taught you.

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Cricketing Inventions and Lessons from a Bored Afternoon

by VM

I never thought that an odd invention from a bored summer afternoon would occupy my childhood fancies so much. What could possibly happen when it’s so scorching hot that you aren’t allowed outside, you don’t have a proper bat, and less than three people available for a team game? Stick-cricket happened.

As the name suggests, it’s a modified form of the game we love, only with rules tweaked to make a game out of the several restrictions that I describe. It’s mostly played with only two people using a stick – often curtain rod - and a harmless plastic ball or occasionally mock-tennis ball to minimize any damage to our surroundings. A box or shelf doubled up for stumps and a line drawn with chalk delineated the batting-crease. There was no wicket keeper, unless we could afford a third player, and no fielders, well, actually there was one fielder: the bowler. There was no umpire either, the batsmen would have to “walk”, in this case to the bowling crease, to bowl to the person who he has just faced as bowler. Honesty was necessary and inevitable, for anything contrary would mean returning either to the books or the boring TV. No “in-the-air” shots were allowed, for that could cause damage at home and invoke the ire of the folk at home. The rules were thus set up.

So how does the batsman score? Well, the bowler would run up for a few steps and bowl to the only other player: the batsman. The batsman could then hit it some distance and run to the other end, quick enough to reach there before the bowler could pick up and throw to the end the batsman is running at. Hitting the end from which the batsmen is running from would not constitute a run out! So the game goes on like this.

If you’re thinking that it’s a boring game, you may not be too far from the truth, though it must be said that it kept me occupied and saved me some very boring afternoons. But more that anything, playing this game was in many ways the moment of truth for the cricket fan in me. It taught me how hard it can be to hit the ball for single, without dragging it on to my makeshift stump, how valuable the reverse sweep could be, and what talent it takes to hit a four. I must add that we did get better at scoring, but only with a lot of practice and meanwhile learned the art of patience. Most importantly, it turned me from a jingoistic cricket fan to an appreciative fan who would attempt notice the details, and most importantly realize that it is after all a game and not war, as was often portrayed by the newspapers then. Maybe this is why I like Test cricket more and than any other form. Perhaps this is also why most of favorite batsmen are the more patient like Dravid, Kallis and Chanderpaul.

Do you have a cricket-based invention from childhood or a cricket-watching moment of truth? There’s no better place than here to share.

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Little games people play.

by Naked Cricket

It’s bad enough they’re still playing one day games. It’s bad enough we’re still watching.

But once you’re sucked into a hundred over where-did-my-day go game?, you want 100 overs approx. Not some filthy approximation of a pro 40 game’s single innings.
England vs. South Africa, 2nd ODI, Trent Bridge, lasted 37.1 overs. Playing time: 177 minutes. That's less than a modest Hindi film.

Naturally, this result will be blamed on harmless, little T20 games. The price you have to pay, for being small. Fry in hell.

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