Names On a Scorecard

Indian cricket took a quantum leap with the advent of the Indian Premier League in 2008 which transformed almost every dimension of an Indian cricket fan’s relationship with the game. Among the many well-documented changes that resulted from its arrival on the scene, one of the most positive was the elevation of fringe cricketers to the mainstream. The likes of Swapnil Asnodkar, Rajat Bhatia, Manoj Tiwary who were toiling away in domestic cricket for years were as visible as a Zaheer Khan or Sourav Ganguly for those two months of the Indian Premier League, and in some cases, as well paid. Although domestic cricket continues to be played across the country in front of empty stands even now, lives of a lot of domestic cricketers did change courtesy the Lalit Modi brainchild. 

Another fairly unimportant fallout of the league was to affect me personally. In this piece, I want to talk about that - the change in the relationship I shared with the stars of domestic cricket before the IPL turned them into household names. For me, before that summer of 2008, they were just names on a scorecard.

The cricket bug had bitten me quite early in my life. But as grand as my love for the game was, my means to access it were equally frugal. Beyond a portable Black and White television that only had Doordarshan playing on it, the only other source of cricket news for me till much later in my life was the sports page of the newspaper. Before getting ready for school, I would scan through the sports page while sipping milk early in the morning. Anything related to Indian cricket as well as international matches was read then and there. After returning from school, I used to read the parts of the same sports page which I had left earlier in the day. This, often done while having lunch, consisted of reading reports and scorecards domestic cricket.

The coverage of domestic cricket always used to be minimal, something that sadly hasn’t changed much over the years. Full-fledged match reports were a rarity and if there was a match report, then it meant that a major Indian team star was involved in the match. That in turn meant that much of the report revolved around his performance. And since there were no reports, there were also no pictures from the matches that would generally accompany match reports from matches played by the national team. On most occasions, there was nothing more than brief scores of the multiple matches that would be going on in the Ranji season. The brief scores were so brief that only the top scorer and the top wicket-taker of the day would find a mention. Not only that, but the brief scores were also of matches that involved some of the domestic heavyweights like Mumbai or Karnataka. And that’s why with no pictures and no reportage about their exploits, these cricketers would remain for that cricket-obsessed kid mere names on the scorecard.

That, however, didn’t deter me from developing my own unique relationship with those names. The reason I used to read those scores religiously at one point was because of my curiosity to know how those players who recently got dropped from the national side were performing. My cricket watching journey had begun in 1999 and within a year, the composition of the team changed a great deal under Sourav Ganguly’s leadership. Several regulars from the team that I had begun cheering for got sidelined and several youngsters were blooded in

Since the likes of Sunil Joshi and Vijay Bharadwaj were prolific performers for their Ranji teams even after they got sidelined from the national side, their names would often be found in those truncated scorecards during the Ranji season. Seeing their names crop up under brief scores section piqued my curiosity and I would then begin to somewhere root for them to make a comeback.

While these were the names that got me to reading those scorecards, I also began to notice another set of names who hadn’t played for India till then but would keep turning in performances that would get them a mention in the newspapers. This gave me another set of players to secretly root for and one more reason to read the scorecards of domestic games seriously.

The likes of Mithun Manhas, Amit Bhandari, Subramaniam Badrinath began to emerge as some of the names I would look for in the scorecards and would feel a slight disappointment when I wouldn’t find them since it meant that they weren’t’ the top performers in those matches. Looking back, despite being purely innocent, it was also strange how I developed a connection with cricketers whose bowling actions or batting styles I had never seen. It was only when I began to buy Sportstar every month that I saw how a Subramaniam Badrinath or a Ranadeb Bose looked, whose feats I had been cheering for quite some time by then. And still, I didn’t have any idea how did so many of those other names I had been reading about looked like.

Then there were names that remained stuck in my head merely because of the way they were – quirky for a young teenager. There was Uttar Pradesh’s Ashish Winston Zaidi, who, I’d later come to know was nicknamed ‘Amar Akbar Anthony’ for his amazingly secular sounding name. Barrington Rowland seemed like a bit of Cricket’s Tom Alter. There was also Mumbai’s Wilkin Mota whose surname would make me chuckle. Another such name was Yere Goud, a Railways stalwart who always seemed to score runs. Even today, I don’t know how do all these men look like. But the quirkiness of their names made me look for them in the newspapers.

But my favorite was a certain ‘I Pathan’ who seemed to take a lot of wickets despite being at two places at the same time! At least, that’s what I used to think for a while. Let me tell you what happened. The curly-haired broad-shouldered youngster named Irfan Pathan had already made a name for himself quite early in his career by 2004. Sometime after that, I remember reading I Pathan’s name for Baroda on a scorecard at a time when he was playing for team India. I couldn’t understand. I thought it was a typing error on the part of the newspaper. It was later that I realized that two Irfan Pathans played for Baroda. It didn’t help my confusion then that the other man in question and the source of my confusion, Irfan Saifi Pathan, was also a left-arm pacer who opened the bowling for Baroda, often with the more famous Irfan Pathan.

Seeing these ‘names on the scorecard’ make the team India squad felt good for some reason, partly because I knew their run-scoring/wicket taking feats that got them here and partly because I knew. Yeah, for someone who watched a lot of cricket with his father who would tell how a Sachin played a blinder at Sharjah and how Sourav helped India overcome Pakistan in Dhaka, it was nice to have some information that he didn’t have about a new incoming player. I remember my father being bemused at how Dinesh Mongia kept making comebacks to the Indian team despite a disappointing 2003 World Cup. I took the opportunity to tell him about his brilliant run with the Punjab team that made it difficult for the selectors to ignore him.

What those tiny scorecards did was that with so little information in them, they left a lot of space for imaginations to run wild. I would often cook up match scenarios in my head based on the few variables made available through those scorecards. In hindsight, I feel it was to us in the 2000s what radio commentary was to those growing up in the 1960s and 70s.

Much changed with the Indian Premier League where I was finally cheering for some of these names while watching them play. Remember, the first season of the jamboree that I could watch on my TV screen was in 2009 when finally we bid Doordarshan adieu from our lives. Finally, I knew how Ashoke Dinda looked like when running in to bowl and how a Shikhar Dhawan looked like batting.

For once, for me, they had become more than just names on a scorecard.