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Sunday Snippets
By Venkatesh Raghavan*
As I go down memory lane with Indian cricket, I recall that for the most part of the seventies, till 1978, Indian bowling department was dominated by the spin quartet. It comprised Bishen Singh Bedi, Bhagwat Chandrashekhar, Erapalli Prasanna and Srinivas Venkataraghavan. The last two were off spinners and mostly they had to take turns in appearing for the test side. Interestingly, all four spinners played together only in one Test.
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If the dominant spinner era had its advantages on tracks like Madras (now Chennai) and Calcutta (now Kolkata), it also had the disadvantage of a brittle batting side with little depth to back the bowlers with a good total. This was the era of test cricket which George Bernard Shaw early on had quipped, “The English were never a spiritual people and so they invented cricket to give themselves an idea of eternity”
There were two aspects that deserve to be highlighted when talking about the spin quartet. Firstly, they needed a track that will assist spin bowling. Secondly, they had to rely on medium or slow medium bowlers like Abid Ali or Eknath Solkar to take the sheen off the ball for the first 10 overs or so. Let’s observe the pattern from 1971. India won two overseas test series, one in West Indies and the other in England by a 1-0 margin in each. Ajit Wadekar was the captain in both these outings. Bhagwat Chandrashekhar had succeeded in appointing terror over the opponent’s batting camp and in the absence of television broadcast, people were glued to their radios in anticipation when it was Chandra’s turn to bowl. In 1972 we played a home series against England. England won the first test match played at Feroz Shah Kotla stadium, New Delhi. Our spinners helped us win the matches in Calcutta and Madras. The matches at Kanpur and Bombay were tame draws. This series again was under the stewardship of Ajit Wadekar.
Wadekar was later chosen to captain the team for a three-test series in England in which the Indian team was exposed to its weakness in the pace department as none of the wickets assisted spin and the English seamers were very good at restricting our batters. We lost the series 3-0 and India also registered its lowest score in Test cricket, 42 at Lords.
Next in line, was a home series with the mighty West Indies. It was a five-Test series and this again demonstrated our weakness in the pace department. We lost the first two matches in Bangalore and Delhi. Subsequently, playing on spinning tracks, we won the matches at Madras and Calcutta. The final Test match at Bombay was fixed to be a six-day match as Bombay was known to be a batsman-friendly dead track. We lost it on the sixth day.
This trend of performing well on spinner-friendly away and home tracks continued till 1978, when the Haryana hurricane Kapil Dev arrived on the Test scenario. Kapil first caught the attention of the captive Indian Test audience when he hit the Pakistani pacers for sixes over the ropes. Within weeks Kapil had become a household name in the cricket crazy country. The spin department made its exit and Kapil was assisted by another all rounder Karsan Ghavri who could bowl both pace as well as left arm spin in addition to contributing with the bat. That could be called the beginning of a new era. We will catch up on that next Sunday.
*The writer is a Mumbai-based journalist, novelist and satirist. He is the author of bestseller thriller, Operation Drug Mafia (Times Group Books).
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