Tales from 22 yards

A chance encounter with yesteryear great Salim Durrani in 2008 set S Giridhar, Registrar and COO at Azim Premji University in Bangalore, on the path to cricket writing. Durrani was both surprised and flattered at being recognised and generously spent time talking to Giridhar about anecdotes from the past to the present state of the game. Though Giridhar has been writing on education and social change for more than a decade, writing on cricket was a new challenge.

Giridhar and his co-author VJ Raghunath, a consultant with the Azim Premji Foundation, after publishing their first article in ESPN Cricinfo with the help of Harsha Bhogle were well and truly bitten by the writing bug.

In a free-wheeling chat with Business Line before the launch of their book – Mid-Wicket Tales: From Trumper to Tendulkar (Sage Publications 2014) -- the authors spoke about their love and passion for the game and wanting to write about it in a new and novel manner. Raghunath played first class cricket in Bombay and Madras in the sixties and seventies where he rubbed shoulders with many yesteryear greats and narrowly missed out playing Ranji Trophy. Giridhar has played the game at a lower level but with no less passion.

The authors wanted to bring in a lot more depth and analysis into cricket writing. The book, a collection of articles, is an interesting mix of anecdotes, analysis and number crunching, says Raghunath. It covers a wide range of topics and characters – from captaincy, leg-spin, off spin, leg before wicket and the Fab Four line up of Tendulkar, Dravid, Laxman and Ganguly.

Raghunath says that casual conversations about cricket with co-author Giridhar emerged into articles. For instance, Raghunath once remarked that a lot more batsmen are being given out LBW now than in the past. That sent Giridhar hunting for data and crunching the numbers to see whether the hypothesis stood statistical validity. This approach to cricket writing, the authors feel, has not been attempted before.

Of course Giridhar admits that the availability of a plethora of cricket statistics on the Internet had made their job easy, which 15-20 years ago would have been very difficult. It took a painstaking amount of number crunching for the authors to conclude that Herbert ‘Ranji’ Hordern of Australia, who played just seven tests in 1911-12, was the finest leg-spinner ever!

But Giridhar says that it is important for the love and passion of the game to shine through as mere statistical analysis would have made the articles very dry and boring. The fact the one can go on talking about a catch one took in his twenties at an inconsequential office match for the next 40 years shows the ‘sillyness’ of the game, says Giridhar. But it is from this ‘sillyness’ that the love of the game emerges, he adds.

The authors have consciously avoided idolising the players but have a frank admiration of their skills and ability. Raghunath has a huge collection of cricket books which Giridhar lapped up voraciously and this helped the writers bring in some very interesting nuggets about the game.

The articles in the book which tell a story are very close to the authors’ hearts. The nobility and sportsmen spirit of the game are clearly important for the authors. Through this book, the authors also want the younger generation of cricket lovers, weaned on IPL, to appreciate the nuances and the finer aspects of test cricket.

The fact that the authors were avid bloggers also helped them put this book together, which Giridhar calls was the ‘luck’ element. The comments offered by readers of their blogs also played an important role.

Giridhar is generous in his praise for his publishers – Sage – who had come to his university to discuss about a book on economics with a professor. It was during that discussion that Giridhar, rather sheepishly, said that he also had a book in mind but it was about cricket. Much to his surprise Sage, which usually publishes academic books, was keen on bringing out his book.

The authors sign off by saying that they have great faith in the survival of test cricket, the true test of a cricketer’s skills and temperament, given how the oldest format of the game has adapted and learned from the shorter versions of it.

COMMENT NOW