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SPORTS: CRICKET
Small Town, Big Strides
The emergence of talent from outside cricket's traditional
strongholds reflects hinterland grit as much as the pan-Indian character
of the game
By Sharda Ugra and Ramesh Vinayak
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S.S. DAS: 22 Bhubaneswar
The promising opener's home state has only
one turf wicket
India's
newest opener learnt how to bat on the wicket in this picture. Das'
home club, Pragati Cricket Club, boasts a battered matting wicket
and a bumpy outfield. Orissa has just one turf wicket, 25 km away
in Cuttack, where practice is allowed only before tournaments, which
are few and far between. But the retired schoolmaster's son chooses
to count his blessings. "The high and uneven bounce of this
pitch has made me a better player off the backfoot." Backfoot
play is the opener's stock-in-trade and Das plies it with great
confidence for India.
"This
wicket has made me a better player."
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If you pay close attention to directions it is
easy to find Srirampur. It is 90 km from Ahmadnagar, 30 km from Shirdi
and about 60 km from Aurangabad in Maharashtra. Or maybe that's 60 km
from Ahmadnagar, 30 km from ... Anyhow, it is one of those towns that
flash past the mainstream in a blur, names in train timetables, dots on
a map, places with faded pasts and hardly a handle on the future. City
slickers call them the boondocks, the hick towns, and use them as settings
for witty post-colonial Indo-Anglian novels.
One bunch of hillbillies has had enough and is
not standing around waiting to be laughed at. This lot plays cricket for
India. When you can cut Glenn McGrath like an offending, overgrown branch
and make Mark Waugh look like he's got feet of lead, no one, from sophisticate
to street urchin, sneers. They make idols out of you instead and sometimes
even pray to them. The roll call of Indian cricketers now no longer echoes
only in the metros or the other traditional centres of Indian cricket
like Baroda or Hyderabad. More than half a dozen players in the running
for spots on the forthcoming tours to Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka and South Africa
come from towns way off the Indian cricket landscape, including Srirampur.
What is its claim to fame? That's old stomping ground to left-arm strike
bowler Zaheer Khan. Srirampur has a couple of colleges, but no proper
cricket ground. Bhubaneswar, the Mecca of Odissi dance rather than opening
batsmanship, has, like a gift from a kindly God, produced an old-style
frontman in Shiv Sunder Das. Najafgarh, on the fringes of Delhi where
life revolves around flour mills and seed production for the villages
that skirt it, is home to allrounder Virender Sehwag. That's the guy who
a month ago won a man-of-the-match award in a one-day international against
the Australians-with a broken thumb. And then there's Jalandhar in Punjab's
industrial heartland, where hundreds flooded the station to welcome back
Harbhajan "Turbanator" Singh when he had finished off the wizards
of Oz.
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HARBHAJAN SINGH 20
Jalandhar
The turbanator rolled pitches before
rolling his arm over
His rise
to the big league may seem meteoric. But the off-spinner has paid
heavy dues. Coach Devinder Arora remembers Harbhajan Singh bowling
on the roof of his home and wearing out the ball in two hours. A
reluctant schoolboy, Harbhajan would cycle off to the cricket ground
three times a day, help his mates push the roller up and down the
wicket, put up the nets and begin to bowl. He says, "I knew
only cricket could help me achieve something in life." A prodigy
who preferred to practise with seniors, Harbhajan said he learnt
early to watch a batsman's footwork rather than his face. He spent
two nights in a gurdwara in Patiala when called for selection trials,
and days at an academy in Chandigarh where, homesick, he would "cry
over trivial things". But his bowling-whether to the West Indian
tourists or Sachin Tendulkar in the nets in 1996-was marked out
as extraordinary. "It was the first time I felt that getting
to the Indian team was within reach," he says. "I learnt
very early that cricket is a game of the mind."
"I knew
only cricket could help me."
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In the past too, some cricketers have grown from
unfashionable roots and were often sneered at for their "lack of
cricket culture". But never before in the history of Indian cricket
have so many from these new territories grown to maturity all at the same
time. "I've seen cricket grow, seen it spreading in the past 10 years.
These are the boys who prove that," says Balvinder Singh Sandhu,
head coach at the National Cricket Academy (NCA) in Bangalore. In the
1980s, hardly anyone in World Cup winner Sandhu's village in Punjab played
the game. Today, he finds children using thick wooden laundry sticks as
bats. It is an image that tells the remarkable story of cricket's journey
from a sport of colonial heritage and princely patronage to emerge not
just as a powerful market force but as a pan-Indian phenomenon that has
swept away all the old rules and swept up humdrum hamlet and remote district
towns in its undertow.
Love it or loathe it, satellite television has
been a caravan of this transformation, its virtual footprints reaching
distant doorsteps in one long stride. Now you don't need to go to a city
to watch the Australians steal singles, the South Africans pluck catches
out of thin air and Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis bowl reverse swing: at
the click of your TV switch, they'll come to you-close-up, in super-slow
motion, with bars charts, graphs and diagrams and, the icing on the cake,
an army of teachers. Former Test players on commentary panels give impromptu
show-and-tell classes in field positions, foot work and the basics of
the modern game. To the young student many miles away from the action
and equally removed from a half-decent coach, cricket television was not
only razzed-up entertainment but an education.
When Harvinder Singh decided to take up pace
bowling, Younis was his first coach-through the television. Harvinder
would imitate the Pakistani player's run-up and action in front of a full-length
mirror and then replicate it on the field. Dilip Vengsarkar runs an academy
in Mumbai which draws most of its trainees from the northern suburbs.
They arrive-age 10 and above-armed with raw talent and loads of technical
questions stemming from television shows like Boycs' and Sunny's Master
Class.
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