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SPORTS: CRICKET
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ZAHEER
KHAN 22 Srirampur
Bowled with a tennis ball till the age
of 17
 When
left-arm paceman Zaheer Khan runs in for India, it's easy to forget
that five years ago he lived in a town deep in the Maharashtra heartland,
had never bowled with a leather ball and wanted to study instrumentation
engineering. But cricket always came first. "I would watch
matches on TV and always wanted to play for India." A fortuitous
meeting with coach Sudhir Naik in Mumbai and Zaheer's photographer
father had committed a year of his son's life to cricket. A completely
unpolished but gifted bowler, Zaheer learnt fast bowling in stages,
first with the old ball, then came the new and only after he had
some control was he given the ball used by first-class players.
Baroda signed him up, the MRF Pace Foundation polished his skills
some more. And then one day in Nairobi, Saurav Ganguly tossed the
ball over and asked him to open the bowling for India.
"I always
wanted to play for India."
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In the smaller towns,
says Harbhajan, "there are no distractions like money or glamour
as in the cities". Coaches like Sandhu and Naik say that the talent
pool in the heart of cities, equally attracted to the computer and the
television screen, cannot quite keep up with the intensity that the players
from smaller towns bring with them.
Andhra's first Test player M.S.K. Prasad, born
to a chemist's family in Guntur, believes only when grit and skill weigh
in equally can a cricketer from a background with no formal system of
coaching or organised facilities aspire for the highest level. While skill
helps the cricketer climb the ladder, grit helps him keep his balance
in a new world where social rules assault his shyness and inhibitions.
Some worry about their lack of fluency in English.
Others, like a group in the first batch of the NCA last year, have to
deal with advice on how to eat with forks and knives and to use toilet
paper. But these are survivors who quickly pick up everything that helps
them stay competitive, so what if they mix regional accents with a global
slang. Harvinder, whose roots are in rural Punjab, had a bewildering first
stint at the MRF Pace Foundation a few years ago, when Dennis Lillee's
bowling tips were lost in an incomprehensible stream of English-with an
Aussie accent. Harbhajan has done his sums about the value of vocabulary
and says with a flourish, "Now I let my cricket speak for itself."
When he works on his batting at his home ground now, he dangles a little
carrot before the net bowlers-get him out and he will give you the shirt
off his back. They cannot stop coming at him with everything.
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HARVINDER SINGH 23 Chheharta
Paceman did 2,00o sit-ups a day to get
tough
Harvinder Singh's hometown belongs
to a slice of Punjab countryside both famous for producing Dara
Singh and Asian Games medallist Praveen Kumar and once notorious
for supplying local youth to terrorists. A junior at national handball,
when Harvinder was chosen for under-16 district cricket, he was
grateful: "I thought Amritsar's cricket ground was meant only
for rich players." A fitness freak who once did 2,000 sit-ups
a day, he has modified an Australian fitness regime to get stronger.
Wickets for Punjab took him to a national camp in Bangalore in 1996.
"When Sachin Tendulkar sat next to me in the bus, I was so
nervous and speechless." And then surprised to discover that
in hotels where the Indian team stayed dal makhni could actually
cost Rs 350!
"I sat speechless
next to Sachin."
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The knock-on effect of small-town success is
a powerful thing: Das knows that in his case it sparked off a revolution
in his mind. When Debashis Mohanty became the first cricketer from Orissa
to play for India, a "mental barrier was broken". Says Das:
"He made us believe that if we were good we could also be playing
for India." When Orissa reeled under a cyclone, Mohanty put out the
word that he was organising a benefit match for a relief fund and was
overwhelmed by the response. The two Oriyas are already Indian cricket's
mavericks. Sujit Mukherjee, ex-Ranji player and author of Autobiography
of the Unknown Indian Cricketer, believes Mohanty and Das have "disproved
every theory about small town players". Players from weak states
have always left home and switched loyalties to further their cricket
and their livelihoods. But not these two. Das captains Orissa and Mohanty
still steams in for his state. Last season, the two engineered an amazing
maiden victory over the zonal big boy Bengal, a side which included Saurav
Ganguly. Not only did Orissa go on to win the East Zone Ranji league for
the first time, it also managed to reach the semi-finals of the national
championships.
The more enlightened coaches today know that
cricket's growing democracy can do for the Indian game what the discovery
of oil did for the Gulf. They are moving into the oilfields at a greater
speed than ever before. The first floor of Jagannath's house is always
reserved for what he charmingly calls "mofussil players". Sandhu
held a week-long seminar for 60 coaches from Maharashtra districts last
winter with lectures not only on technique but fitness, sports medicine
and mental preparation. Last season, the Cricket Association of Bengal
sent out 20 senior coaches to the Bengal hinterland to hold clinics and
spot talent. Raju Mukherjee, a former Ranji player from Bengal who now
coaches juniors in Kolkata, says, "Don't wait for the child to come
to you-you go to the child."
The children from anonymous villages and towns
will still keep coming. Jagannath reckons that today more than 60 per
cent of Karnataka's junior players are from the districts. There are a
couple of fast bowlers from Kerala, a state which has never produced a
national player, now training at the MRF Pace Academy in Chennai. Ranji
Trophy finalist Railways off-spinner Kulamani Parida is the son of an
Orissa fisherman and is, it is said, an old hand with nets of both kinds.
Every day, Bakhtiyar Khan of Srirampur gets letters from as far away as
Assam, with parents asking for addresses and advice on how to make India
players out of their sons. Boys land up at "Viru Bhaiya's" door
in Najafgarh asking him to recommend their names to coaches of the lush,
promise-laden grounds in the capital.
This is a young India pushing its way through
barriers of class, culture and convention, aspiring for distinction and
singularity, ready to eat rusted nails and walk on water if asked to.
Its latest leader Harbhajan Singh belongs to a community of hard-working
artisans called the Ramgarhias, about whom there is a joke: show a Ramgarhia
a spare part of a Mercedes-Benz and he can chisel out the same on his
lathe.
Show this new generation of Indian cricketers
a glimpse of what they can be and they will carve out their destinies
from the stuff of their dreams.
--With Ruben Banerjee, Subhash Mishra and
Amarnath K. Menon
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