ESPNcricinfo writer wins KN Prabhu award

ESPNcricinfo's Nagraj Gollapudi has won the KN Prabhu award for cricket writing for his story on what it takes to produce a cricket match for television. Gollapudi watched the 2011 World Cup final at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai from the control room to write the piece.

Anand Vasu (for Sports Illustrated) and Vaibhav Pawar (for Mumbai Mirror) were joint-second - Anand, now with Wisden India, got it for his interview with Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman; Pawar for his IPL 2011 story about Rajasthan Royals captain Shane Warne's practice of handing a doll to a team-mate who had performed poorly.

The award, instituted by the Mumbai Press Club, drew over 70 entries from across India. The three-member jury comprised former India batsman Sanjay Manjrekar, sports journalist Ayaz Memon and ESPNcricinfo's editor Sambit Bal. Bal abstained when Gollapudi's article came up for discussion and for voting.

Memon said the jury's task wasn't easy because the award was not divided into categories. "For instance, news stories competed with features, interviews, et al. In assessing the entries, the jury members agreed to prioritise choice of subject, journalistic skills (like fact-finding, attribution etc) as well as quality of writing. The winning entry, all things considered, fit this best."

Gollapudi said the idea for the story occurred to him while reading Robert Winder's Hell for Leather, a travel-cricket book on the 1996 World Cup. "Winder had painted a vivid picture of the climactic moments of the final which Sri Lanka won, and of Tony Greig sitting in the commentator's box somewhere in the bunker of the TV control room," Gollapudi said. "It sparked off an idea of the world of the TV control room, an unknown zone for the viewers. And I thought the best time to do the story would be the final of the 2011 World Cup.

"I climbed down to the basement on the media centre end of the Wankhede Stadium where Deepak Gupta, the director and chief narrator, sat in a crowded, windowless room, the walls of which had been covered by flat-screen TVs of various sizes, and the floor was a jungle of wires. For the next eight hours Gupta was like an expert choreographer, dictating the sequence of shots being fed from each of the 15 manned cameras and a few other remote ones. It was magic, but without any trickery."