February-April, 1971: Sardesai's spring

The death of Dilip Sardesai reminds us how thin and star-struck Indian cricket writing is. A dense archive of cricket writing will have its share of heroic biography but it will also document collective achievement and failure and, in doing so, will describe (and commemorate) the times when good players, who weren't stars, rose above themselves to help turn a contest. These turning points in Indian cricket's history often hinged on the performances of players whose career statistics weren't stellar, but whose talent and will flared briefly but fiercely enough to win us landmark victories.

Dilip Sardesai hit five centuries in his Test career. Luckily for Indian cricket three of these came in one series at the fag end of his Test career, when Wadekar's men toured the West Indies in 1971. He hit a double century and two centuries: the double century set the tone for the series by forcing the West Indies to follow on in the first Test and then his century in the second Test at Port of Spain, Trinidad, helped India win the match and the series. Sardesai had a series aggregate of 642, an Indian record, breaking Vijay Manjrekar's earlier mark of 586 runs. It was a golden year for him because he went on to play an important supporting role in the victory at the Oval where Chandrasekhar bowled India to another unprecedented 1-0 away series win against England.

So he hit big centuries at the right times, broke records, played the critical part in winning an away series against the West Indies, hit a crucial fifty and forty in a low scoring match to help seal another Test rubber and basked forever more in the love of a grateful, win-starved nation. Wrong. One year later Sardesai had played his last Test and retired to the obscure limbo that was the fate of all but the most successful Indian cricketers before television.

Sardesai turned in one of the three or four most significant series performances ever by an Indian batsman but he was unlucky that the crowning moment of his career coincided with the greatest batting debut in Test history. He had barely set the record for aggregate runs in a series, when Gavaskar broke it, by scoring 774 runs in four Test matches with four centuries at the absurd average of 154.80. I was in high school at the time and I can testify to the way in which Sardesai's achievement was obscured. India had beaten the West Indies in their backyard and found a great young champion: in a fourteen-year old's head the two things had to be related, the script cried out for the connection. So we made the connection.

And it wasn't that far-fetched: Gavaskar had struck two fifties in the Test we won and his subsequent heroics (including that double century and century in the same match) kept India's 1-0 lead safe. The knowing ones gave Sardesai credit: his captain, Wadekar, made it clear more than once that Sardesai's batting had contributed more to the series win than even Gavaskar's, but in the public's mind (and mine!) it was Gavaskar's series. The fact that Gavaskar went on to become India's greatest batsman confirmed that judgment for posterity.

Alert cricket writing might have redressed the balance because a) professional writers don't have the excuse of being fourteen and b) they have the advantage of hindsight. What Sardesai achieved in 1971 was the equal of Laxman's run of genius thirty years later. I grant that Australia's bowling was superior to the West Indian attack in 1971 and, yes, the Australian team was one of the greatest sides ever. As against that in Sardesai's favour is the enormous fact that we were playing away, that to beat the West Indians, even a team in transition, on their own grounds, Indian cricketers had to chart unknown regions of self-belief. 1971 was the year Indian cricket learnt to walk, became adult, made its bones, call it what you like, and Sardesai did more than anyone to make that possible. And he did it without a helmet.

Till the mid-Seventies, great Indian performances couldn't be watched by the majority of fans: they had to be heard or read about. Weeks after Wadekar's team returned from its glorious tour, Doordarshan showed us twenty-odd minutes of film that summarized a five Test series. Great Indian performances in the West Indies suffered from the double disadvantage of no television and radio silence.

Geniuses like Gavaskar don't need television to immortalize their deeds. They perform so consistently as such a high level that they live godlike lives in lore and legend. Journeymen or the merely good, do. This is not to suggest that Laxman is merely good. Laxman is an under-performing genius but if he had had an interrupted run of thirty Tests over a dozen years as Sardesai did, and ended with an average around forty (which, given Laxman's inconsistency and selectorial whim, is possible), cricket's public and its posterity would take a dimmer view of his career without the live telecasts, the archival footage and the DVD nuggets which keep that incandescent 281 alive in our minds. In cruel contrast Sardesai's heroics in the West Indies didn't even have radio commentators bearing witness because AIR was too cheap to send any and there was no Caribbean World Service broadcasting a West Indian version of Test Match Special.

Indian fans worship the loaded individual career. Looking through the contents page of my book on cricket, Men in White, I realise that all the Indian players profiled in it have one thing in common: they were all conspicuously successful, they were the best. It might seem reasonable to celebrate excellence, but the problem with the heroic tendency in cricket writing is that it confuses great deeds with great men. So the great works of lesser men don't get the recognition they deserve and our understanding of Indian cricket is skewed.

Soumya Bhattacharya, in his excellent cricket memoir, You Must like Cricket?, supplies us with the perfect example of such skewing. Describing an eccentric and unlikely century hit by Chetan Sharma (who opened the bowing with Kapil in the Eighties) in the course of a Kanpur ODI against England in 1989, he writes:

"Thank heavens for Chetan Sharma. I have never otherwise—either before or after this particular incident—had cause to say these words. (And by the way, thank heavens for not having had to say 'thank heavens for Chetan Sharma' ever again)"

Reading these lines I felt an almost comical indignation on Chetan Sharma's behalf. Given that his passion for Indian cricket lights up his lovely book, I suspect Soumya was either too young at the time to remember, or Sharma's modest career record has misled him into forgetting, the large debt he and every other Indian fan owes this tiny fast bowler. Three years before Sharma made this ODI century, he did something considerably more important: he played a crucial part in helping us win a Test series in England. It's been more than twenty years now and no Indian touring team in all that time has won a rubber in England. In fact till Dravid's men beat the West Indies in the West Indies, no Indian team had won a Test series outside the sub-continent since Kapil's men, spearheaded by Chetan Sharma, defeated England 2-0 in 1986.

Sharma took five wickets in the first innings of the first test to set up the game for India which we duly won. Sharma finished with sixteen wickets for the series despite missing the second Test. In the third Test he took ten wickets in all, and left the Indian batsmen nearly a whole day to make 236 runs to win. They managed a leisurely 174 for five in 78 overs.

The extraordinary thing about this series which India won 2-0 (it would have been a clean sweep if our batsmen hadn't been asleep at the wheel in that final Test) was that India's dominance was founded on a bowling attack made up of honest triers. The second Test was won by Roger Binny who took five in the first innings and two in the second. Maninder Singh and Binny took twelve wickets each in the series, two more than Kapil Dev. There's a certain irony to this: India's most decisive 'away' triumph (if you count the whole sub-continent as 'home') was made possible by the likes of Chetan Sharma, Roger Binny and Maninder Singh. And yet, we remember that series for Vengsarkar's fine centuries because he was a batsman of pedigree and class while the bowlers who shone were bit players.

In fact, if you wanted to generalise, you could argue that the little golden age in the mid-Eighties—India's World Cup win in '83, the victory in the World Championship of Cricket in '85 and that uniquely emphatic Test triumph in England in '86—was made possible by the josh of journeymen.

Our plaintive demand that Tendulkar ought to win us more matches, has more to do with our need for bona fide heroes than it has to do with winning. Not giving a 'lesser' player credit where he has earned it is the flip side of our hero-obsession. When we neglect Sardesai's role in that watershed series or Chetan Sharma's inspired bowling in 1986, we don't merely do them an injustice, we misread our past and we devalue our victories. India hasn't won often enough for us to be careless with our triumphs: we need to attend to them and to pay our dues to the men who made them possible, men like Chetan Sharma and Dilip Narayan Sardesai.

A shorter version of this post appeared earlier in the The Telegraph, Kolkata