Why everyone loves Salim Durani

He could be brilliant or ordinary, not so much because of his skills or prevailing conditions, but because of his mercurial temperament. At his best, he was no less than a genius; on several other occasions, he could be maddeningly mediocre, leaving fans, critics ” and one dare say even opponents - wondering at what might have been.

He roars with laughter when asked to imagine what it would have been like had he been born in this generation of cricketers. "There were no one-dayers then, only Test matches. One-dayers were looked at as entertainment and we batted like today’s batsmen slog in T20. Borde, me, Pataudi and others never knew then that we were such powerful hitters," he recalls. Durrani batted lefthanded, and he sees a bit of himself in Yuvraj Singh and Suresh Raina now, and jokes that some of his shots were the same, though there were no cheerleaders outside the boundary rope.