In 2004, before the Indian cricket team’s tour of Pakistan, Jagmohan Dalmiya, then President of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, received a call from “a senior (very senior)” minister of the government, asking him to call off the tour. Dalmiya respectfully told him firmly, “I am the President, and the BCCI wants cricket to go ahead. You are the government; if you don’t want the tour, please go ahead and order its cancellation.”
Since the Vajpayee government was in power and the caller was not merely a minister, not even a senior minister, but a’very’ senior minister, it is not difficult to work out who it was. The story is told in Amrit Mathur’s Pitchside: My Life in Indian Cricket, which gives us a close-to-the-action feel of Indian cricket told by one of its leading actors as the manager of the national team, BCCI official, member of the World Cup committee, IPL manager, and first-class umpire.
The journalist Mathur was a colleague at the 1992 World Cup in Australia, where he was reporting for a news agency, and the book has the pleasing touch of a writer comfortable with words. The BCCI, he says, “is a shining example of diversity leading to unity.” All squabbles end in unanimous decisions.
There are, too, vignettes of players. Like Sachin Tendulkar’s comment ahead of a match in South Africa: “He observed the batsmen could run two to third man because the blades of grass were facing the other way and would slow the ball down.”
Mathur kept a diary and wrote only of events where he was present. Thus, there are no lectures here or ‘gyan’ (one of his favourite Hindi words in a book that uses a lot of them). There is no real’masala’ either, suggestive of a writer who knows how to keep secrets.
Yet, if it remains a readable effort, it is as much because of the skill of the writer as the warmth with which he narrates the anecdotes. The chapter IPL: The Road Ahead brings together the two sides of Mathur, the journalist and the insider, and the result is sobering. Given the IPL’s growing clout, he says, “it is possible that the league could snarl at, if not bite, its parent.” An early warning that private players might break away from the BCCI and establish their own league across the world.
It is surprising how amateurish our approach to the game once was. On the tour of South Africa (where Mathur was manager), players hadn’t heard of some of their opponents. Earlier, the BCCI didn’t know about television rights and was caught off guard when asked by Ali Bacher to name a price.
Mathur, who often downplays his role in fixing things, speaks with the gratitude of a man who thinks he was in the right place at the right time. “I see myself as a concussion sub,” he says, “someone not supposed to play but unexpectedly pushed into the middle.” Thoroughly charming.
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