Sunil Gavaskar on Underwood, Raman Subba: They showed why cricket is a gentleman’s game

Derek Underwood and Raman Subba Row, who passed away recently, were hard-nosed professionals who never gave you an inch on the field but were the first to applaud an opponent when he did well.

An illustrious face-off: English left-arm spinner Derek Underwood bowls to India’s G.R. Viswanath on day one of the fifth Test at Chepauk in 1982. Viswanath made 222 in the first innings.  | Photo Credit: The Hindu Photo Library

Last week, not just English cricket but world cricket lost two wonderful gentlemen. The passing of Raman Subba Row and Derek Underwood reduces the number of gentlemen in the game. Make no mistake, they were hard-nosed professionals who never gave you an inch on the field but were the first to applaud an opponent when he did well. That, in no way, took away their competitiveness or lessened their desire to do well for their team. Not just that, but when they were successful, they were humble and did not celebrate in a wild way with expletives, screaming like a banshee, or jumping up and down as if the success was totally unexpected. There was no ego, either.

Who can forget Underwood applauding the exquisite century scored by G. R. Viswanath with a warm handshake and then saying to him, ‘Master, when you have had enough, please give your wicket to this bowler’. Not that he was not going to try and get Vishy out, but simply an acknowledgement of a superior performance by an opponent. This was during the Delhi Test match in 1981, a game where the little genius was to be dropped from the squad. The selection committee, headed by Polly Umrigar, one of India’s all-time greats, had already taken the momentous decision to leave out Chetan Chauhan from the team despite him being the highest scorer on the tour of Australia and New Zealand a few months earlier. Despite being a failure on that twin tour with just one 50-plus score in both countries, I had been appointed as the captain for the series, so leaving Chauhan out was a shocker for me.

Chauhan and I had struck up a lovely partnership on the field, and my respect for his gutsy fighting qualities as an opener was second to none. Still, he was left out of the team even after I requested the committee to give him two Tests to fail. Normally you ask for two chances to succeed, but here I asked the other way, so confident I was that Chauhan would carry on his scoring, especially after the confidence of having done well Down Under on different pitches and conditions.

Now, after two Tests, the committee wanted to leave Vishy out. He had just played a crucial cameo in the first Test, which we had won narrowly, so this did not make any sense to me. When I saw that the selectors were bent on leaving him out, I said that I did not want to be part of the meeting and would leave. The meeting was held immediately after the second Test in Bengaluru had finished. I had scored 172 there before being dismissed caught and bowled by Underwood, so I was much more confident when I joined the selectors for this meeting.

Off-spinner Ghulam Ahmed, who had also captained India in one Test, was the Hon. Secretary of the BCCI then and the convenor of the selection meeting. He was also a bureaucrat. He had also been a selector before becoming board secretary. He therefore could sense when he needed to step in. He said that if the captain feels so strongly about it, the selection committee should respect it, as after all, he is going to take the team out in the middle. The selection committee was made up of stalwarts; apart from Umrigar, there were the premium all-rounders, Dattu Phadkar and Chandu Sarwate, who was also a fingerprint expert in the police.

Vishy not only got the century, which I have just written about but followed it with a 200 in Chennai, where he and the late Yashpal Sharma batted together for a whole day. To Umrigar’s credit, when we sat down to pick the team for the final Test, he thanked me in the selection meeting for insisting on Vishy being selected.

Mind you, as the captain, I was only coopted to the selection meeting with no voting power. That gesture from Umrigar once again showed that when it comes to Indian cricket, there should never be any egos.

Raman Subba Row was like Chauhan, a gutsy opening batsman who later came to India as the manager of the England team and got along tremendously with the BCCI officials. In later years, he would travel to Mumbai every winter to spend time with his good friend Madhav Apte and stay with him. No doubt the evenings would be filled with reminiscing about the cricketers they both had seen and picking all-time Best Elevens and World Elevens.

RIP, Raman and Derek. Thank you for showing why cricket was called the gentleman’s game.