Playing It My Way: My Autobiography (13 page)

After the match Jatin and I decided to drive back to Yorkshire in the evening, so that I could rejoin my county the following morning. This journey too was rather eventful. There were roadworks everywhere as we got out of Newcastle and the speed limit had been brought down to 55 mph from the normal 70 mph. Given that it was fairly late, we decided to follow a police car that was in front of us, reckoning that as long as we followed a police car while maintaining a safe distance we would also be safe.

After a while I saw the police car making some sort of gesture to me. The driver had his hand out of the window and had all five fingers stretched out. He then closed his fist before spreading his fingers again. I thought he was asking me to put my lights on full beam and duly followed his instructions. A few minutes later the police car put on its hazard lights and signalled us to stop.

I was confused but did exactly as I was told. The policeman asked me if I had seen his earlier signal. I said yes and told him that I had followed his instruction and turned on my lights. He said that wasn’t what he had meant and explained that the signal was for me to slow down because I was speeding. The police car was doing 65 mph while the speed limit had been set at 55 mph. As I’d been maintaining the same distance for the last hour and a half, I must have been speeding. He went on to say that the reason he stretched his five fingers twice was to indicate to me that the speed limit was 55 mph and I should slow down.

I was taken aback and immediately confessed to my mistake, saying it wasn’t intentional and that I was blindly following the police car, believing it to be the safest option. In the interim the policeman had seen the white rose and Yorkshire CCC printed on my car and asked what it meant. I informed him that I played cricket for Yorkshire and it was a car given to me by the county. At this he asked my name and queried if I was indeed the first overseas professional to play for Yorkshire. I think it was my identity that earned me a reprieve and I was let off with a warning that I should always keep the speed limit in mind while driving.

At Yorkshire we often played back-to-back matches and it helped me improve my batting a great deal. The conditions were very different from those back home and I definitely matured as a batsman during my time in county cricket. The ball would swing a greal deal more than in India and it allowed me to improve my technique and ability to adjust to different conditions. Over the years, the lessons learnt from my stint at Yorkshire continued to help me whenever I toured England as part of the Indian team.

Socially too it was a good learning experience. The authorities, including the president Sir Lawrence Byford, were extremely sociable. The team had a great time and I particularly remember some extremely interesting Sunday club bonding sessions. In one it was decided that everybody had to wear towels and a tie without a shirt and meet in the hotel’s convention centre. At first I thought my team-mates were pulling my leg and I wasn’t prepared to dress up without seeing a few of the other players do so. I kept a close eye on the lobby and only when I saw a number of my team-mates sporting a towel and tie did I do the same. It turned out to be an eccentric but hilarious evening in the end.

Everyone at Yorkshire knew I was only nineteen and they were always eager to help. This was just as well, because things were not at all what I was used to in Mumbai. I had toured England in 1990, of course, but back then I had been with the Indian team and everything was arranged for us. This time I had to do everything on my own – from organizing my own food to doing the laundry.

Coping by myself sometimes caused me great embarrassment. One incident involved my first attempt to use a washing machine. I had no idea how much detergent was needed and must have emptied about half a packet into the machine before starting the washing cycle, then I went out. On my way back I could see something oozing beneath my front door. I was shocked at first until I remembered that I had left the washing machine on. All the detergent had made it overflow and there was foam everywhere.

That was the first and last time I did the laundry on my own. Every other time Solly bhai’s family kindly came to my rescue. Solly Adams, who I fondly referred to as Solly bhai, was a resident of Dewsbury in West Yorkshire. I had first met Solly and his wife Mariam in 1990 in the company of Dilip Vengsarkar. Every Mumbai cricketer who had played league cricket in England had spoken to me about Solly bhai’s hospitality and it was natural that I should get in touch with him. His house had become a refuge for all Indian cricketers in the area and we all looked forward to the delectable food we were served at Solly bhai’s house, particularly the biryani, tandoori chicken, raita and mango lassi. It soon became a ritual for me to visit him three times a week when I was in Yorkshire.

Solly bhai’s brother Younus and his wife Ruksana were also great hosts and it was from them that I learnt the art of filling the salad bowl. When a few of my friends – Jatin Paranjpe, Mufi and Vinod Kambli – came to stay with me in Yorkshire, we mostly survived on cheap fast food. As the only member of the quartet who was earning, I would pay the bills and, with limited resources, fast food was the most affordable option. We would eat out at KFC, Burger King and the like, but the all-you-can-eat buffet at Pizza Hut was our favourite. While we could eat as many pizzas as we wanted for a fixed price, we could only fill up our salad bowl once. And it was here that the training from Younus and Ruksana came in handy. They taught me to use lettuce leaves to construct a wall, so that the size of the bowl, which was ordinarily just two or three inches tall, increased to five or six inches. We could then fill it with as much salad as we wanted.

I finally left Yorkshire for India around mid-August, to get back in time for the Duleep Trophy, India’s second most important domestic competition. It’s named after Ranjitsinhji’s nephew Duleepsinhji, who played for England in the early 1930s, and features teams representing the country’s five zones: West, North, South, East and Central, It was suggested that I should play in it before we left for what would be a challenging tour of South Africa in October. The Yorkshire management was most considerate and allowed me to come back early, thus ending a really fruitful and productive time in county cricket.

It was a historic tour because it was the first time the South Africans had played a Test series at home since returning to the international fold in 1991. They had toured India in November 1991 to end their international isolation after twenty-one years and in the three one-day internationals showed they were a very good side. In Allan Donald they had one of the best fast bowlers in the world and he was ably supported by Richard Snell, Brian McMillan, Craig Matthews, Meyrick Pringle, Brett Schultz and a host of other really good bowlers. In South African conditions the fast bowlers would pose a serious challenge.

The United Cricket Board of South Africa had made every effort to make the tour memorable. We landed in Durban and were immediately met by the hosts, who put us in open-top cars. There were two cricketers in each car and hordes of people lined the road as we made our way to the hotel. I was in a car with Pravin Amre, a middle-order bat and another of Ramakant Achrekar’s students, and remember listening to Kishore Kumar songs all the way to the hotel. It was a fabulous experience.

We played our first tour game against Nicky Oppenheimer’s XI at his private ground in Randjesfontein. It had rained heavily before the start of the game and it looked highly unlikely that we would get any cricket on the day. But I had underestimated our hosts and was totally taken aback to see what they were pouring onto the pitch to dry it out. They actually burnt petrol on the pitch to expedite the drying process, something I had never imagined could happen. That wasn’t all. To our surprise, a couple of helicopters hovered over the ground to dry the pitch for a good forty-five minutes. As a result of all this effort, the pitch was finally playable and we managed to get a game. I made a hundred and we won the match easily, making a very good start to the tour. Afterwards, the talk in the dressing room was that we would beat the South Africans easily. We carried this sense of complacency into the next match, where we scored over 500 runs against a Combined Bowl XI after bowling them out for 230. The tour was turning out to be a walk in the park.

Things changed dramatically when we played the South African Board President’s XI at Centurion on 6 November 1992. We bowled first and, standing at slip, I could see that the ball was not carrying through to the keeper. Manoj Prabhakar and Subroto Banerjee, a promising medium-fast swing bowler with a terrific sense of humour, opened the bowling for us and neither generated much pace off the wicket. Apart from Srinath, who could bowl fast, none of our bowlers could get the ball to carry to the keeper on that slowish track and we felt reasonably happy to get the opposition out for 268.

As our innings started we felt confident of batting the opposition out of the game again, but things didn’t quite go according to plan. The second over was bowled by Brett Schultz and he generated serious pace in his very first over; in fact, it was one of the quickest first overs I had seen. This wasn’t what we had expected and within minutes the atmosphere in the dressing room had become very subdued. The wicket had started to look lively and the batsmen were having all sorts of problems. It wasn’t difficult to see that the Test series might not be so easy after all.

During the match it rained a little and the drizzle had made the outfield slippery. As a nineteen-year-old full of energy, I decided it would be a good idea to use the rain to practise sliding, at the opposite end of the ground from the pavilion. Chamundeshwarnath, a former South Zone first-class player who was playing club cricket there, helped the Indian team in fielding practice and also gave me throw-downs in the nets. He was with me and was helping me with my drills. If under normal circumstances I was able to slide for about three or four yards, the rain stupidly encouraged me to slide a few extra yards each time I chased a ball. In doing so I twisted my ankle and had to be carried off the ground. When I went to the hospital to get the injury checked, I was told it would take at least four to five weeks to recover.

With the first Test still a week away, I was desperate to play a part in the series and pushed myself to get fit as quickly as possible. After a few days, I started to walk but I was still finding it difficult to run. The team management was keen for me to play because I was batting well, but the only way I could do so was by standing in the slips, where I did not have to do much running about. It eventually turned out to be quite embarrassing because there I was, a youngster, standing in the slips while Kapil Dev, the senior member of the side, was running about in the deep.

In the first Test match at Durban, starting on 13 November 1992, we batted well and remained competitive throughout the game, which ended in a draw. Pravin Amre scored a fantastic hundred on debut and it was an innings full of character. I, unfortunately, wrote myself into the history books by becoming the first batsman to be given out by the third umpire – the use of TV replays had just been introduced. I had played the ball to point, where Jonty Rhodes was fielding. He was on it in a flash and returned it to the keeper in quick time. Still hampered by the ankle injury, I took a little extra time to turn back and, thanks to Jonty’s brilliance, fell short by two or three inches. Just to be sure, umpire Cyril Mitchley went to the third umpire, Karl Liebenberg, who declared me run out.

It was my first taste of Jonty Rhodes’s fielding prowess, something that caused us problems for the whole tour. Jonty was particularly effective in the ODI series and was undoubtedly the best fielder I played against. His anticipation and reactions were the quickest I have encountered and he managed to dry up all the singles around point, cover point and towards third man. On difficult pitches they can be crucial runs and all of a sudden they had been cut off, with Jonty manning the entire area on the off side with amazing speed. He ran a number of us out and saved a lot of runs every game, making a significant difference to the outcome of the series.

The other thing about Jonty was his running between the wickets. In the third match of the ODI series, which we won, Jonty had played a slog sweep off Ravi Shastri to deep square leg, where Kapil spilled the catch. In the interim Jonty had completed the first run really fast and had almost made it back to the striker’s end, only to realize that his batting partner Andrew Hudson had not made any attempt to run a second. To our amazement, Jonty turned back and almost made it to the other end before the bails were dislodged to run him out. He had all but completed three runs in the time the non-striker had managed just one.

Coming back to the Test series, we followed the Durban draw with another good performance in the second Test at Johannesburg, which started on 26 November. I got a hundred in this game, my fourth in Test cricket. It is an innings I remember with great satisfaction. I was not out on 75 at the end of the second day and had to fight really hard on the third morning. Allan Donald was bowling a brilliant spell and patience was the key to survival. I kept leaving balls outside the off stump and knew I had to see Donald off before I was able to get on with scoring. I played just one cover drive before lunch, otherwise it was a battle of attrition and patience. That memorable contest against Allan Donald typefies what Test cricket is all about for me, making it the pinnacle of all formats of the sport. Here was a fast bowler propelling the ball at close to 150 kph. For a batsman there’s nothing more challenging than really hostile fast bowling in bowler-friendly conditions. You don’t get to play spells like that in domestic cricket and surviving is a true test of a batsman’s calibre.

At Johannesburg, I finally got to my hundred after lunch, facing 270 balls in the innings, which lasted for six and a half hours. With Kumble taking six wickets in South Africa’s second innings, we managed to draw the match and went into the third Test at Port Elizabeth with all to play for. The other bowler who bowled very well for South Africa was Craig Matthews. He was the most accurate of the lot and bowled a crafty line outside off stump, from where the ball would generally swing away. Occasionally he would get one to nip back and it was difficult to play this incoming ball. So much so that almost the whole team ended up with very similar black bruises on our thighs after being hit by Matthews. We even joked about it in the dressing room, saying, ‘
Aare isko bhi medal mila hai dekh!
’ (He too has got a medal. Check!)