Mid-Wicket Tales Quotes

“Heroism is at its finest when there is nothing in it for the hero: only pain, humiliation and defeat. But the hero prefers to embrace such things, rather than take any of the easy options.”
― S. Giridhar, Mid-Wicket Tales: From Trumper to Tendulkar

“To us, the story of Tendulkar is unlike any other cricketing story. Gavaskar through his time and Kapil Dev who followed him were iconic cricketers but nothing has remotely matched the frenzy of modern cricket in India coinciding with the era of Tendulkar. How does he remain so calm? How does he handle this unimaginable pressure? How supreme must his love for the game be that he finds a nation’s expectations not weighing him down? He still has time to greet the young boy who comes to him for an autograph. He is polite to the hordes of journalists wanting a sound bite. He manages to present himself with such poise in the face of mercurial and whimsical assessment of his batting. People talk of Dhoni’s calmness under all circumstances, but spare a thought for Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar whose genius is under the microscope of a billion people.”
― S. Giridhar, Mid-Wicket Tales: From Trumper to Tendulkar

“The years between 2004 and 2008 were troubled years, as Tendulkar battled injuries and form, coinciding also with the ill-fated years of Greg Chappell’s tenure as the coach of the Indian team. All the arm-chair critics said he must go. Somehow, somewhere, Tendulkar found the composure and sagacity to ignore all this and concentrated on getting healthier, fitter and back to his best. He rediscovered himself and everyone knows how incandescent this second coming of Tendulkar was, for he blazed away in Bradmanesque fashion culminating in the 2011 World Cup victory. Back to his attacking best, he scored quickly, attacked the bowling and it was clear that he was enjoying his cricket more than ever before. We did not ask Dravid—actually we forgot to ask him—but Arun Lal or Gavaskar or Ravi Shastri are quite sure that Sachin was batting as well if not better than he had ever batted in his life.”
― S. Giridhar, Mid-Wicket Tales: From Trumper to Tendulkar

“Maybe, just maybe the grand old man of cricket—and he is certainly that—knows when it will be time for him to go. Till then, he will remain primus inter pares as far as this cricket-mad nation is concerned. Nothing will change that. To a billion people, the sport begins and ends with this short statured man from Mumbai who carries everyone’s hopes and that is something that is unlikely to be ever bettered, in much the same way as most of his records.”
― S. Giridhar, Mid-Wicket Tales: From Trumper to Tendulkar

“I remember Manjrekar admonishing me for rolling the ball back down the pitch. (I was keeping wickets with our regular keeper injured.) Polly Umrigar in a friendly match at CCI, as soon as he came in, would not play balls on his leg toward short leg preferring to take them on his thigh-pad till he was set; such was the seriousness and professional attitude the Bombay player displayed. And the more senior you were, the greater was the discipline for they saw themselves as role models. This was not evident in Madras or Bangalore where players who had made the grade often thought they were above the law and the code of conduct that was preached. Venkataraghavan was the exception—apart from talent, his discipline, fitness and work ethic has ensured that he is till today, the most successful cricketer from Tamil Nadu.”
― S. Giridhar, Mid-Wicket Tales: From Trumper to Tendulkar

“Finally, captaincy is something that can be experienced and felt, for the more one tries to describe it the harder it gets. Brearley tries to simplify it by saying that cricket captaincy is a combination of good man management and technical competence. Surely within those few words there is the wisdom of a lifetime. Worrell, Benaud, Brearley and those other great captains, they had all this in great measure. Somewhere ultimately we would like to believe that above all, the really great captains are also good human beings. In this hardnosed business of leading the country’s cricket teams we sometimes forget that.”
― S. Giridhar, Mid-Wicket Tales: From Trumper to Tendulkar

“Everyone knows that Brearley the player could barely qualify for a place in the side for his batting. In fact but for England’s tradition of selecting its captain first and then the rest of the team, Brearley may not have played much for England at all. In contrast, Australia selects its best players and chooses the captain from that pool. England got it right with Brearley for without doubt he is among the best captains cricket has ever known. To be able to captain with such command, for players to look up to him and do his bidding, when he was himself a mediocre contributor must imply that Brearley must have been a magician of a leader. He was quite simply outstanding. Unruffled, technically very sound, able to move swiftly between attack and defense and above all the ability to get everyone together as a team to perform to their potential.”
― S. Giridhar, Mid-Wicket Tales: From Trumper to Tendulkar

“The other famous story is from 1977. Middlesex needed an outright win against Surrey and one day’s play had been washed out. After bundling out Surrey for 42, Mike Brearley stunningly declared Middlesex’s first innings after just one ball so that his bowlers could again run through Surrey a second time when the pitch was at its worst. Surrey collapsed for 89. Now, in better batting conditions and with sufficient time in hand, Middlesex knocked off the required runs.”
― S. Giridhar, Mid-Wicket Tales: From Trumper to Tendulkar

“Professionalism and discipline in Bombay cricket was paramount. You could be India’s leading test cricketer or the most precociously talented but the rules applied. Raghunath playing for Indian Gymkhana, has seen Ashok Mankad and Hanumant Singh as captains castigate and drop test cricketers who were even a minute late reporting for the game. The captain could merely be a respected cricketer and not necessarily a highly ranked state cricketer, but his writ would run. If Vasu Paranjpe decided to sit out a test bowler for coming late, then that was it and the test bowler would carry drinks for the day. In that respect alone Bombay was head and shoulders over Madras. Madras had a superbly organized cricket league, but their cricketers somehow never had the focus and discipline of the Bombay cricketer. Venkat was the glorious exception and for his stern discipline alone was he greatly resented by the easy going Madras cricketer. One incident remains etched in Giridhar’s memory. It was January 1972 and the second morning of the match between Madras and Mysore at the Central College grounds in Bangalore. 9 am and an hour more for play to begin, I (Giridhar) walk into the ground to chat with Venkat. He is already in full cricket gear, taking his customary practice catches. He is surrounded by only four fellow cricketers and as he takes his catches he keeps calling for the rest of his teammates to join him for practice. They all come in dribs and drabs, some still not in gear. He talks patiently and cheerfully to me but turns and lets out a fusillade at a fellow player who comes running, tucking his shirt in, and with his spiked cricket shoes in the other hand. Ask Venkat and he will tell you that no Bombay cricketer would ever take his cricket so lightly. Cricket was and is God to the middle-class Maharashtrian.”
― S. Giridhar, Mid-Wicket Tales: From Trumper to Tendulkar

“Clarrie Grimmett is the stuff of legends. We dwell upon him only briefly and know that is sacrilege. Undoubtedly the most accurate of leg spinners, he also worked tremendously hard. He kept adding variations continuously to his bowling to the extent that when batsman started recognizing his flipper because they could hear the snap of his fingers, Grimmett the wily fox, started bowling leg breaks with a snap of the fingers of his left hand! Some double bluff this!”
― S. Giridhar, Mid-Wicket Tales: From Trumper to Tendulkar

“We have used the same model for analyzing the off spinners, the left-arm spinners and the fast bowlers too but it is only in this chapter that we will burden the readers with the details and logic of our model building. Our premise is that every aspect of bowling performance—wickets, strike rate (SR), bowling average, five wickets in an innings, 10 wickets in a match and the wickets taken in away matches—has a bearing on determining the overall value or effectiveness of the bowler. In order to arrive at a composite overall effectiveness index, we used the SR, bowling average, five wickets in an innings, 10 wickets in a match and the proportion of wickets taken away from home to create a relative index and converted each bowler’s performance in each of these factors into his individual index score. To calculate the index for a particular parameter, let us demonstrate with the example of Warne’s index for SR. His SR is 57.4. The cumulative SR of 38 players in our list is 2760.7 and so Warne’s SR Index is 57.4/2760.7 expressed as a percentage which is 2.7. A similar index for each parameter is calculated for each of the players. The aggregate of the index for the five parameters—SR, bowling average, five wickets/innings, 10 wickets/match and proportion of away wickets—of each player provides us a score for each bowler. And as you would have noted from the way we calculated the SR Index, the lower this score the better is the bowler’s rating; thus the one with the lowest score is best in class and the ranks would progressively go down as the individual index scores went up. Let us call this aggregated score as “Bowler Index Score.” But this “Bowler Index Score” does not recognize or give weightage to the number of wickets that a bowler had taken. The number of wickets reflects a bowler’s longevity at the highest level of the game. Since 38 bowlers in our list range from an extreme high of 708 wickets to an extreme low of 40 wickets, we decided to convert the wickets to their logarithmic value. (Log W for 100 wickets has a value of 2.0, for 200 wickets would have a value of 2.3 and for 400 would be 2.6 and so on.) In order to retain consistency in the convention of lowest figures indicating highest degree of effectiveness, we created an overall Effectiveness Index by dividing the Bowler Index Score by the Log value of the wickets taken. Thus, Effectiveness Index = Bowler Index Score/Log W.”
― S. Giridhar, Mid-Wicket Tales: From Trumper to Tendulkar

“Leg spin is infinitely and uniquely fascinating. Subhash Gupte and Bhagwat Chandrasekhar, Shane Warne and Abdul Qadir and all those other artists have provided individual nirvana to millions of cricket lovers. Our love for leg spin is the love one has for an impish, unpredictable clever child who will thrill, please, surprise and frustrate you depending on his mood.”
― S. Giridhar, Mid-Wicket Tales: From Trumper to Tendulkar