Durrani’s first brush with organising a sports event, as a volunteer, was for the 1952 India-Pakistan Test, played at the University Ground on the banks of river Gomti. A first year graduate student at Lucknow University, as a member of university hockey team Durrani was close to N.N. Mukherjee, popularly called Habul-da, a renowned Indian hockey team coach and a powerful sports administrator. He was coach of former India captain K.D. Singh ‘Babu’ and headed the Lucknow Sports Association that was allotted the Test. Habul-da wanted to finance hockey, his first love, with the profit earned from the Test. “But the Test was a disaster, financially. The five-day match ended in two-and-a-half-days, so half the revenue from the sale of tickets was lost. Anyway, half of the spectators had barged in without tickets by removing the nails drilled into the barricading. This happened because the stands were makeshift. The concept of advertisement wasn’t there at the time, so not a single rupee was earned through this. Habul-da was completely dejected, because his soul belonged to hockey,” rues Durrani.