Sports

The Lost Empires

Whatever happened to the breeding grounds of Mumbai, Chennai and Delhi?

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The Lost Empires
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A tell-tale statistic of that triumph was that the team had only two players from the West zone and but one from the North zone. And in that West component, just one was from Mumbai, the city long acknowledged as the home of Indian cricket. The descendants of Bedi and Kapil Dev, of Wadekar and Gavaskar would seem to have descended to mere twilight on the Indian cricket scene of the last quarter of a century.

Though Bishen Bedi did not head a strong pack from the north, his presence in the Indian team from 1967 onwards indicated that a Punjab sardar had the subtle skills to excel at cricket. It was only the advent of Kapil Dev towards the end of the '70s that brought the spotlight on the north zone. All of a sudden, the North became a powerful cricket centre. Kapil, Mohinder Amarnath, Madan Lal, Chetan Chauhan, Maninder Singh, Manoj Prabhakar, Chetan Sharma, Yashpal Sharma, spinner Rajendra Goel, Balwinder Sandhu and all-rounder Kirti Azad stamped their mark on Indian cricket. North zone came under national floodlights—from Kapil's coach in Chandigarh to a Test centre in unknown Mohali.

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After Kapil Dev's conscious withdrawal from all matters of cricket, the north's cricket prowess seems to have ebbed. Punjab, under Bedi's coaching, does satisfactorily in the Ranji Trophy, but it is not the repository of greatness. Coach Azad seems unable to discover a second Kapil. And Delhi's cricket continues to be in a perpetual shadow of maladministration and politicking. Never possessing a ground of its own and with local competitive structure never having been systematically organised or intense as in Mumbai, Delhi's cricket upsurge that was remains the one-off kind.

In the West zone, the cricket associations of Maharashtra, Baroda, Gujarat and Saurashtra have shown no change in their output. While Baroda continues to throw up an occasional Kiran More or a Nayan Mongia, the others cannot contribute a player even to the Rest of India XI. However, it is Mumbai's decline which is striking, especially this season, when only one Mumbai lad is considered worthy of the India cap. Maybe Manjrekar and Kambli are somewhat unlucky in being out of the national team. But even they are of relatively old vintage.

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Talking to two club cricketers of over 30 years' standing suggests what ails Mumbai's cricket. Both Nandu Patankar and Shrikant Tigdi feel that the burden of an intensely competitive education system leaves little time for schoolboy talent to bloom into stardom. Tendulkar and Kambli, they feel, have been the last products of school; and that, too, because they were exceptionally gifted. Unlike in the past, the general reluctance of today's business houses to give jobs to cricketers prevents youngsters from devoting more time to cricket than to textbooks. A staggering rise in urbanisation has led to thousands of dwellings, thereby killing the 'gully' cricket of yore, says Pat-ankar. And the chock-a-full maidans, says Tigdi, are a disgrace. Moreover, both believe that net practice has become a luxury for the young; at any number of private coaching pitches, a boy gets to bat for just 15 to 20 balls.

Patankar thinks a full-fledged cricket academy is one solution towards restoring Mumbai's status of old. Maybe what Dilip Vengsarkar is doing in that direction with the help of a private sponsor could soon bring salvation—provided, always, that the filly is willing to drink from the trough.

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