A RUN DOWN MEMORY LANE

A RUN DOWN MEMORY LANE

A sense of history inspires one to carry on with the finest traditions of the game. I mean cricket with all its glorious past, its village greens, County Championships, Sheffield Shield, Ashes matches, W.G., Ranji, Hobbs and Sutcliffe, Trumper and McCartney, Bradman, McCabe and Ponsford, George Headley, Learie Constantine, Wolley, Rhodes, Verity, Jardine, Larwood and the Bodyline, and the great victories and defeats. Cricket with its rivetting past dated in Hambledon, Yorkshire and Lord's, the Oxbridge matches, Winchester, Eton and Harrow, the Gentlemen and the Players with separate dressing rooms and entrances and exits, the coalminer's son delivering the ball at 90 miles per hour, pulverising batsmen with vicious bumpers at a fiery pace, stumps flying on impact with the dipping, darting yorker, pubs animated in discussions on the elements of the day's game---those were the halcyon days of this glorious game played in the sun in July-August and in the cold English early summer of May when a thousand first class runs was the prized possession of the very best of batsmen and over 3000 runs in a season, as Ranji and Compton achieved, the immortal attainments of the game. This it was, so typically an English sport played in the days of Empire, whose lifebreath was captured in the prose of Cardus and Swanton, of Robinson and Arlott, like moods frozen in poetic metre or as ice melting in a flowing lake. And the interwar years that saw the maturing of batsmanship to new heights, and postwar heroes in Sobers and Kanhai and the three Ws. Hutton, Laker and Lock, locking horns with the Aussies, Graeme and Peter Pollock, Barry Richards, the great Viv, Lillee and Thommo and the fearsome West Indian pace battery--- Roberts, Holding, Daniel, Garner, Croft, Marshall, Patterson, Davis, Sylvester Clarke, Ian Bishop, Ambrose and Walsh, all bloodying batsmen and rolling stumps. Way back in early 20th century we had Sidney Francis Barnes, Bill O'Reilly and Clarrie Grimmett, and just the other day we had Warne and Murali, and earlier the famed quartet of Bedi, Chandra, Prasanna and Venkat coming in the line of Vinoo Mankad, Subhas Gupte, Ghulam Ahmed, Benaud, Gibbs and the redoubtable duo, Ramadhin and Valentine. Gavaskar lit up the Windies and Apartheid robbed the cricketing world of the Pollocks, Barry Richards, Eddie Barlow, Mike Proctor and more. Greig, the Chappell brothers, Kerry Packer and the cricketing revolution has done the rest. Now it is big money, the sibling of cricket, and shorter and faster brands of commercial cricket. Gone now is its languid romance, the rapturous joy of seasonal cricket played on the village greens. Hail to those halcyon days which is to be never anymore!

Written by Sugata Bose