Coward - Cricket Beyond the Bazaar

I am grateful to many people for their help with this book particularly Imran Khan and Sunil Gavaskar, two of crickets most formidable players and thinkers, who have each contributed a foreword.

Thankfully, Bob Radford, the chief executive of the NSW Cricket Association has a sense of history and an affection for players of summers long gone and his vigilance ensured the official file on His Highness the Maharaja of Patialas team of Australian Cricketers did not go to the incinerator when the NSWCA shifted from George Street, Sydney and the Australian Cricket Board moved to Melbourne in 1980. Unrestricted access to the file provided excellent material for a social reconstruction of perhaps the most exotic journey undertaken by a team of Australian first-class cricketers. Ern Cosgrove, a friend and passionate cricket person, provided the statistics and along with Ken Williams, who has a statistical record of every Australian first-class cricketer, insisted I use figures compiled by the Association of Cricket Statisticians when discussing Jack Ryders 193536 pioneers to the subcontinent. In its 1986 publication, A guide to first-class matches played in India, the AOCS ended speculation about the status of some games by stating unequivocally that 17 of the 23 matches undertaken in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and India were legitimate first-class fixtures. The late Wendell Bills unpublished memoirs were another priceless source of information and I very much appreciate the generosity of his widow, Patricia, and his dear friend, Tim Caldwell.

Julian Zakaras, the photographic manager of John Fairfax and Sons, was unstinting in his assistance and advice. The photographs have been gathered from many and varied sources and I am in the debt of Graham Morris, S. Krishnan, the sports editor of The Hindu, Madras, Shri Anil Ambani, of Reliance Industries, the sponsor of the 1987 World Cup, Peter Charles, pictorial editor of The Age, Aditya Patankar, Zafar Ahmed, Mueen-ud-Din Hameed, Philip Gray and Belinda McCulloch, the public relations officer for Foster Parents Plan of Australia. Furthermore, Dean Jones, Jim Higgs, Tom Leather and Ron Morrisby generously allowed me access to their personal photographs while Berry Favell and her son Alan stoically undertook the hunt for a rare print of the late Les Favell meeting American president Dwight D. Eisenhower.

I am, also, most grateful for the assistance so readily given by Leslie Frewin, Ray Sutton, Alan Crompton, Simon Balderstone, Henry Everingham, Michael Carey and Darren Reddanwho took much of the pain out of the transition from typewriter to word processorand I am delighted that Random Century permitted me to quote from Dominique Lapierres unforgettable City of Joy (Century, 1986).

It is also gratifying that many distinguished Australian cricketers and administrators, past and present, so willingly contributed their time and precious recollections.

Finally, I salute good friends and fine journalists R. Mohan, Nirmal Shekar and Qamar Ahmed, proud, generous men who have never tired of my questions and taught me much about one of the most remarkable regions on earth.

Mike Coward
Sydney, April 1990

Theoretically, I should call to Ganesh, the elephant-headed deity in the Hindu pantheon. As the god of learning, a carrier of success and the remover of obstacles he is invoked at the beginning of many books in India. I confess to having carried a miniature sandalwood carving of Ganesh whenever I travelled with the Australian cricket team in India in the 1980s. I pray he smiles benignly and recognises that I have learned a little of this vast and complex land, which confronts and confounds and challenges like few places on earth. Certainly the icon was close by during the tied Test match of 1986 and the World Cup the following year, when seemingly insurmountable obstacles were overcome. I did not exchange the carving for a prayer mat whenever the exotic caravans reached Pakistan or Kashmir, but in deference to the Muslim population I kept it in purdah.

Above all else, the Indian subcontinent provides a constant and strident reaffirmation of life and a stark reminder of our tenuous hold on it. The senses are never dulled and the sensibilities are often offended. The land is exhilarating and exhausting and always your master. You cannot be ambivalent about the subcontinent. You either reject it or rejoice in it. And you can never forget its images.

The origins of my affection for the region are unclear. Suffice it to say I do not feel out of place in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Perhaps, unwittingly, my unwavering, adolescent loyalty to Les Favell, a distinguished South Australian and Australian cricketer, raised my consciousness. When he scored his Test century in Madras on 13 January 1959, pictures of his triumph were vivid in my mind. Madras, where Australian cricketers performed heroic deeds in 1986 and 1987, is my preferred city in India and some of this book was written on its southern outskirts 100 metres back from the Bay of Bengal at Palavakkam. Often, late in the day, I would play cricket on the beach with Santhanam and his wide-eyed mates from the fishing village of Neelankarai. It mattered not at all that I could not speak Tamil because I could play cricket, however modestly, and hailed from the same country as Borda, Borda. Those were happy, uncomplicated days in the sun and the spontaneous games ahead of the incoming tide are among precious memories of India.

Surely only those with hearts of stone return from the subcontinent without a cherished memory. For the cricket person the reminiscences often involve the game. But not always. Ian Johnson, who captained the first official Australian team to Pakistan and India in 1956, has never forgotten his meeting with Mother Teresa as she tended the sick lying on stone benches in a Calcutta hospital. Johnson, who subsequently penned a piece for the Melbourne Argus, marvelled aloud at the nature of her work. What makes you do it? he asked reverently. Mother Teresa replied: I just like to give them peace between earth and heaven. More than 30 years later Johnson can recall the conversation verbatim. It has always stuck with me, he said. Probably it was the most inspiring day I have ever had.

For me, the beauty and the pride of a poor Punjabi child scavenging for soft drink bottles at Chandigarh is as vivid a memory as that of a rejuvenated Allan Border being held aloft by his teammates against a Calcutta twilight.

The subcontinent can also bewilder and intimidate. It is a vast land where the elite barely recognise the hordes living and sometimes dying on the streets. Every smile on the face of poverty brings a tear to my eyes, said my friend and fellow journalist, R. Mohan, recalling an Indian proverb during a walk in Calcutta. It is a saying that could be recited every moment of every day throughout the subcontinent and sometimes I wonder whether I have any right to revel in a region which so cruelly condemns so many of its people to a life of misery. Yet for all their deprivations invariably these people reveal a quiet and compelling dignity and a spiritual awareness and strength beyond the comprehension of a visitor from the West.

I find irresistible the power of the subcontinent and in time it will beckon me again. Inshallah.

India! A land of incomparable beauty and variety, and of hideous prospects like the slums of Bombay and Calcutta. A land where the sublime often stood side by side with the very worst this world can offer, but where both elements were always more vibrant, more human and ultimately more alluring than anywhere else.