Sachin and Azhar at Cape Town

Abhishek Mukherjee

Description

Sachin and Azhar at Cape Town is the story of an incredible partnership between Tendulkar and Azharuddin in the Newlands Test of 1997. Replying to 529, India slumped to 58/5 against Donald, Pollock, McMillan and Klusener. What followed was an exhilarating counter-attack from both ends, seldom seen in Test cricket. With Nelson Mandela watching on - he met the players during lunch that day - the pair added a magical 222 in 40 overs, treating the lethal bowling attack with disdain. Arunabha Sengupta and Abhishek Mukherjee relive the partnership, recounting and analysing every stroke, but as they do, they also bring to life the cricket, history and society of the two countries. Covering a multitude of topics as diverse as apartheid, Mandela and Gandhi, Indians in South Africa; cricket isolation and non-white cricket in South Africa, rebel tours; the television revolution and commercialisation of cricket; with other historical details and numerical analysis of the game supporting the text, this is a fascinating snapshot of cricket at that time through the prism of that impressive sixth-wicket stand.

Sujets

• Críquet
• Cricket

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 29 janvier 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785318955
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2021
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Arunabha Sengupta and Abhishek Mukherjee, 2021
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A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 9781785318191
eBook ISBN 9781785318955
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Pre-Match Presentation (Introduction)
Pitch Inspection
Evening
Morning
Lunch
High Noon
Afternoon Light
At the End of the Day
Match Scorecard
Appendix
Index
About the Authors
TO
The protagonists
Nelson Mandela
Sachin Tendulkar
Mohammad Azharuddin
Acknowledgements
THE AUTHORS would like to start by profusely thanking the late Clive Rice for the enormous amount of time spent in providing very candid interviews a few years ago, much of which has been invaluable for this book.
Dilip Vengsarkar was obliging and forthcoming in sharing his valuable thoughts and experiences.
Dennis Amiss was generous with his time in sharing his observations about the game.
Lance Klusener and Paul Adams, members of the 1996/97 South African side, went out of their way to help us with their recollections and insights.
Dodda Ganesh, a member of the 1996/97 Indian side, was similarly very accommodating in sharing his views.
Harsha Bhogle not only provided the splendid introduction in which he captured the essence of the book as concisely as only he could, he also proved extremely perceptive in immediately grasping the offbeat idea and was always full of encouragement and enthusiasm.
Senior journalists Vijay Lokapally and G. Viswanath helped immensely by sharing their memories. Chandresh Narayan deserves a special mention for the outstanding leads he provided.
B. Sreeram, or Wisden Sreeram as he is known in some circles, was as ever an asset in fact checking and also finding the elusive bits of information about the match that had been lost to all but his resourceful self in the last 24 years.
The extraordinary thoroughness of Dean Rockett s brilliant editing left the authors spellbound.
Maha, the inimitable artist, was incredible as usual with her prompt and high-quality artwork.
Mayukh Ghosh, with his suggestions of cricket literature, and Sumit Ganguly, with his immaculate research into old dusty scorebooks, provided prodigious help.
Jayanta Kumar Pal, Suvasree Basu and Ratnabali Sengupta helped out with the photographs taken in South Africa.
A few personal notes:
Arunabha would like to thank Paddy Briggs for volunteering to share his own research into the isolation years. He would also like to thank Stephen Chalke and Tony Ring for remaining the constant, interested well-wishers.
This being Abhishek s first half-book (or halfth first book), his list is longer. He would like to thank his mother for unsuspectingly introducing him to cricket, his father for that first cricket bat, his brother for relinquishing rights of the television remote control during live cricket; and Koi, the remarkably perceptive canine.
He would also like to thank Prodipto- da , Shakuntala, and Tanmay for being there through highs and lows; and Rituparna, for being a healthy influence.
And finally, his daughter who, for some reason, believes in him.
Pre-Match Presentation (Introduction)
by HARSHA BHOGLE
THE SOUTHERN tip of Africa. A land and a people that were distinct from the rest of the continent. White and black inhabited the place but the two hardly met. I only knew South Africa by one word. Apartheid. It was reprehensible, it was brutal, it was inhuman and so everything we saw about the land that nature was generous with, was through one prism. We knew about their cricket players playing in England and of Basil D Oliveira, we knew the odd tennis player, we knew of diamonds and we knew of Johannesburg through the picture that Alan Paton had painted in Cry, The Beloved Country . It was a large city where bad things happened.
And of course we knew of the Gandhi connection and the incident on the train at Pietermaritzburg. The Congress Party, and so India, was close to the African National Congress and so when, under the weight of international condemnation, South Africa began opening up, we in India began to play a central role. South Africa was re-admitted to the ICC and within a week, a long time in India but a mere twinkling of an eye elsewhere, a team was flying out to India.
It was 1991, we had met Ali Bacher in Sharjah and he had introduced us to names in South African cricket. We had heard of Rice and Wessels and Donald and Cook and a bit of the older Kirsten brother but little else. The period between that great side of 1969 that beat Australia 4-0 and the team that was flying out was restricted to snippets of the rebel tours in a non-internet era.
Just a year later, some of us were flying into Johannesburg. We had no visas because there were still no diplomatic ties. We hadn t heard of the protea and the rand was the answer to a quiz question. It was an eye-opener. South Africa were a powerful but diffident cricket team who had to rely on Wessels to tell them what Test cricket was all about. When Wessels hit Kapil Dev on the foot in retaliation to his running out of Kirsten who was constantly outside his crease before the bowler bowled, Ali Bacher ensured that no footage was visible. Nothing could go wrong on that tour.
But you were never too far from politics. We were introduced to harrowing tales of the apartheid era, there was a protest in East London and when there was a reception in Bloemfontein, the heart of apartheid itself, we were told it was the largest collection of non-whites in the Town Hall! It was, of course, the Friendship Tour and a plaque still stands in Durban, opened by the youngest player on either side, Jonty Rhodes and Sachin Tendulkar. Soon Jonty was to run Sachin out, the first decision made by a replay umpire!
The cricket was tepid and the last Test excruciatingly boring. But the memories were good. To see a nation wake up is always special.
By the time India returned in 1996/97, South African cricket had shaken off its diffidence and was planting the seeds of two decades of outstanding performance. Mandela was in power and he was a compassionate leader, having ensured that South Africa hadn t gone the way of its beautiful neighbour Zimbabwe. The Rugby World Cup had played a big part in bringing people together, even if on the surface, and the rand was still relatively strong. On the field though, fine players were blooming. In the four years since India had visited, South Africa had unearthed Kallis, Pollock, Gary Kirsten, Cullinan, Gibbs and Klusener. It was as good a side as any in world cricket in such a short while.
India had regressed. The captaincy was changing hands, dark thoughts had started surfacing, openers had vanished, Srinath was at his peak and Prasad had appeared but that was it and the youngsters soon to set the world alight were mere buds. We feared the worst after the disaster on the trampoline at Durban.
Then that partnership happened. We had seen glimpses of it in an Azhar blitzkrieg at the Eden Gardens but we were unprepared for what followed. It didn t change the result but Tendulkar and Azharuddin, already no longer the best of friends, lit up a series and produced batsmanship that had few things to rival it till Sehwag arrived. I am fascinated by the idea of writing a social and cricketing treatise around one period of play. Far too often, we who cover cricket, don t place it in the perspective of a wider world. If anything, our vision has narrowed. Society and politics might seem distant neighbours of sport but in reality they are close cousins and nowhere is this more visible than in South Africa, the setting that two cricket lovers with a view of the world beyond cricket, have chosen to place this book in. It was the place to be in the nineties; cricket started with hope and ended in brief despair but it was at all times a mirror to a ravaged society looking for sustenance.
Arunabha and Abhishek, the numbers men with a flair for words, sensitive, history-loving writers, have attempted a mammoth task and in doing so look at South African cricket in a larger context. If anything, the game there has hollowed since but only the future can tell us if this was the necessary weeding out of one culture and the planting of another.
South Africa was the country to watch through the nineties. You can watch it in this book.
Pitch Inspection
THE STACK of books lies on the table. Each volume tantalisingly inviting. Each one incredibly difficult to procure in India.
The world, for all its pretensions of having become a global village, is still divided according to geographical regions and the corresponding ease and cumbrousness of logistics. Distribution of cricket books varies vastly from the West (Europe and United States) to Australia to India to South Africa. Unless of course we are talking about the ghosted - and often ghastly - autobiographies of superstars.
Among the pile are a number of volumes by Stephen Chalke , One More Run; Bob Appleyard: No Coward Soul; Geoffrey Howard: At the Heart of English Cricket. There is The West Indies at Lord s by Alan Ross,