CHENNAI: After the 1996 World Cup, with wounds of Eden Gardens still fresh, the Mumbai cricketing lobby undertook a march to the Cricket Club of India offices.
The march, attended by several 100s ranging from the casual fan to former players, wanted to make a point to the authorities in charge of picking the Indian team for an upcoming series. Why was the Indian team so light on Mumbai players was the crux of their argument. Sachin Tendulkar was an automatic pick from India’s greatest cricketing city — the city has probably been responsible for producing the most number of cricketers on a per capita basis — but the squad didn’t have anybody else.
You can interpret that in two different ways and both interpretations would hold water. One, because of Mumbai’s sheer cricketing history, India teams have been filled with cricketers either born and brought up there or who moved to the city to further their cricketing education. But, it was also a tool to question dodgy selections.
The only reason X was there in the team was because they were from Mumbai.
There can be no such accusations as India prepares to play in another World Cup in India. In fact, you can safely say that it stopped being a thing a long time ago.
Rapid commercialisation, the advent and the spread of T20s and the rise of MS Dhoni were perfect catalysts to move the game beyond traditional centres.
But while all of that has allowed newer markets to not only breathe but flourish, the older centres still produce the majority of cricketers to the men’s national team.
Just before Covid struck, a Reddit poster had compiled where India’s then 295 Test-capped players came from. More than 60 per cent were either from Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Gujarat and Punjab.
Nine of the 15 cricketers at the World Cup come from the traditional pockets of Gujarat, Madras, Mumbai and Punjab. The more things change, the more they remain the same. Incidentally, this will be the first Indian men’s team without a single Muslim cricketer in a WC roster this century.
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Just before the first match of the 2016 edition of the T20 World Cup in India, Virat Kohli was addressing the media. MS Dhoni was still the skipper but the signs were already clear when Kohli walked into the room.
“Our youngsters,” he had said when talking about why young modern India cricketers increasingly embrace pressure, “also have anxiety in them but they also have a lot more confidence compared to us (senior players) when we first came in. In this format, their preparation and mental set-up is very different from mine when I first came in. These guys have played IPL finals, performed in different conditions and have brought that confidence here.”
In many ways, the Indian Premier League (IPL) democratised the sport and showed the way forward for many cricketers, including those who thought they had missed the bus. Without the IPL, some of these players would have never played for India. In a sport like cricket, where the onus is still on the international game with franchise leagues in the background, that’s remarkable.
Take the example of Varun Chakravarthy. After finishing college, he dabbled in architecture as well as some film-making. In his mind, he had said good bye to a cricket career even before it had properly begun. A few phone calls followed by a few spells in the Tamil Nadu Premier League (TNPL) changed his life.
“Right after completed college, I was working in an architectural company for one and a half years as an assistant architect,” he had said in a show hosted by R Ashwin. “I started with around Rs 14000.”
A few phone calls followed by a few spells in the Tamil Nadu Premier League (TNPL) changed his life. These days, Chakravarthy’s four overs in a T20I game is considered unhittable, a banker. But he wanted to scratch that itch. Scratch it he did.
That’s the kind of hold the sport holds on young men and women in this country. Sometimes it also holds young parents in a kind of trance.
Ishan Kishan’s mother played a huge role in shaping the fortunes of her young son knowing full well the pitfalls of sending away a child away from home. The dream of seeing Ishan become a cricketer, they felt, would be better served if he switch the team from Patna, place of birth, to Jharkhand, the neighbouring state.
Dhoni had already shown what was possible has he had become the first player from the state to play for India.
“I moved to Ranchi and for a few months I spent the nights at a small hotel,” he had told TNIE in 2015.
“Then somehow I managed to find a club in Ranchi and after I explained my situation, they provided me with accommodation. Then Subroto sir (former Jharkhand coach Subroto Banerjee) helped me a great deal in getting to know how things operate.”
This, in a way, was why Dhoni felt that boys from the so-called smaller towns were mentally stronger than the ones born in metros. They had already seen a lot and getting into the game was a means not only to an end but the end.
Nobody knows that better than Rinku Singh, whose mother had to borrow money to fuel his cricketing journey at a time when the journey had a lot of question marks. “I have seen my family face financial struggles and I wanted to help them overcome through cricket,” Singh had told JioCinema before leaving to Ireland on his maiden international tour in 2023. “That desire to get them out of the grind kept me going. It kept me motivated to work hard and keep up my efforts. My family had a massive role in my journey to date. When they didn’t have enough to fund my career, my mother borrowed money from others to keep me going.”
In a parallel universe, Sanju Samson would have represented Delhi, where he spent his formative years thanks to his dad’s job in the Delhi Police. But Viswanath, a recreational footballer, took the decision to move back to Kerala to help his son’s cricket career.
Throughout all these inexhaustive stories is a very common strand. The quiet sacrifice of the parent.
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Suryakumar Yadav is the captain of this side, the public face of a national obsession. But, in a way, Surya embodies everything about this format, including the fickle nature of ‘form’ in T20s. For a period of time, he thought his moment in the sun had come and gone. A late bloomer by sport’s ludicrous standards, he had already displayed a lot of match-winning nous for Mumbai Indians before the Indian team gave him a call up in 2021. Since then, he has continued to grow in stature.
Post the exits of Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli from this format, Surya is also one of the lead voices inside the dressing room. And it’s not a surprise that this particular is one built in his own image of being ultra aggressive with the bat. He had said as much in one of his first pre-match press conferences as captain of the T20 side in 2023. “Everyone has a different skill set, and they also want to come out and express themselves,” he had said ahead of a game against South Africa in Durban. “So that freedom is very important when they get onto the field, and that is what I try and give.”
On the eve of this World Cup, you can see that in the way the batters approach their innings. None of them are encumbered by the fear of failure. That could also be because of the Surya touch. He received his first international cap after the age of 30. He became India captain two months before turning 34. A reminder to the world that it’s never too late for anything.