Grand Prix

One of the most inspiring stories in Chennai’s cricket league was scripted by Grand Prix, a youthful side promoted to the First Division in 1982.

This collection of schoolboys and college cricketers practised along with members of another club, Grove CC, inside the compound of “The Grove”, the late Sir C P Ramaswami Iyer’s residence on Eldams Road.

That first season in the first division showed Grand Prix in a shining light, though they finished in the middle of the points table if not in the bottom half. (A year later, they were to finish among the top four teams of the league and earn the right to take part in the Simpson Trophy). Followers of Chennai cricket would be aware of the huge gap in standards between the first and second divisions of the TNCA league. Newly promoted teams invariably struggle to hold their place, even though they have finished first and second in the lower rung to earn that promotion.

One of the primary reasons for this barrier, besides the overall superiority of the senior teams is the psychological one of having to do battle against seasoned cricketers, some of them big names at the national or even international level. By exception, the Grand Prix players were a confident lot, possibly because most of them were academically bright and drew inspiration from watching and reading about great cricketers and their heroic exploits. None of them seemed to be overawed by the reputations of their new opponents.

In that first season, Grand Prix were in danger of losing a match outright to Alwarpet Cricket Club, a team that included K Srikkanth, V Sivaramakrishnan, Satvinder Singh, P Mukund, Bharath Kumar, Vasudevan and Harjinder Singh, a powerhouse of talent if ever there was one. When the mandatory last twenty overs of the match began, defeat was staring them in their face and the ninth wicket fell with 13 overs still to go. The Alwarpet bowlers were confident of wrapping it up but they did not reckon with the stonewalling ability of Ravi Chellam, now a nationally known environmentalist, but then the personification of callow youth. They were not to know Ravi had almost pulled off a similar rescue act just a week ago. Determined, even cocky, he kept up a continuous flow of words of advice delivered in an unexpectedly stentorian voice to his partner. Together they offered a broad defensive bat or their pads to everything the bowlers sent down. No amount of sledging, cajoling or downright bullying by the close-in fielders had any effect on the pair, which played out the remaining overs. On the contrary, the incessant chatter by the batsmen irritated the fielders and bowlers into making mistakes.

Grand Prix had a good run in the senior division, largely through the outstanding contributions of W V Raman and L Sivaramakrishnan, two who went on to play for the country, but superbly supported by less known players like N Ramesh, K K Sridhar, Shankar, Madan, P S Raman and a whole bunch of gutsy youngsters. But soon, the inevitable happened and the most talented of them were grabbed by company teams and some were lost to job responsibilities in Chennai and elsewhere or higher studies abroad. Some four years down the road, the team was relegated to the second division and thereafter slid all the way down. Such is the plight of private clubs in an era of professional teams sponsored by corporate patrons of cricket, though without such support Tamil Nadu cricket would surely languish in today’s competitive environment.