How green was my Marina 1

The Marina ground is at long last receiving a facelift. After years in the wilderness, the historic venue of many a stirring cricket contest has now been adopted by the Amalgamations group, which has renovated the pavilion and fenced the ground before starting restoration work on the ground itself.

I have a particular reason to be pleased by this development. I played on that ground well nigh everyday for five years back in the sixties. I joined the adjoining Presidency College—whose ground the Marina is—in 1964. Though hailing from a family of cricketers, I was too diffident to give myself a reasonable chance of being selected as a member of the college cricket team. It had once been a champion side, but the year I joined it did not have a recent record worth writing home about, though there was news in the air that some exciting players were joining.

Came the day of selection and I decided to give it a miss. I went to college without my cricket kit, which made it virtually impossible for me to attend the trials. I did not however reckon with the determination of friends to make it happen. One particular friend, ‘Alley Sridhar’, the least elegant lefthander in the history of the game, thought I was out of my mind, as he believed I would certainly be picked if I took part in the selection process. Living on Lloyds Road, not very far from Presidency, he cycled home immediately after the bell, picked a spare kit for me, and literally forced me into his cricket gear just in time for me to join him at the nets.

I was an emerging off spinner. I had discovered this talent of mine quite by happenstance at Vidya Mandir where I finished my school years. I had played cricket from the time I could walk, growing up in a cricket-mad atmosphere (I strongly recommend you read my book Mosquitos and Other Jolly Rovers, in which I have described my fantastic childhood of never-ending cricket in the Alwarpet neighbourhood where I grew up. How’s that for salesmanship)! But, until one fateful afternoon when I attempted an unusual grip and discovered I could turn and spin the ball prodigiously, I had been at different times a ‘fast’ bowler, leg spinner and even specialist batsman.

The summer before I came to Presidency College, I, along with my brothers and cousins, as well as ‘Alley’ Sridhar, had been a regular at the practice nets organised by Ram Ramesh, the captain of the Vivekananda College team. Now Ramesh had been feeling sorry for me for more than a year because I had not been selected for the college team, the Physical Director Mr T V Venkataraman having rejected me. During the recent summer nets, he had been impressed with my youthful attempts at off spin bowling and actually apologised to me for not insisting on my inclusion in the college team.

How strange can life be! Here was a conspiracy of circumstances that paved the way for my being selected for the Presidency College cricket team. On the first day of the selection trials, when thanks to Sridhar’s generosity, I managed to show up at the nets, Mr Ram Ramesh decided to pay a visit to the Marina, where he had no earthly reason to be. His close friend V V Rajamani, an all rounder, was a senior member of the Presidency College team and perhaps its most influential voice, though the captain elect was the mild mannered Bhaskar Rao. Ramesh stood by the side of Rajamani throughout the selection trials and made sure he took a good look at my bowling. This was crucial, as at least a hundred hopefuls came to the nets to try and impress the selectors. If Alley—who too knew Rajamani—and Ramesh had not warned him to look out for me, I would probably have bowled a couple of overs and left the ground a disappointed if hardly surprised candidate.

With that kind of extraconstitutional support, there was no way the college selectors could ignore me. And they must have seen some merit in the recommendations Ramesh and Sridhar made. When the team was announced, sure enough my name was there, and my joy knew no bounds. It was a fantastic feeling, as the college team had a number of new recruits in N Ram, S V Suryanarayanan, J S Gupta (the last two are no more) and R Premkumar, which made it a strong combination, capable of taking on favourites Vivekananda, Pachaiyappa’s , Loyola and Engineering. (The last named was a star-studded team, virtually unbeatable). I shall try and describe in future postings the wonderful idyll that my teammates and I enjoyed over the next five seasons at the Marina.