The world’s oldest first class cricketer passes away at 100
MUMBAI: Vasant Raiji, the former Mumbai and Baroda batsman, has died aged 100.
Raiji, who had celebrated his 100th birthday on January 26, had been the world’s oldest living first-class cricketer. Sachin Tendulkar, Steve Waugh and Sunil Gavaskar, amongst others, had visited him on his birthday.
“I met Shri Vasant Raiji earlier this year to celebrate his 100th birthday. His warmth and passion for playing and watching Cricket was endearing. His passing away saddens my heart. My condolences to his family & friends,” tweeted Tendulkar.
Born in 1920, Raiji played nine first-class matches in the 1940s, scoring 277 runs in his decade-long career. Soon, Raiji decided that he was not cut out for top level cricket, and left the game to make a living as a chartered accountant. But the game never left him—all his leisure hours were spent watching, reading, talking or writing about cricket. He became an eminent cricket historian, with a wealth of stories to tell, from watching Col CK Nayudu play at Bombay Gymkhana in 1926, to Lala Amarnath scoring the first century by an Indian batsman in a Test to watching Virat Kohli score hundreds at will. He also used to correspond regularly with the late Sir Don Bradman.
“Cricket means a lot to me. I have played cricket, watched good cricket. I have written books on cricket, including one on Col CK Nayudu, my favourite cricketer. I am absolutely mad on cricket, you can say,” he had said to me when I visited him on his 100th birthday.
Raiji, who passed away in his sleep in the early hours of Saturday, lived a healthy life and retained a sharp memory till the end. “Well, it is a feeling of joy that I am celebrating my 100th birthday,” he told me that January day, sitting next to his wife Panna, who is 94. “I am not bedridden, that’s why I am enjoying my 100th year. If the health is down and if you are bedridden then there is no point living. It is a gift from God.”
Raiji was hooked to cricket when he accompanied his father to a game at Bombay Gymkhana as a six-year-old, between a local team called “The Hindus” and the touring Marylebone Cricket Club (the first MCC tour to India in 1926–27). This was where he watched Nayudu score 153, hitting 11 sixes against a bowling attack then considered the best in the world.
“That would be my greatest cricketing memory,” Raiji told me earlier this year. He was present for the first-ever Test match played in India, at Bombay Gymkhana in 1933-34, in which Amarnath scored a century on debut against Douglas Jardine’s England. His passion for the game remained undiminished till the end, and he described it as the key to his long and healthy life.
Raiji is survived by wife and two daughters.