THE COACHES BEHIND THE CHAMPIONS
Forty years ago, a candidate presented himself at the cricket selection trials of St Stephen’s College. St Stephen’s then had the best college team in Delhi, and perhaps India. The new lad who came to the nets that day had two disadvantages: He was not articulate in English, and he was not to money or status born. Promising freshmen cricketers in St Stephen’s announced themselves by their pedigree; they either came from elite boarding schools such as Mayo College .
This shy new boy came from an unknown school in West Delhi; and he said he had played for Sonnet Club. The Stephanians had not heard of that place either. The Delhi cricket clubs they knew of were Roshanara Club, Madras Club, and Rohtak Road Gymkhana. So amused were they by the background and demeanour of this freshman that the senior Stephanian cricketers derisively nicknamed him ‘Bonnet’.
I speak here from intimate personal experience, since I was one of those condescending fellows myself. But later in the season our knowledge of Sonnet Club was to expand by leaps and bounds. Till then, our sole cricketing rival was Hindu College. We normally won the early rounds of the inter-college championship by an innings. Then came the main match of the year, the gruelling, close-fought, five-day final against Hindu. However, the year the boy from Sonnet joined our nets, we were given the fright of our lives in the quarter-final by the previously unknown PGDAV College, whose opening batsman, Raman Lamba, and opening bowler, Randhir Singh, were far better than our own.
Both Lamba and Randhir came from Sonnet Club, where they were coached by Tarak Sinha, who had just taken over as the coach of PGDAV as well. They had given us elitists a wake-up call, and were soon to dethrone us, when within a few years PGDAV replaced St Stephen’s as the best college cricket team in Delhi.
I was reminded of that early (and educative) cricketing experience when reading a profile of Rishabh Pant, the wicket-keeper batsman who has had an excellent domestic season. Pant narrowly missed selection for the Champions Trophy, but has already played for India in T20s, joining a long list of cricketers from Sonnet Club to be capped for the country, among them Aakash Chopra, Ashish Nehra, and India’s player of the tournament in the Champions Trophy so far, Shikhar Dhawan.
The website of Sonnet lists its members who have played for India. Then it adds: ‘As for the number of first-class players, they stopped counting a decade or so ago. Maybe a hundred?’ One of those first-class cricketers from Sonnet was, in fact, the shy boy who arrived at the St Stephen’s college nets 40 years ago and whom we mockingly called ‘Bonnet’. His actual name was Deepak Sharma, and he went on to have a successful career with Haryana, scoring 199 in a Ranji final when his team beat Mumbai in a match decided in the last over of the last day.
The Sonnet website also has an interesting account of how Tarak Sinha took to coaching. I quote: ‘It all started in 1969, when Sinha, then a budding wicketkeeper-batsman at the government-run Birla School in Kamla Nagar, failed to find a place in the final 16 of Delhi’s CK Nayudu team — then led by Salman Khurshid, who is now more famous as a Congress leader. That was when the idea of running a training center where children from lower-middle-class families could learn the basics of the game, came to Sinha. “I realized that government school children did not have the basic coaching facilities to rise,” he recalls. “I made a vow that I would strive to give the best playing facilities to cricketers from government schools.”’
The recent documentary on Sachin Tendulkar saw a cameo appearance by his own early mentor, Ramakant Achrekar. Because of his association with the greatest of all Indian cricketers, Achrekar has at least got some attention; most Indian cricket fans know his name. But other coaches who are as remarkable remain little known outside their home town.
The contributions of these coaches to Indian cricket are both individual and institutional. They take gifted cricketers at hand at an early age; hone their skills and mould their personalities; recognise, develop, and fulfil their potentialities. But beyond the impact on particular individuals, these coaches have helped further the democratisation of cricket in India, both socially as well as geographically. They have made working-class and lower-middle-class kids into international players; and they have made Indian cricket itself many-centred and multi-polar.
When I was young, Indian cricket had but one power centre, Bombay. When Karnataka grew to match Bombay in cricketing strength, few recognised that behind the rise of their best players was a focused and absolutely selfless coach named Keki Tarapore. Likewise, if Delhi has come to equal Bombay and Karnataka, a great deal of credit must go to coaches like Tarak Sinha who groomed the cricketers who have since won their teams Ranji titles, Test matches, international one-day championships, and more.
Achrekar worked only in Bombay; Tarapore, only in Bangalore. After nurturing so many first-class cricketers in Delhi, Tarak Sinha then went on to coach Rajasthan to its first Ranji Trophy title. Still later, he helped make Jharkhand a considerable force in domestic cricket. The calculating selectors who denied Sinha a place in the Delhi under 16 side all those years ago are deservedly forgotten. But the boy they spurned has since become a real (if perhaps still somewhat unsung) hero of Indian cricket.