Unhonored, unsung – but should they be?

I’m an unabashed fielding freak, and feed off the electricity of those unlooked-for moments of athleticism that can light up a contest.

For all its ‘team’ ethos, cricket is essentially a one-on-one game, a contest between bowler and batsman, with victory and defeat being appropriated by the one or the other, depending on whether the ball went out of the ground or onto the stumps.

Every once in a while, though, a fielder produces a moment of magic that hijacks the spotlight and captures the collective imagination – and the tragedy of cricket is that while batsmen and bowlers are constantly evaluated through a plethora of statistical tools and celebrated endlessly in prose, fielders and their breathtaking displays get at best passing mention in a match report.

Rob Steen finally redresses that balance, with a lovely piece on cricket’s unsung foot-soldiers.

This highly unsatisfactory state of affairs has seldom been better exemplified than when Rahul Dravid recently overtook Mark Waugh’s record of Test catches by an outfielder, a feat that rightly drew plaudits aplenty in India and beyond. But what, beyond durability and longevity, did it signify? That Dravid – who took six more games to reach 182 than Waugh required to pouch his 181 – is the more capable or reliable? Hardly. That Dravid has achieved higher standards of excellence? No chance. For all his unflappability, for all that enviable ability to remain still, to anticipate, to coordinate hands and eyes with uncanny consistency, nobody who has seen both strut their considerable stuff would put him in the same ballpark as Waugh for jaw-dropping athleticism.

It gets worse when one considers history’s backward-points and cover prowlers, the Paul Collingwoods, Ricky Pontings and Tillekeratne Dilshans, the Colin Blands, Jonty Rhodeses and Clive Lloyds, the Learie Constantines, Derek Randalls and Neil Harveys, much less those, such as Andrew Symonds, who reign supreme in the deep. Trading less in hitting stumps than stopping runs, as often by presence and reputation as by agility, alacrity and accuracy, their accomplishments are appreciated by cameras, crowds and colleagues, yet go scandalously unrecognised by the scorebook.

Conventional wisdom is that fielding – especially in context of teams such as India, stereotypically lethargic in the field — has really come into its own only in modern times. Really? Think of a close catching cordon that reads: Syed Abid Ali, Sunil Gavaskar, Ajit Wadekar backed by S Venkatraghavan at gully and Eknath Solkar – that short leg specialists’ specialist – in the leg trap, aided and abetted by Syed Kirmani behind the stumps. Now name me a modern-day Indian equivalent to match that line up. [And since Mark Waugh’s name came up in Rob’s post, compare contemporary Aussie lineups against one that reads the Chappell brothers, Ian Redpath, Doug Walters, Paul Sheehan and Ashley Mallett, and try to top that cordon for close catching.]

Comment cue for you: The most memorable fielding display you’ve ever seen?

Mine has to be the England versus India Test, January 1973, Chepauk. In the first innings Eknath Solkar, standing closer to the bat than any short leg before or since, was directly involved in three of Bhagwat Chandrasekhar’s six wickets and, by his presence alone, responsible for all ten wickets that fell to the spin troika in the first innings. A Solkar at short leg meant that the batsmen facing Bedi, Prasanna and Chandrasekhar had the options of playing back or pushing out to leg denied them; their options severely restricted, they were forced to try and play off-side, keeping their body between the ball and Ekki, and such a handicap when playing master spinners on top of their game proved too much for England’s finest.

Bedi opened the bowling with Solkar in the second innings, and in tandem with his cohorts had gotten England down to four down for very little. England skipper Tony Greig came out to join Mike Denness, who alone seemed untroubled by the subtleties of Bedi and Prasanna and the vicious spin and bounce of Chandrasekhar.

From the moment he took strike, Greig operated to a plan. Stretching his front foot well out [and when the tall Greig plonks his front foot forward at full stretch, that is almost half the pitch covered] he took to holding his bat in defensive position at an acute angle to the pitch, and smothering everything coming at him.

The stands hummed with initial anticipation, then disgust, as Greig successfully resisted the spin troika while Denness continued to stroke the ball. Wadekar kept switching his bowlers around, but nothing seemed to work. He finally took a punt and tossed the ball to Salim Durrani, who was in the middle of his sixes-on-demand comeback series. Durrani bowled a flighted topspinner; Greig stretched well forward in defense, and you’d have sworn the bat was at a 20 — okay, 30, tops — degree angle to the pitch.

What we saw next was a swarm of white-flanneled Indians crowding around Ekki. Inching ever closer at short leg, the supreme athlete had, just as Greig lunged in defense, flung himself forward and got his hands under the ball as it fell to earth off the inert bat.

Those were the days before television, and the endless replays brought to you by sponsors — that one live glimpse is all we had; yet, at the end of a Test that India scrambled to win, losing 6 wickets in the process of chasing a modest 86 and needing Tiger Pataudi and Sunil Gavaskar, batting in that innings with an injured finger and coming in at number eight to take them through, the only thing we could talk about — with graphic demonstrations for the benefit of those who were unlucky enough to have been seated on the ‘wrong’ side of the stands — was that stunner from Solkar.

Oh, by the way — once Greig went, England folded to the combined wiles of Prasanna and Bedi. The only star of the England second innings was Denness, who looked good for a century until Prasanna sent down a vicious off break; the ball hit the inner edge of the bat, grazed the pad, and headed to earth. Only, Solkar got there first. Again.