Ranji Trophy: Mumbai eye quick turnaround
Blond hair streaking out of a white floppy hat, he stood arms akimbo and stared ahead at the Mumbai boys at a nets session at the Wankhede stadium. Now and then, he would lean to his left and have a chat to the new Mumbai coach Chandrakant Pandit. Occasionally, he had a word with a player or two. The humid October sun was roasting the ground but the man whose idea of preparation for a cricket series was to chase down pigs didn’t seem too bothered by it. Jeff Thomson seemed at home near a cricket net in Mumbai.
It made one wonder what was really going through his mind even as his sweaty T-shirt clung to his body. What was the man who “didn’t bowl your little outswingers” thinking when he saw the Mumbai seamers bowl some little outswingers? Perhaps, that he has some real hard work to do. Thomson is here to coach the Mumbai pacers in the MCA academy and was at the ground at 8.30 am on this sultry day to oversee the nets session. Mumbai team have just returned from a humbling visit to Vizag where they lost the first-innings lead to Andhra, a middling-level Ranji team.
Their pacers haven’t clicked yet, their batsmen have been inconsistent for a couple of seasons now at least and their captains have been changed around a few times now. Aditya Tare, the young batsmen who puts up a serious face of intent when he talks to the press about “Mumbai pride” and stuff like that which have become such a cliché these days that it just evokes a tired shrug in this migrant city.
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That cynical shrug was seen among the locals as well — some in the association itself, and some spread across the cricket maidans where earlier this season the Kanga, league, the supposedly wet-weather tournament took place in a dry monsoon. Veteran cricket tragics — coaches and organisers — lolled around on plastic chairs sipping tea out of tiny plastic cups, looking vacuously at the cricket, their minds coming alive only when pondering over nostalgia of the past.
Mumbai cricket has been on a wane for the past few years but days like this tends to trigger an exaggerated sense of cynicism about it. Things hopefully aren’t as bad as it looks. To be fair to them, the MCA are trying. They got Pandit as a coach, someone who has played when talk of Mumbai pride and khadoos cricket didn’t produce a guffaw from the listeners.
They are trying to trigger something special by roping in Thomson and are getting more former Ranji cricketers to get involved at different levels of the city cricket. The last real Mumbai cricketer is now playing for Vidarbha and it did still move you when earlier this season, Wasim Jaffer spoke about the pain and heartbreak welling inside him at the separation from his Mumbai.
In contrast, when Tare spoke about pride, it was hard to take him seriously. No fault of his of course, for all you know he is dead serious and all earnest about it but it’s the “mahoul” as they say that just makes it difficult to believe him.
Across the Mumbai cricketers on the other half of the ground stood the Punjab cricketers. Yuvraj Singh, their captain, was trying to justify why he is still playing Ranji cricket. There was the talk about a possible India return for the T20 but the dream seems too distant to take it seriously. Probed further, he talked about a chat with Sachin Tendulkar. “There are moments when you think about quitting. But I remember a chat with Tendukar late last year when he said, when we started to play cricket we didn’t think about playing for India, right? It was the joy of playing cricket.”
The cynicism of a journalist popped out a thought inside: “Does he really believe that? Is it all about just playing one more IPL?” Thought didn’t translate into words; sometimes even journalists have some iota of decency and this place with people teeming around wasn’t the right time to ask that question. Perhaps, some other day, some where else.
His team, though, will start as slight favorites on Thursday. In Brainder Sran (He is tall and quick, says Yuvraj) and Siddharth Kaul, they have two new-ball bowlers who can pose a few problems to this Mumbai line-up.
And if the pitch, which doesn’t look too seamer-friendly turns out to help the spinners, their left-arm spinner Varun Khanna, who took 8 for 97 in the second innings against Railways in the last game, which was also his comeback match after five years, can do some damage. They will miss the batting of Gurkeerat Singh, who hit a double hundred against Railways, but their top four — Manan Vohra, Jiwanjot Singh, Uday Kaul, Mandeep Singh — have been in decent form and capable at this level.
If Mumbai don’t extend themselves and put up a good fight at home conditions, Thomson might wince a few times in the next few days and start dreaming about pigs.
U-16 selector gets death threat
Mumbai Cricket Association (MCA) managing committee member and under-16 selection committee chairman Ramesh Vajge has filed a written complaint to MCA and Shivaji Park police station saying that he has received a death threat from an unknown person with regards to selection of one player.
Vajge in a long letter to MCA, accessed by The Indian Express, wrote that he received a call on Tuesday night where a caller started abusing him. “He was saying that he was not picked due to objections I raised in the managing committee for not completing the two years’ cooling period. He also gave me death threats,” Vajge wrote.
When contacted Vajge said that whatever he wanted to say was submitted in his letter to the MCA. “I have filed a police complaint and also have written a letter on this to MCA. I don’t want to make any further comment on it,” he stated.
Meanwhile, MCA joint-secretary Unmesh Khanvilkar said that the matter will be raised in the next managing committee meeting.
Senior inspector of Shivaji Park police station Ashok Jagdale said Vajge approached them on Tuesday after a person called him up on Tuesday and threatened him.
“The caller abused him several times on the phone for not selecting him in the team. Someone told the caller that his selection did not happen as Vajge had interfered,” said the senior inspector.
Vajge in his statement to the police said he told the caller, whom he did not identify, that he had nothing to do with his selection process however the caller did not listen. Jagdale said that they had identified the caller as a Pune resident and had sent him a letter asking him to come to the police station.
The police have taken a Non Cognizable complaint under sections 506 (criminal intimidation) and 507 (criminal intimidation by anonymous communication) of the Indian Penal Code. —ENS
