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The book “is a story of Tamil Nadu cricket, more than its history, though an attempt has been made to narrate the chronology of organised cricket in the state,” he adds in his explanatory note. Here we bring you some of the chapters of this interesting history nee story of Tamil Nadu cricket. Over to V Ramnarayan:
Personally Speaking Cricket was as indispensable a part of growing up in sleepy Madras of the 1950s as curdrice and oilbaths. Everywhere in the city, there were cricket-mad children, their fancy fed by radio commentary and newspaper reports, and the occasional visit to the cricket ground to watch their local heroes. In Alwarpet, my brothers, sisters, cousins and I grew up in a large extended family that stretched across two widely separated roads - Eldams and Murrays Gate - with no wall separating the four houses in that vast compound. Life revolved around cricket, just as I am sure it did for countless other children in Nungambakkam and Kilpauk, T’Nagar and Kodambakkam, Adyar and Mandaveli. All important adult discussions, or so it seemed to my fevered imagination, centred around the willow game, as indeed did all juvenile verbal duels and pitched battles. We had charcoal stumps drawn on a number of walls in the compound, every corridor and hallway was a makeshift ground when it was too hot outside even for mad dogs and Mylaporeans, there were three or four pitches within the compound that we kids had levelled and rolled-even had cowdung-sprayed by our helpful domestic staff-but the crowning glory was the vast “ground” across the street, now completely swallowed by the residential enclave Venus Colony.
At deep third man stood two gateposts--and no gate-on top of which stood two little boys playing the pipe, the mythical Gemini lads in all their sculptured splendour. The driveway that extended from that gatepost all the way to the DEO’s office suggested that there had once been a compound wall extending from deep fine leg to deep third man. Our ground must have been part of the vast compound to the left of the imposing, now non-existent gate. The wicket was a beauty, levelled by innumerable humans and cattle walking in a diagonal from the studio gate to the Gemini gatepost and on to Murrays Gate Road. The ground itself was well-grassed but manicured by grazing buffaloes, which seemed to equal the human population of the street. Only when it rained did the playing surface pose problems, challenging the technique and courage of the barefoot batsmen, while transforming our military medium pacers into demon fast bowlers. The hoofmarks of the buffaloes on wet soil hardened into dangerous ridges from which the ball reared up steeply. Batting then became largely a matter of survival of the luckiest. On this ground, we played the first matches of our lives. The first league player we encountered on our Lord’s was A K Vijayaraghavan, a left arm all rounder, who was probably in his teens then, in the late fifties or early sixties. His left arm spin was of a quality we had not been used to hitherto, but we too had some pretty useful players, so the match was a fairly even contest.
Once we moved out of Murrays Gate Road, and Venus Colony came up, obliterating our own private Lord’s, we had to find other playgrounds, but we did not have far to seek, with construction activity in the city still well below the frenzied levels that began to be attained in the seventies. I was by now old enough to join the formal nets inside ‘Mangadu House’ on Mowbrays Road, between Seethamma Road and Bharatidasan Road, where MRC ‘B’ led by Gopu (M Gopalakrishnan, later chairman of Indian Bank and a vice-president of TNCA) practised, but my younger brother Sivaramakrishnan, the loquacious M K Ramanathan, his brother Krishnakumar, N Kumar of the Sanmar family, and a host of younger cricket fanatics played undying matches inside a compound at the junction of Mowbrays Road and Sir C V Raman Road. Wouldn’t you love to read on? Watch out for more next week. Same day. Published by Kalamkriya Ltd and distributed by Eastwest Books (Madras) Pvt. Ltd, the book is available at all leading bookstores and is priced at Rs 295. Kalamkriya, 9, Cathedral Road,
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Copyright
2008, Chennai Interactive
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“The title of the book is a play on the names of two clubs long established in Chennai cricket. Mambalam Mosquitos was a popular club born in the 1940s, while Jolly Rovers is the name of one of the most successful teams in the state’s cricket history,” says V Ramnarayan in his book on Tamil Nadu cricket.
To the left, past deep midwicket was a side entrance to the Venus Studios, and a few hundred yards beyond the deep extracover boundary was the District Educational Officer’s (DEO’s) office, an old colonnaded building that once housed the Ananda Vikatan office.
At around the same time, boys also played regularly at the Nageswara Rao Park at Luz. We once embarked on an expedition to that rather unkempt piece of turf-it was not the well-maintained park it is now-expecting to play a match against a team that included Venkataraghavan and his elder brother Veeraraghavan, but for some reason, the match did not take place.
