TEMPTOS

Public memory is short and the young I find are more swayed by recent events rather than older people who have seen the game and players over a much longer period. A disturbing trend I have noticed is that today’s generation of cricket lovers seem content to know about contemporary players.

Their knowledge of the past greats is very limited. This is borne out through my inter action with several hardcore cricket enthusiasts as also by a number of polls conducted by various publications. The questions pertaining to the greatest Indian team, greatest batsmen, greatest bowlers, greatest all-rounders and so on invariably have only cricketers stretching back at most to the seventies.

Today’s generation of cricket lovers have been brought up on television and videos and because there is so little footage of cricket played from the thirties to the sixties, the younger followers of the game are quite ignorant of the feats performed by CK Nayudu and Lala Amarnath, Mohammed Nissar and Amar Singh, Vijay Merchant and Mushtaq Ali, Vinoo Mankad and Subash Gupte, Vijay Hazare and Vijay Manjrekar, Polly Umrigar and the Nawab of Pataudi.

Reading unfortunately is a vanishing habit. In my youth, in the fifties and sixties, we were brought up on books from where we got to know about the exploits of great cricketers of previous eras. I remember reading avidly about Trumper and Hobbs, Hammond and Hutton, O’Reilly and Grimmett, Nayudu and Merchant and going through books written by Neville Cardus, Ray Robinson, RC Robertson Glasgow, AA Thomson and Berry Sarbhadhikari. With reading a lost art, there is this tendency by today’s generation of cricket lovers to belittle or dismiss the facts, figures and statistics associated with cricketers of a bygone period.

Just the other day, I was going through a website opinion poll asking readers to list the greatest Indian spin bowler of all time, even as some ten names (options) were listed. Anil Kumble alone got about two thirds of the vote, Harbhajan was way behind in second place while the members of the famous spin quartet all got single digit votes. Subash Gupte arguably the greatest of Indian spin bowlers (a view shared by Gary Sobers and Erapalli Prasanna among others) was second last in the voting.