Cricket, and the Crowd

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Dream comes True in 1969

In the winter of 1969, I was thirteen and newly transplanted—from Craddock High School to Swavalambi Vidyalaya in Wardha. Those were the years when television sets were rarer than a hat-trick in a Test match, and cricket reached most Indian homes the way gossip does: through voices, rumours, and grainy photographs.

My cricket education came from the crackling devotion of radio commentary and the small black-and-white pictures in newspapers. I knew the names, the scores, and the heroes, but I had never seen a real pitch with real players moving on it. A live match, for a boy like me, was not a plan. It was a private fantasy—one that you don’t even say aloud, in case it dissolves.

Then my father’s friend, Mr Champalal Fattepuria, did something that felt as generous as it was unexpected. He offered to take me to Nagpur for the second Test match between India and New Zealand at the old VCA ground near Liberty Cinema. Jamtha, with its grand modern stadium, was still a distant future. This was the Nagpur of narrow roads, familiar squares, and a stadium that seemed enormous simply because I had never entered one.

As we drove towards the ground in Mr Fattepuria’s car, I felt a tightening in my stomach that had nothing to do with motion sickness. It was the anxious thrill of stepping into a world that had previously existed only in sound.

The first pilgrimage: white flannels and green grass

The stadium was buzzing long before the first ball was bowled. The air carried the mixed smell of dust, sweat, and snacks. People looked serious, as if they were about to sit for an examination. I climbed the steps and suddenly saw the field open up below me—an oval of green, so bright it looked almost artificial. Players in crisp white flannels moved like they belonged to a different class of human beings.

I remember being spellbound not only by the game but by the presence of the men themselves. Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi Jr was there, marshalling his troops with that unmistakable air of command. Around him were names I had worshipped in print: Bishan Singh Bedi, Erapalli Prasanna, Farokh Engineer, Ajit Wadekar, S. Venkataraghavan. Even if I had seen none of them bat or bowl, just watching them take their positions felt like witnessing history being assembled.

Farokh Engineer fascinated me most. He stood deep behind the stumps to the medium pace of Syed Abid Ali and Rusi Surti, collected the ball with that effortless flourish, and whipped it to Wadekar at first slip as if it were a casual reflex. As a boy who had grown up watching cricket in imagination, I could not believe that such elegance could be routine.

That match also gave me a debut to remember. Ambar Roy, a left-hander, walked in after the fall of the seventh wicket and began cutting and pulling Hedley Howarth with a confidence that did not match his position in the batting order. I can still see those strokes—sharp, clean, and slightly defiant—three boundaries in a single over, as if he had decided that if the seniors were failing, he would take responsibility for their dignity.

India lost that match by 167 runs. Our spin quartet could not make the ball misbehave the way Howarth did. But defeat, that day, felt irrelevant. I returned home with the conviction that the radio, for all its magic, could never recreate the collective gasp of twenty thousand people when a ball beat the bat by a whisker.

Cricket, I realised, was not only a sport. It was a shared emotion.

The voices in the air: when radio was religion

Of course, most of our cricket still came through the radio. In the 1970s, tuning a transistor was an art form. The needle slipped, the signal wandered, and short-wave commentary required patience that felt almost spiritual. We would gather around a single radio set—at a paan shop, a café, or a street corner—and create a community out of listening.

Those commentators were not merely narrators. They were storytellers. They didn’t describe cricket; they performed it.

I loved the mellifluous voice of Suresh Saraiyya and the excitement of Narottam Puri, whose phrase “Ek goonj” carried a drama of its own. There was Anant Setalvad with his careful diction, Jasdev Singh with his resonant baritone, and Sushil Doshi who could make even a defensive push feel like an event. Along with stalwarts like Berry Sarbadhikari, Pearson Surita, and Dicky Rutnagur, they became the soundtrack of our youth.

When I think of those years now, I realise that we were not just listening to a match. We were listening to a world being built—ball by ball, over by over—inside our heads.

The Colonel arrives: Nagpur, 1975

Six years after my first Test, in October 1975, I was a third-year medical student at GMC Nagpur. Diwali was approaching, and my classmate Omprakash Singhania and I decided to watch the Irani Trophy final between Rest of India and Bombay. It had poured heavily the day before. The ground was wet, and we did what students do when they don’t have the luxury of cushions: we laid down sheets of The Indian Express and our handkerchiefs, hoping our trousers would survive the day.

We had come for the famous names—Gavaskar, Vishwanath, Prasanna. Instead, we were served a lanky, unknown teenager called Dilip Vengsarkar. When he walked in to bat, the crowd groaned with the impatience of people who believe they have paid for stars, not apprentices. His name itself felt like a tongue-twister, and he looked too thin to fight a spin attack.

Then he began to bat.

What followed was so unexpected that it still feels slightly exaggerated, even though it happened in front of my eyes. Vengsarkar played as if he had no respect for reputations. He hit seven sixes—seven—against an attack that included Bedi, Prasanna, and Venkataraghavan. It was a display of fearlessness that belonged to a later era, the kind we now associate with T20 cricket, not with the cautious grammar of the 1970s.

The Nagpur crowd, delighted and astonished, christened him “Colonel,” comparing him to the great C.K. Nayudu. Years later, I checked his career statistics and found that Vengsarkar hit only 17 sixes in 116 Test matches. It appears he had spent almost half his lifetime quota on that one rainy afternoon, and I was lucky enough to be there for the spending.

The philosophy of the East Stand

Over the decades, my preferred seat became the East Stand.

It began as a student’s choice—cheap tickets, no need to pretend you belong somewhere else. But I stayed with it for another reason. The East Stand is real. It has no polish and no patience for pretence.

It is not a comfortable place. You sit on concrete. You sweat. You inhale dust. You discover that shade is a privilege. Yet it is there that the true pulse of cricket beats. The audience doesn’t merely watch; it participates. People offer unsolicited coaching tips to long-off fielders who cannot hear them. They cheer singles as if they are boundaries. They ridicule misfields with the cruelty of experts who have never had to bend their own backs.

It is chaotic, affectionate, dramatic, and honest. Unlike the dignified silence of the pavilion, the East Stand vibrates with the kind of energy that makes a live match feel alive.

Perhaps that is why, when Sunil Gavaskar was asked which stand at the Wankhede should be named after him, he chose the East Stand. He knew where the heart of the game lived.

The gilded cage: comfort without atmosphere (2010)

I learnt the value of the East Stand the hard way—by leaving it.

In November 2010, Mr S.R. Halbe gifted me passes to a Corporate Box at the new VCA Jamtha Stadium for an India–New Zealand Test. I took Ashwini and his friend Alok, curious to experience cricket in what I imagined was the “luxury” version of life.

The box was magnificent. Air conditioning. Fine dining. Glass walls. A television screen that ensured you never missed a replay. It was cricket with every inconvenience removed.

And yet, within a few hours, a strange thing happened. We became bored.

The match felt sterile, like watching fish through glass in an aquarium. The crowd’s roar arrived muted, filtered through soundproof comfort. The game was still happening, but the atmosphere had been disinfected. We left shortly after lunch, mildly ashamed of ourselves, as if we had betrayed cricket by expecting it to entertain us without the crowd’s heat.

That day taught me a small lesson I have since applied to other parts of life: comfort is sometimes the enemy of experience.

The changing game: from romance to industry

The cricket I grew up with has transformed into a financial behemoth.

The IPL arrived in 2008 with a valuation of around a billion dollars. Today it is worth many times that. Franchises are bought for sums that could fund small public health programmes for decades. Cricketers have become global brands, with entourages, endorsements, and social media teams that sometimes seem larger than the team itself.

When I look back at the receipts of the 1983 World Cup heroes, it feels like a different civilisation. Match fees of Rs 1,500. A daily allowance of Rs 200. Many players held bank jobs and lived carefully, counting money the way middle-class families do. Today, they drive Audis and fly business class, and the world applauds their “humility” for posting a photograph in economy.

The game has grown richer, faster, louder. But sometimes, in the middle of pyrotechnics and music, I miss the crackle of the radio, the wet newspapers of the East Stand, and the simple joy of watching cricket without knowing what a “brand value” is.

Three generations, one match (2026)

In January 2026, I watched an India–New Zealand T20 match at Jamtha with my son and my granddaughters. Three generations, one evening, and a mind full of old memories.

It took me back to another India–New Zealand match I had watched long ago—in 1969, at the old VCA ground at Sadar. I was a schoolboy then, wide-eyed, counting every run and wicket as if it were a personal matter. That first live match had felt like a revelation.

This time, strangely, the match became almost nameless.

From where we sat, there was no big screen. The scoreboard was too far to read. For long stretches, I had no idea who was batting, what the score was, how many wickets had fallen, or how many overs were left. I spent the evening doing something doctors are not trained for: guessing.

Only after the match ended did I realise Sanju Samson had opened. The one-drop batsman who came and went was Ishan Kishan. I lost count of Abhishek Sharma’s sixes. And, believe it or not, I did not even know Axar Patel was playing. For all I know, he could have been sitting next to us.

Yet something made up for it.

The crowd. The roar. The whistles. The chants of “India Jeetega!” For four hours, thousands of strangers felt like family. My granddaughters enjoyed every minute. They didn’t care about strike rates, partnerships, or who was on 44 not out. They only cared that India was hitting the ball into the night sky.

It took nearly an hour to walk barely a kilometre back to our car. We reached home past midnight—tired, hoarse, and happy.

Somewhere between Jamtha 2026 and Sadar 1969, I realised the game is the same, but the world—and the eyes watching it—has changed.

In the winter of 1969, I was thirteen and newly transplanted—from Craddock High School to Swavalambi Vidyalaya in Wardha. Those were the years when television sets were rarer than a hat-trick in a Test match, and cricket reached most Indian homes the way gossip does: through voices, rumours, and grainy photographs.

My cricket education came from the crackling devotion of radio commentary and the small black-and-white pictures in newspapers. I knew the names, the scores, and the heroes, but I had never seen a real pitch with real players moving on it. A live match, for a boy like me, was not a plan. It was a private fantasy—one that you don’t even say aloud, in case it dissolves.

Then my father’s friend, Mr Champalal Fattepuria, did something that felt as generous as it was unexpected. He offered to take me to Nagpur for the second Test match between India and New Zealand at the old VCA ground near Liberty Cinema. Jamtha, with its grand modern stadium, was still a distant future. This was the Nagpur of narrow roads, familiar squares, and a stadium that seemed enormous simply because I had never entered one.

As we drove towards the ground in Mr Fattepuria’s car, I felt a tightening in my stomach that had nothing to do with motion sickness. It was the anxious thrill of stepping into a world that had previously existed only in sound.

The first pilgrimage: white flannels and green grass

The stadium was buzzing long before the first ball was bowled. The air carried the mixed smell of dust, sweat, and snacks. People looked serious, as if they were about to sit for an examination. I climbed the steps and suddenly saw the field open up below me—an oval of green, so bright it looked almost artificial. Players in crisp white flannels moved like they belonged to a different class of human beings.

I remember being spellbound not only by the game but by the presence of the men themselves. Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi Jr was there, marshalling his troops with that unmistakable air of command. Around him were names I had worshipped in print: Bishan Singh Bedi, Erapalli Prasanna, Farokh Engineer, Ajit Wadekar, S. Venkataraghavan. Even if I had seen none of them bat or bowl, just watching them take their positions felt like witnessing history being assembled.

Farokh Engineer fascinated me most. He stood deep behind the stumps to the medium pace of Syed Abid Ali and Rusi Surti, collected the ball with that effortless flourish, and whipped it to Wadekar at first slip as if it were a casual reflex. As a boy who had grown up watching cricket in imagination, I could not believe that such elegance could be routine.

That match also gave me a debut to remember. Ambar Roy, a left-hander, walked in after the fall of the seventh wicket and began cutting and pulling Hedley Howarth with a confidence that did not match his position in the batting order. I can still see those strokes—sharp, clean, and slightly defiant—three boundaries in a single over, as if he had decided that if the seniors were failing, he would take responsibility for their dignity.

India lost that match by 167 runs. Our spin quartet could not make the ball misbehave the way Howarth did. But defeat, that day, felt irrelevant. I returned home with the conviction that the radio, for all its magic, could never recreate the collective gasp of twenty thousand people when a ball beat the bat by a whisker.

Cricket, I realised, was not only a sport. It was a shared emotion.

The voices in the air: when radio was religion

Of course, most of our cricket still came through the radio. In the 1970s, tuning a transistor was an art form. The needle slipped, the signal wandered, and short-wave commentary required patience that felt almost spiritual. We would gather around a single radio set—at a paan shop, a café, or a street corner—and create a community out of listening.

Those commentators were not merely narrators. They were storytellers. They didn’t describe cricket; they performed it.

I loved the mellifluous voice of Suresh Saraiyya and the excitement of Narottam Puri, whose phrase “Ek goonj” carried a drama of its own. There was Anant Setalvad with his careful diction, Jasdev Singh with his resonant baritone, and Sushil Doshi who could make even a defensive push feel like an event. Along with stalwarts like Berry Sarbadhikari, Pearson Surita, and Dicky Rutnagur, they became the soundtrack of our youth.

When I think of those years now, I realise that we were not just listening to a match. We were listening to a world being built—ball by ball, over by over—inside our heads.

The Colonel arrives: Nagpur, 1975

Six years after my first Test, in October 1975, I was a third-year medical student at GMC Nagpur. Diwali was approaching, and my classmate Omprakash Singhania and I decided to watch the Irani Trophy final between Rest of India and Bombay. It had poured heavily the day before. The ground was wet, and we did what students do when they don’t have the luxury of cushions: we laid down sheets of The Indian Express and our handkerchiefs, hoping our trousers would survive the day.

We had come for the famous names—Gavaskar, Vishwanath, Prasanna. Instead, we were served a lanky, unknown teenager called Dilip Vengsarkar. When he walked in to bat, the crowd groaned with the impatience of people who believe they have paid for stars, not apprentices. His name itself felt like a tongue-twister, and he looked too thin to fight a spin attack.

Then he began to bat.

What followed was so unexpected that it still feels slightly exaggerated, even though it happened in front of my eyes. Vengsarkar played as if he had no respect for reputations. He hit seven sixes—seven—against an attack that included Bedi, Prasanna, and Venkataraghavan. It was a display of fearlessness that belonged to a later era, the kind we now associate with T20 cricket, not with the cautious grammar of the 1970s.

The Nagpur crowd, delighted and astonished, christened him “Colonel,” comparing him to the great C.K. Nayudu. Years later, I checked his career statistics and found that Vengsarkar hit only 17 sixes in 116 Test matches. It appears he had spent almost half his lifetime quota on that one rainy afternoon, and I was lucky enough to be there for the spending.

The philosophy of the East Stand

Over the decades, my preferred seat became the East Stand.

It began as a student’s choice—cheap tickets, no need to pretend you belong somewhere else. But I stayed with it for another reason. The East Stand is real. It has no polish and no patience for pretence.

It is not a comfortable place. You sit on concrete. You sweat. You inhale dust. You discover that shade is a privilege. Yet it is there that the true pulse of cricket beats. The audience doesn’t merely watch; it participates. People offer unsolicited coaching tips to long-off fielders who cannot hear them. They cheer singles as if they are boundaries. They ridicule misfields with the cruelty of experts who have never had to bend their own backs.

It is chaotic, affectionate, dramatic, and honest. Unlike the dignified silence of the pavilion, the East Stand vibrates with the kind of energy that makes a live match feel alive.

Perhaps that is why, when Sunil Gavaskar was asked which stand at the Wankhede should be named after him, he chose the East Stand. He knew where the heart of the game lived.

The gilded cage: comfort without atmosphere (2010)

I learnt the value of the East Stand the hard way—by leaving it.

In November 2010, Mr S.R. Halbe gifted me passes to a Corporate Box at the new VCA Jamtha Stadium for an India–New Zealand Test. I took Ashwini and his friend Alok, curious to experience cricket in what I imagined was the “luxury” version of life.

The box was magnificent. Air conditioning. Fine dining. Glass walls. A television screen that ensured you never missed a replay. It was cricket with every inconvenience removed.

And yet, within a few hours, a strange thing happened. We became bored.

The match felt sterile, like watching fish through glass in an aquarium. The crowd’s roar arrived muted, filtered through soundproof comfort. The game was still happening, but the atmosphere had been disinfected. We left shortly after lunch, mildly ashamed of ourselves, as if we had betrayed cricket by expecting it to entertain us without the crowd’s heat.

That day taught me a small lesson I have since applied to other parts of life: comfort is sometimes the enemy of experience.

The changing game: from romance to industry

The cricket I grew up with has transformed into a financial behemoth.

The IPL arrived in 2008 with a valuation of around a billion dollars. Today it is worth many times that. Franchises are bought for sums that could fund small public health programmes for decades. Cricketers have become global brands, with entourages, endorsements, and social media teams that sometimes seem larger than the team itself.

When I look back at the receipts of the 1983 World Cup heroes, it feels like a different civilisation. Match fees of Rs 1,500. A daily allowance of Rs 200. Many players held bank jobs and lived carefully, counting money the way middle-class families do. Today, they drive Audis and fly business class, and the world applauds their “humility” for posting a photograph in economy.

The game has grown richer, faster, louder. But sometimes, in the middle of pyrotechnics and music, I miss the crackle of the radio, the wet newspapers of the East Stand, and the simple joy of watching cricket without knowing what a “brand value” is.

Three generations, one match (2026)

In January 2026, I watched an India–New Zealand T20 match at Jamtha with my son and my granddaughters. Three generations, one evening, and a mind full of old memories.

It took me back to another India–New Zealand match I had watched long ago—in 1969, at the old VCA ground at Sadar. I was a schoolboy then, wide-eyed, counting every run and wicket as if it were a personal matter. That first live match had felt like a revelation.

This time, strangely, the match became almost nameless.

From where we sat, there was no big screen. The scoreboard was too far to read. For long stretches, I had no idea who was batting, what the score was, how many wickets had fallen, or how many overs were left. I spent the evening doing something doctors are not trained for: guessing.

Only after the match ended did I realise Sanju Samson had opened. The one-drop batsman who came and went was Ishan Kishan. I lost count of Abhishek Sharma’s sixes. And, believe it or not, I did not even know Axar Patel was playing. For all I know, he could have been sitting next to us.

Yet something made up for it.

The crowd. The roar. The whistles. The chants of “India Jeetega!” For four hours, thousands of strangers felt like family. My granddaughters enjoyed every minute. They didn’t care about strike rates, partnerships, or who was on 44 not out. They only cared that India was hitting the ball into the night sky.

It took nearly an hour to walk barely a kilometre back to our car. We reached home past midnight—tired, hoarse, and happy.

Somewhere between Jamtha 2026 and Sadar 1969, I realised the game is the same, but the world—and the eyes watching it—has changed.

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