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On the day the 1975 Cricket World Cup got underway in England, the West Indies’ demolition of Sri Lanka by nine wickets with almost 40 overs to spare in Manchester was not the only no-contest of the four matches being played simultaneously.
At Lord’s, in front of a near full-house, India were taking on the hosts in what was the only preliminary match of the tournament played at the spiritual headquarters of the game.
(Copyright Skysports.)
Opening batsman Dennis Amiss set the pace after England captain Mike Denness opted to bat first. He belting 137 off 147 balls with 18 fours and laid the foundation for an impressive total of 334 for four off their allotted 60 overs.
Then came a performance which has been talked about and speculated on much more than the Amiss century.
Sunil Gavaskar, with a growing reputation as an outstanding opening batsman and certainly very well known in the Caribbean already—after amassing 774 runs in four Tests in his debut series in 1971 (including the rare feat of a century and a double-century in the final Test at the Queen’s Park Oval)—responded to the England challenge… by not responding.
(via Cric Mash.)
In the same way that Amiss established the tempo of the home side’s innings, Gavaskar did the same, but in the opposite direction. He batted through the entire 60 overs to finish 36 not out—yes, 36 not out!—off 174 balls with a single boundary, as India finished on 132 for three to lose the match by 202 runs.
Scores:
England 334 for four off 60 overs (Dennis Amiss 137, Keith Fletcher 68, Chris Old 51 not out, Mike Denness 37 not out; Abid Ali 2-58, Mohinder Amarnath 1-60, Madan Lal 1-64);
India 132 for three off 60 overs (Gundappa Vishwanath 37, Sunil Gavaskar 36 not out, Anshuman Gaekwad 22; Peter Lever 1-16, Geoff Arnold 1-20, Chris Old 1-26);
Result: England won by 202 runs.
Toss: England.
So with 13 days to go to the 50th anniversary of the West Indies victory over Australia in the final at Lord’s on 21 June, we will try to get a sense of what that Gavaskar performance was all about.
Was it, as many surmised at the time, that India were just clueless about the limited-over game and didn’t know how to go about a run chase?
Madan Lal, who opened the bowling for India in that tournament with his gentle medium-pacers, seems to give credence to that view with his comments in the Fox Television documentary 1975 Cricket World Cup Story:
“It’s a whole new experience you know. At home we didn’t play that much one-day cricket and the people were not expecting us to win anything.
“So we were just new to one-day cricket and we were just analysing the whole thing, how to play this one-day game.”
Inexperienced yes, but not entirely new because just 11 months earlier, India were in England for a three-Test series followed by two One-Day Internationals which featured the majority of players who appeared at the 1975 World Cup, including Gavaskar and Lal.
England were comfortable winners of both matches, by four-wicket and six-wicket margins, as India posted 265 all out off 53.5 of their allotted 55 overs in the first fixture at Headingley in Leeds and then 171 all out off 47.3 overs in the second at The Oval in London.
Gavaskar got to 28 off 35 balls with three fours and one six before being bowled by seamer Geoff Arnold at Leeds. He made 20 off 23 balls with three fours at The Oval, falling to debutant medium-pacer Robin Jackman.
(The same Robin Jackman who ignited a firestorm in the Caribbean in 1981 when, because of his South African connections—he regularly played domestic cricket there—he was refused entry into Guyana and the scheduled second Test at Bourda of the five-match series was cancelled.)
(via Daily Mail.)
But the point of those Gavaskar stats is that he was very much capable of batting positively. So why not at least make an effort of challenging that target of 335 in the opening World Cup match?
After all, even if the feeling in the dressing room was that it was way beyond their reach, this was the men’s game’s first global tournament and surely—if for national pride only—the Indian team would not want to be seen going down without a fight.
Amiss has his own theory on the go-slow.
(via ESPN Cricinfo.)
“He was just protesting that we got too many runs and there we were with all the fielders [spread out] because there were no restrictions as to how many you could have out on the boundary so we had a pretty defensive field,” he said, in the Fox Television documentary.
India’s team manager, GS Ramchand, was clearly at odds with the opening batsman’s tactics.
“I do not agree with his tactics, but he will not be disciplined,” he said to the media immediately after the match, although he was quoted with far more strident in the Daily Express in London, two days later.
“It was the most disgraceful and selfish performance I have ever seen. His excuse (to me) was, the wicket was too slow to play shots but that was a stupid thing to say after England had scored 334. The entire party is upset about it. Our national pride is too important to be thrown away like this.”
Messages from the dressing room to get going or get out were ignored. Indian fans hurled insults at him from beyond the boundary. One managed to get out to the middle and apparently dumped some sort of foodstuff at Gavaskar’s feet—all the while berating the batsman before police finally led the protester off the field.
And what does the man himself have to say? In Clifford Narinesingh’s book Gavaskar: Portrait of a Hero, published in 1995, he describes the experience as a “complete mental block”:
Four years later at the World Cup, Gavaskar said he was caught behind off Snow in the second ball of the innings; but nobody appealed, so he batted on.
(via The Cricketer.)
“By far, it was the worst innings I have ever played. There were occasions when I felt like moving away from the stumps, so that I would be bowled. This was the only way to get away from the mental agony from which I was suffering. I was dropped thrice, off fairly easy chances too.
“I was in a curious position. I couldn’t force the pace and I couldn’t get out, even when I tried to. Towards the end I was playing mechanically.”
In his investigation of the situation, published on ESPNCricinfo in 2011, Martin Williamson quotes Gavaskar as regretting he didn’t walk when he edged the second delivery of the innings from John Snow to the wicketkeeper.
Photo: Hulton Archive.
“I keep tossing and turning around about it now. I asked myself, ‘Why the hell did I not walk the second ball?’ I was caught behind and would have been out for zero. But nobody appealed.
“I had flashed outside the off-stump… it was just such a faint nick that nobody appealed. The bowler went ‘Ah!’ and the ‘keeper, Alan Knott, who was standing some way back, did the same.
“There was no real appeal, no proper ‘How’s that?’ That little moment of hesitation got me so much flak all these years.”
Copyright: AP Photo/ Str/ Kishore.
A moment of madness—well, 60 overs of madness—in an otherwise glittering career?
Maybe he can blame the Lord Relator for inspiring him to take the calypsonian’s tribute to his 1971 heroics literally: “Just like a wall, we couldn’t out Gavaskar at all!”
Next: How the teams from Down Under fared on opening day.
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Fazeer Mohammed is a journalist/broadcaster with almost 40 years’ experience across a range of media.
His interest in cricket, and particularly its history, started at home via his father’s small collection of autobiographies and magazines, offering perspectives and context which have informed his commentary and analysis on contemporary issues in the game.
