A tough, proud man

Before he gained the respect of players and commentators as a top class international umpire, S Venkataraghavan  was player, administrator, selector, commentator and match referee at different times. In an arena wider than the field of play, he must be cricket's most versatile all rounder.

The qualities that made Venkat such a good umpire were evident in him as early as during his schooldays, when I first met him. These were a thorough knowledge of the game and its laws, fearlessness, superb physical fitness, the ability to concentrate hard for hours, a brisk decisiveness and a commanding presence. These are not necessarily endearing qualities, and Venkat has never been in the race to win any popularity poll.

I played with or against (mostly against) Venkat from the time I was about 10 and he 12, but though we had occasion to meet intermittently on the cricket ground as well as socially for decades, I cannot count myself as one of his friends, for he is a very private man, with few intimate friends. On the field, however, we had some enjoyable exchanges, highly competitive and intensely fought. That is the only way the off spinner knew to play his cricket. The needle was a bit extra, at least on my part, when we competed against each other, because I was an off spinner myself, trying to dislodge him from the Indian side, though without success. Every time I faced him I was determined not to lose my wicket to him, and every time I bowled to him I desperately wanted his wicket. I do not know if he reserved any special effort for me, but the going was never easy when I was at the receiving end from him.

We both played for the same school, P S High School of Mylapore, Madras, but in college cricket, we were regularly pitted against each other. He led the formidable Guindy Engineering College against Presidency, my college, which had a number of talented players. In addition to bowling his accurate and nippy off spinners, he batted high in the order and scored consistently. He was a brilliant fielder, especially close to the wicket, a facet of his cricket for which he was admired at the highest level. (One remarkable catch I saw him take in local cricket, however, involved his running to midwicket off his own bowling and holding on to a skier, a truly fantastic effort, on the Marina ground). He was already a Test cricketer, and some of the senior batsmen in my side got out to him even before they left the safety of the pavilion, so complete was his psychological domination of them. Our first victory over Engineering was achieved only after Venkat's graduation.

Our worst performance against Engineering came when I was captain. We were dismissed for 42 on the University Union ground, and though we managed to cause a few alarms when Engineering batted, they passed our score after losing four wickets. It was the final of a tournament, and the umpires tried to continue the match—naturally to my delight, as it gave my side an outside chance—thinking it was a two innings affair, but the party was spoiled by Venkat, who, rule book in hand, proved that the match was in fact won and lost already.

My enduring memory of Venkat is one of the seriousness with which he approached net practice, bowling non-stop for three hours everyday, following that with an extended session of fielding practice. Taking a hundred slip catches a day was about par for the course for him.

Everyone knows that throughout his career, Venkat never left the ground citing injury. Two occasions stand out in my memory. The first was during a Duleep Trophy match against Central Zone at Bangalore in 1975. One evening during the match, Venkat met with a minor road accident, falling off a scooter. (Can you imagine a current Test cricketer on two wheels?) On the morrow, he carried on as if nothing had happened, bowling a long, match-winning spell with little or no indication that he was in any discomfort. But back in the pavilion he had great difficulty taking off his trousers to change, because he had been badly bruised from waist to foot on one side.

On another occasion, Venkat bowled a marathon 72-over spell against East Zone in the Duleep Trophy at Eden Gardens, nursing a very painful injury. Left-hander V Sivaramakrishnan, my younger brother, who played that match, rates that spell as the bravest, most disciplined effort he has seen on a cricket ground.

Around the time he made his Test debut against New Zealand, after a splendid match for Indian Universities against the tourists, Venkat’s bowling was perhaps the most accurate anywhere. His sharp off spin was persistent and his occasional well-disguised leg cutter a deadly variation, invariably resulting in a catch behind or at slip when it was not clipping the off bail. Batsmen mostly played him from the safety of the crease, stretching well forward to avoid being lbw. Rarely did one of them use his feet to dance down the track. To prolong his career at the first class level, Venkat slowed down, but his trajectory was still flatter than that of the classical off spinner who flighted the ball. He was much taller than Prasanna, for instance, and therefore could not achieve the arc that Prasanna did. Still, his own adaptation of flight and spin to suit his natural endowments—which by the way included strong, long fingers, and a supple, wiry frame—was a beautiful sight on a cricket field. All his life, he remained a difficult proposition to score off, and earned the respect of many leading batsmen, including the incomparable Garfield Sobers. In fact, some of Venkat’s important successes came against the formidable West Indies.

No tribute to Venkat can be complete without mention of the terror he struck in the hearts of team-mates and rivals alike. Stories about the nervous wrecks he made of some of them are a frequent cause of merriment in the dressing room. I remember him describing the South Zone fielding in that same Bangalore match as "diabolic" and my wondering how many of my team-mates understood the word. And sure enough, I found one of them scurrying off to the KSCA office and asking the clerk there if he could borrow a dictionary.

Another time, playing for Madras Cricket Club in the Chennai league, he was the non-striker, with S Vasudevan in the midst of a brilliant spell of left-arm spin, claiming six wickets on a placid track. Vasu bowled one ball down the leg side during that spell, possibly the only bad ball he bowled that day, and to his utter shock the non striker literally barked: "How many times have I told you to bowl the faster one on the stumps!" Venkat was then the captain of the state team and Vasu one of his main bowlers.

Of most combative sportsmen it can be said truthfully that they mellow with age. I believe Venkat suffers from no such constraint. He continued to be aggressive and relentlessly focused on his job as an umpire, just as he used to be as a player. He still does not seek to win popularity contests and revels in calling a spade a bloody shovel. He is indeed a professional, with whom pride of performance in all he does is an article of faith.