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.
