November 19, 2001

Cricket in the Maidans

- Jonathan Dyson

Few travellers stay for long in Mumbai. The hostel room I've been staying in for the past week has appeared, at times, to be the venue for a game of musical beds, with people moving on to Goa, Singapore or Australia, and new travellers, no doubt, planning similar routes, taking their places after a night or two.

Yet, for obvious reasons, I couldn’t stay for long enough. As a red-hot cricket fan, visiting Mumbai represents a dream come true for me, an ambition fulfilled at last. For this gorgeous city is arguably the home of cricket in India, which is in turn, of course, perhaps the world's home of cricket.

First on my list of places to see were the famous maidans. I spent three days here, prior to England's warm-up match at the Wankhede stadium. When I return to Mumbai for another week in January, I will visit Shivaji Park in Dadar, where Gavaskar, Tendulkar and Kambli learnt their craft.

There only used to be one maidan, or Esplanade as it was known. This was a vast open space that lay beyond the Mumbai Fort ramparts. After the Fort was demolished in the 1860s, the Esplanade was fragmented due to the construction of several streets.

Now there are three maidans - the Oval, Cross and Azad. Each has a distinct physical appearance. The Oval is the most picturesque, with a neat oval-shaped area of lush, carefully nurtured turf encircled by huge, baying palm trees.

The Cross maidan is smaller, and is surrounded by blocks of flats on one side and trees on the other. It has a less attractive rectangular shape. The Azad is the biggest of the three, with the famous Fort peering down on a mass of largely rough, lengthy grass.

Yet of course all three have one thing in common - they are witness to all kinds of cricket. School, college and club matches are played here, as well as organised friendly matches between groups of friends, and more casual games played in non-white clothing.

Yet, what I found most surprising about the maidans is that that is pretty much it. Apart from some organised net sessions, including those in the Elf-Vengsarkar Academy on the Oval maidan, all I could see were just games of cricket. No mucking about, no practising, no French cricket. Just organised matches.

When I played cricket with friends on lazy summer afternoons as a boy, even when in larger groups, we would not normally bother organising a game. We would instead line up to bowl at a single batsmen, rather like in a net session, and soon become bored and practice slip catching, or sometimes play French cricket. It wouldn't really cross our minds to pick sides, and get an organised match underway.

Yet, on the maidans, even with groups of as few as five, everywhere you can see the clear structure of a match situation, with a batsman at each end, a bowler and a wicketkeeper. There are even umpires in many of the casual games, and I even found one which had a square leg umpire as well as one behind the bowler's arm.

Perhaps there is a difference here between how the English and the Indians play their recreational cricket. The English tendency is to muck around. Invariably we play bat and ball, rather than cricket itself. Sure, as kids, if we got ourselves organised we would arrange a match now and again, but you will not see anywhere in England like the maidans, with so many organised matches competing for space.

It could all be to do with a deep and loyal respect towards cricket that I have noticed among Indians. It is almost as if to play the game in any other way than how it was intended would be some kind of unforgivable heresy.

As I observed the maidans more closely, my impressions of them gradually changed. At first, as I wandered around the periphery, I watched in awe at the sublime picture of so much cricket in such beautiful surroundings. Yet, as I got closer, I found that the matches being played, far from matching the serene environment, were of a raw and intensely competitive kind, with fierce arguments between players, and between players and umpires, commonplace.

And when I looked even closer, I found that amid the chaos created by so many games being played at once, and overlapping each other despite the vast spaces, the famous qualities of Indian cricket such as the nimble footwork of the batsmen, and the guile of the spinners, were very much in evidence.

On Saturday I watched a college match, which saw the spinners on one side flight the ball to such ruthless effect that their wicketkeeper collected five stumpings.

Meanwhile, on Thursday I ended up playing briefly in a friendly match, when a player wandered off with a hand injury. For the first time in my life, I was asked to stand at first slip. They had obviously not seen me field before.

From this position, as I watched the opening bowlers tear in, and appeal with immense gusto, it struck me how the intensity displayed within each individual match is at odds, quite comically, with the overall scene of chaos, whereby a ball struck from a match nearby will often find itself on the outfield of another match.

Unsurprisingly, it didn't take me long to fall in love with the maidans. I love the way that so much cricket is crammed into such large areas, as though even if the space was endless there would be enough games to cover them. And I love the way that you can wander round for hours on end, and find matches of such endless variety.

And, most of all, I love the way that in the Azad maidan, some matches envelope themselves across the dusty track that winds its way through it, resulting in the strange sight of old ladies in bright saris wandering across the outfield, oblivious to the fact that the side batting first is struggling on 50 for five.

GE Features

Earlier Diaries:
- A Backpacker's Diary
- Bowled over by the great Bedi
- Agonising uncertainty!
- India, not Lord's, is the mecca of cricket

Mail Jonathan Dyson

Illustration: Bijoy Venugopal