A friend suggested that I avoid the chronological approach and narrate ‘Hyderabad Blues’ in an anecdotal style, doing some time travel back and forth, to make it more interesting.

Another friend, Arun Dev from Dallas, USA, reminded me via e-mail of an incident during the last training camp I attended (and his first) with the Hyderabad squad, bringing back memories of the momentous happenings before and after that camp.

The camp was a three-week programme held at Nizamabad, a few hours’ drive from Hyderabad, and some 25 of us attended it. At the end of it, I, one of the senior-most players in the group, was omitted from the 14 that did duty against Andhra in the Ranji Trophy opener of the 1979-80 season. In fact, I had almost missed the camp.

The camp came a couple of weeks after one of the most dramatic developments in Indian cricket, when the entire Hyderabad team was sacked on the morning of its match against Mafatlal Sports Club in the first round of the Moin-ud-Dowla Gold Cup.

Trouble had started the day before the match, though it had been brewing from the time the Hyderabad boys under M Narasimha Rao went to Srinagar to take part in the Wills Trophy. Rumblings of some form of player rebellion had begun to be heard, catalysed by the brave noises made by the captain, disgruntled at being left out of the South Zone squad, and blaming the Hyderabad Cricket Association (HCA) for it.

I had been out of the Hyderabad team since the previous season’s knockout round, when Shivlal Yadav came back from Test match duty, and had not been selected for the Wills Trophy. I had, however, worked very hard to reclaim what I regarded as my rightful place in the state team, and had a bagful of wickets in the tournaments leading to the first class season. My performances had been quite spectacular, with 5, 7, 7 and 6 wickets in the last four innings before Moin-ud-Dowla, and the selectors were well nigh forced to include me.

Arriving ten minutes late for morning net practice the day before the Moin-ud-Dowla opener, I was surprised to see the whole team trooping back into the dressing room. For a moment, I wondered if I had been so hopelessly late that my colleagues were already taking a drinks break.

I soon found out that the players, led by their captain and the hugely talented batsman Saad bin Jung, were actually staging a walkout in protest against coach K Premji’s instructions to those two players to leave the nets and change from their tracksuits to cricket ‘flannels’, to fall in line with the HCA’s dress code.

‘The coach insulted our captain and senior player,’ was their vociferous claim, and there was bedlam in the dressing room. “Ram, are you going to talk some sense to your teammates or are you too going on strike?” Premji had asked as soon as I entered, and now it all began to make sense to me.

Once I had a chance to talk to my colleagues, I tried to do exactly what Premji had asked me to do. But my advice fell on the deaf ears of a very worked-up group of young firebrands, or so it seemed. “That’s the trouble with you old guys, you have no guts,” Saad bin Jung told me, and a couple of his friends nodded in agreement.

I still persisted that confrontation would do us no good. “We can’t walk out of practice a day before an important match. We should instead try to sort out our differences with the association across the table,” I tried to reason, but again, I met with stiff resistance. Finally, I warned my friends that we could all be dropped en masse on the morrow, and asked, were we prepared to face such a consequence? A loud ‘Yes’ in chorus was the reply.

“Now that all of us are prepared to accept the worst punishment, I am fully with the team,” I assured them and we all dispersed, amidst much nervous giggling and palpable excitement.

‘Mafatlal Favourites’ screamed the sports page headline next morning, even as I was getting dressed to go to the ground, and I was wondering how the Hindu could so blatantly disregard the all round strength of the local team. Just then I noticed the box item next to it, which said: Hyderabad team sacked.

Also by the author: Chennai Chat, Curdrice Cricket

Profile of V. Ramnarayan