 The changing landscape
One of the oldest rivalries celebrated in Chennai cricket was that between Triplicane Cricket Club (TCC) and Mylapore Recreation Club (MRC). In the early days, i.e., the thirties and forties, outstanding players of the calibre of M J Gopalan and C R Rangachari turned out for the Triplicane side, which was more often than not an Iyengar bastion. The Mylapore team had more representatives belonging to the other Brahmin subsect of Iyers, though there was nothing overtly casteist about the composition of either club. The War of the Roses, the matches between the two premier clubs of the period were often called, after the famous duels between Lancashire and Yorkshire in England.
Today, TCC and MRC are languishing somewhere at the bottom of the league, their promoters struggling to keep the private club status intact. That they have not succumbed to the temptation to sell their clubs for a few lakhs of rupees to a corporate marauder in search of votes in the TNCA elections speaks volumes for their sporting spirit and love of cricket.
With the city of Madras expanding geometrically in the past few decades and the constituency of cricketers moving to the suburbs, Mylapore and Triplicane are no longer the nursery of cricket in any exclusive manner. Many other areas have begun to abound in cricketers graduating to representative levels of the game. When I returned from Hyderabad to Madras in 1981, I decided to take up residence south of the Adyar, as I was already familiar with that neighbourhood having lived in Shastrinagar in the sixties. The temperature dipped noticeably when you crossed the bridge and the peace and quiet of Gandhinagar, Shastrinagar, Kasturbanagar and the other nagars beyond the Theosophical Society were in welcome contrast to the rest of Madras as I knew it.
To my delight, I realised that there were many other talented cricketers living in that part of the city. Many of us in Alwarpet Cricket Club — my team on my return to Madras — indulged in the pastime of selecting a South Madras team that could take on state teams in the Ranji Trophy and hope to do well.
I was of course immodest enough to include myself in the team, having played first class cricket for some years, and the selection committee consisting of K Srikkanth, another teammate T Nedumaran and myself came up with the following team: K Srikkanth, V Sivaramakrishnan, P C Prakash, P C Naresh, S Vasudevan, T A Sekar, M O Parthasarathy, S Venkataraghavan, P Mohan and Parthasarathi (both of Port Trust), D Girish, T Nedumaran and a few more cricketers playing for Gandhinagar Sports Club in the league. It was a formidable team, quite capable of performing creditably in first class cricket as most of us were still active at that level. Later, more cricketers moved to South Madras from other parts of the city, the brilliant lefthander W V Raman the most notable of them.
Today, the increasing density of traffic in the city has meant the reversal of this trend to move to the suburbs, and some of us are crossing the Adyar to go back to the heart of the city to reduce the stress and duration of our daily commuting. South Madras, in short, has lost some of its veteran players, but I am sure many young cricketers belonging to these areas are prominent in Chennai cricket and someone can give me a list of players that can put up a good fight against the South Madras All Stars XI of the 1980s.
V Ramnarayan
|
