 Wicketless at Dhaka
 Playing for Hyderabad Blues before 35,000 paying spectators in January 1978 at Dhaka, long before any Test nation toured Bangladesh, was an unforgettable experience. We might have been a loose combination of players from all over India, but as our skipper Ajit Wadekar reminded us minutes before the toss, no matter what we were called, we were the Indian team and it was as good as a Test match. The match was played in all seriousness, like the rest of the matches on that tour of Australia, South-East Asia and Bangladesh.
Today, we have the A team concept through which young hopefuls gain valuable exposure to international cricket in conditions they do not experience at home. In the seventies, tours by clubs like the Blues or CCI filled this gap admirably. What they also did was to enable young cricketers to mingle with Test cricketers, past and present, and enrich their cricket education. Equally fortunate were cricketers who knew they had missed the bus and would never otherwise visit these nations and play against their Test and first-class cricketers in superb cricketing conditions full of history.
An example of the kind of preparation such tours afforded youngsters was the experience of playing in Australia, where even club grounds have 85-yard boundaries. Anyone who has chased the ball to the fence and thrown it back to the keeper on one of these vast grounds is more likely to go home and strengthen his throwing arm than a stranger to those conditions. You also learnt to bowl and bat on wickets vastly different from Indian pitches.
 Private tours make for greater interaction with people of the host nation than Test tours do. Very often, the visiting cricketers are billeted with cricketers’ families and the resultant friendships are sometimes lifelong. My own unforgettable memories of that 1977-78 tour include playing against and sharing a few beers at a Perth clubhouse with a young English left-hander called David Gower, who we thought was not a bad little player!
Personally, that match at Dhaka was a frustrating experience for me. I bowled nearly 40 overs in the one innings of the match without a single wicket against my name. I found that I was getting quite a bit of turn and bounce, but at a benign pace, so that I either missed the batsman altogether or only hit his pad. Either the wicket was lifeless or I was tired at the end of a long and successful tour for me, in which after a decent Australian leg, I had taken 8 for 47 in 30 overs against a strong RAAF team at
Penang.
At the end of the match, our veteran wicket-keeper Tukaram Surve, all of 47 years old, came in for much friendly leg pulling, having conceded over 50 byes in a score of 450 or so. He was nicknamed ‘Godfrey’ after former England great Godfrey Evans. At one stage, he burst out in an unusual fit of pique, saying it was impossible to keep to wayward spinners like Narasimha Rao, our leggie, and me because according to him both of us bowled constantly outside the leg stump.
Our captain Ajit Wadekar decided to have some fun at the expense of Surve and told him I was upset by his remarks. “You really hurt his feelings, and that’s no way to talk to a Test prospect,” he needled him.
Surve then brought the roof down with his attempt at an apology. He put his arm round me and said: “Ramu, I didn’t mean what I said. Actually, today, you bowled well for the first time on this tour.”
V Ramnarayan
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