It was without doubt the premier cricket event in India outside of Test matches. All the Test players and the best of the rest took part in this invitation tournament. The Lal Bahadur Stadium wore a festive look for a fortnight, all the matches being played at the same venue up until the eighties. They were three-day affairs and regarded as first class fixtures until over limitation was introduced in 1974 to make for results and exciting finishes as opposed to drawn games. These were not slam bang affairs, at least in the first innings of 90 overs each, but sometimes the second innings of 40 overs could produce exciting run chases.

I played in the tournament for five or six years in the seventies, bowling my first ball at that level of cricket to Rohan Kanhai, and forcing my way into the Hyderabad Ranji Trophy team by taking eight for 75 against JK XI. That glamorous side was led by Pataudi, and included the likes of Surinder and Mohinder Amarnath, Salim Durrani, Abdul Hai, Karsan Ghavri and Laxman Singh. I played under a number of excellent captains like Abbas Ali Baig, Hanumant Singh and Ajit Wadekar and rubbed shoulders with several cricketing greats. On one of those occasions I was a member of the State Bank team, when, in one sensational burst of left arm medium pace bowling, young Abdul Wahab took a hat trick against us, dismissing Ajit Wadekar, Ambar Roy and Hanumant Singh.

In another match a couple of years later, I was the junior partner in a last wicket stand during which I swept Shivlal Yadav powerfully and injured short leg fielder Rajan so severely that he could not come out to open the innings when Hyderabad batted. His replacement at the top and captain of the side, P Krishnamurti, scored a splendid century, reserving some special treatment for S Venkataraghavan. Murti was dropped repeatedly off my bowling, and my good bowling went unrewarded. My opposite number Shivlal picked up four or five wickets, earning a place in the Indian team soon afterwards, while I missed the bus.

Moin-ud-Dowla was dominated by the powerful State Bank of India. The eleven often read like the Indian Test team, boasting such names as Ajit Wadekar, Hanumant Singh, Abid Ali, G R Viswanath, Syed Kirmani, Gopal Bose, B S Bedi, Rajinder Goel, and V V Kumar, and, in later years, Roger Binny, Mohammad Azharuddin, Yashpal Sharma and Ashok Malhotra. Yet, with all those stalwarts around, less known players sometimes came up with match and tournament winning performances. The most notable of them was left arm spinner Ashok Joshi who frequently bowled State Bank to victory.

Other strong teams, especially in the early years were ACC, Nirlon and Mafatlal. Great players like Polly Umrigar, Vijay Manjrekar and Bapu Nadkarni were seen in the Gold Cup, and during the years when Sunil Gavaskar led Nirlon, Ashok Mankad captained Mafatlal. A very popular outfit was U-Foam whose captain M L Jaisimha collected a galaxy of stars around him. Salim Durrani, Tiger Pataudi, Mike Dalvi, Parthasarathi Sharma and Brijesh Patel (when their team Mafatlal was not competing), E A S Prasanna and B S Chandrasekhar were regulars in his eleven. My brother V Sivaramakrishnan made a spectacular hundred on his Moin-ud-Dowla debut for U Foam against a Syndicate Bank attack that included Roger Binny and B S Chandrasekhar, and that’s how he came into the limelight.

Vazir Sultan Tobacco, the local patrons of cricket, always fielded a youthful team with an eye on the future, and many Test players began their careers turning out for the VST Colts team in the Gold Cup. Dilip Vengsarkar, Kapil Dev and Arun Lal are names that readily come to mind.

My most pleasant memories of Moin-ud-Dowla are those of sitting on the balcony outside the rooms at the Lal Bahadur Stadium and watching cricket in the company of India’s best cricketers and listening to cricket talk, eagerly absorbing some priceless cricketing wisdom from them. It was something my generation of cricketers was privileged to enjoy.