Undoubtedly the players were talented, but it takes more than talent to maintain the standards that we had set for ourselves […] Bombay’s batting tradition has been hailed all over the world, but the fact is that we would not have been half as successful had our bowlers not taken twenty wickets on a regular basis.
— Ajit Wadekar, ‘75 Years of the Ranji Trophy’.
The Ranji Trophy was a knockout tournament till 1956–57, after which a zonal league-cum-knockout format was introduced. 1957–58 onwards, every team played against the other sides in its zone for points. The team with the most points from each of the five zones – North, South, Central, East and West – qualified for the knockouts.
At the BCCI’s AGM in September 1970, the Maharashtra Cricket Association proposed that the top two teams from each zone should get to qualify for the knockouts. The MCA’s angst was understandable. Baroda had topped the West Zone league in 1957–58, but thereafter it had been Bombay all the way. Maharashtra had never got a look-in.
To understand why Bombay and Maharashtra had separate teams despite the former becoming the capital of the latter in 1960, one needs to go back to the 1930s. The Bombay Presidency Cricket Association25, a member of the BCCI, was officially established in 1930. It was meant to represent the entire Presidency, except Sind. However, officials from Pune and Ahmedabad – both part of the Presidency – approached the BCCI for direct affiliation, and they were granted the same in 1934, just before the start of the inaugural Ranji Trophy season. It was said that one of the catalysts for the inception of the Maharashtra and Gujarat Cricket Associations was the omission of players from outside Bombay in the squad that was meant to represent the Bombay Presidency in a three-day game against Douglas Jardine’s England team, just before the first Test on Indian soil in December 1933.
Today, Maharashtra, which officially became a state on 1 May 1960, is home to three different Ranji Trophy teams, two of which (Mumbai and Maharashtra) are part of the West Zone and the third (Vidarbha) is in the Central Zone. Gujarat, which came into being on the same day as Maharashtra, is also home to three Ranji Trophy teams. Saurashtra (formerly Nawanagar and Western India) and Baroda were princely states when their respective cricket associations were created. They have their headquarters in Rajkot and Baroda, respectively. The areas in the state that are not under the jurisdiction of these two associations are managed by the Gujarat Cricket Association, which is headquartered in Ahmedabad.
The BCCI did not tinker with the associations that already existed in Maharashtra and Gujarat, but it adopted the “one state, one Ranji team” rule for all the other states that were created after Independence. The erstwhile princely state of Hyderabad, which had fielded its own cricket team since the start of the Ranji Trophy in 1934–35, was also allowed to carry on. Andhra Pradesh, which was created in 1956 with Hyderabad as its capital, fielded a separate team in the Ranji Trophy. Today, the Hyderabad Cricket Association runs and manages the sport in Telangana, which was created in 2014.
It was but natural that a metropolis like Bombay, with its rich legacy and a robust ecosystem that encompassed grounds, turf wickets, coaches, schools, colleges, clubs, corporate houses and administrators who cared for the game, kept producing exceptional cricketers. The city won the first two editions of the Ranji Trophy and repeated the achievement seven more times until 1956–57. Bombay’s eminent status in Indian cricket could be gauged from the fact that India’s playing XI for the first Test of the 1954–55 series against Pakistan comprised as many as eight players from the city. The gap between Bombay and the other teams only widened after the dissolution of Holkar in the mid-1950s.
After losing out to Baroda in 1957–58, Bombay topped the West Zone league in the next season and went the distance, beating Bengal in the final. Desai established a Ranji record with 50 wickets in the season, and Wadekar scored half-centuries in the semi-final and final. They were complemented by senior players like Polly Umrigar and Madhav Apte.
That victory in 1958–59 signalled the start of a triumphant run. It was not that Bombay did not have its share of alarms during this period, but every crisis birthed a champion.
The unavailability of players who were on national duty made no difference to Bombay’s fortunes in the Ranji Trophy. It was famously said back then that it was easier to get into the Indian team than to represent Bombay.
Sudhakar Adhikari, an opener of the 1960s, did not want to risk losing his place by skipping a Ranji game against Maharashtra, which was to begin on the same day as his wedding. He cracked the problem by having the rites conducted at the crack of dawn, after which he left for the game. He scored a century and then attended his wedding reception in the evening.
There are many stories that underscore Bombay’s supremacy in the 1960s. They beat Rajasthan in seven of ten Ranji Trophy finals from 1960–61 to 1969–70. Bhagwat Singh Mewar, also known as Bhagwatsinhji, the ex-Maharana of Udaipur and head of the Rajasthan Cricket Association, did everything he could to build a champion team, even engaging cricketers from Bombay itself as professionals, but to no avail.
There was elation in Mysore when their team scored 341 against Bombay in the 1966–67 semi-final. With Prasanna and Chandrasekhar both playing, Mysore eyed a historic win, but Wadekar scored 323 all by himself and Bombay won by an innings and five runs. The following season, Bombay took the first-innings lead in the final against Tamil Nadu but struggled against the spin duo of Venkataraghavan and Vaman Viswanath Kumar on the final day. At lunch, Tamil Nadu needed five wickets for an outright win and Bombay needed to bat out two sessions to win on a first-innings lead. The champions – Bombay – did just that, with Manohar Hardikar, the captain, and the 20-year-old Solkar proving to be impossible to dislodge.
This tradition of different generations combining with splendid effect, endured. Bombay were 174-6 in response to Karnataka’s 406 in the quarter-final of 1993–94, when Ravi Shastri, the captain, and Sairaj Bahutule, a leg-spinner playing his first season, scored centuries to enable Bombay to take the first-innings lead.
A word that Bombay/Mumbai’s cricketers have traditionally used to describe themselves is “khadoos”, which in the city’s parlance stands for a combination of determination, perseverance and obstinacy.
Cricketers from the city were at their most “khadoos” in the 1970–71 season.
The Indian team that toured the West Indies in 1971 comprised five Bombay players: Dilip Sardesai, Ashok Mankad, Eknath Solkar, Sunil Gavaskar and Ajit Wadekar, the captain. In their absence, the 24-year-old Sudhir Naik was appointed captain of Bombay for the knockout stage of the Ranji Trophy.
Naik scored 93 in the quarter-final against Delhi. Bombay gained a first-innings lead of 106 and went on to win by ten wickets. Padmakar Shivalkar, Bombay’s left-arm spinner extraordinaire, took six wickets in the game.
For the semi-final against Bengal at Calcutta, Naik convinced the selectors to add the seasoned Vijay Bhosle to the inexperienced batting line-up. Bhosle repaid the faith with an innings of 58. Ramnath Parker and Mahesh Sampat scored hundreds, and Bombay totalled 459. Shivalkar once again ran riot, taking 5-36 as the hosts collapsed for 158. He took another “five-for” after Bengal were asked to follow on.
Borde, the captain of a full-strength Maharashtra team that met Bombay in the final, would have reflected on the irony of it all. Maharashtra had topped the West Zone league that season with 26 points to Bombay’s 25. This meant that had the Maharashtra Cricket Association not insisted on the inclusion of the top two teams from each zone in the knockouts, Bombay would not have even qualified, leave alone made the final!
Bombay seized the initiative after scoring 287. Maharashtra lost their fifth wicket at 137, but Nicky Saldanha counterattacked with a series of lofted shots.
The Bombay tradition of the old guiding the new then came to the fore. Ramakant Desai, a visitor to the dressing-room at the tea interval, reminded Naik of how he had placed the latter at deep square leg and then tempted Saldanha with a bouncer, in a game some seasons ago. Saldanha had fallen for the trap and given Naik a catch.
At the resumption, Naik instructed Abdul Ismail, Bombay’s new-ball bowler, to bounce Saldanha, and stationed himself at deep square-leg. History repeated itself.
Fifties by Bhosle and Sampat, and a knock of 33 by Milind Rege, the off-spinning all-rounder, in Bombay’s second innings ensured that Maharashtra needed 254 to win. Maharashtra then ran into Shivalkar at his most unrelenting. There was some hope for them as long as Borde was batting, but when he fell to an outstanding catch by Rege at slip, it was all over.
At the time of writing, Bombay/Mumbai has won the Ranji Trophy 42 times in 90 seasons. The second-most successful team is Karnataka, with eight titles. That says it all. Mumbai has produced over 70 Test cricketers, including ten men’s Test captains. The city’s 15-year-long winning streak in the Ranji Trophy from 1958–59 to 1972–73 has no parallels in first-class cricket.
Excerpted with permission from Running Between the Wickets: The Story of the Indian Men’s Cricket Team, Devendra Prabhudesai, Rupa Publications.
