A Test match at Chepauk is an occasion to catch up with many
old friends. In the 20th century, the late S Annadorai was usually among those
present, none the worse for his years, climbing the stairs effortlessly,
trading old anecdotes with people he watched over as they grew up in cricket.
He was his jaunty old self, as full of beans well into his eighties, as he was
decades ago, when he would announce the City Colleges or Inter-Association
Junior team with a flourish to anxious young cricketers who had gone through
the trauma of selection trials. A former joint secretary of the Tamil Nadu
Cricket Association, he had been a junior selector and Chairman of the league
sub-committee as far back as 1955. A trusted lieutenant of S Sriraman,
Annadorai never rose beyond being bridesmaid to occupy the secretary’s chair in
the TNCA.
The joke doing the rounds in my playing days was that with
Annadorai around as convener of the selection panel, you stood a good chance of
being picked if you had an alien-sounding name—Coorgi and Anglo-Indian names
were said to be particularly lucky. The moment the official stylishly announced
“Monteiro” or “Cariappa”, knowing glances were exchanged among the players
assembled. Perhaps those players fully deserved their inclusion, but human
nature being what it is, we could never resist the temptation to conclude that
there was bias in favour of the exotic. After all, familiarity does breed
contempt, doesn’t it?
Annadorai had a long innings in Chennai cricket. He ran a
club called City Central League for decades. Hailing from a land owning family
in Mannargudi near Kumbakonam, he spent a great deal of his time and money on
the promotion of his favourite game, cricket. An outspoken man, he believed in
calling a spade a spade, only you might not agree with his definition of a
spade. A great believer in young talent, he was also a stern critic of
individual players, whom he tried to correct and motivate in his own inimitable
style, not always to the liking of the player concerned.
It was through Annadorai’s initiative that the Colts’ tour
of Bombay took place on a regular basis. Despite his eccentric views, and his
own version of catch practice—India's bowling coach B Arun does a very good
imitation of it—the old man was a popular manager, because he took excellent
care of the boys and often spent his own money to give us wonderful treats,
buying us dinner at top class restaurants, taking us to the movies and so on.
The Colts’ tour was a first rate learning experience for
young cricketers from Tamil Nadu, for it afforded them their first exposure to
turf wickets and Bombay professionalism for ten days at a stretch. The tour was
also without tensions of any sort because the visitors were not expected to win
too many matches, as most of the opposition was from the top drawer. Quite
possibly because of that, the Colts won more often than lost.
The only jarring if somewhat amusing note was struck by the
average age of the team. According to the dictionary, a colt is a young horse,
and you would naturally expect the team to consist mainly of teenagers, but as
players in the second and third divisions of the Chennai league were eligible
for selection, you often found veterans of several summers in the squad. The
common joke was that the Colts were in fact “Kezha Bolts”, meaning a Dad’s
Army, “kezha” meaning old, and “bolts” added for rhyme.
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