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By Sidharth Monga

After hitting Ricky Ponting in the head with a vicious bouncer, he went on to apologize to Ricky; it was of little influence that Ricky went off in a rather ungentlemanly manner, sledging him; he still acted as a perfect gentleman. You won’t normally associate such soft behavior with a fast bowler good enough to beat the best hooker of the cricket ball and hit him straight in his head. But that’s Javagal Srinath for you! A perfect soft-spoken gentleman trapped in a fast bowler’s body. As if that isn’t ironic enough, he has now accounted for most ODI wickets for India, a place where finding a desert rose used to be easier than finding a quality fast bowler.

In a time when fast bowlers are getting robust and harsher by the day, Srinath has been a pleasant change. He had never had the vocabulary to qualify him as a fast bowler. He was that kind of guy-next-door champion who believed in letting the ball do all the talking. With his contributions largely under-estimated, he had opted retirement from test cricket in 2002 and for the shorter version, his body wasn’t considered fit enough to take the grudges. He hadn’t apparently ended on a high note and quite strangely, no one seemed to even notice that the man who carried the baggage of Indian pace attack almost single-handedly for the best part of a decade had gone. Worse still, no one seemed to be disappointed.

No one seemed to notice because all through his career, he had been a quite achiever. He, on the other hand, had probably given into the fact that perhaps he wasn’t good enough anymore; that perhaps it was time to let young blood in. It wasn’t the Pat Rafter or Brian Lara kind of half-vacation-half-retirement which would recharge him so that he would come back rejuvenated. He seemed to have resigned to his fate and a tame end to a glorious career. But as Sunil Gavaskar says, “We cricketers aren’t given the power to decide how to end our careers. There’s someone up there who does it for us.”

And this time, the Man up there sent Sourav Ganguly as his messenger. As if the Man up there wanted to tell Sri that he had to disprove some people; the writer of this article included! And more importantly that India still needed his services; that the new crop of quick bowlers needed some grooming up. As it turned out, He had chosen one heck of a messenger. Sourav Ganguly knows no half measures. He just believed in getting the work done, didn’t matter if he had to plead with Srinath in public; didn’t matter if he had to take the flak of the media for going back to an old man when we had a promising young batch coming up.

Sourav knew what he wanted and he finally talked Srinath out of retirement and what a move it has proved to be. Srinath, in the NZ trip and World Cup, had been in the best form we had seen him in for years.

And who said these South Indians are only good enough to plot and plan; they don't have big hearts. Srinath, in his comeback showed a lot of heart. The biggest change in Sri’s comeback was that he enjoyed the game more than he ever did. You could see him joining a Mexican Wave at the boundary, you could see him having fun with his juniors and he has deserved every bit of respect they bestow unto him. One can see how well Zaheer and Nehra have flowered under him.

Why I have focused on his comeback is because that gave his career the completeness. Because in his comeback, he stood proud mocking away at skeptics like me. Because in his redemption song, he turned his critics into his fans.

The India Pakistan contests always leave me dreamy. And in an isolated corner of my mind, there lies that heroic performance by Srinath in the otherwise disgraceful Eden Garden test match. This is not a proper place or time to remind Kolkattans that they were thankless enough to not celebrate Sri’s bravery. But still crowd respect or not, that vintage performance from Srinath will live as one of the best performances by a pace bowler in the dust bowls of the subcontinent. And who will forget that 6 wicket haul against the Proteas?

That was then and this is now. Sri has finally decided to retire for good. A time when 13 years of hard work has been brought down to mere figures. “551 international wickets” it will read, but it wouldn’t show the number of toiling overs, the countless drops of sweat, the truckloads of heart and character, the agony of career shortening injuries, the pain of not being able to help India win a World Cup or a test series abroad. “ 551 international wickets” the record books will read.

Its done now. No more body aches, no more broken knees, no more dislocated shoulders, but there will be a heart which will miss the fight, which will miss the game. Thanks to his comeback, people now ask the question why is he retiring; while earlier some cynics asked, why not.
 

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