Pitchside

Martin Chandler | 8:50am BST 15 October 2023

Published: 2023
Pages: 327
Author: Mathur, Amrit
Publisher: Westland
Rating: 3.5 stars

The name of Amrit Mathur must, I assume, be one that most Indian cricket lovers will recognise. On the other hand I doubt too many will have heard of him elsewhere. My initial thought was that perhaps he was related in some way to LN Mathur, an Indian cricket writer from the immediate post war years. It seems not from what I am told, but can’t be ruled out.

This does of course mean that Mathur’s role in Indian cricket has been an adminstrative one, starting with his appointment as manager of the party that toured South Africa in 1992 for the Proteas first post re-admission series, through to the establishment of the IPL. Such longevity of itself suggests a man who was adept at the ambassadorial roles he fulfilled, and hence not one to seek a place in the headlines for himself.

In fact I suspect modesty must certainly be one of Mathur’s attributes, as if there is a disappointment in the book it is that the author does not say very much about himself, the chapter that sets the scene before the business of that historic 1992 series occupying a mere ten pages. It would have been interesting to know a little more about how his civil service career developed and his move into cricket administration and, whilst he wasn’t a First Class cricketer, I suspect he was a much better player than he lets on in his brief summary.

The story Mathur tells is certainly an interesting one. That historic series in 1992 must have registered with me at the time, but is long forgotten. The off field story is an unusual angle to look at any tour from, and the organisation of the tour remarkably straightforward in that when decisions had to be made, it was for Mathur himself to make them without endless consultations with his paymasters.

Cricket is, as we all know, big business in the 21st century, particularly in India, and one unexpected account is as to how the South Asian bid for the 1996 World Cup was put together. The direction of travel, replete with commercial and political considerations was clear even then, but other aspects were dealt with in a surprisingly naive way, the issue of television rights for that being the best example.

In 2004 Mathur managed the Indian side that toured Pakistan. Five years earlier, when Pakistan had visited India, the BCCI had appointed Mathur to accompany the side managed by Shahryar Khan and, certainly for this outsider looking in, the extensive chapter dealing with those episodes are the highlight of the book. I certainly learned a good deal I had not previously appreciated about the problems that afflict cricketing and other relations between the two countries. Most surprising was that the tour went ahead at all, the discovery on arrival by Mathur that a recent kidnapping of a sports minister had ended with a ransom being paid clearly not troubling him unduly.

The bulk of the narrative deals with Mathur’s account of his cricketing times, and as a curious neutral I certainly enjoyed reading it. I am sure however that Indian readers will find even more in it than I did, and I would certainly recommend the book for that alone. But then at the close there is a rather different chapter that I greatly enjoyed, entitled Gamechangers.

This is a very different type of writing, and in it Mathur gives his impression of some of the biggest names in Indian cricket, from both on and off the field. He begins with Tiger Pataudi, a man about whom a great deal has been written before. Much of that I have read, but none of that has ever captured the essence of Tiger the man in the way that Mathur does. Sunil Gavaskar is looked at too, as well as modern Indian greats Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly. Administrators featured are Jagmohan Dalmiya, Lalit Modi, Madhavrao Scindia, Arun Jaitley and Raj Singh Durgarpur and, rounding off the chapter, a gentleman named Imran Khan.

Pitchside is an excellent book, with just a couple of frustrations. The first is the occasional use of words from the Hindi language. A glossary would have been useful, albeit Google did the job perfectly well and, of course, I don’t suppose Mathur has expectations of selling too many copies outside India or her diaspora, so perhaps I am being a little churlish with that one. The other minor grumble is that more care could have been taken with dates and places and the like where a number of errors were allowed through. None have any serious impact on the narrative, but do occasionally cause the reader to have to backtrack and check his memory. That said this is an eminently readable book that I have no hesitation in recommending to all, and for its target market it should be required reading.