Sunny G

Martin Chandler | 9:16am GMT 23 February 2025

Published: 2024
Pages: 272
Author: Bhathia, Shyam and Datta, Debasish
Publisher: Deep Prakashan
Rating: 3.5 stars

This isn’t an easy book to review. The reason for this is not difficult to articulate. First of all it is most definitely a hagiography, which is seldom a good start. It doesn’t help that the content is, to say the least, repetitive. But then sometimes that is the nature of the beast, and a book compiled to celebrate the 75th birthday of a superstar is never going to be anything else.

To this day I can remember reading about the young Indian batsman who was due to pitch up in England in 1971 with a Test average of 154. I was still at primary school then and, not really understanding mathematics at the time, was completely agog at the prospect of seeing a man bat who was half as good again as the legendary Bradman.

In the event that series turned into a stunning Indian victory at the Oval, but thanks mainly to leg spinner Chandra rather than opening batsman Sunil Gavaskar. It was not a great debut in England for Sunny, but he got a couple of half centuries and, importantly for me and noting that by the end of the summer that that average had slipped to 83.09, helped me to understand how statistics worked.

Eight years later I spent most of a day in front of the television willing Sunny to take his side to their seemingly impossible victory target of 448 at the Oval and, watching him put together that remarkable 221, realised just what a high quality batsman he was.

So a tribute of some sort is clearly merited, and the two compilers of this one, together with their publisher, have produced a beauty. The book is a hard back printed on good quality paper and lavishly illustrated with some excellent photographs, not many of which I can recall seeing before.

The book’s narrative consists of introductions from both Bhatia and Datta, followed by a total of 57 contributions from, in the main the great and the good of the game of cricket, but also from others who know Sunny well. Part way through the stream of tributes is interrupted by the transcript of an entertaining conversation between Datta and the birthday boy. There is then a quiz to enable the admirer to judge the level of his knowledge of the great man’s deeds and, closing the book, a statistical summary and a list of the major records that Sunny holds.

Entirely fittingly the tributes begin with one from the man who is, for me anyway, the greatest cricketer to have played the game, Garry Sobers. But Sobers’ preeminence is not the reason that his opening up is so fitting. That is explained by the role that the Sobers’ played in Sunny establishing himself during that historic series in the Caribbean in 1970/71. I did know that in his first Test innings Sobers had dropped a sitter from Sunny early on, but not that he had also put him down early on in the next Test, an innings in which Sunny went on to record his first century. The consequent byplay between the pair is dealt with in greater depth in the interview.

And the other 56? Great cricketers from all over the world feature, in fact the only notable absentee  I can think of is Sir Richard Hadlee. Naturally there are a number of teammates, a sprinkling of cricketing scribes and, to a rather greater extent than I expected, a number of contributors whose qualification is, essentially, being a close friend of Sunny’s, some lifelong and some of rather more recent elevation to Sunny’s inner circle. All, without exception, have only good things to say about Sunny, but then nobody who picks up the book is going to expect anything else, and all pay their tributes with sincerity and all, importantly for those of us who know Sunny only through his media appearances, provide valuable insights into his character.