How Sachin Destroyed My Life: but gave me an All Access Pass to the world of Cricket

by Vikram Sathaye

  7. Where to Stand

  It’s important to understand that cricketers and officials are reluctant spokespersons and therefore ensure that they wear shades whenever they come for press conferences.

  The Indian team celebrating after the win in Durban 2006, a rare overseas victory.

  Me doing a segment on funny spinners in a lighter moment with Wilko and Wasim Akram during the 2006 tour of South Africa.

  This is Murali’s bowling hand, look at the state of his index finger because of the “rip” he gives the cricket ball.

  Steve Waugh appreciates as I tell him how he stands in the slips with a chewing gum in his mouth.

  Mohandas Menon, Harsha Bhogle and Ian Bishop cramped up in the commentary box.

  This was my big moment of being with the commentary team during the 2003 World Cup. With Tony Greig and Michael Atherton.

  An overwhelming feeling standing outside Nelson Mandela’s house in Soweto, experiencing history.

  Only the official masseur Mane kaka knows why Bhajji is meditating.

  This behaviour is very similar to filmstars on an early morning flight. So as a journalist one can’t see where they are looking and trust me they can see everyone. Your only chance of catching Dhoni’s attention is to stand at a strategic place where he will cross you and where you can communicate. It’s a small observation but it’s a big one for a journalist.

  8. Buying Time From the Player

  One of the most strategic things that Sunandan shared with me is that whenever you go to a player’s room, order for a coffee or a sandwich in the room. In a 5 star hotel it takes a minimum of 25 minutes to get the order and that ensures quality time with the player.

  9. Technology and Learning

  Every journalist’s key to success is the ability to befriend technology in every possible way because you never know when something can happen and if you don’t know how to shoot, upload and send the pictures to your local office you know what you will miss.

  Ok! I know that’s 9 and not 10, but you get the drift.

  12

  Fine Tuning The Indian Team

  While millions of Indians would give an arm or a leg to get a chance to touch Sachin, Rahul or MS Dhoni at least once in their life, I met someone who did this for a living. Meet Ramesh Mane aka “Mane kaka”, a man who went on from being a chemical plant operator to someone who keeps the cricketers “well oiled” and fighting fit.

  Like many others mentioned in this book, fate and a sequence of unplanned events had made him an integral part of the Indian team. A lack of fulfillment with his job as a chemical plant operator led him to attend social service camps on the weekends and eventually a course in acupressure. He was soon conducting camps at the factory and as he honed his skills over time, even started giving massages to sportsmen at the factory.

  This carried on for a while until one day he was summoned by Balwinder Sandhu to come and treat a young Sachin Tendulkar who had a back problem during one of the Ranji Trophy games. The rest as they say is history. Ramesh Mane served as the Official Masseur (yes there is such a designation) for the Mumbai Ranji team for 7 years and then eventually from 2005 onwards he has been the official masseur and one of the most respected members of the Indian cricket team.

  Mane kaka recalls, “When I first entered the Indian cricket team’s dressing room I was told about a custom that required every new member to stand up on a chair in the middle of the room and introduce himself in a language he wasn’t fluent in.” Many had been subjected to this and all had a good laugh listening to a north Indian fast bowler speak in English followed by south Indian batsman speaking in Hindi. Finally it was Sachin who mediated and said that though this rule was sacrosanct, he would like to relieve Mane kaka from it and he went on to personally introduce him to everyone. Mane kaka said, “Sachin never liked older people being disrespected and this showed even in a lighter situation like this one.”

  Whichever part of the world you meet Mane kaka in, he always has his jadi butis packed along with a cooker which he uses for preparing his ayurvedic concoctions. He first started experimenting and implementing his theories on the Ranji team players and has even used needles to relax fast bowlers who would get extremely charged up after a game. He says his job was to not only ensure the physical well-being of the players through massage but also create a mentally relaxing atmosphere in the dressing room. One of the many things he always does is create a praying space for players across religions to make them feel at ease.

  Mane Kaka’s Music Therapy

  Mane kaka believes that unless the mind relaxes, the body will not and hence one of the techniques he uses during his massages is music therapy. International players are subjected to constant pressures and are hence prone to anxiety attacks. Music helps them relax and achieve a meditative state of mind. Not surprisingly, one of his main jobs was to understand the music tastes of all the players. At any given time, he has at least 3 iPods with different kinds of music catering to players in the team. One of the first things he does after every tour is to go to Rhythm House to source the latest music available. I’m not sure if Himesh Reshammiya ever made it to this list, but it would be interesting to know the impact his music had on players. I once told Mane kaka that he could easily take up DJing as an alternate career option anywhere in India.

  Over the years, he has managed to develop a taste for music from across the country. So while Gujarati bhajans help Ravinder Jadeja relax during his massage sessions, Sachin prefers Ganpati bhajans which he has been listening to since his school days before he goes out to bat. Mane kaka says that he has observed Sachin’s batting patterns and realised that whenever he has played certain songs he has batted extremely well. Maybe now is a good time for those artistes to demand an extra “Sachin performance based royalty” for their music.

  Sachin himself has acknowledged that his all time favourite has been Lata Mangeshkar and we will all agree that this woman has never had a bad patch in her life. Hanuman Chalisa is very common amongst many players including the likes of Gautam Gambhir. He also observed during his stint at the IPL that Dale Steyn would get motivated by listening to gospel music and would start dancing in the dressing room propelling him to bowl faster on the ground. I would have never imagined gospel music as being one to which people danced to, but if it worked for Steyn, it must be good. I guess as an opposition captain the only thing one can do as a strategy against a bowler like Steyn is to ensure that someone steals his iPod before the game so he might just be a little less effective.

  The legendary Kishore Kumar has undoubtedly been one of the most popular voices in the Indian dressing room. Mane kaka always says that before he came to the team he was not that big a Kishore Kumar fan but now knows every song of his inside out as they are always listened to in the dressing room. During my IPL shows I was quite impressed by Suresh Raina’s singing abilities but according to Mane kaka it is none other than the Indian captain MS Dhoni who is the only player who can sing the entire repertoire of Kishore Kumar songs with the right lyrics.

  As Indians, no matter which gastronomic capital of the world we are in, we are always homesick for the comfort of Indian food. Mane kaka has gone beyond his call of duty and even played the role of whipping up delicious Indian food so that the young players in the team never feel homesick.

  When players are on a long tour, especially in countries like England or South Africa, their yearning for a simple home cooked Indian meal would often take them to his door and he would cook them a meal of simple dal rice or khichdi. He always carries a separate bag on tour which consists of dal, rice and various masalas because he cooks all his meals during the tour and he knows that if he wants better performances from the players he better feed them authentic Indian food once in a while. He recalls an instance when almost 80 percent of the Indian team was unwell because of the extreme cold in Ireland. Eventually it wasn’t some complicated medication but a meal of simple khichdi, the night before the game which helped t
he team recover and win the match the next day. My immediate reaction to this story was that the BCCI should make khichdi mandatory on forthcoming tours.

  BCCI should make khichdi mandatory on forthcoming tours.

  Mane kaka believes that all the players he has seen do well have also been good at meditation and visualisation (The exception to this rule was of course Viru). He specially mentions Rahul Dravid who according to him was the most hardworking person he ever saw in the Indian team. Once when they were staying in the team hotel in Kanpur someone complained to him and the other support staff that there was lot of noise coming from a particular room. Mane kaka realised that that room belonged to Rahul and he was quite surprised as Rahul was the most disciplined of the lot. He later found out that Rahul was practising the night before the game using a hanging ball and that is what was creating the noise. When Mane kaka informed the guests, they were overwhelmed and apologised and said, “We can’t stop the great Rahul Dravid from practising, please tell him to carry on.”

  I had been hearing about this low profile individual for a long time. One always knew from the players, support staff and the media about this masseur-cum-uncle of the Indian cricket team who looked after the players like his own kids. The public always sees the glamourous side of the cricket stars but at the end of the day these young kids who come from small towns feel at home when they see a Mane kaka like character around them to help them with the smaller but essential things in life. One always tends to forget the contributions made by such individuals to the team.

  13

  Getting The Figures Right

  There was a friend of mine whose wife was so irritated by the fact that he was watching cricket the whole day that she asked him, “Do you even remember the day we got married?” Yes, he said, “That was the day when VVS Laxman scored 281 against Australia in Kolkata.” She filed her divorce papers the next day. When somebody asked him on what grounds, he said “EDEN GARDENS.” I have to admit that this is not an entirely original joke. There has been a similar joke in England that has been floating around for years but I, just like a good cricketer, adapted this to suit Indian conditions.

  But seriously I do believe that an ideal marriage in India is possible only if the two people involved are in love. In love with cricket that is. Is that even possible? I never thought it was until I met Mohandas Menon and his wife Valsa. Mohan has been a cricket statistician for more than 20 years and guess what? His wife maintains the database of all the statistics. If you can’t believe it here’s more. Mohan and Valsa between them have watched 97 Test matches and 322 ODIs; ball for ball in all these years. Yes they have watched 807 days of cricket together, every second and every minute of it and recorded it as well. They once watched cricket for 25 hours at a stretch entering data as there were three matches happening simultaneously in New Zealand, India and West Indies in three different time zones. Imagine, 25 hours of TV at a stretch without fighting for the remote or any argument about pleasing the other person. In such a relationship the wife asking for space and time becomes irrelevant as a concept. It would be so awesome, discussing Duckworth Lewis while grocery shopping, DRS while having lunch and reverse swing during dinner. What a life! They say marriages are made in heaven. Well some of them are made in front of a TV screen.

  Statistics are like mini-skirts, they reveal more than what they hide. — Navjot Singh Sidhu

  Sidhu once said, “Statistics are like mini-skirts, they reveal more than what they hide.” Surely he understood the significance of statistics unlike a lot of us. The only stats I was interested during my cricket playing days was 36-24-36. It may sound funny now but when in college, statistics as a subject simply seemed to have no significance in our lives, or at least we thought so. Mean, median and mode actually caused a standard deviation in my personality. Nobody questioned whether the weighted averages would impact one’s life in anyway unless it was to do with one’s weight. Not questioning the reason why we were learning the subject was actually the most common statistic among all the students.

  In all of this the one person who was respected the most among the boys (besides the guy who dated the hottest girl) was the guy who knew the statistics of the current Indian team’s performances. There was always this guy who knew who took how many wickets and who had batted well in earlier tours. Typically he was himself the most average cricketer in the batch but he made up for it by memorising cricket stats in order to get some respect from the boys. But back then, none of us thought that this would someday be a serious career option. Just like a subject called Geology, which I graduated with.

  I guess Mohan himself had no clue that one day he would be doing just that. Interestingly the game changing moment for him also was Sachin Tendulkar! The story is that he was the guy who recorded the statistics for the Harris Shield game in which Sachin scored 328 runs and Kambli scored 349 runs. It so happened that Sachin’s friend and now sports journalist, Marcus Couto wanted to document the score as a record and so he called Mohan to have a look at the scorecard for a recheck.

  Mohan rescored the entire match again and found out that there were two leg byes which were wrongly attributed to Sachin’s score and therefore he got it down to 326. Obviously this didn’t go down well with a 13-year-old Sachin who couldn’t believe that he got 2 runs less and fought with his friend as to how someone could reduce his score. Mohan says, “I did not budge. Little did I know that he was going to be the greatest batsman in the world. If I knew, I would have probably given him two extra runs to be in his good books. This is the record which actually got me my first dose of fame.”

  “It hasn’t been an easy ride,” says Mohan. His father-in-law stopped talking to him because he couldn’t imagine someone leaving a steady job to do this. He was embarrassed because he couldn’t tell his friends that his son-in-law was a cricket statistician. Fortunately for him, his wife Valsa supported him and later became his partner in the world of statistics.

  One of the amazing stories is that just when Mohan was making a mark on the scene as a statistician, BB Mama, an eminent cricket statistician died in 1995. It so happened that after his death, BB Mama’s daughter asked Mohan to meet her at the earliest. Mohan did not know what to expect. When he reached the meeting there was a gentleman sitting besides her who started the conversation by asking him, “What is the origin of the word “Chinaman” in cricket?” Without batting an eyelid, Mohan told him about how an English player had got out to a West Indian of Chinese origin, and who on his way out blurted, “How ridiculous to get out to a Chinaman!” Since then that kind of a bowler was refered to as Chinaman.” Mohan started wondering why he had been summoned and asked these questions. When probed, it was revealed to him that BB Mama, in his will had left his entire collection of books on statistics to Mohan and the person who had asked him this question was his lawyer who was executing the will. This question was purely to test whether it was the right decision to do so and Mohan passed with flying colours.

  The Job Profile

  So what does a cricket statistician actually do? He or she documents every delivery in a cricket game into specially designed computer software. Before the proliferation of computers, this was done manually.

  While in the commentary box, a statistician has to be ready with every kind of information which could vary from the playing team’s head to head standings, any approaching milestones, pitch conditions, average runs scored, who takes more wickets in particular conditions or even which batsman has scored more runs on his birthday! A statistician’s job can be as interesting as it can be academic.

  According to Mohan, Tony Greig was the most stressful commentator to work with as he constantly challenged him with a counter view. One always felt like a first bencher in class, unsure about what question the teacher would ask next. So Mohan was always on his toes like a slip fielder, ready for an edge from Tony.

  Australia’s Nathan Lyon got the first wicket on his debut match against Sri Lanka, in Sri Lanka. Tony who was sit
ting next to Mohan immediately looked at him and said “Mate, let’s see what you have for us…tell me who are the other bowlers in the history of the game to do this?” Within seconds Mohan rattled off a number of names including Intikhab Alam, Nilesh Kulkarni and others much to the disbelief of Greigy who took time to recover from the shock. That’s the level of competence required of a statistician during a live broadcast. One of the key insights for a stats guy is to know the psyche of the commentator and anticipate the kind of questions that he was likely to ask and therefore keep the answers ready. In a way it was like preparing for board exams by reading 21 Question Sets, just that in this case, the statistician was preparing the likely questions.

  A statistician needs to be good natured because everything he does is actually going to make someone else look good. — Harsha Bhogle

  Sometimes coming up with unexpected shocking statistics gives one immense pleasure. This happened with him in Ahmedabad when India was playing Sri Lanka. Murali was bowling to Sachin and the commentator said “The highest wicket taker in Test cricket is bowling to the highest run getter in Test cricket.” Suddenly Mohan came up with a clincher and said that the only time this has happened in the history of cricket was 110 years earlier in 1887 when Englishman Arthur Shrewsbury faced Australia’s Frederick Spofforth in Sydney. Everybody in the box was in a state of shock and moments like these were when the statistician was pleased with himself. They thrive on the challenge.

  Good statisticians read a lot, have immense knowledge about the game and the uncanny ability to correlate things and look at the larger picture just when it is required. So if you have read about a certain event in Sir Garfield Sobers’ autobiography, then when you are asked to react about West Indian cricket in the 70s, you can match that statistic with the moment resulting in an interesting observation.