The Picador Book of Cricket

by Ramachandra Guha

  Bula would come back into the pavilion from practically deciding the turn of a game against a major province with a noble and hard-hit 80 which had aroused spectators to a high degree of excitement. After a shower he would suggest with a kind word to one of the Fijians dropped or rested from the side and sitting on the floor behind the yaqona bowl that he might relieve him from the humble task of serving the yaqona. Here it is necessary to explain that no game would begin in the morning or go throughout the day without the ceremonial South Sea drink yaqona, or kava as it is more generally known in the Pacific, being prepared continually in a large bowl presided over non-stop by whichever three Fijians had not been selected to play. This would be served to the two Ratus (Princes) Cakobau, descendants of the former cannibal King Cakobau of Fiji, who were skilled members of my side, and to myself and any visitor to the pavilion adventurous enough to try it. There is a way of serving it governed by convention: a Fijian in a crouching position politely offers it in his two hands and then softly claps, squatting back on his haunches. It was a strange experience, this. The enthusiastic applause which had accompanied Bula’s return to the pavilion had scarcely died down: its echo would seem to be taken up a few moments later by the hero himself stepping from the darkest corner of the dressing room and clapping softly as he offered us the yaqona, while the twelfth man, relieved from being custodian of the yaqona bowl, strolled around the ground in his Fiji blazer eager to bask in a little reflected limelight.

  And then there was the time when officials of the Waikato Cricket Association presented him on a railway-station platform with a ball inscribed in silver to mark the District of Waikato’s appreciation of two of the hardest-hit innings ever seen. Bula had no English at his command for such an occasion. His ‘Thank you, Shir’ to the president was all he could muster. He entered the train, walked up the central corridor which New Zealand coaches all have, crouched in it level with my seat and, with his smile in which shyness and equine teeth rival each other for prominence, offered his magnificently won ball to me. I was very touched. But I wish I had accepted it, even if only temporarily, for on the last night of the tour it was stolen out of his suitcase in an Auckland hotel. He was deeply upset, not because he had wanted to show it off to his family on his return, but because, unworthy as he regarded himself as the recipient of such a gift, to his unworthiness he had added incompetence in looking after it.

  The great virtue about him was his dependability, a characteristic rare and refreshing in a Fijian. He was always there for everything; not least he seemed to be always at the wicket, surprisingly so for a spectacular bat. But he was judiciousness itself in picking out the right ball to pull for his great sixes: almost never did he fail when going for them. Part of his secret was due to exceptionally rapid footwork: he would put his leg out as far as Sheppard. He had no back defensive shot, but a later change of plans in his general forward technique would result in a very good cut.

  What little coaching he had had was from Viliame Tuinaceva Logavatu, himself an uncoached player and as the only Fijian to have exceeded a 200 in an innings (and to have done it twice) the best native player never to have played outside Fiji, and from Ratu Edward Cakobau (who had played for Auckland and in Oxford Trials): this combination gave him a happy mixture of orthodoxy and unorthodoxy, but based in each case on hitting hard and straight. There was a shade of Constantine about him, and also a touch of Hammond about his very robust off drive all along the ground. But in general impression he was more perhaps like Gimblett, that much underestimated bat, than anyone else. Bula’s average on the 1948 tour was nearly 40: by outside standards this is not lofty, but (a) Bula knew nothing about averages, and (b) half of his innings were under orders to get, say 60 in 15 to 20 minutes. There were many such situations in the fourth innings, desperate efforts against the clock. Bula then went automatically and willingly in first: it was do or die. If he failed, we had to be careful. He almost always saw us there, but was frequently out in the last over or so before we were quite home, usually having scored 40 in 15 minutes or something of the order of 3 runs a minute. He was the sort of runner between the wickets who covered the pitch in half a dozen effortless and deceptively fast strides, so that not all his runs were by monumental sixes, but in these circumstances included the galling but safe pushes off his legs in the act of having advanced almost halfway up the pitch.

  He happened also to be about the best fieldsman in an eminent fielding side. He specialized in fielding at deep long on, the position over which his own hits so frequently soared. During the Canterbury match, Hadlee and MacGibbon were in the middle of a powerful partnership when Hadlee, playing with less restraint than I remember from seeing him on English tours, made a big drive out to Bula off a googly of mine – to be dropped, to everybody’s surprise, by Bula who did not have to move a foot. Not long after, MacGibbon also made a tremendous hit at my googly, more across it this time. Bula had to run flat out, sulu flying, his bare feet scorching the grass, for yards along the boundary. He took this catch, infinitely more difficult than the one he dropped, with consummate ease while still rushing along at top speed. He allowed himself a broad beam on his honest, light-brown face, and a typical Fijian emotion for his previous somewhat expensive slip in dropping Hadlee, by kicking with his bare instep the ball from deep square leg, where he had taken the catch, past the wicketkeeper across the other side of the ground to third man.

  I have said that, as captain of a team, one either does not or should not have heroes in one’s own team. The truth is, although there were other splendid players and characters of all kinds in this unusual touring team, that, so far as I was concerned (I can admit this now, but I could not, obviously, at the time), Bula was in the heroic mould because he carried a guarantee of success and popularity for my team as a whole without causing any envy within the team. What more could a captain ask for? I was frequently his partner at the other end – a very passive one. As he would thump the ball back dangerously close to my head and we ran, he would smile softly, chuckle huskily, with the ends of his mouth curled right up and murmur as we passed, ‘Shorry, saka’ (‘Sorry, sir’): his sibilants when speaking English, but not Fijian, were always slurred. He had to say sorry in English: there is not an equivalent in his language.

  Not many minutes later the score would have grown, by his efforts alone, quite handsomely, and he would perhaps be striding back to the pavilion with his loping, rolling, heavy-footed stride, head hung modestly down, before running embarrassedly up the pavilion steps to a clamour of applause, back into a corner of the pavilion to crouch and serve out the yaqona.

  I shockingly overworked him. He was so much of a match-winner and so much the man of the tour whom the crowd wished to see in the breadth and length of New Zealand that I could not rest him from any match in the whole tour.

  Fiji is the latest country to have first-class status: Bula is its most spectacular player. Not a little of this achievement for a tiny country of 300 islands, with a mostly unsophisticated and much scattered population no larger in total than that of Leicester or Coventry, is, therefore, due to him. He went again to New Zealand in 1954 and had some splendid innings, including another hundred against Canterbury. He took more catches than anyone. But he was not really quite himself, even if in quite a few New Zealand eyes he was still something of a hero. There was a reason for this. In 1951, his younger brother, Asaeli Waqabaca, a most promising player who was too young to tour in 1948, but was a certainty for further tours, was returning with the team of the capital, Suva, from a visit to an island stronghold of cricket, when the launch carrying the team collided with another in a passage through the coral reef. He was sunning himself on the gunwale: alone of all the passengers thrown into the sea, he was never seen again.

  As in triumph, so in grief, Bula was restrained and dignified. Waqabaca was his favourite brother: he regarded him as a better all-round cricketer than he could ever be. He accepted gravely the whale’s tooth which my matanivanus (herald)
presented on my behalf in sympathy as custom requires. His fine long face was mourning, but you had to know his face and have studied it for long to read this, just as you would have to know him well to detect (if you were also quick and close enough) when he would at the last moment be deciding on a six instead of a smothering prod.

  There was a public ceremony on Albert Park the next Saturday afternoon, when all eight teams playing on this spacious ground assembled halfway through the afternoon round the flagstaff under the Suva Association’s flag at half mast. I was in the middle of an innings in one match and in pads when the adjournment was made for me to say my tribute to Waqabaca. Bula was also halfway through an innings of another match and in pads. As he listened his head was bowed: his bearing outwardly serene, well under control, with a nobility Fijian commoners seem to have in as much measure as do their very regal chiefs. I expected that bearing of him, but I think I would have been disappointed in him as a person if he had been so ironclad as to be able to ride the catastrophe completely, as if it had never happened, although one knew how devoted he had been to his brother. One doesn’t know for certain, of course, but I believe that the shock had its effect on his play. As I have said, he went to New Zealand a second time and was a relative success. When the West Indian team passed through Suva in 1956, Bula gave a glimpse again of his timbre against Dewdney, Ramadhin, Valentine, Sobers, Goddard, Atkinson and C. Smith: in a low-scoring match (neither side made 100) he was top scorer and helped Fiji to win. But his play seemed ever after the disappearance of his brother to have lost its masterly assurance, the distinguished sparkle, the unforced, totally natural, zest.

  Bula is now a clerk in the Native Lands Commission: he spends most of his time entering other Fijians’ names in the landowners’ register in his copperplate style. He still plays and scores runs, by local standards a lot more than anyone else. He has five daughters, also a lot more than most people by any standards. He is thirty-seven, and this year it seemed as though a possibility was arising that he might be seen in this country contributing a little brightness to an overcast Old Trafford day or startling the pigeons on the Lord’s boundary with the silence of a bare-footed approach or making sure that slow left-handers would not have the audacity to bowl without a fielder out. When it seemed likely, my friend in the Islands, Harry King (a Sussex man and until recently secretary of the Fiji Association) wrote to tell me that Bula had said that he could think of nothing he would like more than to come to England where he could learn how to play real cricket. He was modestly surprised when he was told by Harry King that many of his English countrymen thought that real cricket was the way Bula played it.

  Of course, the truth cannot be concealed that his modesty can at times be almost maddening: he is too retiring, for instance, to coach, and too much the Fijian of no standing, in his own estimation, to take a hand in helping the administration of the game along a sensible course of action in the Islands. As it is, a tour of England by Fijians will not take place now – or, sadly, in the future, at least during his short remaining time as a player – for reasons which unfortunately could not be further from what I. L. Bula in his essential Fijianism of the finest order represents.

  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆

  In the lore of the game, the cricketing schoolmaster constitutes a category of its own. At home, in England, there were once numerous gifted masters who turned out for their county in August, when their schools went into recess. Abroad, in the colonies, the most effective missionaries of sport were often teachers in the public schools set up on the model of Eton or Rugby. It was one such master, Chester McNaughten, who taught the game to the great K. S. Ranjitsinhji at his school, Rajkumar College, in Rajkot.

  At his best, the schoolmaster taught his pupils about cricket and life, about the craft of the game as well as the values that underlay it – namely discipline, fairness and teamwork. Both aspects are nicely illustrated in Sujit Mukherjee’s recollection of the Jesuit priest who taught cricket at St Xavier’s School, Patna. This is followed by an essay by Cardus on a schoolmaster whose passion for the game was unfortunately not equalled by his skill.

  SUJIT MUKHERJEE

  A Jesuit in Patna (1996)

  One of the enduring enigmas of my association with Father Cleary is that I can never make up my mind about how good he really was as a cricketer. While I was in school it did not seem there could be a better or more complete cricketer than he anywhere in the world. My yardstick was, of course, the standard of cricket I saw being played only in my home town. That he did not score a century and/or bag ten wickets in every match he played in Patna cannot be a measure of his abilities. Even if he were capable of such feats, by character and by vocation he would have been averse to attempting them. He played in a match, if not as a man of God, certainly as a preceptor of the game – always playing not so much for his own good or even for the good of his team but for the greater good of cricket itself. I am pretty sure that, having chosen to be a Jesuit priest, he abjured any other kind of ambition not connected with his vocation. When the Reverend David Sheppard made or attempted a comeback to England’s Test team, I remember wondering whether, had Father Cleary aspired to and got the right breaks, he would have ever made it to the Indian Test team of the mid-1930s, contesting C. S. Nayudu or S. Amir Elahi for a place. The road to such eminence would have been laid through the Pentangular contests – would he have played for the Europeans or the Rest? – and through Ranji Trophy matches. People who ought to know in Jamshedpur have told me that during his playing days he could have walked into the Bihar team any time he liked, had he made himself available for selection. I have no doubt that, had he gained wider cricket fame, many of us in St Xavier’s would happily have converted to Christianity if only he asked us.

  A schoolboy’s judgement of a cricketer cannot be of much value, less so when that schoolboy had nothing better to judge by than the cricket played in a backwater of the game. Even here Father Cleary’s performance in terms of runs scored and wickets taken was not out of the ordinary. Many of his pupils must have surpassed him. Except once, I never saw him pitted against better opposition than what Patna could afford in those days. This was a two-day match with a visiting side from Jamshedpur, probably the Cricket Club of Jamshedpur, played on the Engineering College ground. I remember the location clearly because I was sitting behind the goalpost at the northern end and one of Father Cleary’s drives came whistling over it. He seemed to have no difficulty in dealing with the visitors’ bowling (which must have included a future Bihar captain, Bimal Bose, at least) and hit up 30-odd runs fairly soon before he was bowled. He also ran somebody out at the striker’s end from mid-off and leaped to a marvellous caught-and-bowled for one of the four or five wickets he took in this match. This must have been in 1943 or 1944, and he fully justified my conviction at the time that he was the best all-rounder playing then in India. Happily, this belief has never been tested and, since it was never disproved, I may as well hold it till my dying day . . .

  I should remember him better as a bowler because I kept wicket to him in my last two seasons at school. It was a job that came to me more or less by default, there being no other aspirant in the school those days. (Later, the school provided several wicketkeepers to the Patna University team, at least two to the Bihar State team, and very recently S. Saba Karim has toured the West Indies with the national side.) It was a job made more onerous by the worry of letting Father Cleary down by muffing a catch or fumbling a stumping chance off his bowling. I did both, quite regularly, but never heard again about them from him because he knew much better than anybody else that I was anything but a born wicketkeeper. He and I worked out a signal by which, when he pulled up his shirt collar while walking back for his run-up, I would know that the next delivery would be his faster ball and quietly retreat several steps from my already not very close position several yards behind the stumps. This used to be quite fast, from the way my hands stung within schoolboy-size wicketkeeping gloves. Generally I took this r
ight-handed in order to make sure that it stayed – thereby violating a fundamental principle of wicketkeeping, namely, that both hands should be employed – and between overs I sometimes examined my reddening palm (and telling myself, from my reading knowledge, that I should use a piece of raw beef inside, or is that for a black eye?). Mercifully, the good Father bowled this infrequently, perhaps once every three overs or so, and I was spared permanent damage. Even more rare, perhaps one every three matches or so, was his googly – a real secret weapon, a brahmastra, preserved carefully for use only when nothing else would do. Or maybe I only imagined it was rare, because I never learned to spot it and he may have bowled many without my recognizing them. In his tactical tip to leg-spinners (I aspired to be one for a couple of seasons) he always advised cautious and sparing use of the googly, so that its surprise effect does not dissipate. Also, he warned that apprentice leg-spinners who get too fond of the googly sometimes lose their leg break. I seized upon this warning thankfully a few years later to explain away (to whoever cared to listen) my failure to develop into a leg-spinner. I had learned to bowl a googly first and could turn it on any wicket, but never mastered the leg break. The few that ever turned did so without any contribution on my part. In this I had sorely failed my mentor.

  Father Cleary was mainly a leg-break bowler, but alternated with off breaks, and bowled both quite briskly. Off an eight- to ten-yard springy and beautifully balanced approach, he bowled practically at medium pace, with the ball snapping up smartly from the matting wickets on which I kept to him. Had his cricket career developed amid more specialized circumstances, he would probably have cut back on speed and flighted the ball more. By the time I saw him he was an all-purpose bowler – for example, he used the practically new ball for our school team – and this was another waste forced upon him by his situation. As the shine went off, two to three leg breaks per over were the usual quota, pitching on the stumps and going away, sometimes fetching snicks which I dropped or slip-fielding team-mates muffed. To my boyhood sense of cricket, his pitching on the stumps was a waste, more so when the catches he provoked were not accepted – why didn’t he pitch outside the leg stump and aim at hitting the stump outright? This, he explained, not in terms of his own bowling but while instructing aspiring leg-spinners, would be far more wasteful because the batsman had bat as well as pad to deal with the leg break pitched outside the leg stump and may not need to play the ball at all. Whereas by pitching on the stumps, the leg-spinner compelled the batsman to use the bat, whether in defence or in attack, and thus enhanced the chance of his losing his wicket. Watching cricket at higher levels in later years, it has always seemed strange how leg-break bowlers and left-arm spinners assiduously bowl outside the off stump all day. If they had passed through Father Cleary’s hands, they would have bowled at the stumps and got on with the job . . .