In Harris top-10,forgotten heroes of school cricket

A day after his record-breaking 439 in the Harris Shield,a tired Sarfaraz Khan is once again at Azad maidan,obliging the media...

A day after his record-breaking 439 in the Harris Shield,a tired Sarfaraz Khan is once again at Azad maidan,obliging the media with long interviews and snappy sound-bytes. Not far from the 12-year-old,at the adjoining Cross Maidan,the umpire for an inter-college game is 59-year-old Anand Solkar,who also found a small mention in Thursdays newspaper story about Mumbai discovering another batting prodigy.

Four decades ago,as a school boy,Solkar had scored 396 on the same ground where Sarfaraz hit the national headlines on Thursday. He smiles and nods when he encounters the uncomfortable query: Are you Mr Anand Solkar? So finally I am remembered, he replies. There was not so much media in our time. Your name would be there in a newspaper,thats it, he says. With time,the memories of that triple hundred have faded as Solkar now stands in the sun to officiate in minor matches for Rs 300 a day. While his brother Eknath made it to national team,Anand Solkar only managed to play a tour game against the visiting England team sometime in the 80s.

Solkar isnt the only lesser-known cricketer on the top-10 list of Harris Shield run-getters. Besides the big names Sachin Tendulkar,Vinod Kambli,Ashok Mankad and Wasim Jaffer,there are people like R Nagdev,Sanju Jadhav,Yash Gandhi and Rohan Tondulkar,who have since gotten lost in the flannelled crowd thats a daily feature in the vast expanse next to Churchgate station.

Old-timers still remember Sanju Jadhavs 422 in 1985 which included 80 boundaries but dont recall any other of his exploits. Now a junior selector,Jadhav works a 9-to-5 job in the ticketing department of Air India.

When Gandhi and Tondulkar had made the top-10 list four years ago,they had made a media splash like Sarfaraz. They struck triple hundreds during the 2005-06 season,but tough competition after their school days have made them realise that rubbing shoulders with the stars in Harris Hall of Fame wasnt the guarantee of a bright future. With a name like Tondulkar,expectations were huge,but he says the 357 he scored ended up making things difficult. I used to leave from my home for any match,my neighbours used to tell me to hit one more 300. The pressure got to me. I got picked in the Mumbai under-17 team and later played a couple of under-19 matches,but I was dropped. Now I am struggling to get into the under-22 squad, he says,adding that he once thought the path to the Indian team would be easy.

Gandhi,too,is learning the harsh realities of being a 19-year-old cricketer in India. I play for Union Bank and I was picked by Kings XI Punjab last year. But the IPL contract is expiring this year lets see what happens, he says.

In this list of young prodigies,the least known is R Nagdev,the man whose 46-year-old record was broken by Sarfaraz. Like everybody else in the Mumbai cricket circuit,Solkar doesnt know where Nagdev is now,but hes ready to vouch that he was better than even Sunil Gavaskar.

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He scored his 400 in one day. He came from a Sindhi business family and moved to America soon after. Im not sure where he is now, says Solkar.