From Shashank Singh to Rajat Patidar: A tale of three Madhya Pradesh cities at the heart of Indian cricket’s T20 boom

At a distant corner is a retired roller, a relic and a symbol of the royal patronage the game enjoyed from the early 20th century. The engraving has not rusted: CEO GAHAGAN & Co. Bombay 1907. It was supposedly ferried to Indore by Tukoji Rao III Holkar, a cricket tragic who established Yeshwant Cricket Club in 1916 to nurture his son’s game and hired Bernard James Bosanquet, the inventor of googly, to coach his son.

A roller of 1907 vintage, bought by the Holkars, at the Gymkhana ground in Indore. (Express Photo)

It now belongs to CCI, where Delhi Capitals’ Ashutosh Sharma polished his game. At the opposite end is the MYCC, which raised Kolkata Knight Riders vice-captain Venkatesh Iyer. RCB skipper Rajat Patidar, Rajasthan Royals seamer Avesh Khan and DC all-rounder Madhav Tiwari complete the Indore band in the IPL. Indore, on the western edge of the vast state, is the heart of Madhya Pradesh cricket.

The eyes of Ashutosh’s former coach Nitin Kulkarni, are fuming. A pre-adolescent had just attempted a reverse sweep and missed. “Dekho aaj kal ke bachhe…” he mutters. “IPL is a great platform, the cricket is excellent. But you cannot become a star by playing a reverse sweep when you are not even as tall as the bat. It has to start with the red ball.”

It’s a paradox that the city that has moulded half of Madhya Pradesh’s cricketers in the IPL is obsessed with red-ball cricket. Maybe, it runs in Indore’s chromosome. All the illustrious batsmen of the Holkar era were attacking stylists.

The first was CK Nayudu, India’s first Test captain, who struck lusty blows to the crowd even in the late 60s. The most loved is Syed Mushtaq Ali, who batted with the improvised daring of a modern T20 cricketer in Test era. “I would call him India’s first T20 batsman,” says former first-class cricketer and seasoned administrator Sanjay Jagdale. “I saw him when he was 60 and he was playing all the kinds of strokes played these days. He left the crease to seamers, drove in the air, placed it fine past the fine-leg fielder, or left the stumps open and hit over extra cover,” he adds.

Mushtaq Ali’s son Gulrez, himself a holder of 77 first-class caps, flips through the pages of the heavy family album and points out: “Look at this shot, he has picked it off his hips and placed it over short fine leg. Modern-day batsmen hit one-handed and no-look sixes. So did he.”

Arguably the first cricketing superstar of his country, rubbing shoulders with Bollywood stars and counting among his best friends actor Dilip Kumar, anecdotes swirl in the crisp morning air with adrak chai and bhutte ka kees, the namkeen made from grated corn. Tall, handsome and with a disarming smile, he was so obsessed about dressing smartly that he used to fetch clothes for ironing during lunch.

But for decades, he remained the only cricketing celebrity from Indore, or Madhya Pradesh. For all the patronage and a robust club culture, the talent pool was dry. In the Holkar era alone, though, they had reached 11 Ranji finals and won five. But they waited till 2019 to win their first in the post-Raj era.

So Jadgale, a visionary administrator, decided to establish a cricket academy in Indore. “We needed a platform to bring all the youngsters together and develop their talents with expert coaching, so that they don’t slip through the system,” he says.

Academy was just part of a larger process that spins around an intensely competitive club circuit and tournaments from Under-14 age-group. “Throughout the year we have activities, even in girls’ cricket. We have different age-groups, different formats,” he says.

Nitin estimates the city hosts nearly a thousand games every year. “Even at U-14 level, we conduct two-day, two innings games with the red ball. So you are literally playing round the year, except in monsoon, though the kids come for nets. It’s an addiction, is it not?” he asks.

“Bilkul nasha jaisa hain,” says Ram Atre, who coached Patidar at the Vijay CC in Dussehra Maidan in the more crowded locale of the city, where the city sheds its mask and exposes the more rustic side. A retired State Bank of Indore employee, he devotes six hours every day to coaching. His hawkish gaze does not miss a single ward, among hundreds, on the ground.

The selectors, officials, and video analysts attend as many games as possible to spot talents. On one such trip to Ujjain, Jagdale stumbled on Ashutosh in a U-14 game against Rewa and took him to the academy.

He was 12 and rented an apartment near the Gymkhana Ground. To make ends meet, he umpired in local league games. “A lot of teenagers do that, rent apartments or stay in PGs near the ground. It’s like the rush to crack NEET, maybe even bigger,” says Kulkarni.

Like how Indore, once in the lower reaches of the cleanliness ranking, scaled the peak, the city’s cricket faithfuls believe it could become the number one cricket factory in the country. “Red ball cricketers,” emphasises Atre.

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TALE II: Bhopal

The archway to the historic Bab-e-Ali Stadium in Bhopal captures its glorious past and forgotten present. An alley leads to the creaky gallery, a sufficient vantage point to watch the largely dug up, grassless mosaic of black pits that is the ground. A few rollers are lying unused, perhaps for decades, at the far corner; a hockey goal post is gathering rust.

“Construction ho raha hain bhai,” the security says disinterestedly, before adding as an afterthought: “Bahut, bahut saalon se.” The stadium has not hosted a first-class game since the 90s, the last domestic game the city itself hosted was at the BHEL Stadium in 1994.

Like the nawabi buildings it has left for time to ravage, the city embraces kismet to take its natural course. It’s kismet—and a whole lot of hard work—that rocketed Aniket Verma to IPL fame. He was born in Jhansi, moved to Bhopal to live with his uncle after his mother’s death. The uncle, Amit, was passionate about the game and he enrolled him at a local academy. “The coach told me to look after the kid, he has great hand-eye coordination,” says Amit. “I told him about the hardships that cricketers make and narrated the story of Pandya brothers living in a tent and making Maggi. It caught his imagination,” he adds.

The turning point came when Aniket was enrolled at the Ankur Academy. “In Bhopal you find hidden gems everywhere, but most are left unpolished,” says coach Jyoti Prakash Tyagi, a fastidious man in his 60s.

Children training at the Ankur Cricket Academy, where Aniket Verma trained, in Bhopal. (Express Photo)

He lists some of the reasons—the usual staple of detachment, unawareness of the sport’s possibilities and the city’s now waning first love, hockey, a lack of club culture and a heritage like Indore, “which is miles ahead of us, because the Holkars had been promoting the game for centuries.”

The affinities of the Nawabs and the Nawab Begums of Bhopal, inclined towards fine arts and music. The last Begum was Sajida Sultan, the mother of Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi, who was born in Bhopal. He, though, turned up for Delhi and Hyderabad, where he had strong familial ties. Wikipedia lists both Pataudis (his father Iftikhar) as India cricketers from Bhopal, but in reality all-rounder JP Yadav is the only international cricketer from the city.

Cricketers spreading wings in Bhopal is an accident. The journey of Shashank Singh, the Punjab Kings batsman, was similar. Recounts Yogendra Singh, his childhood coach: “I used to take him to different private academies for practice and then matches. When he was 15-16, we decided to send him to Mumbai.” He then took a circuitous route—transiting in Puducherry and Chhattisgarh, before gaining IPL’s attention.

Private T20 cricket tournaments, Tyagi says, are booming. So are academies. One of them is LB Shastri Cricket Shaala, run by Sanjay Bharadwaj, who moulded Gautam Gambhir among others. “It was a dream to start a residential academy, where I could have four training sessions. In Delhi, because of the traffic and distance, I would end up having just one session,” he says.

He chose Bhopal because of the city’s centrality. “Bhopal is at the heart of the country. Parents are no longer reluctant to send children far away. It’s like the entrance exams. If you offer good facilities and faculty, besides have a history of producing cricketers, children will come from everywhere,” he says.

He has aspiring cricketers from Kashmir to Assam, Jamnagar to Hyderabad. It is Bhopal’s aspiration too—to be at the centre of the state’s enlarging cricketing map.

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TALE III: Rewa

Rewa summers are dry and dusty. The sun-parched soil, gnashing its black cotton soul, has cracks wide enough to devour a human leg. Men on two-wheelers fizz by, they face blanketed white towels and sunglasses. Outside the F9 Unisex Salon, a motley line has bubbled. The owner, Ram Pal Sen, is a patient but busy man. His son Kuldeep, is a 145kph quick for Punjab Kings. But the riches of IPL have not pushed his father from shutting the shop. “Kuldeep ko uska line, aur mujhe mera line,” he says, wryly.

He is not an anxious father who watches every single ball his son bowls or keeps checking updates of games. He, admittedly, is a man of small dreams from a small town (though Rewa is a city), one of the most backward regions in the country in the 1950s.

Ram Pal Sen, the father of pacer Kuldeep Sen, still runs his salon in Rewa. (Express Photo)

Cricket, though, is ubiquitous. Awadhesh Pratap Singh University Stadium is abuzz, where Sudhakar Shukla is monitoring the front-foot defence of a teenager. “If nurtured, there are many who could make it big,” says Shukla, a coach at the Champions Cricket Academy, which is run by Ishwar Pandey, the former fast bowler.

Pandey and Sen are the two most recognisable cricketers from the region in Eastern MP, that shares a border and similar tastes with Uttar Pradesh.

Their journeys, separated by a decade, traced largely unconventional and similar routes. Rewa division cricket coach Aril Antony chanced upon Pandey bowling with a tennis ball in his school ground. “His height and built impressed me, and I asked him to join the academy. His father, a retired ex-serviceman was not happy, but I asked him to give me a year and finally convinced him,” Antony remembers.

In six months, he was fast-tracked into the U-19 side and landed at the MRF Pace Foundation. Sen’s tryst came when Antony noticed the raw power in Sen’s throws from beyond the boundary ropes. Sen had come to watch a division match as a spectator. He had no hesitation in putting him in the academy, despite the father’s reluctance.

The Madhya Pradesh Cricket League is another binding factor that has catalysed the rise of new talents. “Definitely, it has given opportunities to more players, and a platform to show the talents and catch the attention of IPL teams,” says Pandey, who coaches Rewa Jaguars.

Not just Rewa, Gujarat Titans seamer Arshad Khan is from Seoni, 380 kilometres from Bhopal. Rajasthan Royals’ left-arm spinner Kumar Kartikeya, originally from Sultanpur in Uttar Pradesh, honed his skills at Shahdol, 170 kilometres from Rewa, upon Bharadwaj’s advice. There are others like Saumy Pandey, the left-arm spinner who impressed in the U-19 World Cup last year, apart from women’s cricketers Nuzhat Parveen and Pooja Vastrakar

“One reason is that even small towns now have facilities like turf wickets. So there is access, and now it’s a matter of having patience, both for players and coaches,” says Antony.

An elated Pandey captures the mood: “The state has begun producing cricketers that befits its vast size.” From Ratlam to Rewa, Seoni to Shadhol, Bhopal to Indore, the vast central Indian state is now central to Indian cricket.