6 min readFeb 2, 2025 06:51 PM IST
First published on: Feb 2, 2025 at 06:45 PM IST
The last day of Wriddhiman Saha on the domestic field was quiet. Swathes of fans did not turn up at the Eden Gardens to wave him farewell, or shed a tear, or ink goodbye messages on placards. The social media handles did not jot frenzied tributes; there was no mad flutter of camera shutters. It was just an ordinary day, like the thousands he had spent under the crushing sun in white robes for his state and country, unsung, unassuming and under the radar.
He made a seven-ball duck, took a pair of catches, but not from his usual perch behind the stumps, but in the outfield. A hundred days past his 40th birthday, the knees would revolt the day-long bend-rise-stand rigours. The mind too had surrendered — he knew his wicket-keeping had diminished, his batting had lost its zest, and he had made peace with what he had achieved. To the final day, he nursed a grouse that he was snubbed from the national team too soon — “I still had two-three years left in me,” he would repeat — but admitted he would have been “over the moon” if he knew at the start of the career that he would be a Test cricketer.
The shy boy from Siliguri who once crammed into a single room with six men in a derelict building in Kolkata’s Koley Market to pursue his cricketing dream would feature in 40 Tests, the sixth highest for his country by a keeper, scored three centuries, the third most by an Indian wicketkeeper and had his name in 104 dismissals. His limited-over career somehow never soared, despite intermittent flourishes in IPL. He once reeled off an unbroken 115 off 55 deliveries for Kings XI Punjab against a Kolkata Knight Riders bowling attack that constituted Morne Morkel, Sunil Narine, Umesh Yadav and Shakib Al Hasan in an IPL final no less.
That he remained under-utilised in white-ball international cricket (just 13 ODIs), remains something of a mystery. He once reflected to this newspaper: “I don’t know why. I have not thought deeply about it. All I have done is to make the best of my opportunities.”
Behind the mild-mannered demeanour was a tough cricketer, who persisted with his dreams. He was no quitter, even if the breaks were few. For years, he was the shadow keeper to MS Dhoni. He was always in the squad, in the nets, and on the bench. After making an unexpected debut, when Rohit Sharma got injured playing football on the morning of the game, against South Africa in Nagpur, he waited two years for his next Test. Another two years would pass before his third outing. It was not until Dhoni retired that he became a permanent fixture, a three-year window wherein he was India’s undisputed first-choice wicket-keeper.
By then he was 31, an age when physical prowess of wicket-keepers begin to deteriorate. But supremely fit and incredibly tough of mind, he regaled with his glove-work. He was a classicist and a throwback.
He craft was bereft of theatre, simply because he prioritised on function and conformed to orthodoxy. Like good batsmen get an extra second to judge the ball’s length, Saha had the allowance of an extra half-a-second to judge the ball’s length, its flight, routes and reroutes via edges.
Like high-class centre-backs don’t lunge into tackles, he needn’t dive to pouch a catch less gifted catchers are necessitated to. Because his judgement was precise, his footwork was definite. Browse his files and you would be surprised to find not too many one-handed plucks. Or the gravity defying ones. He made cricket’s most taxing preoccupation look lubriciously simple, to such an extent that he stripped some of its glamour. His movements were like a whisper, the stealth of the feet designed by hours navigating through the crammed streets of Central Kolkata. The only time he ever made some noise was recently on the X, when he flagged a journalist’s “threat tweets”.
But watch some of his catches sharply and you would discover its artfulness. The technique was copybook. When diving for the ball, it’s the head that led him, not the arms. Then followed his arms and the feet. The palms were almost parallel to the path of the ball. It was an orchestra of bones and muscles, the core conditioned by hours he spent on fields in Siliguri. Even when he flung air-borne, he was in optimal control of his body in that he knew the exact degree of his stretch. He knew exactly when the ball would nestle in his gloves. He never groped, rather the balls look like they are being magnetically pulled into his clutches. He swooped on it rather than picked it up.
Contrastingly, the batting was all grit and granite. He took blows on his body, intermittently counter-punched, drove and cut seamers, slogged and swept the spinners. The defensive technique was robust, and left the balls outside the off-stumps more adeptly than some of the top-order batsmen. His hundreds in St Lucia on a green-top and Ranchi on a slow-turner were crucial hands in averting defeats. But his batting, cruelly, went under-appreciated in the shadows of his predecessor Dhoni and successor Rishabh Pant.
That’s the larger thread of his career too — one crunched in shadows, in the aura of Dhoni and the effervescence of Pant. History would cruelly remember him as the bridge between the Dhoni and Pant eras. It’s a condescending epitaph to remember the career of one of the finest to have donned the wicket-keeping gloves for his country. But that was quintessential Saha — unsung, unassuming and understated, and quiet like his final day in cricket.
Behind the mild-mannered demeanour was a tough cricketer, who persisted with his dreams. (Credit: Cricket Association of Bengal) 
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