Cricket trivia actually changed my life. Honest!
It was 1996, and I was working for BITV, a television channel launched with a lot of promise and good ideas and very little idea about how to actually make money.
One floor above our office, IMG, the sports monolith started by Mark McCormack, had come to India. And other than having the rights to Indian cricket, football and tennis, they were also doing a cricket quiz.
I asked a friend who worked upstairs, and when he told me it was being researched by a statistician, I begged him for five minutes with the bosses.
So, a week later, I was standing in front of two bemused Englishmen, telling them that just stats would make a quiz very dry. After all, who would be interested in whether Sunil Gavaskar’s test average was 51.12 or 52.21. And then when they asked what might work, I went with my personal favourite. What was unique about Gavaskar’s batting in the second innings of the 1983-84 Ranji semis against Karnataka?
And the answer was that Gavaskar had batted left-handed for the only time in his first class or international career, to counter the left-arm spin of Raghuram Bhat.
I would like to say I got the assignment immediately, but it was less dramatic. They tried stats for two episodes, were less than impressed with the results, and in a month I was setting quizzes for them, and within a year working on football as well! That was my start in sport, and with the occasional aberration, I’ve worked there for a quarter century now.
The memory masters
Four years later, my first assignment with ESPN Star Sports was to set an India-Pakistan cricket quiz, where the Indian team, led by Gavaskar, had the likes of Navjot Singh Sidhu and Kris Srikkanth, while the Pakistanis had Asif Iqbal, Zaheer Abbas and Rameez Raja. The Indians won easily after a really close first quiz, where the Pakistanis lost only because Iqbal could not recognise the club colours of Kent, where he had played for so many seasons.
Gavaskar was the best of the Indian quizzers, as expected — he had the memory of an elephant and was extremely cool under pressure. Stumped, which was the quiz name, continued with a series against a serious Australian side of Allan Border, Tom Moody, Adam Gilchrist and Ricky Ponting, and Gavaskar captained the Indian side to a thumping victory. The most closely contested season of Stumped was a domestic one where Gavaskar captained a team of batsmen and Srinivas Venkataraghavan, bowlers.
Venkat had a ridiculous memory for dates. Once I had set a question on what was unique about Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi’s captaincy debut other than him being the youngest-ever captain at the time, the answer being that he was not just the youngest captain ever, all the remaining players in his XI were older than him. Venkat reckoned that also might be true for the Australian team in their first test under Ian Craig, and then started reciting the exact date of birth of each of the Australian players by position. He went through five before reluctantly concluding that Bob Simpson was a year younger. Phew!
The next cricket trivia quiz I did for cricket teams was for the Kolkata Knight Riders in 2010, and you will be surprised at how little players remember about their own matches and scores. Interestingly, Ishant Sharma’s team was the best, with one terrific answer on how a swarm of bees actually disrupted a Test match. We need to revise our opinion about fast bowlers not being the intellectual giants of the game.
Tough and demanding
A few years later, Cricbuzz Live started a tradition of a cricket question at the end of each episode, and my only mandate was that it should not be Googleable and stay unashamedly tough and demanding. And, almost every question has been answered by a set of hardcore cricket trivia specialists. I can remember just one question being missed, and it was about what connected the Ranji Trophy finals in March 1990 and the 4th Ashes test in January 1991 (read till the end to find out).
My book, The Great Indian Cricket Circus, came about just like that mythical elephant’s graveyard: where does great cricket trivia go once it’s used in a quiz? After all, facts like cricketer Rachin Ravindra being named after Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar because his father could not decide between the two, or that Swami Vivekananda and Mohammed Shami played for the same Calcutta club couldn’t just be allowed to vanish into the ether. And that’s how Abhishek Mukherjee and I decided to compile three decades of collected cricket trivia.
So, cricket trivia can change lives. And because I know what you’re thinking, the answer to that question is — in both matches, a player made his debut replacing his brother, Sourav and Snehasish Ganguly in the Ranji, and Mark and Steve Waugh at the Ashes.
Happy reading!
The writer is former head of production, South Asia, for ESPN Star Sports, and co-author of ‘The Great Indian Cricket Circus’.
