The score issue

It’s one the most vital aspects of any cricket game and ironically it’s something cricket board officials across the country pay uniformly least attention to. While the lives of players have changed dramatically with decent wages finally being paid for domestic cricket, umpires’ fees and pensions being hiked, officials – though honorary – have prestige and power to show for their efforts, the scorers’ lot shows no sign of improving.

Here at the Sardar Patel Gujarat Stadium, there are seven scorers on duty. Two each at the press box, the official scorers’ desk and the main scoreboard, while one loner gets to man the small scoreboard. When we walked into the ground for the second game at Ahmedabad, the painters were frantically painting the last panel on the Zimbabwe team for the main scoreboard – Tafadzwa Mufambisi.

If you thought handling the comings and goings of Zimbabwe’s cricketers was a tough job for the scorers, consider this. The two men operating the main scoreboard, which is perched on top of the stands adjoining the main pavilion, do not even have place to sit. There isn’t provision for so much as a chair, and they have to stand all day, on the corrugated sheets that roof the stands. In Ahmedabad, with the temperature hovering in the mid 30s centigrade – and it feels a whole lot hotter than that – and dust blowing steadily in your eyes from all sides, there can be few punishments worse than standing on a hot tin roof, working the scoreboard as Zimbabwe’s bowlers get dispatched to all parts.

The men in the press box have it better, to the extent that they have a comfortable place to sit and access to food and water. But, you’ve got to wonder what makes them turn up each time, with their multi-coloured pens, correction ink and mark out the dots and runs all day, when they get paid just 600 rupees per match day in first-class cricket. Of course, unless they log the hours in first-class games, they don’t have a shot at being appointed for an international.

The Board of Control for Cricket in India has only recently announced healthy financial hand-outs for various sections of its stakeholders. First-class cricketers now make over 100,000 rupees per first-class match – and the money they earn is always on the up as it comes out of 10.4 % of the board’s profits. Umpires’ wages have been hiked and when they give up the profession they get a pension, the amount varying depending on the number of matches they’ve stood and whether those games were internationals or domestic. But scorers? Nothing.

It seems that some state associations, off their own bat, are doing what they can. Recently OP Sharma, a friend of many years and a scorer for longer, rang excitedly to ask what model of laptop computer would best suit him, as the Rajasthan Cricket Association had sanctioned funds for him to purchase the aforementioned item to help him discharge his duties. It was only a small thing for the association, which has no shortage of money, but it made the scorer feel his work was being respected, that someone was thinking about what he did. But that’s the exception, and a rare one at that.

Under normal circumstances if someone told you he scored, you’d be happy for him. But when he means he was standing on a roof all day, in the sun, changing boards with paint still fresh on them, you know it’s cricket, and there’s nothing to envy him for.