The unassuming kind of cricketer

There’s something about cricketers. I have to admit, that one of the biggest apprehensions, as years of cricket journalism rolled by, was that I’d meet my heroes and they’d turn out to be awful human beings and my image of them would be shattered forever. It’s happened once or twice, when someone you thought was a legend of a man turned out to be merely someone who handled a bat well, and not much besides.

But still, I’m old fashioned that way. Just that fact that someone has played cricket at a high level, forget international – but a good spell at club cricket in a competitive league, or first-class – and you have me. I’d be glad to have a chat, preferably over a few drinks, at an old club, and listen to stories about games that took place when I was still in short-pants.

So imagine my surprise, when at the end of a long queue for accreditation – the efficient ICC desk at the Library at the Sardar Patel Gujarat Stadium was handling every pass issued, from media, to ball boys, to sponsors, to catering staff – was an unassuming man of average build, a letter in hand, quietly waiting his turn. “Myself Mukund,” was all he said, and to some of us journalists from outside Ahmedabad, this meant little.

The gentleman in charge of accreditations asked Mukund to wait till he was finished with the media, and off he went. There were plenty of niggles for the ICC to handle – improperly filled forms, forms that never reached, people who had wanted to collect their passes from one city but changed their minds later – and unlike the BCCI and its state associations, a majority of which act as though they’re doing you a favour by granting you accreditation to cover a game, every request was handled patiently and efficiently.

When Mukund’s turn to collect his pass came round, a senior journalist who spotted him, walked up to have a chat, telling the ICC man, “Mukund just retired from first-class cricket a year ago, after playing for two decades.” And sure enough, us ill-informed greenhorns had to fire up Cricinfo to check on Mukund Harishkumar Parmar. And bloody hell, he’d began in first-class cricket in 1986-87, and gone on till 2005-06. Because Gujarat have seldom had strong teams, they barely ever made it past the zonal phase – as the Ranji Trophy was structured till recently – and he got to play very few matches a year. That explains only 83 first-class games in almost two decades of cricket.

The runs, more than 6000 of them, came regularly enough at a cracking average of 49.80. Thrice in his career he hit a century in each innings against the best opposition he came up against – Mumbai. His best was a massive 283 against Maharashtra, and his final hundred was another big effort, 247 versus Assam in 2002. With all those runs, it’s pretty obvious this guy could bat. “A giant at the domestic level, but perhaps didn’t have it in him to take it to the next level,” said a journalist who’d seen a bit of Parmar. And of all the types of cricketers, this is one that I particularly like to meet – those who have solid years of achievement behind them and yet somehow never got to the big league, the glitz, glamour and megabucks. On the one hand there’s Parmar and on the other Parthiv Patel – Gujarat's latest star to play for India – and he did so without having played a Ranji Trophy match.

Pass quietly collected, Parmar was on his way. And no-one would have known anything more about all those runs, had it not been for one journalist who pointed him out. The unassuming cricketer, now that’s my favourite kind.