Deep Backward Point

Miandad and More

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, about Sunil Gavaskar’s wife. She was once asked who her favorite batsman was. Here’s what she said:

If I wanted someone to bat for my pleasure, I would ask my husband. If I needed someone to bat for my life, I would ask Javed Miandad.

This captures much of what I feel about many things. For example, the iPhone (or the Mac) for pleasure over Android (or Linux) for my life.

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This is only the second-most awesome thing anyone has ever said about Javed Miandad. The most awesome was Rashid Latif in Outlook magazine. Latif claimed that, sure, Miandad fixed matches. But only to win them.

Which is patently ridiculous, but awesome all the same. Fixing a match to win it is worse than fixing to lose, because fixing to win means that all the other times you weren’t being paid, you weren’t putting in one hundred percent.

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Remember Outlook’s series of match-fixing exposés? They were Tehelka before Tehelka. They were News of the World before News of the World.

Manoj Prabhakar, for his part, claimed that Kapil Dev fixed a match. This brought about the second-most famous incident of cricket related crying, when Kapil cried for Karan Thapar on BBC.

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The most famous incident of cricket related crying was Vinod Kambli at Eden Gardens at the World Cup semi-finals.

The rest of the country would have been crying with him, if they had looked up from the burning effigies in their backyard.