Oborne & Heller on Cricket

Sana Mir played in 226 international matches for Pakistan, as an off-spinning all-rounder, 137 as captain, an appointment she received at just 23. She won many awards in her career, including two Asian Games Gold Medals, and was the first woman cricketer to be honoured by her country. Wisden named her Captain of the  Women’s Team of the last decade. On her retirement earlier this year, she received messages from admirers all over the world, in tribute to the inspiration she has given to women in cricket. She is the latest guest in the regular cricket-themed podcast by Peter Oborne and Richard Heller. In Peter’s absence on an assignment overseas, their friend Roger Alton replaced him as co-host.

Sana Mir vividly describes her first memories of playing cricket aged 3 ½ with her elder brother and his friends in the backyard and the street in the northern city of Gilgit, where her father was stationed in the Pakistan army. In childhood, she was usually the only girl playing and had to give up the game in her teens in the face of social pressures at the time. 5-8 minutes

But her family supported her cricket dreams, and her mother induced her to seek a trial with the pioneering Khan sisters of Karachi, who decided to form a Pakistan women’s team and invited girls from all over the country to be part of it. She was successful, enjoying the experience of playing hardball cricket with other girls, including other future stars of Pakistan women’s cricket. She also attended other trials in Lahore organized by the rival group recognized by the then Pakistan Cricket Board. She describes her sadness at the bitterness between the two groups – which led her, still in her teens, to invite the President of Pakistan to reconcile them. It was painful for her and other girls to be caught in the crossfire between the two groups, and the experience gained by the Khan sisters’ team in international cricket was lost to the new Pakistan team formed in 2005. 9-15 minutes

Sana Mir describes her entry into that team aged just 19. Although unable to play at her college (for lack of facilities) she kept fit with other sports and did well enough in trial matches to be selected for an ODI against Sri  Lanka. She survived running out her captain and became captain herself four years later.  16-19 minutes She tells the secrets of her success, based on values learnt from her family, in motivating players to improve their performance and win matches by team work. 27 minutes She herself became the ICC’s top-ranked Woman bowler – but for all her many awards she is proudest of the fact that eight team mates joined her in the top 20 World rankings. 24, 27-31 minutes In telling the story of her two Gold medals in the Asian Games, she suggests that these T20 contests could provide a model for women’s cricket in the Olympic Games. She shows how the Asian Games victories were especially important for the prestige of women’s cricket in Pakistan in view of the recent matchfixing scandal which had mired the men’s team. 35-39 minutes

She celebrates beating India twice  in World Cups (a feat unmatched by Pakistan’s men) and describes the greatly improved relationship between the two teams since she first appeared. She names her favourite male players and says why M S Dhoni is her favourite captain. 25, 31-35 minutes

For six years, she received no match fees or regular income from the PCB. She describes the financial difficulties still faced by women cricketers in Pakistan, especially those who want or need to leave home, and the lack of facilities, equipment and special nutrition for them. She pays tribute to the banks and Departments who give them essential support as effectively semi-professionals. 20-24, 40-41 minutes

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Besides being a celebrated student debater, who replaced Ken Clarke and handily defeated Vince Cable in 1964 as President of the Cambridge Union, then one of Ireland’s leading constitutional and administrative lawyers, a biographer, obituarist and a man of letters Charles Lysaght has been a noted cricketer and host of cricketers in Ireland for over sixty years. (For the curious, he is a distant kinsman of Cornelius Lysaght, the racing commentator.) He shares his deep love and knowledge of the history of Irish cricket and its literary heritage with Peter Oborne and Richard Heller as the latest guest in their cricket-themed podcast.

Delving into the early history of Irish cricket, Charles Lysaght reveals the score made by the future Duke of Wellington in the match in 1792 between the Dublin Garrison and All Ireland – and the other future duke who dismissed him with an underarm delivery.  2-4 minutes

He explains how cricket became popular in rural Ireland after Waterloo, often but not exclusively through teams raised by landlords for their tenants, and also in Dublin. One cricketing landlord was Charles Stewart Parnell. Charles Lysaght says that he was not a popular captain and once led his team off in a sulk over an umpire’s decision. Parnell gave up cricket when he entered the House of Commons and led the campaign for Home Rule – but his onfield behaviour might have inspired his successful obstructive Parliamentary tactics. 5-8 minutes

He mentions another surprising  Irish politician to have played cricket – Eamonn De Valera, at Blackrock school. De Valera enjoyed watching cricket, and even more so rugby, but had to conceal this from the powerful Gaelic Athletic Association, which for nearly a hundred years tried to ban Irish people from playing or even watching so-called English “garrison games.” 9-12 minutes

Charles Lysaght describes two nineteenth-century Irish cricketers who played for England, Leland Hone, from a celebrated artistic and literary family, and an irascible but talented baronet, Sir Tom O’Brien (no relation of Ireland’s recent batting hero Kevin O’Brien). 13-15 minutes He is surprised to learn of a third: J E P McMaster (born in County Down) accompanied England’s first organized tour of South Africa and played in a match later given Test status. He was out for a golden duck, did not bowl and did not take a catch. This represented his entire first-class career. 17-19 minutes

He explores the rich links between Irish cricket and literature, particularly those forged by Clongowes School, in county Kildare. He reads James Joyce’s beautiful short description of cricket there in Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, although noting that Joyce was forced to leave the school at the age of ten. He is sceptical about the feat later ascribed by Joyce in Ulysses to Captain Buller – hitting a six on the Trinity College ground through the window of the Kildare Street Club at square leg. 25-27 minutes

Another Clongowes cricket-lover was the barrister and Home Rule MP Tom Kettle (who once said that the only legal briefs he ever received were from cricket friends). Charles Lysaght reads Kettle’s beautiful sonnet to his infant daughter, composed before his death on the Somme in the Great War. He explains its political and moral context and contrasts this with Yeats’ celebrated poem An Irish Airman Forsees His Death (whose subject, Robert Gregory, was also an Irish cricketer.) 21-25 minutes

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James Coyne, Assistant Editor of The Cricketer magazine, has prepared each year since 2012 the section in Wisden Cricketers Almanack on Cricket Around The World. He is also the co-author of a book Evita Burned Down Our Pavilion ​(to be published next April) a record of an epic cricketing odyssey in Latin America. As the latest guest of Peter Oborne and Richard Heller in their cricket-themed podcast, he shares his knowledge of all the astonishing places in the world which now play cricket.  

He outlines the cricketing crime instigated by Evita Peron, and explains its background in sporting politics. Cricket and two forms of football were all introduced by the British through their commercial influence in Argentina, but whereas association and later rugby football acquired a general following, cricket remained a game for the Anglophile élite, and therefore a prime target for the Perons’ populist nationalism. Egyptian cricket had a similar trajectory (its most famous product was the future actor Omar Sharif). 

He tells the story of the MCC tour of Argentina in the 1920s, managed by Plum Warner with Gubby Allen and a future Prime Minister, Alec Douglas-Home leading the attack. He tells the remarkable story of another amateur on the tour who was picked by Warner to lead the following year’s Test tour of South Africa – and the non-cricketing reason why Warner chose him.

The Round the World feature in the Almanack has covered around 150 countries or territories – many more than the 104 current members of the ICC. James explains that it tends to focus on countries in the news, countries where cricket is contributing to recovery after conflict, cricket among refugee populations – and those with a great new cricket story to be told. The feature has tracked many countries’ rise through the ranks of cricket, notably Afghanistan and latterly Thailand. He suggests reasons for the rapid progress of Thai women’s cricket, a model for the rest of the world.

In contrast are the sad decline of cricket in Morocco (where Richard was the only visiting captain to lose an international series) and the apparent disappearance of the cricket league named after “Sir Peter Oborne” in the West African state of Chad. It may have been a victim of equipment shortages, which have affected cricket in its neighbour Mali. 

James analyses the problems, especially amateurish governance and factionalism, which have persistently held back cricket in the United States despite its rich history and huge potential for participation, spectatorship and financing. He describes the present ambitious plans for American cricket which try to replicate the successful business models of other American sports – and names two of America’s top business leaders who are ardent cricket supporters. He cites the hugely exciting proposal to include cricket in the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games, and the obstacles it faces.

He tells fascinating stories of cricket in St Helena (population around 4500 but ahead of China in the current ICC rankings), in the Falkland Islands (often interrupted by wind or Argentina, and lost kit in Tierra del Fuego), and Antarctica (a match at the South Pole in 1959, regular fixtures at the Australian base).  

He shares the moving story of cricket in desperate conditions in the Shatila refugee camp in the Lebanon, and its British pioneers led by Richard Verity and supported by a local headmaster, David Gray. It has shown the potential for cricket to offer its healing power to Syria’s huge refugee population as it has done previously to Afghans and others. 

Clive Stafford-Smith OBE  is a cricket-lover who is also one of the leading human rights lawyers in the world. He is the founder of Reprieve, an organization which specializes in defending people facing execution and victims of rendition, extrajudicial detention and torture in the name of counter-terrorism. As a lawyer practising in the southern United States he personally represented over 300 prisoners sentenced to death: all but six were spared. He won five cases in the (pre-Trump) Supreme Court. He has secured the release of 80 inmates detained without charges at the American facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, including all the British ones, and is still at work at another seven cases there. He is the guest of Peter Oborne and Richard Heller on their latest cricket-themed podcast. 

For information and how you can support Clive’s local cricket club, Broadwindsor, visit: crowdfunder.co.uk/savebroadwindsorcricket

He sets out his philosophy – and practice – of cricket as an alternative to war, especially between India and Pakistan, and hails the Taliban’s enthusiasm for cricket.  8-11 and 24 minutes He has had a long relationship with Imran Khan, forged in campaigns for victims of drone strikes, 14-18 minutes and repeats Imran’s stark warning of the possibility of a nuclear exchange in the recent hostilities over Kashmir. 18-19 and 21-23 minutes

He sets out ways in which cricket-lovers and other sporting enthusiasts might move human rights forward in different countries, including Dubai, the headquarters of world cricket, where foreign workers are victims of discrimination and exploitation. 50-55 minutes

He describes his amazing experiences playing cricket at Guantanamo (a location not so far mentioned in Wisden’s Cricket Around The World) with the poorly-paid Jamaican workers, 2-7 minutes and how he managed to give the latest scores to cricket-loving inmates despite often bizarre US censorship over numbers. 13-14 minutes

Clive learnt his cricket at Radley College, where his Warden was the inspirational Dennis  Silk, a major figure in English cricket. 36-37 minutes He became the College’s opening bowler despite a teenage struggle against bulimia. He describes this movingly, along with his response to Freddie Flintoff’s recent account of his own struggle with a condition still poorly understood among men. 39-41 minutes

He recalls his long experience of a thriving cricket scene in the United  States, 47-49 minutesparticularly  playing in Atlanta with and against many famous West Indian cricketers. They included Conrad Hunte. He speaks warmly of his ethical personality and his on-field kindness and forbearance with the efforts of his lesser playing colleagues. 42-46 minutes

He recently testified on behalf of Julian Assange in his fight against extradition. He explains the significance of the case and looks forward to welcoming the most celebrated member of the Quito Cricket Club into his local cricket club, Broadwindsor in Dorset. 26-28 minutes He is now trying to save the club from the threat of eviction by the new owners of their ground. 29-35 minutes He gives listeners the chance to donate to the campaign (and purchase an office or title within the club). Henry Blofeld sent such a fierce letter of support that he felt compelled to tone it down slightly. 34 minutes Surprisingly for such a battling lawyer he remarks: “The law’s not a great way to solve anything. I’d rather solve it by the rules of cricket”. 33 minutes

In 1911 the first cricket team to represent all of India made a long tour of all parts of the United Kingdom. Professor Prashant Kidambi wrote a book about it, Cricket Country, which won the Lord Aberdare Prize awarded by the British Society of Sports History and was the first sporting work to be shortlisted for the Wolfson Prize for history. Cricket Country not only describes the events on the field but also the long and complex preparations for the tour, and its role in the history of India and the British Empire. As the guest of Peter Oborne and Richard Heller in their latest cricket-themed podcast, Prashant Kidambi vividly describes the challenges of capturing the big themes of the book and of writing sports history itself. 

He sets out the way in which the Indian middle class in Parsi, Hindu and Muslim communities took over the development of the game from the British and adapted cricket into Indian culture. 3 minutes et seq The British had an ambivalent attitude to Indians playing cricket – disparaging the early teams, then welcoming them as pupils and gracious losers, but shocked and resentful when Indian teams started winning in front of their enthusiastic spectators. 10-13 minutes The British made many excuses for their defeats – including an excess of champagne at the lunch interval. 19-21 minutes

He shows why it took such a long time to overcome communal differences and select a team, and how the tour had an underlying political motive of demonstrating Indians’ loyalty to the British Empire at a time of growing tensions. Although generally unsuccessful on the field, the tour gave a lasting legacy to Indian cricket. 39-44 minutes

The tour was held in the shadow of Ranjitsinhji, who refused the offer of the captaincy. The tourists were not in his class and their initial performances disappointed the press and the public. Prashant Kidambi analyses Ranjitsinhji’s difficult task of managing a series of conflicting roles – international superstar, English cricketer (although regularly described as benefit unfairly from “Oriental magic”) and maintaining his claim to the Indian princely state of Nawanagar. 23-29 minutes

The hero of the tour was Palwankar Baloo, the first great Indian bowler, judged on the tour to be the equal of Sydney Barnes. Prashant Kidambi describes the struggle he faced in showing his talent, as a member of an 'Untouchable' Hindu caste, facing regular episodes of fierce discrimination. Baloo had a later political career as a respected campaigner for the Dalits. 30-37 minutes

Drawing on his recent Derek Birley lecture, Prashant Kidambi sets out how he reconciled the three simultaneous tasks which he sees as required of any sporting historian: setting out the social, economic and if necessary, political context of sporting events; describing the sporting action (sometimes all but forgotten by modern historians) and the purely sporting developments that shape the story; and establishing the time frame of the story. He illustrates this with the example of Shane Warne’s Ball of the century: an episode in English-Australian history, a great cricketing moment condensing years of cricket history, and one of the events of 1993. 47-54 minutes

The rise of women’s cricket, in England and worldwide, is the biggest story in the modern history of the game. Clare Connor CBE is a witness to this journey and a key driver of it. As a cricket-crazed girl, she played in boys’ and men’s teams, not even aware of English women’s cricket. But still in her teens, she played Test cricket for England women, then captained the side to a famous long-delayed Ashes triumph. After retirement she became a top administrator. Since 2012 she has been the chair of the ICC’s women’s committee, and more recently became the ECB’s Managing Director for women’s cricket and a board member. From October next year, she will become the first woman President of the MCC – a men-only bastion for over 150 years. She is the guest of Peter Oborne and Richard Heller in their latest cricket-themed podcast.

She describes the thrill of learning about her MCC appointment from its incumbent, Kumar Sangakkara (then captaining MCC on tour in Pakistan) and the MCC Chief Executive, Guy Lavender.  She outlines her ambitions in the role in making the Club more inclusive. 

She outlines her early cricket career in and near Brighton, unaware of women’s cricket and with no role model in women’s cricket. Although  the only girl in her early teams, she never felt like an outsider, through the unconditional support of her parents and team members. She describes the trial – and the shot  in front of the then England women’s coach – that brought her into women’s cricket. 

Clare speaks of the demands of her England international career, juggling them against her university studies in English and her later job as a teacher. Like her colleagues she was never paid match fees: initially they even had to pay all their own expenses, including overseas tours. Full professional contracts were introduced only in 2014. 

She describes vividly the intense national celebrations in 2005, shared with the England men,  of the double success in their respective Ashes series, culminating in a ceremony and a joint photograph at an empty Lord’s.

Clare picks out highlights of the global advance of women’s cricket, given new impetus by T20, notably its take-off in Thailand, its progress in Pakistan after the pioneering courageous work of the Khan sisters, and the current proliferation of women’s competitions. She outlines the ICC’s efforts to develop the game in new territories with no background in cricket, and to use the game for social unity and global healing after the pandemic. She cites dramatic statistics of the current TV and digital audience for women’s cricket in England and worldwide. She refers to the growing discussions of the possibilities of women’s cricket selling its own rights and obtaining its own sponsorship. (One downside to its growing success is the infiltration of attempted match fixing into women’s cricket.) 

She emphasizes the huge importance of showcasing women’s cricket (with free-to-air TV coverage) at the forthcoming Commonwealth Games in Birmingham in 2022, and the strong efforts being made to include both men’s and women’s cricket in the next Olympic Games in  Paris. Time constraints might well require this to be a T10 format. Hybrid pitches (real turf matched with artificial)  will be essential: they have played a great role in the spread of global cricket. 

Finally she contrasts her early career, unaware of women’s cricket, with the ambitious ten-stage pathway devised by the ECB to attract girls and women into cricket and let them progress as far as they want. She concludes: “There are so many more opportunities now for girls and women to feel more part of cricket, as players, fans, coaches, and that’s a very exciting journey.”

Neil Robinson is the MCC’s Head of Collections and Heritage at Lord’s. He is responsible for one of the world’s greatest collections of sporting art, artefacts, and memorabilia, as well as a constantly expanding Library of over 20,000 books and complete collections of journals, many rare, as well as the MCC Archive, a treasure trove for historians and not only of cricket. Previously the MCC’s Librarian and head of research, he has given unstinting help to thousands of writers on cricket. He is the  guest of Peter Oborne and Richard Heller in their latest cricket-themed podcast. 

Neil describes the scope of the collections (up to 5,000 works of art or artefacts, hundreds of thousands of photographs) and its nineteenth-century origins, especially the efforts of Sir Spencer Ponsonby-Fane, an MCC grandee associated with the club for no fewer than 75 years. The oldest photos show the first English overseas cricket tour, of the USA and Canada, in 1859 as well as the sheep used to crop the field before the lawnmower was invented in the 1860s. Two other historic photographs show the English playing cricket in Yokahama, Japan, in 1863: amid great tension, the sides carried weapons on the field to defend themselves from expected attack by samurai. 

Neil also mentions the first English cricket tour of Australia in 1863 – as a late substitute for a cancelled tour by Charles Dickens (a cricket fan).

He describes the restoration at the Natural History Museum of one of the most popular artefacts – the sparrow killed in mid-flight by a ball from Jehangir Khan (father of Pakistan’s Majid Khan). The gender of the bird has finally been established.

Neil describes the efforts to build up the audio archive of over 200 cricketing interviews, to make the collections, especially the portraits, more representative of non-English countries and of women, and to put more of the collections online, a priority heightened by the temporary shutdown of the Lord’s Museum and the ending of tours. The collections are to be reviewed in the light of current concerns over associations with slavery and colonial oppression. 

Neil reveals the amazing Victorian romance hidden in the Ashes urn – and his own remarkable experiences in transporting it to Australia as part of a (non-cricketing) exhibition. 

He describes the creation of his own cricket book -  Long Shot Summer  - the history of England’s deeply troubled Test match year of 1988. 

Finally, Neil describes some of the vital historic materials in the MCC Archive, especially records of all the England tours organized by MCC as late as 1968. He explains the gaps caused by the haphazard way records were preserved before the Archive was begun in 2006.

The Cricketer, on the edge of a well-deserved century, is the oldest surviving cricket magazine in the world – and shows no sign of leaving the crease. With Peter Oborne and Richard Heller in their latest cricket-themed podcast are its managing editor, and historian, Huw Turbervill, and its editor, Simon Hughes, known to millions from his televised appearances as the Analyst. 

They reveal that another distinguished centenarian, Captain Sir Tom Moore is a subscriber and an avid cricket follower. 

They trace the history of The Cricketer, from its foundation in 1921 as a worthwhile activity for Plum Warner after his retirement from first-class cricket. Although it followed the Great War and the Spanish flu pandemic but  neither figured much in its early pages.  Initially a weekly newspaper (at six old pence, about the price of a pint of beer), it began a tradition of securing famous cricketers and distinguished authors as contributors for little or no money.

Besides being general editor of The Cricketer, Warner was cricket correspondent of the (ultra-conservative) Morning Post newspaper. He combined these roles with managing England’s Bodyline tour of Australia in the 1930s an arrangement unthinkable today, which caused Warner considerable stress. 

In 1939, The Cricketer greeted the outbreak of war with a memorable cricket-themed editorial. Gallantly, the staff coped with paper shortage and the Blitz to bring out issues throughout the war, which were much appreciated by British prisoners-of-war.

Huw and Simon share vivid memories of two distinguished contributors – E W Swanton, grandiose and overbearing but devoted to cricket and good writing, and Christopher Martin-Jenkins, gentle, humorous and always running late, who inspired deep loyalty. 

They analyse the innovative competitions in English cricket introduced and still supported  by The Cricketer, the Cup for old boys’ teams, and the highly popular National Village Trophy, which gives village teams the chance of playing at Lord’s (even in this Covid year.)

Huw and Simon reveal the ructions caused by their two-yearly attempts to name the players and writer with the greatest influence in cricket. They reveal those who objected to being demoted or under-placed.

They describe The Cricketer’s tight relationship with its readers and its determination to cover cricket at all levels. Recent issues have had a more social focus, and Simon outlines the magazine’s treatment of BlackLivesMatter and the loss of black people to English cricket. 

Outlining  his latest book A New Innings, co-authored with Manoj Badale owner of the IPL team, Rajastan Royals, Simon charts the generally benign effects of T20 on global cricket. He also sets out the revolutionary implications of the new relationships between cricketers and spectators through sophisticated digital platforms. These could make cricket thrive even if live spectatorship remains off-limits due to Covid (or the next virus).

Qamar Ahmed is a legend in global cricket. He reported 450 Test matches – about one in six of all those ever played since 1877 – and 738 one-day internationals, including nine of the twelve World Cups. He is respected throughout the cricket world for his authority and integrity. He recently published his memoir Far More Than A Game.  He is the guest of Peter Oborne and Richard Heller on their cricket-themed podcast.

As a boy, Qamar Ahmed experienced the sudden and traumatic end of an idyllic childhood in Bihar, in pre-Partition India through communal violence. Movingly he describes the heroic Hindu family who sheltered him and his family from mobs looking for Muslims to kill – and even more movingly, re-visiting them in Bihar some thirty years later.

Relocated in Pakistan, Qamar Ahmed became a cricketer. He shares vivid memories of the vanished world of first-class cricket there in the 1950s, playing for ten rupees a day (about 50p or ten shillings). He played against the great Mohammed brothers (including a thirteen-year-old Mushtaq), faced the party-loving spin bowling genius Prince Aslam, and had to endure on début a complete duffer in his first-class team – because he had selected himself as Secretary of the local association. He describes his relationship with the great early Pakistan coach, Master Aziz – and years later, his son Salim Durrani, who became a star in Indian cricket and (briefly) movies.

As a journalist, Qamar Ahmed had meetings with many famous people in and out of cricket. He gives a close-up account of four of them: Kerry Packer, Sir Don Bradman (introduced to him in a generous gesture by Bill “Tiger” O’Reilly) and Nelson Mandela. But there was one person he refused to meet: General Zia ul-Haq, then ruler of Pakistan. Qamar Ahmed explains why.

He reflects on the current state of Pakistan cricket, laments the general decline in the quality of Test cricket (after 450 samples) and expresses his fears for its future, especially if a “two-tier” system of Test-playing countries takes hold. 

Mihir Bose, author of over 30 books and the BBC’s first sports news editor has analysed and reported global sport incisively for nearly 50 years.  He has written with special authority about Indian cricket, tracing its journey from colonial dependency to superpower in his book Nine Waves. He is the guest of Peter Oborne and  Richard Heller  in their  latest cricket-themed podcast. 

He explains how the Board of Control for India (BCCI) acquired its dominance over world cricket through its commercial revenues and as gatekeeper for tours by India (which for England are now more profitable than Ashes tours by Australia). In consequence, cricket has effectively become the first world sport controlled by non-white people. However, he sees the BCCI as more focused on local rivalries and Indian political agendas than on its new responsibilities to global cricket. After scandals which provoked judicial intervention, the BCCI has a high-profile new chairman, former Indian captain Sourav Ganguly: Mihir Bose assesses his chances of achieving reform.

He sees no hope of overcoming the political obstacles set by the Modi government against restoring bilateral series between India and Pakistan, despite the warm relations between players and past officials on both sides.

He explains how the IPL has transformed the finances of Indian cricket and the location of power within it.

There was nothing inevitable about the rise of cricket as India’s major sport: soccer could easily have become more popular. Mihir Bose tells the fascinating story of how Nehru saved Indian cricket from international extinction – at just the time when India’s footballers ruled themselves out of the 1950 World Cup by insisting on playing in bare feet. 

Looking further back, he traces the support Indian cricket received from its religious communities (who played tournaments in great harmony in times of great political tensions) and from generally minor princes who used cricket to bolster their claims  to their thrones. The prime example was Ranjitsinhji. The first Indian global celebrity cricketer, he saw himself as totally English and did nothing for Indian cricket: Mihir Bose speculates that this was partly due to his secret love life.

Initially a victim of Indian cultural snobbery about sport in general (shared by Gandhi), cricket is now a rich subject for modern Indian novelists such as Vikram Seth and has had a long relationship with its film makers. Mihir Bose tells how a great Indian movie star actually forced an Indian captain to declare so that he could watch a few overs of Australia batting.

Mihir Bose met a young Sunil Gavaskar at school – but denies that he taught him his perfect defensive technique. However, he has mentored many other players especially as a touring captain in India. He relates the Incident outside the Chepauk Stadium in what was then still called Madras which was even more horrific  than the run-out of Jeffrey Archer.

Apart from Indian cricket, Mihir Bose has  done groundbreaking work on issues of race and discrimination in world  sport. He describes how he will be returning to this theme in a new book Impossible Dream. Although many non-white sportspeople have lately opened  up on their past experience of racism, Mihir Bose sees real encouragement in the sporting lives and status of present stars such as Raheem Stirleng and Moeen Ali (whom he assisted with his recent autobiography.)