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Top class cricketing siblings are not uncommon
phenomena in the world of cricket as we remember many brothers who
were masters at the leather hunt. But brothers, playing first class
cricket for the air force is quite unique. This story came out when Wg
Cdr Arijit Ghosh, Secretary of the Air Force Sports Control Board told
Salute “When I received my commission in IAF in December 1986, my
elder brother, now retired Wg Cdr Bhaskar Ghosh, was leading the
Services Team in the Ranji Trophy.”
He learnt cicket by watching his elder brother Bhaskar and his friends
play for their club whose nets were pitched at their ancestral home.
“Though it was a small town, we always had a lot of cricket to play”,
he says. “There was the district league, inter-school and inter
college matches and tournaments. We dreamed of the day when we would
turn out for the University or District team with the whole town
watching”. When asked why he joined the Air Force, he unabashedly
offered “Because I couldn’t bear to stop playing cricket and I remain
eternally grateful to my service for giving me these opportunities”.
Nostalgic, Arijit recalls the smell of linseed oil as one dug out the
old ‘lucky’ bat, black with all the oil it had ‘drunk’ over the years,
and hammered it in gently with an old ball, lovingly putting some
fresh white tape over the edges and chipped parts, may be scraping off
some old ball marks with sandpaper, superstitiously taking care to
leave the one on the ‘sweet spot’ intact! He
remembers, his first year at the Vizzy Trophy at Hyderabad, with Kris
Srikkanth leading South Zone Universities and Ravi Shastri leading
West. Manoj. Prabhakar was playing for North and many, who went on to
have very successful careers in first class cricket. As a wicket
keeper, he pouched a staggering 29 catches in the five matches in the
delirious run up to the East Zone Semi Finals.
 Arijit,
made his Ranji Trophy debut for Services in 1988 against J & K at
Srinagar. He batted at No. 8, but impressed people enough with the way
he handled the second new ball, to be sent out to open the innings in
the next game against Punjab at Race Course. Bhaskar was leading the
team and for him, it was a privilege to be playing alongside his
boyhood hero. They had made quite a name for themselves as the ‘Ghosh
Brothers’. Bhaskar scored 428 runs including two
hundreds that season, in his last year for the Services, while Arijit
, in his debut, got a very creditable 330 runs in those five matches,
including a hundred and was the second highest scorer for Services
after Bhaskar. North Zone was probably the strongest Zone in India
those days and Delhi, Haryana and Punjab were star-studded sides with
players like Kapil Dev, Chetan Sharma, Manoj Prabhakar, Atul Wasan,
Madan Lal, Navjot Siddhu, Kirti Azad, Maninder Singh, Ajay Jadeja,
etc. – all big names. So it was a privilege to get runs against them.
Some of them were bowling at him, full steam, from 22 yards away and
making the ball fly around ears with disconcerting ease! He could
withstand at that level and remembers hitting Madan Lal for four
consecutive boundaries in the first over of the second innings against
Delhi at Ferozeshah Kotla that year. “I drove the first ball straight
back past him to the sightscreen and he got wild at the audacity of an
unknown youngster from Services and dug in the next three deliveries,
short. I hooked all three of them to the boundary, without a care in
the world!”, recalls Arijit. The high point came
against Himachal, when both the brothers scored centuries together,
sharing a massive 179 run second wicket partnership. Nearly 21 years
on, he treasures the Times of India clipping listing them with the
Chappells (Ian and Greg), the Waughs (Steve & Mark), the Mohammads (Hanif
& Mustaq), the Amarnaths (Surinder & Mohinder), the Flowers (Andy &
Grant), the Crowes (Martin & Jeff) amongst others, as one of the rare
instances in World Cricket when two brothers have scored hundreds in
the same innings of a First Class Match. That’s something to tell
grandchildren! At the end of a particularly testing
over from Manoj Prabhakar on a misty, overcast day against Delhi at
Kotla , Bhaskar had strolled down the wicket from the other end and
told Arijit quietly “I’ll play him for a while, you handle the other
guy and get your confidence back”. And he did, and went on to add more
than a hundred runs together in that innings thereafter. |
