Playing second fiddle is sometimes colourfully called being a Garfunkel, after the apparently lesser half of the Simon and Garfunkel duo who gave us memorable music in the 60s and 70s.
Chetan Chauhan was, as it turned out, Garfunkel to two phenomenal cricketers. In his playing days, Sunil Gavaskar, his opening partner, was the world conqueror while he revelled in the supporting role. Then he was Garfunkel to Mahendra Singh Dhoni, whose retirement announcement took up more airwaves and newsprint and social media traction than Chauhan’s death a day later.
Chauhan didn’t mind the former, it is unlikely he would have minded the latter. For he knew his place, as player, administrator or politician. Dhoni has been feted for his self-awareness, his self-knowledge; Chauhan had these qualities too. He was not as flamboyant, and was never spoken of as a potential India captain — but his value to the team was not calculated in such currency. He was that often overlooked player, the quiet man who knew what needed to be done, and how to go about doing it quietly.
Brought calm to the team
Just as every team needs fast bowlers, spinners, wicketkeeper and batsmen, every team needs a Chetan Chauhan too; someone who brings a calm, measured quality to it. Both as a player and a person. The great West Indies teams of the 70s and 80s, with a phalanx of strokemakers and fast bowlers, had a Larry Gomes; not as celebrated as the Richardses, Greenidges, Lloyds, Marshalls, Holdings, but a crucial balancing factor.
Mike Brearley once wrote that a cricket eleven works only by dint of differentiation. The skills are diverse, but every team looks for balance. Balance is essential in the temperaments too. When a hot-headed Sunil Gavaskar, then captain, miffed at being given out wrongly in Australia, asked Chauhan to walk off the field with him, Chauhan knew it would be mean conceding the match, but as a disciplined soldier followed his leader. He walked slowly, in order to give Gavaskar time to cool down.
Chauhan said later he knew the price India would have to pay. The situation was defused after Gavaskar crossed the boundary – Chauhan was still inside – and the Indian manager waved for Chauhan back and sent in next man Dilip Vengsarkar.
When he was captain, Dhoni was the calmest player on the field; captains are not always the most composed, as his successor Virat Kohli has shown. But there is Cheteswar Pujara for balance. Ajinkya Rahane too. They constitute — as Chauhan did — a version of the ‘elders’, tasked with (whether consciously or not) providing equanimity in the team.
The Gavaskar-Chauhan combination delivered stability and allowed that generation to breathe a little easier than they had been used to. At the Oval in ‘79, when chasing 438, they put on 213, a start that brought India within nine runs of winning a match that was eventually drawn.
Wonderful partnership
In some ways they were similar, although Gavaskar had a far greater range. The late Mike Marqusee’s lovely little poem on opening batsmen says at one point: We play the same percentages/ to different rhythms…. Not written specifically about Gavaskar-Chauhan, it captured their partnership well.
They were the last old-fashioned pair, their job to see off the new ball and protect the middle order. Chauhan played his final Test in Auckland in 1981. Gavaskar’s partner in the following Test (in Mumbai) was Krishnamachari Srikkanth. Opening batting was never the same again.
Chauhan played only 40 Tests in a 12-year period when India played 81. It seems lopsided somehow. But he inspired in varied roles as administrator and politician. He will be missed in each of those fields.
If Chauhan was the last in the line of a particular kind of opener, Dhoni was the first in another line: that of a creative wicketkeeper-batsman-captain who grabbed a match by the scruff of its neck and made it do his bidding. There had been attacking keepers before — Farokh Engineer and Budhi Kunderan, for example — but none who led as often or had so many calls on his various talents.
Only five players — Sachin Tendulkar, Mahela Jayawardene, Kumar Sangakkara, Sanath Jayasuriya and Ricky Ponting — played more internationals than Dhoni’s 538; only one of them, Sangakkara, also kept wickets, and none of them led in as many matches.
Significant contribution
It is an incredible record, but Dhoni’s significance went beyond that. This Ranchi-born gave the cricketing backwaters of India something to aspire to; he led a democratisation drive that saw the game and its players prosper in unexpected places, beyond the main cities.
There aren’t too many cricketing questions he leaves unanswered. There’s that business of the hour of retirement, though. 1929 hours. In all these years, we know about Dhoni only what he has allowed us to know. For someone stingy with personal details, 1929 might have been him having fun. Picasso or Joyce sometimes introduced tricky elements in their work just for the fun of having critics interpret them. Maybe that’s Dhoni’s intention too!