Mohammad Azharuddin: The enigmatic wristy artist

The joint between the hand and the forearm – the wrist – gives humans a degree of dexterity and flexibility. When an artist leverages the benefits of the wrist and makes use of this “rare” art, magic is created. Take the wrist-play out of Mohammad Azharuddin and you would take away the soul from his batting. His batting was delectable to the eye when he was in full flow. The struggles made him look ordinary. But Azharuddin, throughout his career, was the harbinger of the hope that a miracle was around the corner. When on song, he would decimate the opposition, not with brute force, but with silken touch.

Azharuddin, for a long time after his unceremonious departure from cricket, was considered a cheat, a man who sold his soul and the nation. He was accused of not co-operating with Sachin Tendulkar who at the age of 23, was made the captain of the Indian cricket team. As a captain, he did not speak much. The media spoke a lot about his relationship with Sangeeta Bijlani. But unperturbed by the things being said and written about him, Azhar had an aura of his own.

And yes, Azhar had weird idiosyncrasies. His tone was like a superfast train and the pitch of the tone was monotonous. Azhar was considered a silent crusader when he burst onto the international scene in 1984. The young gangly Hyderabadi batsman became the cynosure of all eyes when he scored three hundreds in his first three Test matches. Just a few days before his Test debut, Azharuddin’s grandfather had expired. At that time, Azhar was playing the most important match of his career – a tour match against David Gower’s England team at Ahmedabad. Azhar was rattled by that news but he scored a brilliant century and paved his way into the national team. The whole country was proud of this 21-year-old batting sensation.

The ‘simple’ cricketer from Hyderabad became one of the most interesting case studies in the annals of Indian cricketing history. There was a mysterious streak about him. As a young man, Azhar’s story was quite inspiring. He was shy and reticent, yet when he held a bat in his hands, vintage Azharuddin came to the fore. He became the lynchpin of Indian batting along with Dilip Vengsarkar, Kris Srikkanth, Sunil Gavaskar, Ravi Shastri and Mohinder Amarnath. In 1989, Raj Singh Dungarpur asked Azharuddin, “Mian, captain banoge [Will you be captain?]” And Azhar sai “Yes”. The offer had not only confounded Azhar but the entire country. Dungarpur believed that Azhar was the right man to lead the ‘Team of the 90s’ – powered by the presence of enigmatic Sachin Tendulkar – who Rajbhai had envisaged as a “once-in-a-lifetime player.”

Azhar now had metamorphosed his image from a ‘small-town talented cricketer’ into a superstar of Indian cricket. He was constantly under the media scrutiny. As a child, Azhar used to go to the cricket grounds on his cycle but now he was driving posh cars. His lavish lifestyle became a talking point. He was seen attending parties with his wife Sangeeta Bijlani. Azhar was now asked about “the next party that he was attending” rather than the issues related to the cricket.

Azhar’s batting form was chequered akin a modern art – difficult to comprehend a pattern, the lines divorced from any symmetry, the ups and downs in his batting form defined Azhar as a cricketer. Azhar was predictably unpredictable. When he was a cornered tiger, battling against lack of form and poor strings of scores, the cricket aficionados and mainly the journalists wrote him off. Azhar proved his mettle by scoring important runs, when least expected and made each critic of his eat a humble pie. The hundred at Adelaide in 1992 was scored when he had batted poorly in the Test series Down Under. He made each critic look like a fool and made them realise instead that they were flawed men. Azhar tested the patience of his fans with his ordinary looking shots, yet, provided soothing balm to the every Indian (critics included) with his repertoire of brilliant shots – which on a given day had the ability to force the bowling side into submission.

In the later part of his career, Azhar lost his way. He was not a part of the team that toured Australia in 1999-00 under Sachin Tendulkar. Did he lack any motivation to play for the country? Did he lack any direction? Azhar’s story is unheard. His biography, written by Harsha Bhogle in 1994, reveals Azhar’s humble background and tries to unravel his cricketing career interspersed with some personal information. But this book was just a piece of a jigsaw. Azhar’s life was too complicated to be written with complete objectivity. There were ought to be some biases since his life as a cricketer always hovered around the proverbial cliff. When you expected him to fall from the cliff, he would fly high and enthral the audience like Bob Marley in a concert.

Azhar looked careless while batting; the time seemed frozen in front of him when he got his “magic” touch going. The supple wrists were the protagonists of a fine drive – a drive which could go anywhere from mid-off to fine-leg. The deft touch eluded the keeper, the agricultural shot over mid-wicket was a moral victory for a bowler, but those were runs for Azhar. The bowlers often wondered if nine legitimate fielders barring the wicket-keeper were too less. Such was Azhar’s beauty of batting.

He played 99 Test matches; Azhar’s highest score was 199. These figures embody one fact – Azhar’s career did not have a perfect script. Yet, the country loved him. But the match-fixing saga completely made us oblivious of the fact that Azhar was India’s chief contributors in the late 80s and the entire period in the 90s. He was banned from playing the game which made him a revered and controversial figure in equal measures. But after 12 years, the ban on him was lifted by the Andhra High court.

Azhar is now a relieved man. He reached a half-century in a match called ‘life’ on Friday (8th Feb). There will always remain a question if Azhar did justice to his abundant talent. This is still going to garner polarized viewpoints – not something new in Azhar’s case. But for me, Azhar’s talent with the willow in hand will always remain a rare sight.