Of Spins Sixes and Surprises: 50 Defining Moments in Indian Cricket

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Nothing comes even remotely close to the excitement that cricket evokes in both the young and the old in India. Cricket in India is a religion, with cricketers revered as gods. While we have grown up watching cricket on our televisions, we have felt the tension, euphoria and joy that cricketers on the field may have experienced while playing.

Of Spins, Sixes and Surprises: 50 Defining Moments in Indian Cricket is a humble attempt at reliving those occasions. Authors Shom Biswas and Titash Banerjea present an amazing journey of Indian cricket, from the time when the greatest Indian cricketer of his time (Ranji) used to represent another country (England) to a time when India has become the nerve centre of the world game. The emergence of women's cricket also forms a key theme.

Of Spins, Sixes and Surprises is a celebration of the momentous victories, while also making space for some heartbreaking losses, which turned out to be watershed moments. For all the cricket fans out there, this must-read offers a rare glimpse of Indian cricket.

Soumyadipta 'Shom' Biswas is a senior sales executive, a newspaper columnist, a short-story writer and a dabbler in sundry other things.

He used to write a weekly column on books in The New Indian Express, and his short stories have been published in literary magazines in India and Singapore, notably the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Out of Print, The Bombay Review and Spark. A regular quizzer, he was a semi-finalist at the University Challenge Quiz (2003-04) televised on BBC World. He is a collector of antique sports books, especially Wisdens, and is an active member of the Bangalore Writers Workshop (BWW).

Quizmaster, entrepreneur and a true knowledge seeker, Titash Banerjea has been actively involved with the world of quizzing for more than 10 years. He has hosted many events, including the Starmark Open Sports Quiz, the Cycle Heritage Quiz on Indian Heritage for schools, the Nairobi Rotary Quiz Night, and many more. He has been a champion quizzer, with victories in the Karnataka Quiz Association (KQA) Annual Sports Quiz, the KQA Cricket Quiz and Prahelika (organized by the ISI Kolkata) to name a few. After working with two multinational companies, he started his own knowledge services venture, Gyaanspace, which had been the primary content providers for CricIQ, the biggest ever online cricket quiz organized by ESPNcricinfo. He is currently based in Bengaluru.

It's not easy to be in love with cricket. The demands on one's time are truly endless. Once you're done with the live sport and the analysis for the day, there are reams and reams of wonderful matches to be relived and explored again. And then the debates, always the debates. Who was better, Mankad or Gavaskar or Tendulkar, Nissar or Bumrah, Bedi or Ashwin? There are so many conflicting and passionate views.

And now, Soumyadipta Biswas and Titash Banerjea have added one more wrinkle to those endless discussions with their Of Spins, Sixes and Surprises, talking about the matches that, in their opinion, had the maximum influence on the game in India.

There are many interesting and eclectic choices in the provided list that starts well before Independence, includes the likes of Palwankar Baloo and K.S. Ranjitsinhji, and does not forget to recount some of the great domestic Ranji matches that are sadly mostly forgotten. And I totally agree with their choice of the greatest-ever limited-over innings in the history of Indian cricket. Go on, read the book and find out for yourself!

To truly set the cat among the pigeons, the authors have decided to end with a set of All Time Indian XIs in all three formats. 'They have given their teams for different eras and have also come up with their All Time XIs in different formats inclusive of all eras.

The initial cricket matches one remembers watching were 30-minute highlight packages of the World Championship of Cricket in 1985, and one remembers the refrain of a neighbourhood uncle about India's young leg-spinner, that his full name contains the names of four gods! The players wore coloured clothes, but the television at our homes was black-and-white, so one saw different shades of grey. One of the first cricket books one could remember reading was a small one (less than a hundred pages) about 15 great Test matches. It was easy to read and comprehend-three or four pages describing the action, a page of photographs and a full-page scorecard, that's all. There wasn't much in the way of context-setting, or any pretence of literary aspirations or profound research. This was cricket at its truest-talking about the match, the protagonists and what they did. Wasn't that fun?

It was! One could imagine Gordon Greenidge flaying the English attack for a rasping fourth-innings 214 not out at Lord's, or Joe Solomon hitting bullseye from square leg to run- out Ian Meckiff at the Gabba, or perhaps that day in Headingley, when Ian Botham decided that the word 'impossible' had no place in his dictionary.