Overlapping pitches, virtual boundaries, players from different teams running into each other: A game of cricket at Mumbai’s iconic Azad Maidan is equal parts thrilling and bizarre. And it’s testament to the lack of public spaces in Mumbai
I’m standing at fine leg. Not the most exciting position on a cricket field. Typically, that’s where captains put their fast bowlers — those big, lumbering men who can’t really field. That’s also where you get stationed when the captain’s agreed to let you play because you’ve got a common friend to get you in, but he doesn’t really know what to do with you.
Nothing drifts down the leg side. So, five overs in, I haven’t got my hands on the ball once. But that’s not to say I haven’t had a few balls come flying my way. How? Well, at Azad Maidan, one game’s fine leg is another game’s slip cordon.
Azad is a 25-acre pizza-slice of green (or brown, in summer) in the heart of Mumbai’s Fort area. It’s so big, you could squeeze two-and-a-half Wankhede Stadiums into it.
You can comfortably play half a dozen cricket matches here. No problem. But, for years, Azad has had not six, but 22 pitches. There’s one pitch in the corner of the pizza slice, perennially green and well-maintained, that belongs to the posh Bombay Gymkhana and is separated from the rest by a narrow walkway. In the rest of the space, 21 pitches jostle for room, their (virtual, verbally explained) boundaries criss-crossing.
If you take a birds-eye view of the ground on a busy weekend, when nearly all the pitches are in use, you’d think there was some elaborate, nonsensical game of dodge ball-meets-cricket being played. Maybe, years from now, when the novelty of the T20 format has worn off, this could be cricket’s radical future.
Until then, Azad is a microcosm of Mumbai’s odd sense of order within chaos: on weekdays, in overcrowded trains, we pack in more people than they were made to hold. On weekends, at public grounds (Azad, Cross Maidan, Oval Maidan, Shivaji Park), we pack in more cricket matches than they were meant to accommodate.
MUMBAI’S MAIDANS
Azad Maidan: 25 acres; 22 pitches
Shivaji Park: 27 acres; 8 pitches
Oval Maidan: 22 acres; 6 pitches
Cross Maidan: 5.5 acres; 9 pitches
“It’s always been like this, because Mumbai has never had enough space for sports,” says Mumbai-bred cricketer and former India captain Ajit Wadekar. He’s a member of the Bombay Gymkhana, which owns the fancy piece of the ground, but he’s never played on that pitch. He grew up playing on the wickets on the other side.
“We played on hard grounds, on bad wickets. That ground taught us to keep our eyes on the ball, and it taught us to anticipate,” says Wadekar. He began playing here as a teenager, in the ’60s. “I remember watching Polly Umrigar play here for the Parsee Cyclists Club.” Later, in 1987, two schoolboys — Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli — would share a famous 664-run partnership here, during a Harris Shield game.
Wadekar’s also seen players get hurt. It would be a miracle if he hadn’t. Just half an hour into my first stint here, I see a minor accident. Three games, including ours, stop as everyone rushes to a player who has flopped to the ground. He is on Pitch 2, but took a hit from Pitch 3 smack in the jaw. He is carried off. Another player casually curses the ground staff for the way things are. Five minutes later, we’ve all gone back to cricket as usual.
Ad professional Krunal Bhatt plays in the Kanga League, Mumbai’s inter-club tournament. Speaking later, he tells me he’s seen worse: “I’ve seen players get hit on the head; I’ve been struck on the hand myself.”
Lalchand Rajput, former cricketer and a member of the Mumbai Cricket Association’s (MCA) managing committee, brushes aside the safety aspect. “Cricketers come up the hard way in Mumbai… Touch wood, there hasn’t been any major accident so far,” he says, adding that playing in this manner “can actually be fun”.
Wadekar admits that he and his teammates all developed an uncanny ability to dodge balls from other pitches.
Of course, this ‘ability’ and “fun” translate to what passes for the Mumbai spirit. A city bursting at the seams, but somehow running. Where you go to work on days when trains break down, and when roads flood. Simply because you must. But then you pat yourself on the back and call it “spirit”.
Azad is a microcosm of Mumbai’s odd sense of order within chaos: on weekdays, in overcrowded trains, we pack in more people than they were made to hold. On weekends, at public grounds, we pack in more cricket matches than they were meant to accommodate.
“Azad Maidan has remained largely accident-free in the four years that I have been visiting it daily,” says Nadeem Menon, MCA maidan committee secretary. “Even though 21 of the 22 pitches are close together, the players, as well as the bystanders, know how to stand safe. No safety measures on the part of the MCA have been required.”
Somehow, the maintenance of the pitches has improved. “The outfield used to be bad,” says Mistri Lal, who’s been the caretaker of the Fort Vijay Cricket Club for 23 years. “Now, each year, after the rains, the MCA adds red soil to maintain a decent playing field.” The MCA is in charge of keeping the ground clean. Lal adds that they even cleared the homeless who once encroached on it.
But walk around the periphery, and you still see garbage strewn about. “In the rains, I’ve seen players hurt themselves on discarded beer bottles in the long grass. That’s not how the nursery of Mumbai cricket should be,” says Gautam Sheth, 30, a public relations consultant and a regular at Azad. In comparison, he adds, Shivaji Park [in Dadar] is better-maintained.
Wadekar reckons that if the grounds were maintained better, people might not walk through them. “You’d respect a good cover of green and a professional-looking ground,” he says. “The MCA needs to do more.”
He also makes a case for opening up better grounds to junior-level cricketers. “Allow more local tournaments to be played at the CCI [Cricket Club of India, Churchgate] or the DY Patil grounds [in Nerul], so that youngsters know what it’s like to play on good grounds,” he says. “The Lords [in London] hosts smaller, Under-19 tournaments, as does Eden Gardens in Kolkata.”
Even if that were to happen, it’s unlikely that Azad Maidan’s would become less crowded. Corporate tournaments, club-level games, and casual matches have learnt to coexist here.
Despite the shortcomings and non-existent facilities, this is still the biggest cricketing ground in Mumbai. In a real-estate-hungry city, that’s still something worth holding on to. And on a crowded weekend, it does make Azad quite a spectacle. One that’s worth being a part of, at least once, if you enjoy the game. Just remember to duck in time if your captain puts you at fine leg.
(With inputs from Apoorva Dutt)
Originally published at www.hindustantimes.com on May 10, 2015
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