Paddy Shivalkar: Indian spin’s eternal handmaiden, a cricketer by accident

‘I am a cricketer by accident,’ Paddy Shivalkar told me the first time we met. He had that quintessential sparkle in his eyes, but he wasn’t joking.

Paddy had heard from a friend about office cricket teams who would give you a job as long as you played for them. It was a concept that seemed almost too good to be true. But, desperate to make ends meet, having spent three long years in a fruitless quest for work, young Paddy decided he had nothing to lose. So one day, he accompanied his friend to the nets.

Paddy, until then, had never held a cricket ball in his hand. All his cricketing experience thus far had been with a tennis ball. The first two balls he sent down with the unfamiliar hard ball, hit the net on either side of the wicket. His friend walked up to him and advised him quietly to aim at the middle stump. With his very next delivery, Paddy knocked over the sticks with what he would learn later was called left-arm orthodox spin.

As he bowled at the nets, Paddy had seen a man seated on an arm chair, quietly observing him. He now walked up to the young bowler. ‘Do you want a job’, he asked? A speechless Paddy just nodded. That man, he would later learn, was Vinoo Mankad.

Mankad, by then widely recognised as India’s greatest left-arm spinner and all-rounder, was a familiar name across India. What most people did not know, however, was that he had helped many talented cricketers take their first steps in a tough world.

With the job offer came a word of caution from Mankad for young Paddy. It is something he never forgot — ‘Don’t copy me. Find your own style. If you copy me, you will be finished.’ Paddy would take the words to heart and develop his own style. Over the next twenty years he would become the best spinner who never played for India.

A genius in whites

Drafted into the CCI President’s XI at Brabourne stadium in March 1962 at the age of twenty-two against an International XI led by Richie Benaud, Paddy earned instant recognition. Bowling alongside him was Baloo Gupte, younger brother of leg-spinner Subhash Gupte.

Paddy picked up five wickets in the first innings. His victims included Everton Weekes, Raman Subba Row and Richie Benaud. He got Weekes for the second time in the next innings, for good measure adding the scalp of Tom Graveney.

But young Paddy’s dreams of playing for India did not materialise. To make matters worse, he would have to wait several years before he could even replace Bapu Nadkarni in the Bombay (now Mumbai) team. Once he did, however, the genius of Paddy was truly unleashed.

READ | Sunil Gavaskar pays tribute to Padmakar Shivalkar: Regret not being able to convince selectors to pick him in India’s Test team

On countless occasions, Paddy would virtually single-handedly bowl Bombay to victory. But it was the final of the Ranji Trophy played at Chennai in 1973, that truly revealed the depths of Paddy’s genius as a bowler.

The batting line-up of that 1973 Bombay side boasted more than half the Indian Test team. Sunil Gavaskar, Ajit Wadekar, Ashok Mankad (the son of the man who gave Paddy his first break), Dilip Sardesai, Sudhir Nayak and Eknath Solkar faced off against the Tamil Nadu spin twin of V.V. Kumar and Srinivas Venkataraghavan on a Chepauk pitch tailored to favour the twirlymen.

Winning the toss and batting first, the much vaunted Bombay batting line-up could only manage a modest 151 against Kumar and Venkat who picked up 5 wickets each. Tamil Nadu began badly, losing two wickets with their score at 6, but Michael Dalvi and Abdul Jabbar took the score to 62 for 2 by the end of the first day’s play.

The next day, unusually for a Ranji Trophy match, was a rest day. Paddy recounted to me a conversation that he had with roommate Solkar that evening: “I had noticed Venkat doing something unusual all day. Instead of bowling flat as he normally would, he was flighting the ball. And with the bounce off the turning pitch, this was making it difficult for our batsmen to play him. I told Ekkie that I was going to take a chance and do the same the next day.” After all, this was Venkat’s home pitch and he must have clearly known this would work.

Padmakar Shivalkar, Shantha Rangaswamy and Rajinder Goel, lifetime achievement awards winners, at the annual BCCI awards function in Bengaluru on March 08, 2017.
| Photo Credit:
K. Murali Kumar

As Paddy came in to bowl on the second day of the match, his first ball turned and bounced sharply. Knowing what Paddy was capable of, leg spinner V.V. Kumar, sitting in the pavilion and slated to bat at No.11, turned to Kalayanasundaram, the No. 10 and famously said, “Change into whites. Both of us will be batting within an hour.”

And they were. Over the next hour, Paddy ran through the Tamil Nadu batting. By the end of the carnage that ensued, only the overnight batsmen had reached double figures. Tamil Nadu was bowled out for 80 and Paddy’s figures read an incredible 8 for 16.

The 71-run lead that Paddy gave Bombay would turn out to be crucial as its batsmen failed again on a pitch that had become even more difficult and were bundled out a second time, this time for 113, leaving Tamil Nadu to score 185 to win.

But by producing a surface to help their spinners, the host had played straight into the hands of Shivalkar’s genius. This time Paddy and his roommate Solkar were the wreckers-in-chief, picking up 5 wickets each, as Tamil Nadu collapsed to 61 all out. In two unchanged spells of magnificent spin bowling, Paddy had almost single-handedly brought home the Ranji Trophy with match figures of 13 wickets for 34 runs. The host’s underprepared pitch plan had spectacularly backfired.

This was hardly the only time opponents underestimated Paddy’s impact. In the previous Ranji season, Paddy had run through Mysore’s famed batting line-up consisting, among others Gundappa Vishwanath and Brijesh Patel in the semi-finals, returning figures of 8 for 19 and 5 for 31. Tamil Nadu should indeed have known better.

In a first-class career spanning twenty-six years, from 1961-62 to 1987-88, Paddy took 589 wickets at an incredible average of 19.69 and an economy rate a shade above 2.

A Test career that wasn’t

Paddy was always philosophical about his inability to make it into the Indian side and continued to be passionate about the game well into his 80s. He was rarely to be found in anything other than in whites during the day, passing on his wisdom to younger players.

READ | Paddy Shivalkar: Goel sahab and I were born in the wrong era

The morning of the launch of my book Spell-binding Spells in 2017, my mobile phone rang, showing an incoming call from Paddy. Hesitatingly, he asked me if it was okay to come in his whites since he would not have time to go home and change. His humility stunned me.

It has often been pointed out that Paddy lost out on a Test place to a certain Bishan Singh Bedi, who took 1,560 first-class wickets. But that is not a particularly convincing argument. Ajit Wadekar once said, “Had I been the chairman of selectors, on most occasions I would have convinced the captain to play both in the team depending on the nature of the pitch. If (Erapalli) Prasanna and Venkat could be in the team, why not Bedi and Paddy?’

This is very true, and in fact, after the quartet retired, Doshi and Maninder played together, as did Doshi and Shastri and two off-spinners have operated in tandem on many occasions. As recently as last week, three left-arm spinners played in an ODI as part of an Indian quartet. Watching his last match on television, Paddy would have had that beatific smile on his face.

What is intriguing, however, is that when Wadekar was captain of India in the early 1970s, he himself did not play Paddy in the team alongside Bedi. He instead played Venkat. Gavaskar had the chance to pick Paddy early in his captaincy career but was unable to convince the selectors to do so. Be that as it may, it is indeed India’s loss that Paddy’s talent would never be on display at the highest level of the sport.

Did Paddy resent the fact that despite an universal recognition of his genius, he was never given a chance to play for India while lesser spinners got into the team? When I once asked Paddy this, his response was typically philosophical:

‘‘I was not destined to bowl for India. I have no regrets really. I played cricket and that is what matters.’

A second innings for Paddy

I feel fortunate to have known Paddy, a man I had long admired, even if it was for the last decade of his life.

Over the past few years, we spent hours talking about the game and the art of spin. At the launch of my book Wizards a few months before Covid, as Paddy, in the company of Dilip Doshi and Dilip Vengsarkar, regaled the audience with stories and insights, the management of Title Waves at Bandra had to ask us to wrap up the evening as it was well after closing hours.

It was Paddy, along with another childhood cricketing hero, Chandra, who called multiple times during the pandemic to ask how the family and I were coping and just to spend an hour talking about cricket and life in general. In addition to being a genius at his craft, Paddy was truly a good man.

Paddy may have left us mortals in awe of his immortal genius, but an even better second innings is about to commence. In a contest that is truly blessed by the gods and denied to mere mortals, Paddy Shivalkar and Bishan Bedi, operating from two ends of the Elysian pitch, are getting ready to spin a web around Bradman’s Immortal Invincibles World XI.

Bring it on Paddy.