Kochi: “Somebody please bomb that ground. Then only the children in this locality will attend classes.” These desperate shouts of Potty Mash might still be reverberating through the walls of the bleakly illuminated corridors of the Government Higher Secondary School for Boys in Thrippunithura.
What else could the master, known to be a strict disciplinarian, do when most of his puplis whiled away the time by watching cricket seated on jute sacks laid on the compound wall topped with broken glass at the Palace Oval ground in Thrippunithura?
Not only his students, but many veterans in the locality like Neelakandan and Balan Menon were also among the spectators. They would stand leaning against the compound wall holding an umbrella to protect themselves from the scorching sun, and enjoy the battle between the bat and ball. The crowd also included employees of the Cochin Shipyard, some of the teachers of the same school, daily labourers, and several women, including those from the royal families who were relatives of the players.
Believe it or not, when the Pooja all-India cricket tournament was on, there used to be severe shortage of agriculture labourers as most of them would leave their homes for work, but instead of going to the field, they would throng the ground to cheer up the likes of Ravi Achan, Omanakuttan, and Kelappan Thampuran.
In 1971, when three days of the traditional New Year's Day Test in Melbourne was washed out by rain, Australia and England were forced to play an impromptu match, which turned out to be the first international one-day game. In 1979, Aussie broadcaster Kerry Packer masterminded a ground-breaking unofficial series - World Series Cricket – with coloured clothing and enhanced television coverage, challenging the cricketing establishment. These matches are now being placed on record in golden letters in the cricket history. However, much before that – about 20 years before that first 'official' One-Day International in Melbourne - limited overs cricket had taken its roots in Thrippunithura.
It was the local gang of cricketers from Thrippunitura who devised a curtailed form of Test cricket with 50 overs per side to overcome the boredom of playing five-day matches and two-day local tournaments.
As the 100th birth anniversary of K V Kelappan Thampuran, who was at the forefront of that innovative experiment, will be celebrated on May 19, the occasion also gives us a peek into the history of one-day cricket.
Three members of that gang, who strove hard to draw up the game structure and playing rules along with Thampuran, are still alive. They are wicketkeeper-batsman Kerala Varma Thampuran, P Ravi Achan, popularly known as the Kerala Bradman, and one-down batsman K K R Varma. Kelappan Thampuran and K K R Varma were the two who are credited with outlining the core rules of the limited overs game.
During that period, a single innings cricket tournament organised by the Cochin Athletic Association at the Durbar Hall Ground was very popular in this part of the state. However, that tournament ceased to exist in the late 1940s. With that, the players of the Thrippunitura Cricket Club, the only club in Kerala which owned a ground at that time, lost the only platform to perform and display their skills.
Kelappan Thampuran was desperately looking for an alternative contest when the idea of having an own tournament struck him. The two-day single-innings tournaments had their limitations. If there are good batsmen in a team, it will take two days for all of them to get out. So, it was not an ideal choice to overcome the boredom of five- day cricket. Thampuran’s quest for a shorter and more entertaining format of the game gave birth to the 50-over a side ODI cricket. The matches would start at 9 am and the first innings would end at 12.30 pm. After a one-hour break, the second innings would start at 1.30 pm and the match will end at 5 pm. There was no 10-over per bowler rule. In a match against the Thrippunitura Cricket Club, Thalassery’s Lesley Aaron and Santi Aaron bowled 25 over each. However, in the second edition of the tournament, a rule allowing each bowler to bowl up to a maximum of 12 overs was introduced.
New format, new rules
The distinctive feature of the Pooja tournament was that it had no predecessor to borrow rules and laws from. Moreover, there were no role models to learn the game or coaches to help the players master the basic techniques of the shorter format. Self-learning and the desire to take on a new challenge were what propelled the Pooja tournament. There was no DLS (Duckworth-Lewis-Stern) method to reset targets in rain-affected matches. Winners were decided on the flip of a coin. Once Coimbatore and Thrippunitura played out a draw as both teams completed their innings with 52 runs each. Finally, a coin flip was employed to decide the winner. Kelappan Thampuran had amazing luck as he won most of the tosses, remembers Ravi Achan.
The trend of putting up manual scoreboards displaying high visibility characters was introduced by the Thrippunitura Cricket Club. Before that, scores were entered on the board after every 10 overs with chalks sneaked out of classrooms. The boards with visible display also added to the excitement of the spectators.
Players dropping easy catches being taunted publicly and batsmen scoring fifties being admired till the next edition of the tournament were common sights in Thrippunitura at that time. That kind of passion and obsession was the reason why the Pooja tournament grew in popularity even outside the state. It attracted top teams from cities across the country including Coimbatore, Madras, Bangalore, Delhi and Kolkata. Started as a nine-team championship in 1951, it went on to become one of the prestigious cricket event in India.
The tourney also provided players like Syed Kirmani, Mohammad Azharuddin, Krishnamachari Srikkanth, Tinu Yohannan, and S Sreesanth an opportunity to showcase their talent before they donned the national colours.
The Palace Oval Ground would have been another patch of land overrun with thorny shrubs, if Kelappan Thampuran, supported by a group of passionate youngsters, had not taken the initiative to turn it into a cricketing hub. For that very reason, the people of Thrippunitura will be making the centenary birth anniversary of Thampuran, who was also a member of the first Travancore-Cochin team and the founder secretary of Kerala Cricket Association, a memorable event.