“See, when a legspinner bowls, and the ball is spinning, you cut him, the ball will go like this,” he says, extending his right arm and performing a clockwise turn. “I love watching it. I’ve seen fielders thinking the ball will come straight to them, but it bounces and goes somewhere else and they couldn’t stop it. I loved playing that shot and I loved seeing that happen.”
Just as he enjoyed watching flummoxed fielders during his career, which included eight Tests for India, Gopinath, now 94, enjoys making light of that time in history.
Unfortunately, the lore that surrounds that victory, by an innings and eight runs over England in Madras, is disappointingly strait-laced. And Gopinath did not go through with his scandalous idea of saying whatever he wanted. He did, however, escort that crew to Chepauk to show them exactly where he took the catch to dismiss Briam Statham, England’s eighth wicket in the second innings, which brought India to the brink of history.
“[The crew] asked me how I felt,” Gopinath said, “and I said, look, my job was, as a fielder, I had to take the catch. It’s not an achievement. If you can’t take a catch, why would you be in the team? Yes, we were very pleased that we won, because we didn’t expect to win.Tthat too against England, we never thought we’d ever win. We were very happy, but beyond that, there was no… [at] that time nobody demonstrated. They didn’t make fists and things like that.
“Today when a fellow takes a catch, the whole team runs there – carries him, kisses him, hugs him – not only in cricket, in every game. In football, when someone scores a goal, they almost smother him. Those days you were not meant to express yourself openly out to the world. The catch I held was a straightforward, simple catch, nothing to it. If you held a brilliant catch somewhere in the slips, someone may say: ‘Well held.’ That’s it. You didn’t go running around the whole ground or carrying people. It was considered vulgar to show your feelings to the outside world. So our celebration at the end of that game was: we went to the dressing room, we said to each other, ‘Well done’, we packed up and went home. That was the end of the matter.
“Maybe it didn’t quite dawn on us, because we were the weak team. When we went into that Test match, we didn’t expect to win. We were not even trying to. If we draw, we were very happy. That was like winning a match. So long as we didn’t lose. That was the first time that we realised, oh, it’s also possible to win. You realise, oh, it’s also possible to score hundreds or 200s.”
Gopinath’s lack of excitement – apart from being typical of his era – might also stem from the fact that he never had any intention of becoming a cricketer. That was destiny’s doing, placing him in the same college house as the captain at Madras Christian College, creating a situation where they needed, first, a wicketkeeper – “They saw me playing tennis, so they called me and said your job is to not let the ball pass you” – and then an opener (“You mean face the new ball? No way I can do that”). Except he did, and began scoring a lot of runs.
Gopinath was an uncut gem. “When I was young, I didn’t know anything. I suppose what happened was, my reflexes were good, my footwork was good, my eye was good. I could hit the ball.”
Their mentorship helped him move up the levels of the game. It was batting that interested Gopinath the most, to the extent that he named his home in Coonoor “The Cover Drive”.
Gopinath had an instinct for batting and he was not shy about following it.
Cricket allowed Gopinath to meet to new people.
“I became friends with Lindwall that game, sitting and chatting. We became such good friends that we exchanged caps. I still have it somewhere.”
It brought him recognition.
It helped him win over his family, who once regarded him as an example of who not to be.
“When my mother passed away and we were looking through her things, we found so many newspaper cuttings of me. She never told me, but all of it was there: I saved this match, I scored this century. And when my daughter saw that, she made a book of it.”
The simple pleasure of picking up a bat and swinging it around changed Gopinath’s life and he never let the joy fade.
“My coach Mr Wensley once advised me not to play the cut because I was getting out to it. ‘You play your drives and everything, you’re okay, but stop the square cut,’ he said. ‘That’s very difficult and you’re getting out.’ I tried to stop it and after a couple of matches, I went back to him and I told him, ‘I love that shot. I can’t do it.’ So he said, ‘Okay, if you’re that keen, don’t go opening. Move two-down, three-down.’ So I did and I never stopped the square cut.
“Seeing me square-cut in that Combined Universities game, against Ramadhin, a foreign scribe, the Commonwealth team manager actually, wrote that I was the best exponent of the square cut in India. It was so funny!
“I have never had any ambitions. I never wanted to get anywhere. Whatever happened to me happened because of my thala ezhuthu [destiny]. If I wanted to play for India and so on, I’d have been disappointed. But I never even thought about it. I never dreamt that I would play for India. It just came by. Same thing has happened to me in my life, in my work, and some of the things which at that time was, ‘Oh terrible, a terrible thing has happened’, now I realise I’m so glad that happened.”
At some point, people grow up. They realise the perils of living for the moment, of chasing fleeting highs, like the feeling after playing a great shot, and weigh it against the downsides: its potential to get you out. It’s human nature. You want to do the best you can, so you strip the fun out of things.
But take it from a 94-year-old who used to play tennis until four years ago, who was friends with Raman Subba Row, Frank Worrell and Denis Compton, who has seen the snowy peaks of Alaska and the breathtaking splendour of the Nile, who was chairman of the Madras Chamber of Commerce and who still serves on the board of several trusts: sometimes doing something just because it feels good is good.
Alagappan Muthu is a sub-editor at ESPNcricinfo
