India At The 1975 World Cup - When Players Went on a Holiday

(An 11-part series by Yahoo Cricket on how India fared through the various editions of cricket’s premier tournament, which began in 1975, in England.)

When the Indian team was selected for the 1975 World Cup, the meeting reportedly lasted five minutes. They simply decided to go with the team that had turned out against the West Indies during the winter series. After all, India didn’t have a surfeit of wealth to choose from either, given that we had played just 21 tests in the previous five years!

Not that the rest of the world was much better prepared. India vs England, the first match of the first World Cup, was only the 19th ODI ever played. But make no mistake! This Indian team wasn’t a bunch of novices who couldn’t bat sixty overs.

It had players capable of hitting big sixes. It had players who could score at a fast clip. It had a bunch of bowlers who could bamboozle the best of batsmen. Mohinder Amarnath, Abid Ali and Karsen Ghavri were all capable batsmen, while in Farokh Engineer, India had a batsman who almost got a century before lunch in a Test.

However, the team wasn’t exactly buoyed for an ODI tournament, given that it had lost a Test series to the West Indies prior to the World Cup. There were stories going around that time that the team was given a paid holiday for a more than decent showing against the visiting Caribbean team, having won two matches on the trot after going down 2-3 to the Windies.

Anyway, the tournament was played on just five days with simultaneous matches being held to cut short the time required. There was hardly any television, so no question of hefty TV rights and advertisements. The organizers were earning from the paying cricket fan. Small wonder then that West Indies received a winner’s check of GBP 4000.

Madan Lal bowled the first-ever delivery in World Cup history on June 7, 1975. Nobody remembers though, as the match became famous for the Sunny Gavaskar crawl. He scored 36 runs off 174 deliveries, single-handedly handing the match over to the English, who scored a mammoth 334 runs losing four wickets.

The rest of the batsmen weren’t that bad. Anshuman Gaekwad was striking at 48, while Gundappa Vishwanath was even better with a strike rate of 62.7 runs per 100 balls. But with Gavaskar intent on crawling, Brijesh Patel decided to match the Master, remaining not out on 16 off 57 deliveries. India’s run rate – a humiliating 2.2 an over!

Exactly a week later, India clashed with the New Zealanders at Manchester and Gavaskar was suddenly striking at 85 per 100 balls. The team scored 230 runs in 60 overs though the batting order appeared all awry with all-rounder Amarnath coming in at number 9, ahead of just the two spinners – Bishen Bedi and Venkataraghavan. Our top scorer was Abid Ali who cracked 70 runs off 98 deliveries. The diminutive Hyderabadi all-rounder is also credited with hitting the first six for India in an ODI, which also happened to be the only one hit by an Indian in that World Cup.

Of course, the Kiwis won the match with two overs to spare, thanks to a century from their charismatic captain Glenn Turner. On the bowling front, Bishen Bedi was miserly, conceding just 28 runs off 12 overs for the wicket of opener John Morrison. The most successful Indian bowler? Once again Abid Ali, who scalped two for 35 off his 12 overs of medium pace.

In between these two encounters, we won our first-ever ODI against East Africa, a team that was made up of players from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. Besides the six test playing teams, East Africa and Sri Lanka were chosen to fill up the numbers though the latter did give a creditable account of themselves in their matches.

For the records, East Africa scored 120 runs in 55.3 overs which India managed to get with 20 overs to spare. Gavaskar notched up India’s second fifty in ODIs and immediately thereafter Engineer got his own half-century to complete the victory for India – a momentous event considering that we had to wait eight years to get the next win!

Team manager GS Ramchand was harsh on Gavaskar, and the legendary opener found it tough to explain his batting in the tournament. And so it was that our cricketers completed a paid holiday even as West Indies and Australia went into battle for the silverware.