A day after his record-breaking 439 in the Harris Shield, a tired Sarfaraz Khan is once again at Azad maidan, obliging the media with long interviews and snappy sound-bytes. Not far from the 12-year-old, at the adjoining Cross Maidan, the umpire for an inter-college game is 59-year-old Anand Solkar, who also found a small mention in Thursday’s newspaper story about Mumbai discovering another batting prodigy.

Four decades ago, as a school boy, Solkar had scored 396 on the same ground where Sarfaraz hit the national headlines on Thursday. He smiles and nods when he encounters the uncomfortable query: Are you Mr Anand Solkar? “So finally I am remembered,” he replies. “There was not so much media in our time. Your name would be there in a newspaper, that’s it,” he says. With time, the memories of that triple hundred have faded as Solkar now stands in the sun to officiate in minor matches for Rs 300 a day. While his brother Eknath made it to national team, Anand Solkar only managed to play a tour game against the visiting England team “sometime in the 80s”.

Solkar isn’t the only lesser-known cricketer on the top-10 list of Harris Shield run-getters. Besides the big names Sachin Tendulkar, Vinod Kambli, Ashok Mankad and Wasim Jaffer, there are people like R Nagdev, Sanju Jadhav, Yash Gandhi and Rohan Tondulkar, who have since gotten lost in the flannelled crowd that’s a daily feature in the vast expanse next to Churchgate station.

Old-timers still remember Sanju Jadhav’s 422 in 1985 — which included 80 boundaries — but don’t recall any other of his exploits. Now a junior selector, Jadhav works a 9-to-5 job in the ticketing department of Air India.

... contd.