Tiger,always

Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi belonged to crickets royalty. And it was not just because of his lineage,which,of course,is part of Indian cricket story: after his father,Iftikhar Ali Khan,he was the second nawab of Pataudi to captain the Indian team. While his spot in the Indian side did not come as an entitlement,he did pick up the thread. Where the father had asserted himself in a colonial sport set-up,the son reconfigured Indias place in the international pecking order. He did so by winning and,even more so,by instilling in the side a desire to win,sometimes even recklessly so.

It cannot be overstated how much Indian cricket benefited from his attitude. And he did not have the time or space to prepare for the challenge that came to him so young. It all began when a bouncer tragically hit the back of Nari Contractors head in Barbados. In the chaos that followed,Pataudi,at 21,was appointed the captain,the youngest in the world then. Between 1962 and 1970,he captained India in just 40 Test matches,but in those years he spun success out of strategies that have been revealed to be gamechangers for Indian cricket. Under him played the trinity of spinners S. Venkataraghavan,Prasanna and Bishen Singh Bedi which became the watermark for Indias success story and which helped the team make it big internationally. It was under him that India went on to win the first overseas Test series in New Zealand in 1967. He was the indisputable authority in the dressing room and it was with him at the helm that Indian cricket came to have a few realisations about what a captain can be. It was not just batting though the dashing figure he cut gave Indian cricket its early glamour. He was the athlete who chased balls with an energy that we had not seen on our cricket grounds until then. He raised fielding,then a clearly disregarded element of the sport,to a new,high standard and was arguably the first Indian captain to lay an attacking field. It was famously said,When Pataudi is in the covers,theres curfew in the covers.

The only regret is that in failing overall to induct its greats as mentors,Indian cricket lost the opportunity to learn more from him once he left the field.