by Sumit Gangopadhyay
Syed Mujtaba Hussain Kirmani, born December 29, 1949, was arguably the greatest wicketkeeper of India.
He stepped on the big stage at the tender age of 16 playing for Madras Schools in the Cooch Behar Trophy. From there to South Zone Schools as a keeper and batsman. And then he played four ‘Test.’ matches against the Australian Schools team, making full use of the opportunity. His returns in these four ‘Tests’ were 2 hundreds, 1 fifty with 6 catches and 3 stumpings. After this, when Eknath Solkar led the Indian Schools side on a tour to England, Kirmani was named his deputy. There were accompanying accomplishments as well. According to the memoirs of Sunil Gavaskar, Kirmani was already smoking as a school-going kid.
He arrived on the first-class scene in 1967-68, but had to wait for an opportunity in Test cricket till 1975-76. That was mainly because of the presence of Farokh Engineer in the Indian line up. However, after his entry, the Indian side did not have too many worries concerning the big gloves. In 88 Tests, he caught 160 and stumped 38 batsmen. With the bat, he scored 2758 runs, with two hundreds, including one as a a night-watchman.
In 49 ODIs he held 27 catches and effected 9 stumpings. Perhaps the high point of his limited overs career was the famous match against Zimbabwe in the Prudential World Cup 1983, when he came in at 140 for 8 and added an unbeaten 126 with the rampaging Kapil Dev, he himself scoring 18 not out. Incidentally, in the first match against Zimbabwe in the tournament, he had held 5 catches.
After being omitted from the side during the 1985-86 tour to Australia, he kept trying to break back in till 1992-93, but he did not succeed. Ultimately he retired from first-class and List A cricket in 1992-93.
In 275 first-class matches, Kirmani held 367 catches alongside 112 stumpings. Besides, he scored 9620 runs at 30.15 with 13 hundreds.
Interestingly, even after retiring from first-class cricket, Kirmani did not give up the game. In the Masters Cup of 1994-95, he held 7 catches and effected 5 stumpings. Seeing him at that age, Gavaskar observed that Mongia would be embarrassed if he saw Kiri’s keeping. [ Editor’s note: One can perhaps put that to the normal bias cricketers have for their long time teammates]
Later, he played in the 1995 Masters Cup, 1997-98 Zhandubalm Independence Cup … and even kept brilliantly against the South African veterans side at the age of 54. In 2007-08, he took field for the final time, for the Kerala Veterans in Sri Lanka. He held two catches and made a stumping in the two matches. And hit 62 runs off 45 balls.
In the upcoming movie about the 1983 World Cup, one will probably know more about the person behind the Karnataka/Mysore wicketkeeper. On screen, in the past he did play the role of a villain … in the movie Kabhi Ajnabi The [which starred Sandeep Patil as hero]
Translated by Arunabha Sengupta