Abhishek Nayar has taken 462 runs and taken 20 wickets in Ranji Trophy. (Source: Express photo by Pradip Das) Abhishek Nayar has taken 462 runs and taken 20 wickets in Ranji Trophy. (Source: Express photo by Pradip Das)

Once ridiculed and humiliated by senior teammates for lacking class, Abhishek Nayar has kept his promise of becoming the team’s most important player and has grown to become a mentor. Sriram Veera profiles the all-weather Mumbai all-rounder, who has battled the odds and won respect and acceptability

“Arre! How can you let him bat? Is he a batsman? He doesn’t deserve to bat in Bombay team nets. To bat here, you need a bit of class; he doesn’t have it. Just ask him to bowl and go away. What are you doing, Pravin?”

It’s been 11 years but Abhishek Nayar can still the remember the stinging remarks against him. Nayar was asked by coach Pravin Amre to bat at the Mumbai team nets when a few seniors led by Amol Muzumdar waded into him in Marathi.

Though Amre rebuked the seniors and supported him, Nayar was shaken up by the episode.

Unsurprisingly, he failed as a batsman and was dumped from the team in that first season. He knew he couldn’t have survived the three ducks —especially after the last scoreless horror of a knock had escalated into another painful memory. When he got back to the dressing room, he says, Nilesh Kulkarni, the then captain, Ramesh Powar and a few seniors ripped him apart. “All the abuses you can imagine were thrown in. And I was basically told I wasn’t good enough and should stop dreaming about cricket.”

That night Nayar went to his room and sobbed. Soon, he was joined by a young colleague Vineet Indulkar, who much to Nayar’s surprise, broke down in the room.

“I know how hard you worked to get here, how badly you were treated.”

Nayar told him to stop crying, and with a cocktail of emotions churning inside him — from rage, self-pity, determination — he texted Kulkarni.

It was a long message — “I said so many things there, anger and hurt of course, but also made this point clear: I would never forget what you guys told me, but I will tell you this. One day I would bat at No 4 for Mumbai and be the main player of the team.”

That development took years to eventuate, but the first step was taken in the next season when he made his comeback to the Mumbai team. It came with more pain and tears, though. He was sitting a touch tensed in the dressing room when suddenly the coach told him to pad up and go to bat as nightwatchman. Two of the ducks in the earlier year had come on nightwatchman duty.

“What the hell is happening, I remember telling myself. Here I am, back in the team after all that has happened and again the same pattern happening?”

That knock was one strange experience. Fighting internally with himself, fighting with the world and a desire to prove a point to carping teammates, it proved an intense, and emotionally draining experience, that manifested physically as well. He made 97 and cramped up by the end.

Any exhilaration at a break-out performance, though, was quickly stubbed out of him.

Given the ball, he began cramping up even more and couldn’t turn out a decent spell. As the team trooped back to the dressing room, he was hit by another humiliation. Muzumdar, he says, told the coach in his presence, “If he can’t bowl, then tell him to stay at home.” Another Mumbai Ranji night spent in tears in the room.

“I have made 97 and I am crying in the room.”

Next day, he didn’t get a bowl in the morning session and went to Amre, the coach, and said, “Please tell him to give me bowling, sir.”

After Amre’s intervention, Muzumdar gave him the first over after lunch and lady luck winked. Azhar Bhilakia, the well-set batsman, went for a cut first ball and was snapped up at gully. Elation inside Nayar lasted just five more balls as it was the only over he got in the innings.

“At least I wasn’t crying that evening!” he says with a smile now. More good tidings were to come his way soon. As it happened, Ajit Agarkar returned to the Mumbai team after playing for India in the next game, but somehow Nayar had shifted gears in time.

A stroke-filled knock ensued in that game – “I played the shots I have never played until then”- and the bowling was incisive. The inspiring performance was seen in the nets as well and an impressed Agarkar walked up to the selectors and said, “Who is this guy? What a good find for Mumbai.”

And just like that, the tide turned for Nayar. The frowns evaporated from the dressing room, replaced by pats on the back.

At the end of the season, the video analyst did an interview with the team members which was played out to the team. Powar’s bytes stood out as redemption for Nayar.

“I am very sorry and regret insulting Nayar last time he was in the team. If anyone has contributed to Mumbai this season, it is this guy. His fighting spirit and fire in the belly has been the standout feature for me this year.”

Nayar was moved. More changes came through. Muzumdar, too, had started to warm up to him and Nayar finally got what he craved for: acceptance and respect.

Muzumdar doesn’t shirk away from the memories, but presents his side of the story after all these years. “I honestly don’t remember saying that kind of stuff to him. But I guess, I was just being the hard-nosed Mumbai captain. It was the culture of the Mumbai team then. But I would tell you this: In the years that have gone by, if there is one thing that has impressed me about Nayar, it is his fighting never-say-die spirit and his commitment. Not surprising that he has had such a long career for Mumbai. I am happy that he is doing well for Mumbai”.

The Mumbai Ranji team has been this tough, hard, uncompromising, and has been fiercely proud and boastful of the tough attitude – ‘throw the kids in the deep end, and see them swim or sink’. The collateral damage, though, has been young vulnerable cricketers. For the 10 who make it, several fall by the side.

And it’s a culture that Nayar has striven in the recent years to change.

“The famous Mumbai Khadoos is all fine — and I am insanely committed and aggressive on the field myself —but it doesn’t mean you have to stop being nice to people. You don’t need to be rude. But honestly, I have no ill-feeling against Amol or Nilesh or anyone else. It made me toughen up, and left me with a great desire to prove a point. I managed to pull through, bounce back, but I know many who haven’t.”

***

We are sitting in the corridor overlooking the ground at BKC Bandra, where he was snubbed all those years ago during that training session. Amazingly, even as he recalls those painful experiences, one couldn’t detect bitterness. Life wasn’t just tough on the cricket field, but also off it. When he was in his early 20s, family problems left him in a dire financial situation. He doesn’t delve too much on the nature of the issue, but talks about how it played out on him.

“I had `2000 in my bank, and for months went door to door looking for a place to stay. I stayed with well-wishers — a month here, a month there — and I am so eternally grateful to all of them who supported me then. It was a time of great distress, nothing was going right for me in cricket and in life, but I am so lucky that I had this support from people.”

It’s a theme that he constantly arches back in the chat – the vulnerable youngsters of today and how sensitive today’s kids actually are. And the insane pressures that these supposedly ‘cool kids’ face today.

“I don’t think in my time as youth, there was this pressure. Now, every knock of yours is criticised in social media. The pressures of getting into an IPL team — I can’t even begin to tell you the pressure it puts on the kids. After two bad games, the criticism increases so much that they find it difficult to handle.”

The least he could then do, he felt, was to create an atmosphere in the team that is supportive and emotionally-enabling. Mumbai have a young captain in Aditya Tare and in his captaincy debut season last year, he had problems in getting the team behind him. There were so many captaincy chops just before Tare took over that he ended up facing the backlash and the side effects. It was then that Nayar decided to step in, and had chats with the other team members, convinced them of Tare’s sincerity, of the coach Chandrakant Pandit’s honest intentions, and became the mentor of the team.

So much so, that Milind Rege, the selector, who knows Nayar from teenage days, is absolutely certain that Nayar could be the next coach after Pandit in the next few years when he retires.

“I can’t stress you the role he has played with the youngsters. The team atmosphere has changed for good now, and he has such great mentoring abilities, that I think he should become the coach. But please, let him play for more years first. If anyone in this young team still has the famous Khadoos mentality and knows what Mumbai Ranji stands for, it’s him.”

***

When even your former captain Muzumdar, who was supposedly really hard on you, praises you on your attitude and temperament, you must be doing something right. Nayar has done much right over the years for Mumbai, in his own unique way. That awkward crouching wide-open stance of his is apparently a sanitised version of what it used to be in his teenage years. (thank god for small mercies, eh?!)

It’s quite a sight to watch him settle down in his stance. He keeps stretching his legs until it’s no longer humanly possible to extend further. The upper body has no option but to crouch and the square-leg umpire must see that bum jutting out at him. Somehow, he not only holds his balance but moves crisply to do what he does. In some ways, it almost seems understandable that his early team-mates didn’t rate him all that highly on first look. “I am not a talented cricketer like some. I know that. What I have is my mind, my desire, and the will to make my method work for me.”

His bowling, too, can be at times infuriating to watch. For an entire session, he can rush in and hurl the ball well outside off. Ball after ball. Whoosh Whoosh — it would sail well outside off. The result, though, can’t be questioned.

The run rate would drop, the opposition batsmen, especially at Ranji level, would feel claustrophobic at the lack of runs and soon a mistake would creep in. It’s not as if bowling wide is the only thing he does – he has a good legcutter (developed by watching videos of Damien Fleming) and loves bouncers. But if the team needs him to take the defensive role, he would gladly take it up.

On the domestic circuit, Nayar is the most aggressive medium pacer going around. Never shy of verbals, never short of bumpers, never runs out of glares, and has the ability to make something happen. Gripped with the white line fever, he can turn into a man who can be easily disliked by the opposition.

“I know I can rub people the wrong way. But unless I am aggressive, I don’t do well. Yes, I can get personal in my sledges, I don’t know what happens to me really but I become this different guy.”

In the famous Ranji final in Mysore against Karnataka, not only was he sledging the opponents but was also seen showing the middle finger to the partisan crowd. Once in a game against Bengal, he sledged his friend Manoj Tiwary so hard that he got payback when he went into bat.

Tiwary and Dinda talking this and that, but Nayar just switches off, refusing to even look at them. At one point, they even come and take his bat, but he just looks beyond, into the far distance. What started as a joke escalates into something more unpleasant with Tiwary and Dinda unable to fathom Nayar’s eerie silence.

At the end of the game, he recalls going into their dressing room, and saying, “Voh match mey tha, jaane dey, lets go out now”.

***

His aggression, or the lack of it, is what let him down when the chance to play for India came. He got three games, bowled three overs, and couldn’t just feel that he belonged. Captain MS Dhoni’s reactions didn’t help. Dhoni is on record saying he doesn’t know whether Nayar is a bowler who bats or a batsman who bowls. That, though, didn’t affect Nayar as much as an article in a paper during the camp in Bangalore just before the matches.

Spotting a large photograph of him in the paper, he dived in only to find to his horror that it was a hit-job. “Here, I haven’t even played a game for India and the guy had written such a negative story about my game that I was shaken.”

He remembers opening up to Yuvraj Singh who turned around, pointed to the media personnel assembled in the ground – “Yeh log na, they would never be with you when you are down. Just ignore them and play your game.” Oh well.

“But the damage was done, I guess. Dhoni is a legend and he is entitled to his opinion. He didn’t say much to me but it was clear to me that he didn’t rate me much. Rahul Dravid was really nice to me, and I got along well with Yuvraj, Ashish Nehra, Rohit Sharma (my good friend) but somehow, I couldn’t just find my game there. It would remain a great regret. I thought I would get more chances to play for India, but it never came. I did so well in the Ranji seasons from 2011 onwards but the call never came.”

It also began to affect his Ranji performances in subsequent years, and it’s only after Pandit returned as a coach that Nayar managed to bounce back.

“I had let the non-selection and India rejection affect me. What’s the use of playing well at Ranji if they are not going to select me? That kind of thinking is self-defeating of course and it affected my game, but luckily, I managed to bounce back and I am so happy that I did. Cricket is everything for me.”

***

Nayar has extended his mentorship role beyond the confines of the dressing room. He runs an academy for poor kids interested in the game, and along with former Mumbai player Sahil Kukreja, supports orphanages. “Sahil does all the hard work actually. I step in with the cricket coaching, and building a team there with the kids. It’s such a fulfilling experience. We even managed to send a few poor kids to Durham University in England to play cricket. Cricket is fine, but if I can help at least 100 children turn around their life, I would be happy.”

At his home, now, staying with him are three poor kids who are deeply passionate about the game but don’t have the financial backing to sustain themselves in Mumbai. His phone is always buzzing, be it from cricketers like Rohit Sharma asking for fitness advice or impoverished kids asking for life advice, and his home is turning into an open house for needy kids. His wife Natasha, a hair stylist, has always backed his philanthropical activities, and says she doesn’t know what he would do when the times comes for him to call it quits.

“People don’t understand how tough it is for sportsmen like him. This is what he has been doing from childhood, and the thought of life without sport is alarming.”

When he was dropped from the Ranji team after the first season, Nayar thought about quitting the game. A way had to be found to make some money, and he and his friends even thought of opening a pan shop.

“We thought we would home deliver it also! We calculated it would take us Rs 60,000 to run it. Four of us, 20,000 each.”

It was around then that Makarand Waigankar, a notable figure in Mumbai cricket circles, took him to see Sachin Tendulkar.

“He didn’t know me but gave me 45 minutes of his valuable time, helped me in my back-foot play and was so encouraging that I decided I should give cricket one more go. I worked bloody hard everyday and I am so happy now to hear people call me a mentor and what not.”

The promises made in that SMS to Nilesh Kulkarni has been actualised after all.

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