The Weight of the Name: On Being a Cricketer’s Child and Choosing the Same Game

A boy walks out to bat at a trial, and before he has taken guard the whole ground has quietly done the arithmetic. It knows his father’s average to the second decimal; it remembers the hundreds, the series won, the particular way the great man used to lean into a cover drive. The boy has faced no ball yet and already the scorecard is being kept — not against the bowler waiting at the top of his mark, but against a ghost who is not playing, and who cannot be got out. I have sat behind that arithmetic more times than I can count, at the National Cricket Academy and in selection rooms up and down the country, and I have come to believe that the hardest new-ball spell in all of cricket is not bowled by any fast bowler. It is bowled by a surname.

Consider what we actually do to these children, because we do it without noticing. Every innings a famous son plays is read not as an innings but as evidence — evidence for or against a single, unspoken hypothesis: is he as good as his father? A fifty becomes “promising, but not yet the old man”; a duck becomes “the son who never had it.” No cricketer alive could pass that examination, because it is not an examination of him at all. Rohan Gavaskar played eleven one-day internationals for India, took a wicket with the fifth ball of his international life, and made one half-century, against Zimbabwe; by any ordinary measure a serviceable first-class career and a place in the side. Yet he was measured against the man widely held to be the finest opening batsman the game had produced — his own father — and against that yardstick no fifty was ever going to be enough. He is a thoughtful voice in the commentary box now, and still, three decades on, he is introduced as Sunil’s boy. That is not a fair contest. It was never meant to be one.

The other side of this deserves a proper hearing, and it is a good deal stronger than a sympathetic essay would like. Spare the famous son your pity, the argument runs — these are the most fortunate cricketers alive. They grow up in the nets the maidan boy can only dream of; they are coached from the cradle by men who charge fortunes; the connections are there, the selectors take the call, the door opens for them that stays bolted shut against the gifted kid from Hubballi with no academy money and no surname to trade on. I have argued in these very pages that our system fails the boy with no money and no contacts, and I will not pretend now that the son of a Test cricketer starts level with him. He does not. The access is real, it is large, and it is unearned. All of that is true.

And none of it, in the end, is quite the point. Because the same door the world throws open for the famous son is the door the world then gathers to watch him walk through. Access buys him the trial; it cannot face the ball for him, and it doubles the height of the fall if he middles nothing. The maidan boy who fails at his one trial fails in merciful anonymity and goes home to try again next season; the famous son fails on the back page, in a headline that writes itself, in front of a crowd that came precisely to see whether the magic ran in the blood. Privilege and pressure are not opposites in this story. They arrive in the same envelope, addressed in the same hand, and the boy must open both.

So is it hopeless — is the wise counsel simply that a great cricketer’s child should take up anything on earth but the game his father mastered? It is a tempting thing to tell them, and I understand the instinct entirely; a life is a heavy thing to spend auditioning for a role that was cast before you were born. But the record is stubborn on this, and it says otherwise. The Pataudis remain a feat without parallel in our cricket — Iftikhar Ali Khan captained India in 1946, and his son Mansur Ali Khan captained India too, appointed at twenty-one, one of the youngest ever to hold the office. The son did not spend his career trying to become the father; he built a legend of his own, leading the side for the better part of a decade with the sight in one eye all but gone. Yograj Singh played a single Test for India and faded; his son Yuvraj built a career the father never approached and won us World Cups doing it. Abroad it is the same tale — Geoff Marsh sent two sons, Shaun and Mitchell, into Test cricket, joining only Walter Hadlee and our own Lala Amarnath in that particular club, and Mitchell grew into a genuine match-winner rather than a footnote to his father.

Look closely at how the successful ones did it, though, because the lesson is not “out-bat the ghost.” No one out-bats a ghost; the ghost has stopped making mistakes. What they did instead was change the examination — refuse the comparison and sit a different paper altogether. Which is why I think the shrewdest thing I have watched a famous son do in recent years is what Sachin Tendulkar’s boy has done. Handed perhaps the single heaviest surname the game has ever placed on a young pair of shoulders, Arjun Tendulkar became a left-arm fast bowler for Goa — a different discipline from his father, a different state, a different craft, a different identity built deliberately at arm’s length from the one he was born into. He scored a first-class hundred when it suited him and took a five-wicket haul, but the deeper wisdom was in the choice itself: he declined to audition for a part already immortally played, and went off to write his own. You cannot be a disappointing sequel to a film you are not in.

That, in the end, is the whole of it, and it cuts two ways. To the selector and the coach and the man in the crowd: judge the child as a cricketer, not as a sequel — the surname on his back tells you nothing the eye cannot tell you better, and often it lies. And to the boy himself, if he ever cares to hear it from someone who spent a life inside this game and watched too many bright young men crushed under a name they did not ask for: the surname is an inheritance you cannot bat with. It opens the gate, and then it leaves you exactly where every cricketer who ever lived has had to stand — alone in the middle, twenty-two yards from a hard new ball, with a father famous or a father unknown and no earthly difference between them once the bowler starts his run. Build your own game. The crowd came hoping for a sequel. Give them, instead, an original — it is the only innings that was ever truly yours to play.