Cricket folklore is replete with the deeds of great players, but none, perhaps, had to work as hard and with focused purpose as one of India’s first supreme all-rounders, Vinoo Mankad. While Kumar Ranjitsinhji and Kumar Duleepsinhji were the rarest of knights that ever wore the white flannels, Mankad, who also came from Jamnagar, as the two princes did, was no less a rare Jewel in the Crown of World Cricket.
It was an interesting quirk that Mankad’s natural prowess was first tapped by none other than Duleep, a wizard of the willow, who moulded the youngster, from a raw medium-pace bowler and ‘rabbit’ with the bat, into one of the finest players the game has ever known. It was, thereafter, left to the brilliant vision of coach Bert Wensley of Surrey to transform Mankad into what was to shape his true destiny: a miracle of a slow spinner. It was a vocation that seemed to suit Mankad’s physique well. It was also, indeed, a rare case of a cricket teacher who thought of the ‘perfect’ idea, and solution, for his ward.
Following the Duleep-Wensley ‘aesthetic surgery,’ Mankad looked only ahead, never back. Come 1937-38, he was a star in his own right. The 1946 tour of England was to Mankad what Wimbledon was to Fred Perry, a decade earlier. When he bagged the coveted ‘double,’ in good, old Blighty, Haslingden Club, in the Lancashire League, signed Mankad for a fanciful fee: one of the highest-ever paid contracts, till then, for an overseas cricketer. Also, thanks to league cricket and its spirit of professionalism, Mankad soon blossomed into a giant of an all-rounder. He had just about everything in him: talent, pro-enterprise, fine game plan, and amazing ball sense.
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