The curious case of Devendra Bundela: He had to be ignored by national selectors to be a Ranji collossus

These are not dancing feet. Steady, straight, dictated by experience and wisdom, they shuffle like a pack of cards, creased but classically vintage. The drives are perfect, a few flying off the edge, the lofted shots off the spinners rising high, in perfect arcs, yet not dangerously close to the Indigo, Go Air jets landing at the runway just a few kilometres away at the Palam airport. The Palam Cricket Ground is not where the fans come to worship; sit for hours or days watching the short and the long format of a sport which has evolved more in the past decade than it did in the six before that. There are no long queues of fans here trying to break down barricades, begging to be let in, desperately clicking away on their smartphones. Palam is not the back of beyond either. It is simply not an important stop for what we perceive as real cricket – the national team. [caption id=“attachment_3145604” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Devendra Bundela is an icon for youngsters who want to play purely for the love of the game. Image courtesy: Facebook[/caption] These surroundings, amidst the shouts and screams of bowlers and a small whitewashed group of rooms which you can grandly call the pavilion, a drifter, the marathon-runner version of a cricketer used to showcase his skills. In empty stadia, the sharp, singular sound of a bat hitting the ball comes back to you as an echo, and your century is not welcomed by thousands of raucous fans but by your own group of players. It is in such an environment that Devendra Bundela thrives and has prospered to become the richest domestic cricketer. At the moment he is playing against Bengal at Palam and has 138 Ranji matches to his credit. No cricketer in this country has that record. Bundela stands alone on that summit. The Pope had once asked Muhammad Ali for his autograph. “Sure,” shot back Ali, “but why ain’t Jesus black?” Bundela doesn’t subscribe to hallucinations of the Ali kind. Born and playing in a time when giants like Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly, VVS Laxman and Virender Sehwag strode the cricket grounds, Bundela definitely would have asked himself, “What’s wrong with me?” He startles you with the reply – “Maybe I wasn’t good enough.” It was perhaps akin to trying to be a heavyweight boxer in a time when Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, Ken Norton and George Foreman ruled the ring. You would just watch from the outside, hoping someone would retire early or break down; the selectors constantly telling you, “Sorry, the flight is full, no seats.” Yet, you carry on, day after day, hoping, praying that one seat on that ‘Test’ flight would be vacant. Bundela brings it down to luck. “I think if you have the talent and you work hard, you can be successful. This positive approach is very important. But I am saying that in cricket, luck is very important. Right chance at the right time is important. India is a huge country. Sometimes, you can play and sometimes you cannot. I think it’s very important to perform and play with honesty and I have done that,” he says. After Bundela left Ujjain, a city where cricket wasn’t the most popular pastime, Indore welcomed him and there he built a foundation for realising his dream of playing at the highest level. Things seemed to be going okay when he was put on a flight to Australia, proudly seeing his kit bag embossed ‘India Under-19 Youth’. Bundela played one match; a match in which an Australian bowler by the name of Brett Lee took five wickets. Incidentally, none of the members of that youth team went onto play Test cricket for India – S Sriram, however, played eight ODIs. That team also had Mohammed Saif, the elder brother of Test player Mohammed Kaif. Bundela believes the turning point could have come in the 1998-‘99 season when Madhya Pradesh played Karnataka in the Ranji final. “In those times, it was just the Ranji Trophy to impress the selectors and if we would have won the final against Karnataka, that one percent chance of making it to the national team could have come,” he says. The final was at the M Chinnaswamy stadium. Karnataka scored 304 in the first innings with Madhya Pradesh replying with 379, Bundela being run out for 79. Madhya Pradesh had a 75-run lead. Karnataka declared at 321/7 setting their opponents a target of 247. On a pitch that was turning, Vijay Bhardwaj with his off-breaks took 6/24 in 14.5 overs to demolish Madhya Pradesh. Bundela stood for 168 minutes, playing 124 balls to score 24 before Bhardwaj clean bowled him. “The match changed after I got out,” says Bundela, as a flight screams to a landing. “We lost the match after the last session and that was very sad. We were leading for four-and-a-half days and in the last session, we lost the match. It was very sad.” There is a certain grimness attached to the moment. If there was an opportunity to roll back time, what would he do? “I wouldn’t have got out,” he says, with a smile that folds into the Oakley’s, as he tugs at his Madhya Pradesh cap a little more securely. The MPCA (Madhya Pradesh Cricket Association) crest on the salt/sweat stained blue cap is prominent. Bundela has been wearing the cap for 21 years. In an age where allegiance is fleeting, it’s remarkable that he has stuck with Madhya Pradesh through thick and thin. Of course, there are others who had been loyal to their Ranji teams. For instance, Pankaj Dharmani played only for Punjab and Sitanshu Kotak for Saurashtra, but when pushing for a place in the national side, would he have been better placed in a slightly more prominent team? “It’s a yes and no, both,” he says with a shrug. “If I had discussions with Karnataka and Mumbai players often, I think I could have been a better player." When Bundela made his debut in 1995-‘96 against Tamil Nadu, Harvinder Singh Sodhi was a player in the Madhya Pradesh team. Today, he is the coach and extremely proud of Bundela. “It’s an achievement in itself to play for so long in domestic cricket. He has represented MP since the last 20 years and obviously it’s a special feeling because he has spent such a long time on the field and he is even today doing well for the team. Even this season, he is our team’s highest scorer.” On Bundela missing out on a Test call, Sodhi calls it “unfortunate”. “That was the era in the Indian team when the middle order was packed. We had Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly, VVS Laxman - all the greats were there. So it is just unfortunate. But he didn’t give up on his cricket.” Bundela is no celebrity; no mannerism that displays shallowness off the field in what sometimes is a circus-culture. Uniquely, he is a ’landmark’ in Indian cricket; an icon for youngsters who want to play purely for the love of the sport. Bengal captain, Manoj Tiwary, explains, “As a youngster, I had heard his name. He has been a prolific run scorer for MP and all the credit goes to him because sustaining so long isn’t easy. This year, he has been their highest run scorer in Ranji Trophy. This shows the level of commitment he has and in a way it is helping their youngsters to come up and to know about first class cricket.” There is a certain aura around big cricketers. Not with Bundela. Not even when he has seven 50s in his last nine matches with scores of 93 against Tamil Nadu, 188 against Railways and 86 in his 137th match against Baroda. “It’s not easy,” says Tiwary. “I think he is almost 40 at the moment and playing first class cricket where the competition is so high. It’s not easy to sustain.” “It’s a hunger for runs,” says, Sushil Doshi, a veteran commentator of 80-plus Test matches from Indore. “But I salute his spirit. For Madhya Pradesh and Indian cricket, he is an inspiration and getting better with age.” Doshi does believe Bundela will play 150 Ranji matches, creating a record that just might stand for all time. It’s ironical that to create a domestic record, you need to be ignored by the national selectors. At 8,842 runs, Bundela stands third behind Amol Muzumdar (9,202 runs) and Wasim Jaffer (10,143); records that could be his in a couple of seasons. Even though Bundela takes it a match at a time, he wants to finish like Tendulkar. “Sachin Tendulkar played the last game, the way he played the first,” he says. “I want to do the same.” Rocky Marciano, heavyweight champion in the 1950s, was once described as someone “who quit undefeated and kept self-delusion at bay.” Bundela is not far behind.