Henry Blofeld, Christopher Martin Jenkins, John Arlott – the names trotted off the tongue of C Ehambaranathan, 71. I was amazed that he could recall the names of BBC cricket test match commentators from the 1960s through the 1980s without blinking.
He could also remember who beat whom in test matches in those years.
But then Ehambaranathan, better known to his friends as CE Nathan is no ordinary cricket fan: he’s cricket crazy.
How else do you describe someone who would take leave whenever there was a test match so that he could do the scoring?
How else do you describe someone who would travel from his workplace in Butterworth to his Taiping house so that he could sit down and score the entire match in the undisturbed atmosphere of his house?
No, he was not a national player. Not even a state player. He played for his school but cricket had a stranglehold on him, especially between the 1960s and 1980s.
For a short spell, between 2002 and 2006, he coached students of Anderson School in Ipoh and promoted the game in a few primary schools by teaching them how to play.
“I kept telling cricket officials that we must introduce the game to the young and not wait till students are in secondary school. But hardly anyone paid attention to me,” he tells me.
I ask him how he became mesmerised by the game.
Nathan’s brother Shanmuganathan, who played cricket for Perak state, would practise beside the house with a few friends and Nathan would be “the unlucky one” to be tasked with picking the ball.
He was then in Form One while Shanmuganathan, who was in the Perak XI between the late 1960s and early 1970s, was a teacher. In picking up the ball, Nathan also picked up the rules of the game.
In King Edward VII Secondary School, he started off by picking balls whenever the school team played. In Form Four he made it to the school team and in Form Five he was named vice-captain.
It was also from watching his brother listening to the radio commentary on international cricket matches that he got hooked to radio broadcasts. Nathan would sedulously tune in to the BBC’s cricket commentaries and never miss any test match.
He also began scoring the games. Scoring means each time the ball is bowled, you note down whether the batsman blocks or hits the ball and whether it gets caught by the wicket keeper or fielders of the opposite team or the stump is broken.
This is recorded for every ball of every bowler to every batsman throughout the game. All 11 players must bat, unless 10 of them are out.
Nathan would spend six hours every day of the test matches, bent over the Nordmende radio listening to the BBC, Radio Australia or All India Radio. “The BBC broadcast was on the 49-metre band,” he rattles off.
“Wasn’t this boring?” I ask the father of four and grandfather of six children.
“I loved it,” says Nathan.
That is precisely why when he was working in a factory, he would change his shift whenever there was a test match. Later, when he joined Tenaga Nasional Bhd and was posted to Butterworth, he would take the bus back to Taiping after work at 2.40pm to be on time for the start of the test match at 6pm.
“In the UK it would be 10am but our time will be 6pm. They played Malaysian time from 6pm to 1am. From 8pm to 8.40pm our time, they’d break for lunch and then break for tea from 10.40pm to 11pm and then play from 11pm until stumps (end of the day’s play) at 1am.”
As the game would go on from Thursday to Sunday, and sometimes Monday, Nathan would apply for leave for Friday and Monday. However, if the game was over by Sunday, he would cancel the Monday leave and be at work.
Some of his friends and co-workers thought he was too cricket crazy.
Although his parents didn’t interfere with his hobby, his mother did say years later: “If you had only spent the same amount of time on your books, you could have been a doctor today.” And she’d say the same thing to his friends.
In a seemingly nostalgic trance, Nathan says he derived immense pleasure from listening and scoring the matches.
“You can feel as if you are there and playing. You can hear how the top bowlers are doing minute by minute. Every two hours there was a break and I would go to the bathroom or have my dinner. There were a few occasions when I held back my bladder because the match was so interesting and I didn’t want to miss scoring it.”
Nathan said the BBC commentary by stalwarts Henry Blofeld, Christopher Martin Jenkins and John Arlott came over a special frequency and that the commentators would change every 20 minutes.
Former England cricketer Trevor Baily would sometimes join in to summarise and analyse the day’s match.
“When I do my scoring, there may sometimes be interruptions to the frequency due to factors such as the weather condition. When that happens, I won’t be able to do the full scoring and that would leave me dissatisfied.
“Once, I wrote to William Frindall, the statistician at the Marlybourne Cricket Club – the official administrators of cricket in England. I didn’t know him or his address so on the cover of the envelope I just wrote ‘Bill Frindall, Marlybourne Cricket Club, c/o BBC’, followed by the BBC address.”
To his surprise, the letter somehow reached Frindall and he took the trouble to reply. Nathan had enclosed a copy of his score sheet and explained he had been unable to hear the commentary from such time to such time.
Frindall told Nathan that he was using the old method of scoring and taught him how to use an updated method. And Nathan began following this. Many Malaysian cricket officials were unaware of this new method when Nathan shared it with them.
The first test match he scored was between England and Australia, in 1966.
Nathan recalls scoring the first Cricket World Cup in 1975 when the West Indies beat Australia by 17 runs. The final score was 292 to 274.
West Indies emerged champs again in the second Cricket World Cup in 1979 after beating England by 92 runs, with the score at 287 to 194.
However, India caused an upset in the third Cricket World Cup in 1983 when it beat the West Indies by 43 runs, with the final tally at 183 to 140.
Saying the India vs West Indies match was one of the most exciting he’d listened to, Nathan shared an interesting titbit: “West Indies bowler Malcolm Marshall, considered the greatest fast bowler in the modern era of test cricket, was so confident his team would retain the cup that he ordered a new car before the match. When West Indies lost, he had to cancel the order.”
None of those who played these matches or the officials or commentators knew that one fan in Taiping was crazy enough to diligently score all these games cooped up in his room.
Does he still have the score sheets? No, replies Nathan, who now lives in Seremban. He threw them all away one day as his wife kept complaining that there was too much rubbish in the house.
Does he still score when test matches are held these days?
No. With matches being broadcast live on television, he has given up that passion.
“You know, the enjoyment I got while listening to the commentary and scoring was so much better than watching the game on TV. When you listen, you have to visualise how they are playing on the field and the condition of the field thousands of kilometres away.
“The commentator would say something like, ‘He lofted the ball high, wide and handsome for a six’ or ‘The bowler runs in with his hair flopping and arms swinging’ and I would get a thrill visualising it and feeling I’m right there.
“On TV, everything is there for you to see and it takes away the thrill. You no longer have to visualise the scene; you no longer have to see in your mind’s eye how Viv Richards or Sunil Gavascar hit the ball.
“I used to feel as if I was a participant, that I was in the thick of it, but, today, sitting in front of the TV and watching the game makes me only a spectator,” Nathan says in a wistful voice.