'A naala ran through it'

The sun is jealous. Every morning, it rises to find that a gentleman named Babulal is already up in Mohali, and working furiously. As it begins tracing its languid path through the winter sky, it looks on in wonder at a flurry of activity at the PCA Stadium that lies below. Babulal, the groundsman, is hard at work with assorted malis and helpers, knowing that sharp at 7am., Daljit Singh, curator/visionary of Mohali, will come to see if work is going on as it should be. The dewdrop glistens on the grass, knowing it is cared for.

The Legend of Daljit Singh is one of the most inspiring chapters in the history of Indian cricket. This is the man who, after three decades in the game as player/captain/coach/mad romantic, was given charge of the new stadium coming up at Mohali. He dreamed up an outrageous objective for himself: to create a world-class seamer-friendly track in dust-bowl spinner-friendly India. The first time he said this out loud, people laughed.

Getting laughed at was not new to Daljit. It was a regular occurrence during his 19-year first-class career as wicketkeeper-batsman, most of which he played for minnows Bihar. "Once," he recalls, "Bombay came to play us, with players like Gavaskar, Mankad, Solkar, Wadekar, Ghavri and Shivalkar in their ranks. I told my boys, `we have a chance of beating them.' A couple of them laughed at me!"

Daljit, of course, had the last laugh, as Bihar bowled Bombay out for 200, took a 102-run lead, and, chasing 182 in the fourth, almost won the game. Daljit, the man for whom no task was impossible, made 42 valiant runs. Bihar lost, but it was a moral victory for Daljit, a man moulding a team of youngsters into men who would never give up without a fight, and who would reach the Ranji final in 1975-76.

Inspirational leader and technical guru as he was, the jump to coaching was surprisingly accidental. In RK Narayanesque fashion, "a chance meeting in the marketplace with an old friend" set it off. Daljit was working for an NGO in Bangalore, and the friend in question was the redoubtable Gundappa Viswanath, chairman of selectors of Karnataka. "The greats of Karnataka cricket had long since retired," Daljit recalls, "Vishy, Pras, Chandra, they'd all gone. They'd played their cricket the old-fashioned way, all grace and beauty, and the cricketing culture wasn't professional at all." The new team was raw, and when Daljit said this could be the best team in India, Vishy guffawed (déjà vu!) and said, "Rehne de yaar, kya baat kar raha hai?"

Needless to say, the team Daljit groomed then, with "keen youngsters like Rahul Dravid, Anil Kumble and Sujith Somasunder", went on to win the Ranji Trophy in 1995-96. Daljit was off to Punjab by then though, poached by IS Bindra and Bishan Singh Bedi, both men with a keen passion for Punjab cricket. It was a homecoming for him - "Having gone all over the world, I finally got a chance to go back to my roots." He reached Ludhiana in 1993 with seven days to go for the Ranji Trophy final, in which Punjab were playing. Bedi asked him to coach them. "With seven days left?" asked Daljit, and this time, he laughed. But you don't say no to Bishan; he duly took up the assignment, and Punjab duly won.

When he took charge of Mohali, Daljit recalls, "a naala ran through it." But his approach to this new challenge, as to life, was systematic and determined. First, he moved away from Chandigarh to a house behind the ground, so that "there would be no temptation to go off and play golf." He hired a carefully selected staff, began coming to the ground every morning at 7am, and set a system in place: irrigation and drainage were state-of-the-art, the outfield grass was the poetically named Cynodon Dactylon (Bermuda, or Doob grass, used in golf courses worldwide), and all the rollers and Super Soppers were the best in the business. And then, of course, came the pitch.

Daljit travelled the country, checked out soils from all over, and eventually pinpointed the quality of soil he wanted in a village near Ludhiana. Having found the best, he couldn't have enough of it; he brought enough to Mohali to last ten years, stored it in the labyrinthine vaults beneath the stadium, and set about creating his miracle.

"Anybody can make a green-top," Daljit says. "Urea daal do, chaar bora paani daal do, hara ho gaya." But creating a great ground, he says, where the outfield is soft and the pitch is true, is like grooming a child; it takes years of labour, and is always a work in progress.

The sun yawns in the evening, its languorous trail through the heavens reaching its conclusion. Below, in a circular patch of green, a man stands alone, toiling mercilessly. The sun sighs, gives up, sets.