The man who kept the ball: CD Gopinath and India’s first Test victory | Cricket News
CD Gopinath never intended to play cricket. He played hockey, football, tennis, ball badminton — everything except cricket. Until he was seventeen, he had never held a bat in a competitive match. At Madras Christian College in Tambaram, the captain noticed him. Not his batting — his hands. “Your job is to not let the ball pass you,” they told him, and handed him the keeping gloves. Then the opener kept getting out for single digits. They asked Gopinath to open instead. “They insisted, so I went and ended up making 70 runs,” he told Sportstar, laughing. He became the permanent opening batsman for the college, then the university. He started at seventeen. He played for India at twenty. *** The square cut was his shot. His coach, Bert Wensley, once advised him to stop playing it because he was getting out to it. Gopinath tried. He lasted a couple of matches. Then he went back to Wensley and said: “I love that shot. I can’t stop.” Wensley moved him down the order instead. The …
