It was North India’s very own Wisden - the globally revered Bible of Cricket.
It fuelled the dreams of young kids hungry to make their name in the game. The seeds of the small-town revolution that would hit Indian cricket in the 2000s were perhaps sowed by Cricket Samrat. It acted as a force multiplier, democratising the game by taking it to the blind spots - blind swathes, in fact - in the north. It was a symbiotic relationship, with Indian cricket also gaining from Cricket Samrat. Between Lord’s 1983 and Bombay 1987, it grew exponentially as Indian cricket hit its apogee. The writing of many of its contributors was a breath of fresh air from the stoic style prevalent among Hindi newspapers of the time.įrom its humble beginnings in West Delhi in 1978, it rode on cricket’s expanding footprint in the country. And in an era when TV sets were a luxury in mofussil India and cable TV hadn’t arrived, it was our Star Sports in that its vivid prose in a language that we lived and breathed would help us “see” the matches that we couldn’t watch.
