Haryana’s sprightly pacer Anshul Kamboj is likely to make a stunning Test debut on Wednesday for India, hampered by several injuries, during the fourth Test of the Anderson-Tendulkar Trophy against England in Manchester. Old Trafford has witnessed the first steps of nine India Test cricketers before, with legendary spinner Anil Kumble being the last of those during his debut in 1990. But none could match up to the whirlwind story of Abbas Ali Baig’s debut in Manchester in 1959, stunning one and all.
Like Kamboj, a 20-year-old Baig was nowhere in contention when the tour began, but for an injury to batting mainstay Vijay Manjrekar leading up to the fourth Test of the 1959 tour had India scrambling for options. While having started his First-Class career at only 15 years of age, Baig would have remotely thought of being drafted into the national side while studying at Oxford University. A prodigious talent indeed, Baig had once scored 308 runs in a First-Class match (221 and 87), an Oxford record that has remained for more than 60 years.
Replacing Manjrekar in the XI, Baig had a nimble first essay on the Old Trafford strip, falling for 26 while batting at No. 3 to Ray Illingworth. After India made only 208 all out in response to England’s first-innings score of 490, the hosts set a daunting 548-run target for India. Baig soon hit his straps under pressure as he carved a fantastic century in his second innings on debut. Aged 20 years 151 days, Abbas Ali Baig had become only the fourth Indian to score a century on Test debut and the youngest to achieve the landmark at the time. Incidentally, Baig’s valiant century was also the first Test hundred by a debutant batter in the fourth innings of a match.
The SOS call to India’s request made Baig an instant hero as he was later bestowed with the Indian Cricketer of the Year – 1959 award.
Baig’s international career would, however, taper off as he would win only nine more caps across the next eight years. Baig could only add two more fifty-plus scores in his career and was famously remembered for an unprecedented on-field ‘kiss’.
During the Brabourne Test against Australia in 1960, Baig was walking off the field for the tea-break after scoring a fighting half-century before being stopped by a girl in her 20s for a moment that would make for debates and discussions thereafter. “I was returning to the pavilion at tea when this girl jumped the fence and kissed me,” Baig would describe.
First-Class veteran and India coach
After winning one more cap for India, Baig went onto become a First-Class heavyweight for Hyderabad alongside the likes of MAK Patudi, Abid Ali and ML Jaisimha. Across a 20-year career that ended in the 1975-76 season, Baig inished with 12,367 runs at 34.16 and 21 hundreds.
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He would return to the national set-up as the head coach during India’s 1991-92 tour of Australia and the subsequent 1992 World Cup. As Kamboj gears up for a debut exactly 66 years later, Abbas Ali Baig’s unique Test initiation at the very same ground in Manchester marks for a special recall.
