Padmakar Shivalkar, the champion left-arm spinner who is counted among the greatest Indian cricketers to never play for India, has died at the age of 84. He died in Mumbai on Monday and is survived by his wife, son and daughter.
Shivalkar is often twinned with the Haryana left-arm spinner
Rajinder Goel – the highest wicket-taker in Ranji Trophy history – for the misfortune of having careers that coincided with that of
Bishan Bedi.
“One of the regrets I have is that, as the then captain of the Indian team, I could not convince my fellow selectors to pick Goel
Saab and Paddy to play for India,” Sunil Gavaskar told
The Hindu when the BCCI awarded Goel and Shivalkar
the CK Nayudu Lifetime Achievement award in 2017. “They were born in the same era as the greatest left-arm bowler I have seen, Mr. Bishan Singh Bedi. Else they too would have played plenty of Tests for India.”
Gavaskar shared a dressing room with Shivalkar when Bombay (now Mumbai), the most successful team in the Ranji Trophy, enjoyed their greatest period of dominance. Shivalkar featured in 10 of Bombay’s victorious Ranji Trophy campaigns from 1965-66 to 1976-77 – they won the title in every season barring one in that time – and was part of the squad that reclaimed the crown in 1980-81. Incredibly, he made a comeback seven years later at the age of 47 and played two matches during the 1987-88 season.
His first-class debut had come all the way back in April 1962, when he was picked in a Cricket Club of India President’s XI against an International XI that was making a world tour. Against that team, which included luminaries such as Bob Simpson, Tom Graveney, Colin Cowdrey, Everton Weekes, Richie Benaud and Sonny Ramadhin, Shivalkar took 5 for 129 and 2 for 44 in a drawn game.
In all, Shivalkar took 589 wickets in 124 first-class matches, at an average of 19.69. Of those wickets, 361 came in the Ranji Trophy. No Mumbai bowler has taken more wickets in the competition. Shivalkar’s best figures of 8 for 16 came in the 1972-73 final against Tamil Nadu, when Bombay won
in two days and one ball on a vicious Chepauk turner.
Another fine spinner from the 1970s who never played for India, V Ramnarayan, watched both Goel and Shivalkar closely and
wrote this about them:
“Quite possibly the best attribute of their cricket was their utter dependability. With them in the side, their captains only had to worry about their supporting bowlers.
“Both were tireless, with their smooth actions demanding the minimum of effort – or so it seemed. Yet it was their unstinting work in the nets that made their seeming effortlessness in match situations possible.
“If a comparison must be made between them, it must be to state that there was hardly anything to differentiate them, except the possibility that with his flight and subtle variations, Shivalkar posed a more attractive proposition on good wickets, with Goel perhaps more destructive on crumbling surfaces.”
Shivalkar’s favourite mode of dismissal, perhaps, said something about the kind of bowler he was. “I used to enjoy getting the batsman stumped,” he told
The Cricket Monthly in 2017. “With my command over the loop, batsmen would step out of the crease and get trapped, beaten and stumped.”
