I was covering my first Test match for The Hindu in September 1979. The first cricket match of the Australia-India series was to be played in Chennai. I got a chance to cover it along with K. Narayana Chari, my senior colleague and a legend in cricket photography.
Photographers were allotted the top or the last row in the pavilion terrace from where you could get a bird’s eye view of the ground. I was seated next to Chari with a 400MM Novaflex lens, which had a pistol grip for focussing instead of the conventional focus ring and a Nikon FM camera that had to be wound manually.
The first day was dull and went in favour of the Australians — who lost only two wickets and with a score of around 250 runs and Allan Border remaining unbeaten with a century to his name.
Day two went India’s way. Dilip Doshi, a left-arm spinner playing his first test, ran through the Australian innings with a six-wicket haul. The first to depart was Australian captain Kim Hughes who was caught by Venkataraghavan off Doshi.
Since he was a spinner, I had tilted my camera a little to cover the bowling crease, a slip, the wicketkeeper and other close-in fielders. If a fast bowler was bowling, one had to straighten the camera to cover the batsmen and the three or four slip fielders, and had to sacrifice the bowler’s end.
What happened next was one of those freakish dismissals in cricket. Yallop, the new batsman, hit a ball straight back to Doshi. The ball hit Doshi’s hand and deflected on to the stumps dislodging the bails. Allan Border, who was backing up for a run, tried to get back — literally on all fours. But he was just an inch away and declared run out. I clicked but wasn’t sure. The ‘film’ had to be developed. Moreover, there was a split-second lag from the time one pressed the shutter release button to capturing the image in the focal plane shutters of the 35MM SLR cameras.
My bosses, the proprietors of The Hindu , and cricket enthusiasts were seated right in front of me. N. Ram turned around to ask if I had shot the picture. I nodded. Later I got another good picture of Venkataraghavan taking a brilliant catch in the slips.
Back in the office later that evening, I developed the film and was elated to find that I had caught Allan Border’s run out at just the right moment.
The photograph was carried on the front page the next day and I felt as if I had scored a century on my first appearance.
