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Sanjay Manjrekar retires from international cricket

Sanjay Manjrekar, after being in and out of the national team for the last two years, finally gave up hopes of wearing the India cap again and announced his retirement from first class cricket.

Sanjay, son of Vijay Manjrekar and once touted as the solid backbone of the Indian middle order, today told newsmen in Bombay that his match for his home state against the visiting Australians at the Brabourne Stadium from February 24 will be his last big fixture.

Manjrekar, who has cut a disc, coincidentally debuted as a commentator the day before, when he sat in the expert's chair for the one-off ODI between India and Sri Lanka at the Wankhede.

Saying that his decision was because he had no motivation left, and said that ''Making money was never the question''.

Manjrekar's announcement came in the midst of the super league Ranji match against Railways, in which he made 30 runs off 32 balls with five fours before flicking his Bombay friend Sanjay Bangar into the hands of the square leg fielder. This could be his last Ranji innings, as Bombay was poised for a huge score in reply to Railways paltry 124, and they are most unlikely to bat again. Manjrekar had led the team to the championship last year.

The Mangalore born Manjrekar, who will be 33 in July, made an unfortunate debut in Test cricket in 1987-88 against Vivian Richards' West Indians in Delhi. He was injured while facing the fearsome fast bowler Patrick Patterson. But since then, he had a fantastic run capped in 1992 with five hundreds, all on foreign soil.

His most memorable Test knock of 218 came in Lahore when he toured under Krishnamachari Srikanth in 1989 -- the tour during which another rising star of Bombay cricket, Sachin Tendulkar, made his bow on the international stage. Manjrekar defied the fearsome trio of Imran, Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis. In fact, he made one more century on that tour.

His champagne form had started a year earlier, under Dilip Vengsarkar, with a hundred in the West Indies. His fourth and last hundred came in the first Test against Zimbabwe in 1992 at Harare. In this period, he played 37 Tests, scored 2,043 runs at an average of 37.14 and had nine fifties besides his four centuries. A safe slip fielder, he took 25 catches and was India's standby keeper for emergencies -- in fact, he has a stumping to his name as well.

Manjrekar's misfortune was that the selectors deemed him unfit for the one day format. Memory is short, yet not so short as to remember that in 1991, in Sharjah, he was adjudged man of the series. He averaged 32.23 from 74 internationals with a total of 1,994, inclusive of 15 fifties. And just when talk was beginning that he was unfit for one dayers, he banged his only ODI centiry, 105, off just 82 balls in the Delhi international against South Africa in 1992.

However, the selectors didn't think he was good for ODIs, and that was about that -- despite superb showings in domestic cricket, his name did not even come into the media's speculation, much less the selectors' contention, when picking successive Test and ODI squads.

He had almost given up hope of playing again when Tendulkar, as captain, had a hand in getting him recalled in the second test at Ahmedabad against South Africa. On a cracked pitch, Manjrekar showed considerable skill in a brief innings, but was dropped for the next Test.

Desperate to regain a spot in the national side, he announced that he was available as an opener at a time when India badly needed someone to fill that slot. He got a nod following a freak injury to Saurav Ganguly, and played his last international in 1996 against South Africa -- but against top class fast bowlers and a pitch with low bounce, he failed. That was the begining of the end.

Manjrekar has the distinction of scoring one of the slowest Test hundreds, which came in 500 minutes at Harare.

His highest first class knock is 377, against Hyderabad at the Ranji level.

Manjrekar took over the captaincy of Bombay's Ranji team when Dilip Vengsarkar stepped down in the '92-'93 season. In his first essay as captain, Bombay lost in the very last over, against a Haryana side led by Kapil Dev.