We often relate sports with fairytales. Sport makes us believe in fairytales. When a sporting legend enters his arena for one final time, we yearn for his success. ‘He deserves a fairytale finish’ we say. This constant inclination to liken sport to fairytales stems from the blood, sweat, heartbreaks and hurdles one goes through before attaining the dreamt reality. Sport’s rags-to-riches stories do have a fairytale-like feel to them.
The latest such story of Indian cricket comes from the humble home of a worker of a wire factory in Jaipur, Bharat Singh. And it is about his 20-year-old son, Nathu. Since he was a kid, all Nathu dreamt of was to run in with a cricket ball and bowl fast. Really fast. But the boy was mature for his age and understood that getting him professional cricket coaching was a luxury his father could not afford. So he kept his dream to himself.
He decided to be content with playing tennis ball cricket in the backyard with his neighbours. But fortunately, he had well-wishers among his gully cricket mates, who took it upon themselves to convey to Nathu’s father, and convince him to give the boy an opportunity to harness his incredible natural talent of bowling fast. It was then when Bharat Singh took one of the biggest gambles of his life. He put all of his life savings in line to give his son a chance. Nathu was sent in to Surana Academy in Jaipur. Three years later, he was bowling to the likes of Hashim Amla and AB de Villiers at the Brabourne Stadium in Mumbai.
“My life has changed a lot,” Nathu says, as he reflects on the last three years, in a chat with BCCI.TV. From the academy, he was picked for Rajasthan’s U-19 team, in 2013. He made his first-class debut in the ongoing Ranji Trophy and kick-started it with 7 for 87 against Delhi.
Sandeep Patil, the chief of the national selection committee, was watching. He saw a young Indian fast bowler rattling up batsmen with sheer pace – a rare breed. Soon, Nathu was bowling to South Africa’s best batsmen as part of the Board President’s XI team. Ask him about the experience and you sense genuine gratitude in his voice, “It is a big day for me and my family.”
After the match, we ask Nathu to tell his story. He speaks less but says more. “I used to watch a lot of cricket on the television as a kid. And every time I watched a fast bowler run in, I would say to myself, ‘I want to bowl like this one day’.
“I loved watching Shoaib Akhtar bowl. He was so quick. I watched him and decided that I want to bowl so fast that I break his record. And for that I have to work really hard, for which I am absolutely prepared,” he says earnestly.
It is refreshing to hear Nathu talk about his bowling. He is aware of his talent and he doesn’t wrap it with a coat of modesty while speaking about it. But his confidence portrays innocence rather than cockiness.
“Everything about my bowling is natural,” he says in a matter-of-fact manner. “I still bowl in the same way I used to when I started playing cricket. The only thing I have learned is to adjust my length according to the pitch and the match situation.
“I have a natural in-swinger and I get away swing with the same action and angle. I am not working on any aspect regarding swinging the ball. I am only focusing on getting my lengths right. I have a few variations as well, like the back-of-hand slower one and bouncer, and the cutters. I have learnt all these on my own, bowling with the tennis ball.” Again, not smug, but passionate.
For all his confident self-assessment, Nathu is not a naive young man who believes he has cracked the code of success. He knows his bowling is work in progress, and he displays immense clarity of thought on where he needs to improve.
“The one weakness I have is that I tend to go haywire with my line. I just want to improve on that,” he says, while citing the example of how he found it difficult to adjust when he first made the switch from the tennis ball to the leather ball.
“When I bowled with the tennis ball, my run-up consisted of two to three steps. Once I started with the leather ball, I had to increase the length of my run-up to generate that force. It took me a lot of time to get adjusted to a long run-up.
“It was also a challenge to get control over my swing with the leather ball. Initially, it tended to swing too far across. The coaches would ask me to bowl with a crossed seam. Gradually as I practised more and more, I got the hang of it.”
Another instance where Nathu’s self-awareness comes to the fore is when he talks about the sudden attention he is subjected to – from the selectors, former and current players, coaches and the media. He says he makes a conscious effort to not let all the weight of expectation bog him down and lose focus.
“It makes me feel really happy (that everyone is backing me to make it big) but at the same time it also scares me,” Nathu says. “So many people have such high hopes from me and what if I fail to live up to it?
“But the moment I feel that I am thinking about these things too much, I stop myself and bring my focus back to the present. I tell myself to concentrate on the cricket that I am playing right now and give it my all to do well in the next match. Rest of the things will take care of itself.
Those are the words he will have to replay in his mind over and over again if he is to fulfil the promise everyone sees in him. This is, after all, just the beginning of Nathu Singh’s fairytale.
