That didn’t stop them being good or watchable films. At least that was the ideal India wanted to believe of itself. This was not how the Azharuddin fairy-tale was supposed to have turned out. It also meant that when the match-fixing scandal broke, and when K. That apart, few who had followed the match-fixing scandal and who had played with Azharuddin in the compromised games of the late 1990s — including cricketers such as Sachin Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly, who were to form the nucleus of a better and cleaner Indian team post-2000 — have been able to forgive Azharuddin. He peaked as a cricketer, as India’s ct institutions — and the national cricket captaincy was certainly one such — being open to anyone with requisite talent. Rather the fact that a self-made man, an unsung lad from an ordinary household, without a family legacy to exploit, had made it this far was appreciatedself. A middle-class lad from old Hyderabad, introduced to the sport by a loving grandfather — who, tragically, passed away just before that dramatic century on Test debut — he was painfully shy, endeared himself with his absence of glibness and cleverness, and was a marvel when it came to discipline and rigour. The social churning we are seeing today, and which is throwing up small town cricket stars from extremely humble backgrounds, was yet to come.
By all accounts, the biopic Azhar is a fictionalised rendition of the life, the rise and the fall of Mohammed Azharuddin, the former Double-action and two-speed flour spiral mixer Indian cricket captain. He contested the ban by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and got a judicial reprieve on a technicality, but it was never going to be enough to win him selection (he was too old anyway). He was over. The 1980s was still a time when cricket in India was a big city, English-speaking sport. In the 1980s, few could match him for flair and sheer beauty of stroke play; or for his ability to play the ball late.The author is distinguished fellow, Observer Research Foundation.In 1990, Azharuddin was appointed captain of the Indian cricket team. Whether tht to dismiss the fixing allegations as the product of vendetta against his faith. The wound is most deeply felt when it is inflicted by one in whom there has been the greatest emotional investment. Even so, whatever the circumstances of his appointment, few held it against Azharuddin