About a boy

He's India's youngest wicketkeeper, but already a grizzled veteran at 19. Chandrahas Choudhury traces the remarkable rise of Parthiv Patel. This article first appeared in the June edition of Wisden Asia Cricket.

Parthiv Patel sits down for breakfast before nets at the Sardar Patel stadium in Ahmedabad, with a dozen or so fellow cricketers, all Gujarati boys his age or a little older. Like them, he has on his plate upma and a banana. For drink there is water in large steel goblets with golden bases that look like period pieces out of a museum. These net sessions are for the team that will represent Ahmedabad in the Gujarat district tournament, though some of the players are already Gujarat Ranji players. Fittingly, as the one international player in the lot, Patel sits at the head of the table, laughing and joking, comfortable, even authoritative, in these surroundings. As they go out for nets, I ask him casually if most of the games they are to play in the competition are to be held in Ahmedabad.

Patel's face screws up slightly, as it always does when he ponders something. "No, not in Ahmedabad. In small places. Vapi, Nadiad ..."

Melbourne, Sydney, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Vapi, Nadiad - the Indian wicketkeeper's cricketing orbit spans a little wider than that of most international players. These are the unusual realities of a cricketer who began in all earnest before he was 10, made his way up through the system step by step and into the Indian team at 17, and who remains young enough, and dedicated enough, to be considered for district-level cricket when he returns to his home city in the off season. (A further paradox here, a strange gap between the grand and the small, is that he has never yet played a Ranji Trophy game for Gujarat because of his commitments to various representative Indian teams over the years.)

The Test match against Pakistan at Rawalpindi in April, in which Patel, along with every other player in the Indian team excepting Sachin Tendulkar and Anil Kumble, experienced the thrill of winning a series away from home for the first time, brought to a close his second full season of international cricket. "Before the last game in Pakistan," he recalls, "when we stood one-all in the series, I heard many of the senior players in the team say that this was the most important game of their lives. And some of them had been playing Test cricket for nine or 10 years."

Patel must have the pleasure of being able to reflect that he played a vital role in realising that dream. Unexpectedly moved up the order to open the innings in that game as India tried to work around the problem of playing an extra middle-order batsman, he had to go out late on the first day after India had bowled Pakistan out for a low score. They lost Virender Sehwag first ball but Patel saw out the day in the company of Rahul Dravid, a player he admires and looks up to. The next morning, as Pakistan searched for an early breakthrough that would help them get into the middle order and keep India from getting away, he carried on serenely to 69, his highest Test score and - this seems significant - his third fifty in four Test innings, beginning with his maiden half-century at Sydney, which he blazed in the company of Tendulkar as India looked for quick runs. Both then and now, his runs were made in a style appropriate to the match situation and the interests of his team - always the most valuable kind of runs. His keeping through the game was consistently good, and on the last day he took a fine catch, diving down the leg side, to dismiss Yasir Hameed. All in all he enjoyed a model wicketkeeper's game, excelling at his specialised role in the team and making a significant contribution with the bat.

Recalling that last innings, Patel contrasts it to the first time he walked out to bat in Test cricket at Trent Bridge in 2002, padded and helmeted and all ready for battle, dead serious but nevertheless looking comically underage, and arousing concern and mirth at the same time. He played out eight balls before falling for a duck, and there were murmurs about picking players too early and before they were ready. When he came out to bat in the second innings, India were not too far ahead of England, and risked losing the game by getting bowled out and allowing England a shot at the target. But Patel, in only his tenth first-class game, batted unfussily for nearly an hour and a half for 19 not out, leaving no one in doubt that he could take the pressures of the Test match game.

Crucially, Patel also seemed a natural with the gloves, and already superior in ability to any of the seven wicketkeepers employed by India since the 1999 World Cup, some of whom had been embarrassingly poor. Later that season, he was to keep outstandingly to Kumble and Harbhajan Singh at home against West Indies on raging turners, and grew into one of the support roles traditionally required of the wicketkeeper, which is to aid his bowlers with his observation of the game from behind the stumps. He recalls the dismissal of Carl Hooper in Mumbai, caught and bowled by Harbhajan - "There was a lot of rough just outside Hooper's off-stump, so I asked Bhajji to keep pitching it in that area, and tempt him to drive against the spin" - and that of Ramnaresh Sarwan, stumped in Kolkata: "I noticed that his back foot would sometimes stray out of the crease in defence, and let this on to Bhajji, and he beat him with the straighter one."

Most worries about Patel at that stage centred on his batting rather than his keeping. Though he was chipping in with twenties and thirties, he seemed to lack the strength to force the ball past the infield, and a good part of his runs were made by gliding the ball through the slips with an open face - not a good sign for a player desirous of playing for a long period at the highest level. Also, it was clear that he was not yet ready to bat at No.7 in limited-overs games, and Rahul Dravid continued to don the wicketkeeper's gloves up to the World Cup and even after.

But the World Cup opened up a gap of almost nine months - January to September 2003 - in India's Test match schedule, during which time Patel was on view very sparingly, and when India resumed Test cricket with the home series against New Zealand, it was at Ahmedabad. Coming out to bat late on the second day, Patel thrilled his home crowd with a sparkling cameo, hitting Jacob Oram for three fours in an over and responding to Daryl Tuffey's bouncers with hooks and his barbs with some rejoinders of his own. It was clear that he had taken criticism seriously and put in a good deal of work on his batting in the off season, one sign of which was his maiden first-class hundred in July against Yorkshire on the India A tour of England. "That Ahmedabad knock gave me a lot of confidence," he agrees. "I began to go out and play my strokes more freely."

A tactical maturity of a veteran of sorts © Getty Images

But at the same time as his batting began to progress, the quality of Patel's keeping began to fall away somewhat in his second season. He had a horror game behind the stumps in the next Test at Mohali, where the Indian spinners seemed to pose him more problems than they did the New Zealand batsmen. Even so, there was no question that he was the first-choice wicketkeeper for the tour of Australia, a tour that team members saw as the biggest challenge of their careers. But worse was to follow.

Never must have Patel felt so lonely and exposed on the cricket field as at certain times in Australia. The team as a whole played out of their skins, and Patel made valuable contributions with the bat in every Test - indeed, his hooking and pulling of Brett Lee at Sydney was among the more memorable images of the tour - but he began to make lapse after lapse when it came to stumpings: Steve Waugh in the second innings at Brisbane, Adam Gilchrist in the second innings at Adelaide, Simon Katich in the first innings at Sydney. His most crucial error was the last one: Ricky Ponting in the second innings at Sydney as India pushed for victory on the last day. Ponting went on to bat for another 90 minutes before he was dismissed, and India could not finish off the game. Patel came in for widespread criticism, and even though the old adage of the wicketkeeper not being noticed till he makes a mistake was brought up, it was clear that the team could not afford mistakes made at this rate.

"I think I was getting up a fraction early to allow for the extra bounce of Australian wickets," says Patel. "In a curious way the stresses of that tour were helpful because they brought home to me exactly how much work I still needed to do on my keeping. I sought some help from Syed Kirmani and Kiran More to sort out my problems, and put in a lot more work in my preparation for the Pakistan tour." Indeed, the tour of Pakistan was probably Patel's best in terms of satisfying the demands made of him with both bat and gloves: his keeping to the fast bowlers and the spinners both was assured, and he made two accomplished fifties from different positions in the batting order. It was noticeable that he now presents the full face of the bat to the bowler much more. "I talked about it a bit with Rahul Dravid and he advised me to open up my stance a little so that my front foot doesn't go so far across," he says. "This has helped me play straighter." I ask him what he would consider the most fundamental rules of wicketkeeping. "There are two things that I remind myself of before every ball. Keep watching the ball, and stay down. Keep watching the ball, and stay down."

Patel's thoughts on the game exhibit the tactical maturity of one who, even if not yet out of his teens, is a veteran of sorts. To a greater extent than any other current Indian player (except Irfan Pathan, who is the same age as him and has come up much the same way) he is a product moulded and toughened by the systems now in place to give the prospective India player consistent access to high-class physical and skills training facilities, and a feel of touring and of the wide variety of ground conditions around the world, well before he actually plays at the highest level - the level that players in an earlier generation had to reach before they could embark on this further journey of learning. By the time he made his Test debut, Patel had already led India in the U-17 Asia Cup and then in the U-19 World Cup, and played for the A team on tours of South Africa and Sri Lanka. At 16 he made his first visit to Australia, to the Commonwealth Bank Cricket Academy in Adelaide for six weeks as a recipient of the Gavaskar-Border scholarship. It was on this trip that he met Rodney Marsh and had the benefit of coaching sessions with him. "I look back on those six weeks as a very important learning period of my career," he says. "It had a good effect not only on my keeping but also my batting. At practice we would sometimes work on the cut and pull for 200 balls at a time."

There is some link between that remark, and the fact that neither Brett Lee or Shoaib Akhtar could faze Patel with short-pitched bowling. I watch him at nets, where he bats against both fast and spin bowlers, and on a concrete surface against a bowling machine that fires heavy white plastic balls at him to simulate high pace. The Indian team management has high expectations of Patel's batting, for the value of a wicketkeeper who is virtually a seventh top-order batsman is immense (Patel's hero is Adam Gilchrist, the best batsman among wicketkeepers in the history of Test cricket).

He looks here, as he does in Test cricket, a compact and organised player, whose Test average is currently a healthy 32. His footwork is light and sure - indeed, he has only been out lbw once in two seasons of Test cricket. When he moves to an adjoining net to play the spinners, he attacks more confidently, stepping down the pitch to drive them back over their heads, or else feinting a forward movement and then laying back to cut. Against quicker bowling his game is more conservative, but as soon as he gets something on his leg stump, he dispatches it unerringly. "The toughest spell of bowling I've faced in Test cricket was against Jason Gillespie at Brisbane," he says later. "For five or six overs he kept everything on my off stump and I could get nothing away. And at the other end Sourav [Ganguly] was smacking two boundaries an over against Stuart MacGill."

The most interesting character in the story of Patel's rise is his uncle Jagat Patel, who lives with the Patels as part of a joint family. A shrewd, bespectacled man perhaps in his late forties, Jagat Patel had little experience of cricket beyond a few games at school, but he possessed a great interest in the game, and when he took his little nephew to the net sessions of the cricket team of the State Bank of India, the organisation he works for, the players there were impressed by the fact that the eight-year-old didn't shy away from the hard cricket ball. "So it struck me that he could become a good wicketkeeper. The only problem was that we couldn't find any wicketkeeping gloves his size. Pathik Patel, the Gujarat player, gave him his childhood wicketkeeping gloves."

Jagat Patel displays a certain understanding of a child's psyche. "When he was 10 his coaches and I could see he had a great deal of talent, but when he received an invitation to attend the U-14 trials, we thought it better to keep him back that year, because if he had failed then, it would have had an adverse effect on him. Even so, if you will observe, it so happened that at all ages Parthiv ended up playing for an age group one level above his - he was 11 when he played U-14, 14 when he played U-17, 16 when he captained the U-19 team."

I ask if Parthiv's batting technique has undergone any significant changes from his boyhood days. His answer is again interesting. "I would say he possessed a purer technique when younger than he did when he played for the first time at Test level. He was criticised then for playing too much with an open face, but you must remember that he played a huge amount of junior-level one-day cricket - the Asia Cup, the Youth World Cup - in the time immediately before he made it to the Test side. In this period he became habituated to opening the face of the bat to score runs quickly." Not surprisingly, Jagat Patel is not in favour of too much one-day cricket for young players.

Jagat Patel gives me copies of records he has kept of every single game Parthiv has played since his U-14 days, with his batting and wicketkeeping performances, the team scores and match results all neatly arranged in columns and tables. In this he reminds me of the thousands of cricket enthusiasts all over the country who keep scrapbooks about their team and their favourite players, follow each game hunched on their seats and cut out scorecards from newspapers, pronounce on the state of the game in tea stalls, and sometimes run out to play with the kids of the neighbourhood in the evenings. Except that he thought he saw talent in his eight-year-old nephew, and helped fashion him into a Test player - one member in a team of 11 that again thousands in the country dream of representing - at 17. I tell him that this is quite a remarkable achievement. "It is," he says, and smiles, scrutinising the photographs and documents he has brought out from cupboards and drawers to show me. "Now tell me, would you like a photostatted copy of these records to take away with you.