Top score

Somebody has to be not out at the end of the worst innings a country has ever played.

At Lord’s on 24 June 1974 it was Eknath Solkar, with 18, which was also the highest score in the innings.

What he watched from twenty-two yards

Solkar batted at six. He came in at 14 for four, which had taken twenty minutes, and he was still there thirty-four minutes later when the innings ended on 42 with only nine wickets down.

From the non-striker’s end he watched Sunil Gavaskar go for 5, Syed Abid Ali for 3, Madan Lal for 2, Erapalli Prasanna for 5 and Bishan Bedi bowled first ball.

He faced 17 deliveries himself and hit two fours and a six, which in a total of 42 is an absurd proportion of it. Fourteen of India’s 42 runs came off his bat in boundaries.

Full scorecard: England v India, 2nd Test, Lord’s, 20–24 June 1974 →

The arithmetic of being the best

Eighteen not out. Second highest: 5, shared by three men.

Nobody else reached double figures. Extras contributed nothing at all, in either sense: the column reads 0.

Solkar made 18 of the 42 and the other nine batsmen made 24 between them, and the innings still finished as the lowest total in the country’s history for the next forty-six years.

The one before it

England had made 629 in the first innings and India had replied with 302, which against that total is a respectable score and was built on an opening stand of 131.

Solkar made 43 in that innings, batting 126 balls at number six, and was eighth out at 286. Over the two innings of the match he was India’s second-highest scorer and was dismissed once.

Who he was

Solkar was not a specialist batsman having a lucky day.

He was the finest short-leg fielder of his era. Possibly of any era. He caught things off Bedi and Prasanna and Chandrasekhar that nobody on the ground believed were catchable, standing close enough to the bat to read the maker's name.

He took 53 catches in 27 Tests. He also dismissed Geoff Boycott four times in Tests, which Boycott has mentioned more often than Solkar ever did.

In the first innings of this same match he made 43 and was eighth out at 286, which is another innings nobody has looked up.

The four days before

India had been in the match. They made 302 against England's 629, which is a deficit but not a humiliation, and Farokh Engineer and Sunil Gavaskar opened with 131.

They followed on and closed the third evening at two without loss. Sunday was the rest day. On the Monday morning they lost nine wickets in seventeen overs.

What being top scorer in 42 is worth

Nothing. That is the point of the piece.

There is no version of the story of Lord’s 1974 in which anybody says that a middle- order batsman held one end for half an hour and made 43 per cent of the runs. The number 42 has swallowed every individual contribution inside it, including the one that stopped it being twenty-four.

Every account reaches instead for the blank line at number eleven, where Bhagwath Chandrasekhar is listed absent hurt, because a missing man is a better ending than a present one.

The other thing on that card

Solkar bowled six overs for 16 in England’s 629 and took nothing. Bishan Bedi bowled 64.2 overs for 226 in the same innings.

The full ledger of Eknath Solkar’s week at Lord’s reads: 43 and 18 not out, six wicketless overs, and three catches. On the two days that mattered he was the most effective batsman in the side.

He died in 2005 at fifty-seven. The obituaries led on the fielding, which was correct, and several of them mentioned the 42 without noticing whose name was at the top of it.

••••••

No. 1 in The Other Guy, a series of 24.

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