Born on 31st December 1965, you could call him the flawed genius, he took the world by storm and England found to their dismay as he bamboozled them with 3 successive 6-wicket hauls but sadly that was all one saw from the bespectacled leg-spinner. His ODI performances were of the same pattern. He left the audience hungry for more after blitzing them with stunning performances in the World Championship of cricket in Australia and following it up with another fine performance at the Rothman's cup in Sharjah. Sadly, it was just an appetizer and nothing more.

Perhaps, lack of maturity and very early grooming played its part. A superb spell of 7/28 on his Ranji debut for Tamil Nadu against Delhi at the age of 15 in 1981-82 brought him into national prominence. In the very next year he was in the team for the tour of Pakistan and was not even 17 when he debuted against West Indies at Antigua. He returned wicket-less in that match but was on top of the world by early 1985, at the tender age of 19 after the successes in both formats of the game. He was a massive success in Australia and completed his first Test series at home with 23 wickets against England to win the Man of the Series award.

The success was brief though, Siva as he is popularly known suddenly went through a trough from which he could never recover. He lost his place in the Indian team and tried to improve his batting to stay in contention in the Tamil Nadu team. He did make a brief comeback into the Indian side during the 1987 WC without much success. The emergence of Narendra Hirwani and later Anil Kumble meant that the boy wonder was totally lost on Indian cricket.

Laxman Sivaramakrishnan is now one of the respected TV commentators.


By Pradeep Krishnamurthy