To score 400 in a First Class innings requires more than just the proper alignment of planets and stars. Mizoram batter Chinmay Sutar’s unbeaten 400 against Manipur might bring focus to bear on cricket in the Northeast. That only two Indians have made a quadruple in over nine decades of the Ranji Trophy gives you some idea. Some of it will be positive; most of it negative, taking away from the enormity of Sutar’s feat for being against a weak team in a weak zone.
But the negative could turn into a positive if it pushes the authorities into concentrating more on that region. To make those runs requires a combination of skill, patience, character, luck, single-mindedness. This applies even to making them in a rubber-ball knockabout with your grandparents in the dining room with its artificial rules. Nimbalkar never played for India. The last man to score a quadruple before Sutar was Sam Northeast for Glamorgan against Leicestershire four years ago. He was a great favourite of the writer Neville Cardus, but teammates and colleagues were less enthusiastic. Aftab Baloch, the second Pakistani to get there, had a different complaint: “There was no photograph taken during the match; surprising for it was played at a Test centre. Baloch played two Tests.
The score bears repeating, 400 not out. Bhausaheb Nimbalkar, the first Indian to get there, was batting on 443 for Maharashtra against Kathiawar – ten short of Don Bradman’s world record – when the rival captain conceded the match rather than submit to the ignominy of having the record score against his team. When people talk about how cricket was once gentleman’s game played in great spirit, you can counter with this example from 1948. Sutar, 29, is only the 10th batter to make a quadruple. Bill Ponsford and Brian Lara did so twice, with Lara finishing on 501 not out in a few magical weeks which began with a Test record of 375 and saw him score seven centuries in eight innings. The first man to get into the 400s was England’s Archie Maclaren, a one-time secretary of Ranji, who made 424 in 1895. When he toured England in 1974 he was given room 428 – his score — at one of the team hotels.
“Northeast sides don’t get the exposure, but the spirit of the players is amazing,” Sutar told Cricinfo . “I was more nervous in the 190s than in the 390s,” he said later, having got to 400 with a six. West Indies batter Jimmy Adams said Northeast reminded him of a “young Mohammed Azharuddin. Gideon Haigh put it mildly when he said, “MacLaren was a cricketer like many others, a lion on the field, a lamb everywhere else.