If it put young cricketers on the right path, it also showed the way forward to failed ones. This could have limited his understanding of cricket, but he had an alternative in Cricket Samrat. Growing up in Azamgarh, UP, Abdulla didn’t have access to TV. Mumbai Ranji cricketer Iqbal Abdulla learned the basics of the game through Cricket Samrat, quite literally. The centrefolds would be found in most rooms where budding cricketers would spend restless nights dreaming about the heroes who watched them from the walls. Cricket Samrat used to be a rage at the Sports Hostels of Kanpur and Lucknow that threw up international cricket stars like Mohammad Kaif, R P Singh and Suresh Raina. It was North India’s very own Wisden - the globally revered Bible of Cricket. It fuelled the dreams of young kids hungry to make their name in the game. The seeds of the small-town revolution that would hit Indian cricket in the 2000s were perhaps sowed by Cricket Samrat. It acted as a force multiplier, democratising the game by taking it to the blind spots - blind swathes, in fact - in the north. It was a symbiotic relationship, with Indian cricket also gaining from Cricket Samrat. Between Lord’s 1983 and Bombay 1987, it grew exponentially as Indian cricket hit its apogee. From its humble beginnings in West Delhi in 1978, it rode on cricket’s expanding footprint in the country.
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