Cricket journalist Dicky Rutnagur is no more

Celebrated cricket journalist Dicky Rutnagur passed away in London on Thursday. The 82-year-old was keeping ill for a while. He is survived by son Richard Sohrab Rutnagur.

Rutnagar covered cricket for the Hindustan Times from 1958 to 1966 before migrating to the United Kingdom. There, he worked for The Daily Telegraph from 1966 to 2005, writing on cricket, squash and table tennis.

He was a respected radio commentator and a qualified table tennis referee. A prolific writer, Rutnagar battled cancer for many years. He last visited Mumbai in November 2010.

Former India skipper Ajit Wadekar was one of the many persons Rutnagar was in touch with. “I remember meeting Dicky at Sachin Bajaj's Colaba home in 2010. It's a personal loss,” the 72-year-old year said.

Lavishing praise on Rutnagar, he said, “Dicky was a superb writer. In my book, he was as good as KN Prabhu. He was fair and impartial in his reportage and wrote what he saw. He was also a great commentator. Do you know he covered the Indian team's twin tours of the West Indies and England in 1971?”

For the uninitiated, India won both rubbers under the able leadership of Wadekar. Wadekar wasn't done.

“In those days, we players used to sit down with journalists for a drink. I used to share several things with Dicky, but he never wrote anything controversial. Nor did he utter them on air (laughs) He was a very polished man. He wrote for several publications in the UK and the West Indies, but never boasted. He was a true Indian, always batting for our team even when we were down in the dumps,” Wadekar recalled.

Rutnagar also covered the historic 1983 World Cup. “As, on that June morning, I went through a reporter's pre-match routine of preparing the note book and scrolling a sheet of paper on the typewriter, I hardly imagined that the task ahead would entail recording the events of a day that would usher in a new era in the history of Indian cricket,” he wrote for an Indian magazine a few years ago.

“When Clive Lloyd won the toss and put India in, it would have been fanciful to visualise Lord's being swamped at the end of the day by jubilant Indian supporters rather than those of the West Indies, beating out the rhythm of the Calypso with tin cans and dancing to it as they had done in 1975 and 1979. The reigning champions were clear favourites. The team that Lloyd led out that day was the strongest ever assembled for a limited-overs contest,” wrote the well-travelled journalist who also covered over 300 Tests. Anandji Dossa, the great statistician, was at a loss for words.

“Even after he moved to England, he used to call me for stats,” the 90-year-old said. He rang me up on my last birthday and told me he was keeping ill.”

Former India captain GR Viswanath said he was saddened by the news of Rutnagur's death. Viswanath said from Bangalore: "He used to be part of the Indian team whenever he was covering matches. I am really saddened to hear that he is no more. It is a great loss to Indian cricket. In those days, there were a few journalists who travelled with the team and were regarded as part of the team. Dicky was one of them."

Rutnagur was given a lifetime achievement award at the annual dinner of the Indian Journalists' Association in London in 2009.

Alas, they don't make like him anymore.

The Uthamna ceremony for Dicky Rutnagur will be held at 3.45 pm on Saturday at the residence of his sister, Mrs Arnavaz Dubash. Address: Sorrento 8th floor. Mt Pleasant Road. Malabar Hill.

derek@dnaindia.net