Prithvi Shaw: India’s one-in-a-billion boy wonder

Prithvi Shaw’s story is testament to the talent, connections, luck and patronage needed to become an Indian cricket star.

Prithvi Shaw celebrates a century on debut for India against the West Indies in October. Insets: a cricket-obsessed boy who played on dusty fields. Picture: AFP

When you are born in a nation of one billion you’ve got to want it more than everybody else. When what you want is to play cricket and where you want it is in India, you have to be blessed, determined, brilliant and then some.

You couldn’t script Prithvi Shaw’s journey to the Test team. Well you could, but you’d be accused of making it up, you would be mocked for taking a Disney wand to the old Indian tropes. Train stations. Tragedy. A tiny boy in a big world. Dusty Mumbai maidans and miracles. Doting fathers. Rich benefactors. Trips to England. Thousands of runs in a foreign country.

You want to know about how hard you have to work? How early you have to start? How many runs you have to make?

Wake up at 4am in a tiny room you share with your father in Virar on the far flung outskirts of the world’s richest and poorest city. Yawn through breakfast. Pause to remember your mother who died before you were four. Make your way to the train station with your kit and find a space on the crowded carriage. If you miss this one you won’t get the next because there you are too small to push your way through the commuters headed into the heaving heart of the metropolis.

An hour and a half later the boy is in town and on his way to the famous maidans. Those dusty fields where Indian cricket was born. Game folded in on game.

This is the place where Sunil and Sachin honed their game. The place where thousands turn out to play for this club or that. Appealing and beseeching for chance to turn their way.

In fact, it started even early than that. There is a 2011 documentary, Beyond All Boundaries, which traces the life of a few Indian cricket fans during that year’s World Cup. One is Sudhir Kumar Chaudhary, the flag waving, conch-shell blowing Tendulkar fan who paints himself head to toe in the colours of the Indian flag. The fan who has been known to ride thousands of kilometres to be at a game. Born in poverty in Bihar, he quit school to follow the side at 14 and is still doing the same 23 years later.

Another subject of the documentary is Shaw, who was 11-years-old at the time and already destined for greatness.

His father tells how he recognised his talents during games throwing a soft ball to the boy when he was two. In a land of a billion you don’t nurture talent, you push it and you push it and you push it even harder. When he was three Prithvi began practising against the hard ball. His father, Pankaj, conscious he may have been blessed with a special talent, recounts how the boy was not even the height of the stumps at the time.

Pankaj quit his job in the garment industry to concentrate on the prodigy.

At four, the year his mother died, the boy was enrolled in the Virar cricket academy.

Talent and hard work, however, can only get you so far, in India you need connections, luck and patronage.

Prithvi began playing at Bandra’s MIG Cricket Club and his coach saw the toll commuting three hours a day was taking on the boy. He invited a local politician, Sanjay Potnis, to come down and look at the protege.

Potnis offered the boy a place in his family home and later gifted him a bedroom connected to his offices in the city. A company called AAP Entertainments came on board and offered him a contract. Next off the ranks was Indian Oil who offered him an apartment of his own.

There’s a scene in the documentary where the portly politician is sitting behind the net watching the prodigy. “I’m tired,” the boys says. “Watch this,” Potnis says to the camera, ignoring the plea. He then directs the 11-year-old to play a ramp shot which he does.

Potnis keeps talking while Prithvi keeps playing shot after shot, but to demonstrate what a big hearted guy he is he orders someone to go off and get the boy some water and tells him he can have it after he faces another few balls.

The offers kept coming. In 2012 he was invited by a Manchester school to play in England. He made 1446 runs and took 68 wickets during two months in the foreign country.

In 2013 he was back, playing in Oxfordshire this time, famously scoring 68 in the first 10 overs of a senior game before being dismissed by a professor on the other team.

Tendulkar, whose own son plays at MIG, has taken time to watch Prithvi and back his cause. He has had the boy and his father to his home. There is no greater honour for an Indian cricket fan.

How good do you have to be to be recognised?

In November 2013 Shaw made 546 from 330 balls batting for Rivzi Springfield High in the Harris Shield, an elite under age Mumbai competition.

It’s a lot of runs. In fact it was the highest recorded at that level in 112 years.

Life is, however, relentless, on the subcontinent. Three years later, Pranav Dhanawade, the son of an auto rickshaw driver scored 1009 from 323 balls, for K.C. Gandhi High School.

Prithvi Shaw made his Test debut as an 18-year-old in October. He scored 134 from 154 balls opening the batting against the West Indies.

India coach Ravi Shastri says he is a crowd pleaser.

‘‘He’s a spectator’s delight,” Shastri said after Shaw’s impressive debut Test series.

“There’s a bit of Sachin there, a bit of Viru (Virender Sehwag) in him and when he walks there’s a bit of (Brian) Lara.”

Tendulkar made two centuries in Australia at the same age. Prithvi Shaw has the bar set high, but it always has been.