Salim Durani
Encyclopedia
Salim Aziz Durani is a former India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

n cricket
Cricket
Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of 11 players on an oval-shaped field, at the centre of which is a rectangular 22-yard long pitch. One team bats, trying to score as many runs as possible while the other team bowls and fields, trying to dismiss the batsmen and thus limit the...

er who played in 29 Tests
Test cricket
Test cricket is the longest form of the sport of cricket. Test matches are played between national representative teams with "Test status", as determined by the International Cricket Council , with four innings played between two teams of 11 players over a period of up to a maximum five days...

 from 1960 to 1973. An allrounder, Durani was a slow left-arm orthodox bowler and a big hitting left-handed batsman and famous for his six hitting prowess. He is the only Test cricketer to have been born in Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Afghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...

.

Durani was the hero of India's series victory against England in 1961-62. He took 8 and 10 wickets in their wins at Calcutta and Madras respectively. Also, a decade later he was instrumental in India's victory against West Indies at Port of Spain
Port of Spain
Port of Spain, also written as Port-of-Spain, is the capital of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago and the country's third-largest municipality, after San Fernando and Chaguanas. The city has a municipal population of 49,031 , a metropolitan population of 128,026 and a transient daily population...

 having taken wickets of Clive Lloyd
Clive Lloyd
Clive Hubert Lloyd CBE AO is a former West Indies cricketer. He captained the West Indies between 1974 and 1985 and oversaw their rise to become the dominant Test-playing nation, a position that was only relinquished in the latter half of the 1990s...

 and Gary Sobers.

In his 50 Test innings he only made just the one century, 104 against the West Indies in 1962. He played for teams Gujarat, Rajasthan
Rajasthan
Rājasthān the land of Rajasthanis, , is the largest state of the Republic of India by area. It is located in the northwest of India. It encompasses most of the area of the large, inhospitable Great Indian Desert , which has an edge paralleling the Sutlej-Indus river valley along its border with...

 and Saurashtra
Saurashtra
Saurashtra is a region of western India, located on the Arabian Sea coast of Gujarat state. It is a peninsula also called Kathiawar after the Kathi Darbar who ruled part of the region once. The Peninsula is shared with the Kachchh region which occupies the north, Saurashtra or Sorath forming the...

 in first class cricket. He made 14 hundreds in first class cricket in which he managed 8545 runs at 33.37. He has the distinction of the only cricketer that will respond and deliver with consistency, a demand of hitting a six from the crowd. The crowd would cheer "We want Sixer " and Durrani would hit one. Durrani had a special rapport with the spectators, who once agitated, when he was inexplicably dropped from the team for Kanpur Test in 1973, with placards and slogans like ``No Durrani, no Test.

Popular with the public, he appeared in a film "Charithra" with Parveen Babi
Parveen Babi
Parveen Babi was an Indian actress, who is most remembered for her glamorous roles alongside top heroes of the 1970s and early 1980s in blockbusters like Deewar, Namak Halaal, Amar Akbar Anthony and Shaan...

 in 1973. He was the first crickter to win Arjuna award. He was awarded the C K Nayadu Lifetime Achievement Award by the BCCI
Board of Control for Cricket in India
The Board of Control for Cricket in India , headquartered at Mumbai, is the national governing body for all cricket in India. It's not the apex governing body in India. The board was formed in December 1928 as BCCI replaced Calcutta Cricket Club. BCCI is a society, registered under the Tamil Nadu...

in 2011.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK