Administrator Saurabh Tiwary, a vintage hard-hitting batter, aims to make cricketers’ lives easy

Saurabh Tiwary was one of the hardest hitters of his time, but he reckons he could not have competed with today’s batters.

“I won’t even be in the top 100 when it comes to hitting ability,” Saurabh tells The Hindu with a smile on a hot afternoon at the Keenan Stadium in Jamshedpur.

“Every second batter is hitting so well. Even a 15-year-old boy, Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, is dominating the IPL today.”

He says cricket has become almost a game of power-hitting. “Not just T20s, but One-Dayers as well,” he said.

“People are getting double hundreds in 43 or 44 overs.”

Saurabh — whose M.S. Dhoni-like long mane also caught the eye as much as big sixes — played three ODIs for India and made a mark at the IPL in its early days, also has an excellent record in First Class cricket, in which he scored more than 8,000 runs (22 hundreds and 34 fifties) at an average of more than 47.

After his career ended a couple of years ago, he moved to administration, taking over as the secretary of the Jharkhand State Cricket Association last year.

“When you have played cricket for 24 years, you know what a cricketer needs, and I have been trying to help the players from Jharkhand,” he said.

“I believe a cricket association comes up from cricketers; it is not a case of cricketers coming up from associations. So I ensure our players are given all the opportunities; since we don’t have facilities, our players, male or female, are free to use the Ranchi stadium whenever they want.”

He wants to achieve as an administrator what he could not as a player. “I have won the Vijay Hazare Trophy, but never the Ranji Trophy or the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy,” he said. “I want Jharkhand to win those tournaments.”

Saurabh has won a bigger trophy, though. He was part of the Indian team that won the under-19 World Cup in 2008 in Malaysia. Among his teammates were Virat Kohli, Ravindra Jadeja, Abhinav Mukund and Manish Pandey.

“It was a dream come true, of course, but I was run out in the final (against South Africa),” he said.

“I remember Kohli used to play with the same hunger. If he bats tomorrow, he will play with the same passion. He plays his cricket with so much passion and honesty. Even then he had so much focus and dedication”.