Pravin Tambe is proof that persistence and hard work can triumph over age and perceptions

Pravin Tambe made his IPL debut with the Rajasthan Royals in 2013. He was 41 at the time. (Image via Twitter.com/Rajasthan Royals)

Pravin Tambe is an unlikely protagonist—whether it was for an Indian Premier League (IPL) team or for a feature film. But his is the kind of story that inspires a biopic, a much better one than the many that have been dished out by the Hindi film industry eager to milk every sporting success story.

Kaun Pravin Tambe?, streaming on an OTT platform, is based on the sporting journey of a middle-class Mumbai cricketer who, at age 41, made it into an IPL team with the Rajasthan Royals (from 2013 to 2015). He shot into instant stardom, the kind that the IPL so generously offers, when he took a rare two-ball hat-trick against the Kolkata Knight Riders in 2014 (he got one wicket off a wide ball) that turned the match dramatically in Rajasthan’s favour.

Prior to that stroke of opportunity with the IPL, Tambe toiled on Mumbai’s maidans, playing tennis ball cricket, representing Orient Shipping Company in the Times Shield and participating in sundry Sunday tournaments as he chased a place in the Mumbai Ranji Trophy team. He was part of the list of probable players for Mumbai but never really got a break and was heading towards a silent transition from playing to coaching for DY Patil University when the call came for the RR trials. Rahul Dravid, the then captain of the team, plucked Tambe out of obscurity, ignoring his age unlike others and gave the man who was largely written off a chance to write a new success story.

“I felt I could compete. But just that does not help, does it? Everyone said I am passionate but how do you convert that to a win? I cried when the team won,” Tambe said of the time when he first won man-of-the-match for his 4-20 that helped RR beat Royal Challengers Bangalore in April 2014. He followed it up a month later by grabbing the hat-trick and had the highest number of wickets—12 in five games at an average of 6.50—in the Champions League T20 later that year.

Tambe is currently part of the KKR team, became the first Indian to play in a Caribbean Premier League game in 2020 at age 48 and continues to feel an unending passion for the game. His dream of playing Ranji Trophy did come true in 2013-14, lasting just two matches, but it showed that persistence and hard work can triumph over age, perceptions and limitations of talent.

As opposed to some other sports stories that have been turned into movies, Tambe’s is a fascinating story, of a cricketer who vaulted from the suburbs of Mulund straight into the richest cricketing league in the world, bypassing some of the rigours of first class or international cricket.

“Sudip Tiwari (producer) came to me saying I want to make a picture,” said Tambe a few weeks ago, before the start of this season’s IPL. “I said no. He was after me for a year. He said he wanted to show everyone what I did to play at age 41 (in the IPL). I want to tell your story to all, he said. He had a colleague who used to come home every other day. I said yes later because I realised their motive is good.”

Pravin Tambe, now 50, is part of the KKR IPL team. (Image: Twitter.com/LegyTambe)

The Jayprad Desai-directed film trivialises Tambe’s struggles by portraying him to be some sort of a comic character, a reflection of the wider sentiment that fans had when they first heard of this middle-aged leg-spinner in the IPL. Shreyas Talpade, who was the fast-bowling Iqbal in Nagesh Kukunoor’s splendid 2005 film by the same name, is aptly the slightly thick-in-the-middle medium-pacer-turned-spinner in this film. 

The cricketer works through odd jobs in the film—with a diamond merchant, in a dance bar, as a construction supervisor, sometimes at nights—all so he can support his dream of playing for Mumbai. His difficulties—and the audiences’—are further exacerbated by a smirking sports writer (Parambrata Chaterjee) who works in a newspaper office that looks like a library, takes swigs from a hip flash at work and is inexplicably cruel to a cricketer trying to work his way through. Things reach a flashpoint when they run into each other in a bar and the reporter, instead of finding out what Tambe is doing there as any reporter would do, decides to humiliate him.

Kaun Pravin Tambe? is a wasted opportunity to highlight an inspiring story, a lesson that age has no meaning if there is ambition and hope. It could have been a triumphant underdog story—the way Eddie the Eagle (1988) was for Olympic ski jumper Eddie Edwards—but falls short on several counts. 

The now 50-year-old Tambe, while still playing, says he wants to be a fit coach as well. “In life, when I played cricket, any child would ask, ‘why is he playing?’ But they should ask ‘why is he not playing?’ I want people to think I am a fit coach. Whatever I have played, I want to share it as a fit coach.”