CD Gopinath never intended to play cricket. He played hockey, football, tennis, ball badminton — everything except cricket. Until he was seventeen, he had never held a bat in a competitive match.
At Madras Christian College in Tambaram, the captain noticed him. Not his batting — his hands. “Your job is to not let the ball pass you,” they told him, and handed him the keeping gloves. Then the opener kept getting out for single digits. They asked Gopinath to open instead. “They insisted, so I went and ended up making 70 runs,” he told Sportstar, laughing. He became the permanent opening batsman for the college, then the university.
He started at seventeen. He played for India at twenty.
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The square cut was his shot. His coach, Bert Wensley, once advised him to stop playing it because he was getting out to it. Gopinath tried. He lasted a couple of matches. Then he went back to Wensley and said: “I love that shot. I can’t stop.” Wensley moved him down the order instead. The square cut stayed.
He named his house in Coonoor “The Cover Drive.”
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In 1950, Gopinath happened to be at the non-striker’s end when the West Indian wonder bowler Sonny Ramadhin was bowling. One over. He watched the hand, the flight, the way the ball travelled. “Some intuition told me that he normally bowled an offbreak, which was fairly quick, and when he tossed it a little bit, it was a leg break,” he told ESPNcricinfo. “It was a blind kind of assessment. Just happened that I was right.” He made 93. Sixty or seventy of those runs came off Ramadhin.
Frank Worrell was captaining the opposition at Kanpur. They had met before, something had clicked, and they became friends — casual, joking, genuine. When Gopinath walked in to bat, Worrell told him: “I’ll give you a long hop to break your duck.” Gopinath didn’t believe him. Worrell bowled the long hop. Gopinath hit him for four. “He said, ‘I’ll get you out now.’ I said okay. But I made 66 not out, so he didn’t get me out.”
Many years later, Worrell came to Madras and Gopinath invited him home for dinner. “He was just telling me, ‘For the last week or ten days, I’ve been feeling strangely. I’m feeling unnerved. I’m feeling low,’” he told the New . “I said, ‘When you go back, you better check up.’”
The next morning, Worrell left for the West Indies. Four or five days later, the newspapers reported his death. Leukemia. Undiagnosed. “I was shattered,” he told The New Indian Express. “He was such a good friend.”
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February 10, 1952. Chepauk, Madras. The fifth and final Test against England. India had never won a Test match in twenty-four attempts.
“Before that, it didn’t matter which country it was — even before we went into the ground, virtually we had almost lost it,” he told the Jai Galagali YouTube channel. “We knew that we could not match up. The psyche itself was that we can’t play up to these people.”
Vinoo Mankad took twelve wickets. Polly Umrigar scored 130 not out. Gopinath, batting at eight, made 35 — seven fours, cover drives and square cuts. “Every time I hit a four playing those strokes, my home crowd erupted,” he told Sportstar.
Fifteen minutes before tea on the fourth day, Brian Statham lifted Mankad to long-on. Gopinath was fielding in the deep. “The catch was not a difficult catch,” he told The New Indian Express. “It was on the boundary line. If you can’t take a catch, why would you be in the team?”
He caught it. India won by an innings and eight runs. He kept the ball. It is still in his house in Coonoor, the signatures of his teammates worn off by time.
“We went to the dressing room, we said to each other, ‘Well done,’ we packed up and went home,” he told Sportstar. “That was the end of the matter.”
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He had a standoff with captain Vijay Hazare on the 1952 England tour. Gopinath was the only player who didn’t speak Hindi. When Hazare shouted fielding instructions in Hindi, Gopinath couldn’t understand. “I said, all you had to do was tell me in English. He said, if I told you in English, the batsman would have known I’m moving you,” he told The New Indian Express. “I said, I thought we were playing cricket. The batsman should know where the fielders are.”
He says he was batted at eight and nine for the entire six-month tour. He and Ghulam Ahmed spent six months crying on each other’s shoulders about their lost chances. When both were picked for the West Indies tour, Ghulam called and asked: after all that happened in England, you still want to go? Gopinath said yes. Ghulam talked him out of it. Both turned down the invitation.
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As a selector, he spotted Gundappa Viswanath playing for South Zone and pushed for him when none of the committee had seen him play. Viswanath was invited to practice with the Indian team. First innings, he got a duck. “I thought, oh my God.” Second innings, he scored a hundred. “That made him.”
When his mother passed away, the family found newspaper cuttings in her things. She had saved every one — every match report, every century, every mention. She never told him. His daughter found them and made a book.
Gopinath died at ninety-six. He started playing cricket because someone needed a wicketkeeper. He stopped the square cut for two matches, then brought it back because he loved it. He figured out Ramadhin in one over. He collected money for Frank Worrell’s benefit match. He took the catch that gave India its first Test victory and kept the ball.
The signatures have worn off. The house in Coonoor is still called The Cover Drive.
