Melbourne: Two Pakistan-born security men guarded the entrance to the dressing room of the Indian team while they trained at the Junction Oval ground in St Kilda here on Thursday.
The pair hail from Punjab and are delighted with their assignment, which enables them to get close to the players.
Many fans hope to meet the Indian stars, but their job is to stop them. “Imagine a Pakistani stopping Indians from meeting Indian cricketers! This would have led to a brawl if it happened in a sub-continent country,” remarked a fellow journalist.
These security men also guarded the UAE team during their warm-up match against Afghanistan.
“I was so thrilled to meet players from the UAE since most of them are from my country. We would have loved to meet the Pakistan team as well, but they are playing all their matches in New Zealand. It was a good feeling during the UAE-Afghanistan match as all of them spoke to us in Urdu,” said one of the guards.
This is also the ground where Shane Warne picked up the basics of the game as a child. Warne played for St Kilda Cricket Club as a 15-year-old, while he also represented their under-19 Australian rules football team for two seasons.
This club is getting ready to celebrate its 160th anniversary in October and Stephen Wain, the club’s administration manager, is hoping that Warne will be able to grace the function.
Wain went on to describe how he met Warne as a youngster: “He lived in Blackrock, a suburb down on the bay, eight or 10km from here.
“Andrew Lynch, who was a former Premiership player here and is now the Chairman of Selectors at Cricket Victoria, was the sports master at Mentone Grammar. He contacted us and said we’ve got this kid who fancies himself as a batsman, so Warne came down and started training with us.
“He then went over to the UK to play in the minor counties and it was while playing in England that he became a leg-spinner.”
Wain presented me a photocopy of a page from their 150th anniversary souvenir, for which Warne wrote the foreword on how it all began for him from this ground. Inside the pavilion is a huge banner of Warne and other greats like Bill Ponsford who played for the club.
This also led to a few journalists sharing one-liners about Warne with some of the club’s members. Although many had heard them before, they were happy to listen once again about their old clubmate. “Nobody actually drives Warne, he just takes them for a spin,” one said. A proud member then chipped in: “There is a saying that Warne can bowl, text message, smoke and give commentary at the same time. He is a true all-rounder!”
Apart from the security men that guard the entrance, there are also policemen and women.
All of them have been given special training to guard the cricketers. But another of their tasks is to make sure that spectators do not shed their clothes and turn into streakers. “We have to keep an eye on anyone removing clothes, apart from watching every corner of the stadium. We have a police woman too to prevent any woman from indulging in such an act,” said a policeman.
