Mumbai, more or less!

India opener Yashasvi Jaiswal during Day One of the first Test against Australia at Perth Stadium on November 22, 2024. Pic/Getty Images

Had Rohit Sharma not called time on his Test match career and the selectors felt he still had some red-ball runs in him, the Mumbai stalwart would have been in the recently selected squad for the five-match Test series starting at Leeds on June 20.

And had Ajit Agarkar & Co picked Shreyas Iyer and Sarfaraz Khan for the series, there would have been more Mumbai cricketers in the tour party.

In that scenario, Mumbai's representation in the England-bound Test team would have been five in number. But it's only two - Yashasvi Jaiswal and Shardul Thakur. In another era, with utmost credit to the emergence of batsmen from other parts of the country, it would be unthinkable for an India touring side to have only one batsman from Mumbai in a squad to England. The current scenario is not unprecedented. MS Dhoni's 2011 team to England had only Sachin Tendulkar as part of the batting line-up.

However, in the victorious 1971 side, there were five specialist batsmen from the city - skipper Ajit Wadekar, Dilip Sardesai, Farokh Engineer, Ashok Mankad and Sunil Gavaskar; Eknath Solkar being the all-rounder.

The 1974 team that lost 0-3 to England had a similar Mumbai line-up but without the retired Dilip Sardesai, while Sudhir Naik made the cut.

And in Sunil Gavaskar's squad of 1982, there was the skipper himself, Dilip Vengsarkar, Sandeep Patil, Ravi Shastri, and Ghulam Parkar, with Suru Nayak picked for his all-round abilities.

This was the tour for which Mohinder Amarnath was left out despite making 185 for Delhi in their victory over Karnataka in the 1981-82 Ranji Trophy final.

In an interview with The Sportstar magazine, former Test batsman and selector ML Jaisimha expressed his shock over the national selectors not witnessing the semi-final and final of the Ranji Trophy. Jaisimha wondered why Nayak was preferred over Roger Binny. "Nayak is a bits and pieces player whose role will be to chip in with useful contributions in the various departments of the game. But that is exactly what Binny has been doing and doing it well, during the last few series," felt the departed batting stylist.

On the 1986 tour, Gavaskar, Vengsarkar and Shastri featured in the playing XIs in all three Tests, but there were two more Mumbai players in the side. Chandrakant Pandit played when Amarnath was unfit for the Leeds Test but Sandeep Patil did not get a game. That drove him to international cricket retirement.

Patil described the Leeds Test snub in his 2024 book, Beyond Boundaries as "the last straw" although his non-selection in India's 1985 World Championship of Cricket was a bitter pill to swallow as well.

The 1990 tour marked the first of Tendulkar's five Test series in England. In the Mumbai gang he had Vengsarkar, Shastri and Manjrekar. Vengsarkar, making his fourth and final England tour, couldn't add on to his three consecutive centuries at Lord's; caught behind by Jack Russell for 52 and 35. Wisden of 1991 said he and Azharuddin put on 51 runs at four an over "with a dash of artistry [on the last day]."

Apart from the four Mumbai batsmen in the tour party was manager Madhav Mantri, who was part of Vijay Hazare's team in 1952. There were a record seven Mumbai players who featured on that tour, including Mantri - Vinoo Mankad (summoned from the Lancashire league), Vijay Manjrekar, Dattu Phadkar, GS Ramchand, SG Shinde, and RV Divecha. Polly Umrigar was also on the tour, but he was playing for Gujarat then. He was a Mumbai player when he came on the 1959 tour. For company, he had other Mumbai players like ace spinner Subhash Gupte, Naren Tamhane, Ramakant Desai and Arvind Apte. Future Mumbai captain Bapu Nadkarni was on this side, but he was playing for Maharashtra then.

Meanwhile, Ajinkya Rahane, who the selectors didn't pick for this tour, has been on three England Test tours - 2014 when he carved a match-winning hundred at Lord's, 2018 and 2021 when Suryakumar Yadav and Prithvi Shaw came in as injury replacements to swell the Mumbai presence to six.

Rahane wasn't picked for the 2022 Old Trafford Test, where the 2021 series concluded. Iyer, his Mumbai teammate, cannot be blamed for feeling left out at the moment after being on the 2021 and 2022 tours.

Where fast bowler and useful batsman Thakur is concerned, the Mumbai lion will want to make the forthcoming Test tour to England the most memorable after his first three trips fetched him 10 wickets in four Tests.

And Jaiswal is expected to stamp his class on his maiden Test tour to England. Since India will play at Leeds first up, the young left-hander, amidst all the other advice he may get, should talk to Vengsarkar, who scored one of the most difficult hundreds in the history of India vs England Tests there in 1986. Wisden thus described his unbeaten, match-winning 102 not out: "Vengsarkar had demonstrated on the ground that nurtured Sutcliffe, Hutton and Boycott, the art of batting on a bad patch."

Jaiswal struck in the first Test of the last series India played in Australia - Perth. Both these venues haven't been too kind to visiting teams if we take the all-conquering West Indies side out of the equation. But Jaiswal will keep the Mumbai flag flying high if he conquers the conditions at Leeds and maintains that form through the series.

It's a tour that can shape the destiny of Indian cricket and getting over the loss of class acts like Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma and Ravichandran Ashwin can never be easy.

It is natural for Mumbaikars to rue the fact that Jaiswal is the sole Mumbai batting representative in next month's series. But remember, there was the same number in the inaugural Test at Lord's 1932 as well (SHM Colah who came in at No.5) with Bahadur Kapadia in the reserves. Mumbai's presence grew, and there is good reason to believe that Mumbai will have greater representation in future England Test tours too.

mid-day's Deputy Editor Clayton Murzello is a purist with an open stance.
He tweets @ClaytonMurzello. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.