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Cricketer Raman Subba Row, who has died aged 92, played more than a dozen Test matches as an amateur for England between 1958 and 1961. He then surprised the selectors by retiring at the height of his power and pursuing a business career. Few in the modern game would voluntarily end their playing days at their peak, but Subba Row lived in an era when 'gentleman' players often harbored a studied indifference to sporting achievement, and in any case often had to find a stable income outside the borders. .
Subba Row left cricket to work in public relations, but later made an even greater mark on the game as an influential administrator, and as chairman of the Test and County Cricket Board (TCCB) he was a leading figure in the transfer of the world power of MCC at the International Cricket Council.
Subba Row's championing of that move in the late 1980s ultimately helped bring about a lasting shift in cricket's balance of power away from the traditional centers of England and Australia and towards India. While this may not have been his entire intention - and he later had reservations about the way the ICC exercised its power - it seemed an appropriate outcome for someone of Anglo-Indian descent whose ties to the subcontinent remained strong.
Subba Row was born in Streatham, South London, to Panguluri Subba Rao, an Indian lawyer from Bapatla in Andhra Pradesh, and his wife Doris (née Pinner), whom Panguluri had met during a stopover in London after studying law at Queen's College, Cork. . Once settled and married in Britain, Panguluri Anglicized his surname and young Raman attended Whitgift school in Croydon, and from there to Cambridge University to read law in 1950.
He played first-class cricket for Cambridge as a left-handed opening bat from 1951 to 1953 in a strong side that included two other future England players, Peter May and David Sheppard. After university he went to his native Surrey where he made a significant impact in his first season, averaging over 50 with the bat as they won the county championship in 1953. But in 1954 he had less influence, and in 1955 he was less influential. had joined Northamptonshire.
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National service in the RAF intervened, but by 1958 he had returned to Northants, replacing seasoned professional Dennis Brookes as captain - even though Brookes had just steered the team to second place in the county championship. Although the parachuting of a young amateur skipper was not universally popular, Subba Row was able to quell any rumblings of dissatisfaction about the quality of his batting.
He made exactly 300 in one innings against Surrey that season, which was the county's highest individual score for three decades, and shared a partnership of 376 with Albert Lightfoot in the same match, still a Northants record sixth wicket. In 1959 he had his most productive season, with 1,917 runs and six centuries, and in 1960 he topped the first-class averages with 1,503 runs at 55.66.
He won the first of his 13 Test caps in 1958 and generally performed well for England. Strong down the leg side and an astute stealer of quick singles, he was never a particularly exciting player to watch. His Northants colleague Frank Tyson described him as a batsman of "monolithic concentration and unwavering determination", while Wisden was concerned about his "tight-looking style" and "a certain clumsiness of movement".
Yet he was as effective at international level as he was in the domestic game, and over the next three years he averaged 46.85 for England, scoring three centuries, one against the West Indies in 1960 (in his first overseas Test) , and two against Australia in 1960. 1961, when he was chosen Wisden cricketer of the year.
But just when he seemed to have secured a place in England for as long as he wanted to occupy it, Subba Row announced his surprise retirement at the age of 29. In 260 first-class matches, he had scored 30 centuries, averaging 41.46 with the bat. and had taken 87 wickets with occasional leg breaks.
As an amateur, Subba Row had combined his cricket with work at an accountancy firm and then as a publicist for a London-based music publishing company. When he left the game he became associate director of the advertising agency WS Crawford, where he spent six years before setting up a small PR firm with two former colleagues, which he ran for more than twenty years.
But links with cricket remained strong, and in the mid-1960s he was elected to the Surrey committee, where he would become a modernizing figure who helped transform the county's attitude to marketing, sponsorship and advertising. During a five-year spell as chairman of Surrey from 1974, he also appointed Micky Stewart as the county's first cricket manager, a ground-breaking move.
In 1981-82 he was England's tour manager to India, where he had to send Geoffrey Boycott home, ostensibly due to "ill health", and from 1985 to 1990 he was chairman of the TCCB, where he made full use of his quiet charm and diplomatic skills. Subba Row was more progressive than many in the cricket establishment and used his time there to help wrest control of the game's administration from MCC, whose president until 1989 automatically became chairman of the ICC. After being elected to the MCC Committee in 1967, he also became a progressive voice within that body, tirelessly advocating for a more modern, commercial approach.
As TCCB chairman, Subba Row played a key role in putting out the fires that ignited in Pakistan in 1987 when England captain Mike Gatting and Pakistan umpire Shakoor Rana faced off in a Test match in Faisalabad, a row that threatened to culminate in a large-scale diplomatic incident. With the State Department on hand to assist, Subba Row painstakingly brokered a deal where Gatting reluctantly produced a handwritten apology to Rana, allowing the match to resume. He also unilaterally awarded the England players a controversial hardship bonus of £1,000 in recognition of the stress they had endured during the tour.
To Subba Row's satisfaction, the Gatting/Rana furor led to the appointment of neutral umpires in Tests and after being awarded a CBE for services to cricket in 1991, he himself oversaw many matches as an ICC umpire. After retiring from the PR industry, he competed in 41 Test matches and 119 one-day internationals between 1992 and 2001.
He intervened in a number of controversies, punishing Australian Glenn McGrath for spitting at an opponent, banning Australian Ian Healy for two matches for dissent and overseeing the South African 2000 series in India, where concerns about match fixing came to the surface for the first time. Subba Row confronted both captains about his suspicions during that tour, and was disappointed that the ICC did not support him and take further action.
He later expressed regret that India, since gaining more power through the ICC, had "played politics" with the game he loved. But he continued to enjoy traveling to the country regularly, both for cricket and to visit family and friends.
He is survived by his wife Anne (née Harrison), whom he married in 1960, by their children, Alistair and Michelle, and by four grandchildren. Another son, Christopher, was predeceased.
* Raman Subba Row, cricketer and administrator, born January 29, 1932; died April 17, 2024
