Explained | Who is Pravin Tambe, the subject of Hotstar’s new cricket biopic?

After years of playing club cricket in Mumbai, the leg-spinner made his IPL debut in 2013 at the age of 41

The story so far: The OTT platform Disney+ Hotstar released on Friday, April 1, ‘Kaun Pravin Tambe?’, the Shreyas Talpade-starrer cricket biopic of 50-year-old Indian cricketer Pravin Tambe. The film directed by Jayprad Desai, also stars Anjali Patil, Parambrata Chatterjee and Ashish Vidyarthi. 

An Indian legspinner and all-rounder who played tennis-ball cricket and club cricket in Mumbai for 20 years without getting to play a single high-level match, Pravin Tambe sprung up in the mainstream at the age of 41, when he was selected by the Rajasthan Royals to play in the Indian Premier League (IPL).

Born in 1971, the cricketer started playing gully cricket at the age of 15 in the Mulund suburb of Mumbai. Tambe dipped his toes in the city’s club cricket scene as a medium-paced bowler in the 1995-96 season of a domestic league of Mumbai’s D division, playing for the Parsee Cyclists Sports Club, according to cricket news site ESPN Cricinfo. He then went on to play in the B Division for the Parsee Gymkhana and eventually, played in the A Division’s top league for the prestigious Shivaji Park Gymkhana, which has churned out many a first-class player for Indian cricket, including Shreyas Iyer, Ajit Wadekar, Vijay Manjrekar and the brothers Baloo and Subhash Gupte.

Tambe’s fate, however, was not slated like other Shivaji Park Gymkhana greats, as he never got a chance to play a first-class match for 20 years from his first club cricket stint.

Tambe’s father, Vijay Tambe, also played suburban cricket in his early years. The cricketer got married in 1999 to Vaishali, now his wife of 23 years. He spent almost the next decade-and-a-half working odd jobs which offered cricket quotas.

He juggled jobs to make ends meet while continuing training and taking part in the maidan or ground cricket tournaments organised by the Mumbai Cricket Association, such as the suburban cricket league called the Thosar Shield Cricket, and the corporate cricket league known as Times Shield Cricket, where teams of companies compete against each other from four cricket divisions.

He first took part in the Times Shield league while working for a shipping company called Orient Shipping. It was here that he began to make the shift from medium-paced bowling to wrist-spinning, after being asked by his team’s captain at Orient to bowl a leg-spin during a crucial match. It was also during his time here that he met India and Mumbai's fast-paced bowler Abey Kuruvilla, who later became the sports director at Navi Mumbai’s DY Patil Sports Academy and a selector at the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI).