S. K. Gurunathan (1 August 1908 – 5 May 1966) was a sports journalist and one of the pioneers of

cricket statistics Cricket is a sport that generates a variety of statistics. Statistics are recorded for each player during a match, and aggregated over a career. At the professional level, statistics for Test cricket, one-day internationals, and first-class crick ...

in India. Gurunathan studied in the

Hindu High School The Hindu Higher Secondary School (HHSS), located on Big Street, Triplicane, Chennai, India, is one of the oldest secondary schools in South India, having been established in 1852. The school was founded at a time when many parents were reluctan ...

in Triplicane,

Madras Chennai (, ), formerly known as Madras ( the official name until 1996), is the capital city of Tamil Nadu, the southernmost Indian state. The largest city of the state in area and population, Chennai is located on the Coromandel Coast of th ...

. He started his journalistic career in the advertisement section of ''

The Hindu ''The Hindu'' is an Indian English-language daily newspaper owned by The Hindu Group, headquartered in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. It began as a weekly in 1878 and became a daily in 1889. It is one of the Indian newspapers of record and the secon ...

'' in 1928. He became a reporter in 1938 and from 1958 till his death, was the sports editor. He founded the ''Madras Sports Annual'' which covered local cricket and other sports in the 1940s. While at ''The Hindu'', he started the magazine '' Sport and Pastime'' which ran for about twenty years and ceased publication due to labour troubles soon after his death. Gurunathan was the first Honorary Cricket Statistician for the

Board of Control for Cricket in India The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is the national governing body for cricket in India. Its headquarters are situated at Cricket centre, Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai. The BCCI is the richest governing body of cricket in the world ...

, serving in that post from 1949 to 1950 till his death.Sudhir Vaidya, ''Guru'', Anka - the official journal of the Association of the Cricket Statisticians and Scorers of India, July–September 2001, pp. 3–5 Gurunathan founded the annual '' Indian Cricket'' in 1946 on the same lines as the ''

Wisden Cricketers' Almanack ''Wisden Cricketers' Almanack'', or simply ''Wisden'', colloquially the Bible of Cricket, is a cricket reference book published annually in the United Kingdom. The description "bible of cricket" was first used in the 1930s by Alec Waugh in a ...

'' and remained its editor till his death. He also regularly contributed to the Indian section of '' Wisden''. He covered more than 50 Test matches including the Indian tours of Australia in 1947–48, England in 1952 and Pakistan in 1954–55, and reported the 1961-62 MCC tour of India for ''

The Times ''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper ''The Sunday Times'' (fou ...

''. He authored the books ''12 years of Ranji Trophy'' and three volumes of ''Story of the Tests''. Gurunathan became the Founder-President of the Madras Sports Writers Club in 1963–64. He was a stylish wicket keeper in his youth and represented the Indians in the Madras Presidency matches. In the Madras League matches, he represented Sundar C.C.SK Gurunathan
CricketArchive. Retrieved 2022-06-09. He died a few months before he was due to retire from ''The Hindu''.

Notes

* The references used for this article differ in several details. According to P.N. Sundaresan (who worked with Gurunathan for twenty years), Gurunathan was born on 1 July 1908 and became the sports reporter in Hindu in 1937.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gurunathan, S. K. Gurunathan, S.K. Indian sports journalists 1966 deaths 1908 births Indian male journalists Place of birth missing Place of death missing Cricket statisticians Indian cricketers