Mrugesh Jayakrishna, son of a mill owner and mayor of Ahmedabad – Jayakrishna Harivallabh, was vice-president of BCCI in the year 1983 and president of Ahmedabad Sports Club along with GCA.
He acquired the deserted land of Motera village near Ahmedabad from Gujarat Chief Minister Madhavsinh Solanki to build a new cricket stadium, which was followed by several protests. Although in the midst of many protests, the foundation stone of the stadium was laid by then President of the country Giani Zail Singh and the Motera stadium was constructed in just eight months.
Mrugesh Jayakrishna placed cricketers like Polly Umrigar, Sunil Gavaskar, Bishan Singh Bedi, Prasanna, Chandrasekhar and Raj Singh Dungarpur on the advisory committee of this stadium and built the stadium as per their advice and suggestions.
Initially, the pitch at Motera Stadium was known as a dusty pitch, but it was on this pitch where Gavaskar, playing against Pakistan in 1986, reached 10,000 runs and Kapil Dev, playing against New Zealand, broke Sir Richard Hatley’s record by taking his 5th wicket. In the year 2006, this was the stadium where Sachin Tendulkar celebrated twenty years of his career and had crossed the 30,000 runs mark in his career.
Ironically, Mrugesh Jayakrishnan, now 76, the pioneer of Motera Stadium was not invited to attend the inauguration of the renovated Motera Stadium and its renaming, 38 years after he made the construction of the stadium possible. Replying to a reporter’s question on this matter, Mrugesh Jayakrishna said that he had not received the invitation but was very happy that Ahmedabad’s small stadium has now become the largest stadium in the world.
When Mrugesh Jayakrishna was constructing this stadium, the citizens used to make fun of him saying that who would go so far from the city to watch a cricket match and poor cricketers will have to play alone without the audience. But today Ahmedabad has added one more reason to be known in the world of cricket because of this stadium!
