Why a Tie is Perfect?

Perfectness like most things in life keeps running away everytime someone pursues it hard. And yet every now and then, the randomness of things and the folly and fervour of beings, assisted in conspiracy by a probable Unknown, provide us a glimpse, if not a probe, into perfectness, of the glories that might have been and of lifetimes spent in search of them. Yet as irony would have it sport, that hallowed turf that breeds unremitting competition and demands open-ended improvement, seems to appreciate the imperfect result with one side winning and another losing far more than a result where there is nothing to choose between the two sides. If the reactions to the tied Group A one-day cricket match between England and India in Bangalore, which I have been privy to, are anything to go by, it seems to me that we have missed the point about sport as being a celebration of life by taking it too seriously.

I reckon a number of decibels, reams of paper and bytes of virtual space would have been spent in the last twenty-four hours in arguing why it was a tie. An equal amount of passion would also have been spent, mostly by Indian fans and the cricketing media - which sometimes blur, for right and wrong reasons -, in trying to work out the shape of Dhoni's skull that decided in giving the 49th over to Piyusha Chawla. Amidst all the hullabaloo, the men who made it such an enthralling contest would have been unfortunately relegated to the background by fraying opinions. We in some parts of Asia revere the game so much - and as a consequence take it so seriously - that we fail to celebrate its nuances, the Practical Joke it plays on its exponents and thereby on their followers, the unseen grace with which it evens things and how it stands tallest when two sides vying tooth and claw are not able to sneak a yard past each other even after seven hours of boisterous pandemonium. In my opinion, a spectator who has an overwhelming preference for his team's victory - and I was once that kind of spectator too - over a humdinger of a game is rather like a student who studies for ranks with knowledge having little more use for him.

The England-India game at the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore, afore arguably the most educated albeit ebullient crowd in the country behind Chennai, demonstrated two things: the cofluence of sparkles of individual brilliance into something close to collective perfection in a team game and how a tie in a cricket match is something even cricket scoffers, and those who think it fashionable to bemoan the game, would have to concede as unique if unwittingly.

In favour of the first point, there is ample evidence from yesterday's game. Tendulkar's 120 and the manner in which he blunted Swann in particular gave yet another account, if one was amusingly needed, of why Tendulkar makes his country's cricket fans go bananas after more than two decades in the game. If Sachin's ton was an incredible revelation of how he continues to respond magically to a world of expectations from the heartbeats of one country's fans, then skipper Strauss' 158 was a lesson in the art of setting up a chase and would go down arguably amongst the most purposeful and aggressive innings played by an Englishman in the one-day game. Tim Bresnan's five-for, which proved crucial in the final analyses, prompted just why death bowling is beautiful and critical even if the opposition has gone hammer and tongs thus far with a scorecard already reading in excess of 300. And finally Zaheer's spell during England's batting power play when everything seemed lost for the men in blue and the Bangalore crowd was a wonderfully written action piece on the subject how to make the ball talk! Give me one strong - foolproof - argument for why one of those deserved to be at the smiling end of the game, I will provide two such arguments for the others. I rest my case.

Shifting focus to those who pooh-pooh cricket, cricketers and cricket watchers, especially those with such craftily contrived undertones that debunk cricket every time they delight in praising the sport they owe allegiance to, what would they have thought of yesterday's tie? Well, if one of them said not much I would not be very surprised. But sample this: how precious can "same scores" be in a game of football played for 90 minutes and a few more of extra time if scores are level at the end of the 90? Even the most fervent football fan may have to mutter a "not much" because scoring goals is a devilishly hard task compared to getting wickets, let alone runs, for which reason a tie may actually be the more default result in that sport. Tennis? There is a tie-breaker that eventually resolves a tie, so tennis does not even allow itself to know what a tie feels like to its players and fans.

Enter cricket: even if we stick just to One-day internationals, we are still speaking of about seven hours of play. A wide here, a leg-bye there, an ungainly slog somewhere, a poor umpiring decision or a run out in a crunch situation are all so commonplace in the game that they can spoil one team's party by the narrowest margins. Yet when the artifacts and the very nature of the game, which seem so besotted to discriminate rather than unite, do conspire to even things after hours of battle, the result is not even remotely like any other that cricket or other sports can dare to script. As Strauss rightly opined one must celebrate games like yesterday's: a "historic high", submerging the twin disappointments of not winning,  is what I imagine a tied cricket match gives to those who partake of its cusp of earth-bound perfectness. No wonder we have had only four ties in eleven World Cups! If a passionate hater of the game chooses to remain unconvinced still, I can readily understand. But if a highly educated detractor shakes his head wilfully, all I can offer is a quiet smile.

There is so much more I wanted to convey through this post but I surmise those thoughts can wait for another day. I shall end on a humorous note based on TheVenk's tweet which jocularly suggested that India and England should give their tie to some corporate person. I would fully agree with my friend for once, but with a small tweak to his suggestion: they should probably gift it to a Body Corporate which goes by the name International Cricket Council  as it would help immensely in ICC's bid to save the one-day game from dying a quick death.         

  

Why Ashes Exemplifies Test Cricket?

When aficionados of the game keep harping on the need for test cricket to survive, fans of the game’s most recent versions tend to disagree. And more often than not, they probably think that the support for test cricket is just the indelible quaintness of a few jobless old men who cannot change with changing times. But nothing could be furthest from the truth. Although the recently concluded test match between England and Adelaide was one-way traffic most of the way, and unusually against Australia which is becoming fairly usual of late giving Australian selectors a lot of headache, the primacy of a series like the Ashes and the passions involved in pursuing the elfin urn are unmatched in world cricket. And in more ways than one, the continued fanfare behind world cricket’s oldest and greatest rivalry suggests why test cricket is treated as THE pinnacle by cricketers and purist fans alike even if it is unarguably on the wane.

In 2005 Kasprowicz and Brett Lee almost took Australia home at Headingley from an impossible scenario only to see Geraint Jones pouch a low leg-side feather of Kasper to leave Australia stung and stunned. In 2006 three Australian giants – Glenn McGrath, Matthew Hayden and Shane Warne – sought the most supreme revenge: they aimed 5-0 and gave it to the Englishmen. Adelaide was what hurt most. After 500-odd in the first innings which was bettered by the Kangaroos, England collapsed in a third innings effort akin to Australia’s own three years ago against Ajit Agarkar and Company. England returned the compliments at home in 2008 but not nearly with the same kind of comprehensiveness with which Australia had done two seasons ago. Come 2010. Come Adelaide and Irony. Come Cook, Pietersen, Anderson and Bell. This time the men from the Isles ensured that they did not even leave a window ajar to tempt fate.The rest is silence as the Bard would say.

Ponting said after the Oval defeat in 2008 that he wanted his players to sit around and feel the pain as Strauss held the coveted urn. With an inconsistent batting line-up and his own form hitting different scales in the batting barometer and a bowling line-up that has looked more like an automatic bowling machine, Ponting’s burning desire seems to be headed nowhere but to hard rocks right now. But no one-day tournament or T20 affair is distinguished by such fierce ambitions. Ponting brought his men to India recently with the same firmness of thought as well but his team, with the exception of Watson and himself, let him down. BCCI’s own daft last-minute scheduling of test matches supplanting one-day internationals, something that would have been unheard of three years ago, betray a blatant intention to help India retain the numero uno ranking in tests. For once, a parochial end has crystallised into noble means which can only be good for test cricket. The upcoming three test battle between India and South Africa in the latter’s backyard is therefore more than just a contest between test cricket’s current number 1 and number 2. Based on the quality of the cricket that will be played, which as a test cricket fan I hope is excellent, the series like the Ashes will once again define the stature and significance of test cricket.

Despite lobbying for test cricket as proudly and as vociferously as I do, I can sympathise with test cricket’s haters and detractors. For starters, the game in its essence is still more to do with attrition than adrenaline and  attraction which characterise T20 and to some extent one-day cricket. Given that tastes are a product of our times, the dwindling lack of support for the game’s oldest format which dates back to more than a 120 years is hardly surprising. Furthermore, batsmen-friendly pitches are mushrooming all over the world: from Ahmedamad to Lahore to SSC to Adelaide Oval to Antigua there are grounds which are notorious for helping teams remain 1500-5 in the first innings if they want to keep batting. The growing insipidity of pitches coupled with the presence of uncluttered aggressors like Sehwag and the advent of a more swashbuckling style of playing which has been imported into tests as well from the shorter versions of the game has meant that the noughties was the most batsman-dominated decade since the post-war 1940s. How much ever one loves a Tendulkar or a Ponting or a Sangakkara, seeing runs amassed by the truckloads even as wickets come at a premium leaves one tired or at least to search for the remote controller to switch channels.

Such poor recommendations for test cricket apart, it is still the highest form of the game and arguably the most challenging and therefore the most gratifying. For me personally, the love of test cricket has to do with the parallels I have always been able to drawn between that and life. Fans from other sports, or for that matter of other formats of the game, taunt test cricket with the rhetorical question: which other sport is played over five days? The perception is that test match cricket is lazy and is watched and played by the supremely bored. However, I beg to disagree on the point.

Cricket in general may involve less athleticism than, let’s say, football or tennis but success in test cricket involves as much a battle of wits as guts and over long periods of time. A team that wins a session cannot afford to be complacent; and a team that has been steamrolled one-day cannot afford to have hangovers when they walk into the field the next day for to do so would be to seduce ruins. This is similar to everyday life where as someone said: success is not final, failure is not fatal, it is the will to go on that counts! Nothing exemplifies the point in sport better than test cricket and perhaps Tour de France, both requiring sustained endurance, focus and application of skill. When the skies are overcast and the pitch has a sprinkling of grass, the batsmen ought to be smart enough to give the first few hours to the bowlers as Gavaskar said. And when the pitch is flat and the sun is shining, the bowlers need to think on their feet, cut down on pace, conserve energy and maintain discipline. The upshot is that test cricket involves more than just outwitting and outlasting your opposition over longer periods of time; it also entails wrestling conditions on a regular basis and hence the tag “test”.

Michael Bevan was – and probably remains – unrivalled in the one-day game as a finisher but the fact that he is never mentioned in the same breath as a Tendulkar, Ponting, Waugh, Lara or an Inzamam has to do with the records the latter players have in the game’s long format. The Honours’ List at various stadia in England highlights bowlers who have taken five-fors in tests but not, to my knowledge, one-day cricket. While this is not intended to depreciate the value of cricket played in coloured clothes under floodlights, which has definitively more entertainment value and is required to take the game to territories beyond the boundaries within which it is currently played, it says something about the continued prestige test cricket holds among the Establishment and players.

The worrying signs are, however, obvious. For every Ashes series or an India-Australia contest or a series in New Zealand or South Africa, there are a number of pointless test series that are played out under shockingly batsman-friendly conditions. India-Sri Lanka cricket meetings have become more like bet matches between suburban neighbourhoods. It is therefore not a joke when someone says that these matches hold no spectator interest which is important for the survival of test cricket. Cricket boards in countries like India, Pakistan, West Indies and Sri Lanka have to take a call on some of their test match grounds and pitches: sorry, no cricket fan in his right mind can take a 750-5 anymore even if his own team is batting. Furthermore as Harsha Bhogle said on twitter recently, test cricket needs to be played in centres which have a longstanding tradition of cricketing culture and appreciation for the game: Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata, Bombay, New Delhi and Kanpur are some places in India that come to mind. One-dayers and T20s can be given to the other centres. This way test cricket is ensured its share of interested attendees but every important city – and its cricket board – gets its share of cricketing entertainment as well. So much can be done if responsible minds do some brainstorming and apply their thoughts to actions. This is integral if test cricket needs to do more than just survive as a residue in the subcontinent.     

              

The farce that is one-day cricket!

A few weeks ago Geoffrey Boycott was as straight-batted as ever in claiming that nobody, save Asians perhaps, is interested in the Asia Cup. But seeing the crowd, or the abundant lack of it, at Dambulla for the One-day International between India and Bangladesh today, one wonders even if the contingent of Asian fans is interested. Perceptively, the point that the hosts were not playing could be invoked as a case in point but the general state of one-day cricket is one which needs serious reassessment if it needs to survive as an independent format. But before I go on further, looking at insipid pitches, the abject batsman-friendliness  of the affair and the inconsequential nature of a lot of games, even tournaments (like the recent one in Zimbabwe; and I do not say this because India lost!), I would say I would be happy with Tests and T20s as the only formats of the game. More of that though for later.

Before we look at the slump of the one-day game, we need to comprehend the simple fact that nations like England and New Zealand have never been highly keen on the once shortest format of the game. While countries like Australia and South Africa have stood at the middle of the divide, playing a good deal of test and one-day cricket, it is the teams from sub-continent which used to, and continue to play, a surfeit of one-day games whose numbers are often inflated by the number of bi-pronged series played in India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan (till the Lahore blasts) and even Bangladesh. And all too often absurd scheduling in the name or pretext of giving all cricketing venues their share of matches resulted in series which had two tests and five to seven one-dayers. Cricket-crazy crowds used to throng to many of these games given that some venues especially in a mammoth country like India get matches only once in a couple of seasons despite the jam-packed nature of the calendar. Frankly, much as fans are stakeholders (in an emotional sense and as ticket-buyers), scheduling of cricket must be sensitive to the views of those who play it rather than the watching public or the coffers of a cricket board.

What has happened now though is with the advent of T20 Cricket the balance has tilted, rightly or wrongly but in one-fell-swoop seemingly, towards the three-hour format from the one-day one. While I have not watched any one-day series held in India in recent memory, I am pretty sure that reception for these games, especially if they constitute just academic purpose – after one team has already won the series midway through it – is likely to dwindle slowly but surely even in a place like India. Around the world, like in Sri Lanka currently and in Zimbabwe in the series recently which very few knew was happening, the warning bells for the format popularised in Australia, by Benson and Hedges and later coloured clothes are already tolling.

To blame the rise of T20 alone for one-day cricket’s starting to recede in popular imagination is to miss the point. While twenty-20 has taken world cricket by storm over the last four seasons, the seeds for the descent of one-day cricket, I believe, were sown a while ago in the decade. The advent of T20 has if anything only exaggerated the impact given that the crowds now have an option – every series now has at least a couple of T20 games over a weekend – to choose where they formerly did not. Let us review just a little bit to make the point clear.

One of the reasons for the decline in popularity could be the senseless scheduling of one-day cricket matches. If bi-pronged series in the subcontinents led to a cloying, almost choking, overdose, then ICC did not help the cause one little bit by bringing in tourneys like the Champions Trophy. Until the 1996 World Cup, if memory serves me right, there was only one international tournament where all recognised one-day teams came together to match talent, namely the World Cup. After 1998 all that has changed. We now have a Champions Trophy every two years, a World Cup every four years – have the T20 World Cup splice this ‘impressive’ array of international tournaments showcasing ICC’s organisational ability, you have about an international one-day tournament every year. Take that for a committed sporting body trying to promote the game throughout the year every year! And if by accident a year has no such tournaments, there are enough tri-angular, quadrangular and pentagular tournaments, whether or not they form part of ICC’s FTP (Future Tours Programme, which I believe nobody, save the ICC, ever talks about!), to make up for the ‘seeming’ void. Let us not even get started about the Indian Premiere League! While veterans like Dravid and Tendulkar have said that travelling so much is part of the modern game, I am sure given a choice most cricketers worth their salt will call for a serious (read "sensitised and sensible") reassessment of such inept scheduling of limited over games which have, among other things, the harmful potential of cutting short wonderful careers on account of injury and/or jadedness. Shane Bond’s premature retirement may be a case in point. Breet Lee's bowing out from test cricket could also be added to the list. Had it been an earlier age both these fast men could have, and would have, gone for at least three to four more seasons. 

The slow but inevitable loss of ground that one-day cricket is suffering could be imputed, as mentioned earlier in passing, also to the one-sidedness of the game, stacked heavily in favour of the batting team. As an example let us look at the scores displayed on newspapers: in the last four years 400-plus totals have not only been set, which in itself torments a bowler with his sense of relativised mortality vis-à-vis batsmen, but have been matched – once, and almost matched another time. There was a time when high-scoring thrillers used to be fun because they were the exception rather than the norm; teams chasing over 300-needed to bat out of their skins to win games but now no score is ever a challenging one. While augmenting run rates -  in chases as well as first innings – could be traced to the T20 mentality which enables batsmen to believe that anything at all is gettable, the very mentality is prodigally bolstered by atrociously batsman-friendly, or bowler-killing, conditions, specifically pitches (which again are seldom left to the discretion of the curator alone!) , reducing even class bowlers to a containing job. Anyone who believes that this is the way forward for the game has got to be joking and/or a batsman, a batsman’s parent or an aspiring batsman. If this trend continues, not only will one-day cricket suffer adversely but we will soon see genuine bowlers playing only test cricket, which is unfortunate. I may be a little too radical in stating my clairvoyance but I do not see why it should not happen given the way the game is headed.

Preposterous, almost asphyxiating, scheduling, inconsequential matches, the batsman-centric nature of the game and abysmal cricket pitches coupled with the rise of T20 are only some of the main factors that have contributed to one-day cricket’s slowly going out of sync as a format  but these are critical factors the ICC needs to look into if it needs to – if it thinks it needs to – rescue the format from dying a natural death.  As ever, change cannot, or is not likely to, be proposed on the international scene but efforts are being made in domestic competitions. For instance, Tendulkar suggested some time ago that one-day matches could be broken into four innings – two apiece for each team – and at least the ECB has listened. I read somewhere recently that even the Australian Cricket Board is thinking in the direction. These are surely positives; the ideas may or may not work but it is in the interest of one-day cricket and cricket in general that novel ideas, especially when they come from people who have great standing in the contemporary game, are tested before they are discarded if they do not work. Ricky Ponting too has aired his views on one-day games whose results do not have any value. There must be a way to work around the drudgery and the impasse, and if there is not, new ones should be found and quickly.

 With the one-day World Cup in the subcontinent scheduled for 2011, the ICC will be busy supervising allotted venues, reviewing security, assessing finances and be busy with a thousand other things but a roadmap of what comes, or needs to come, after that for the format has to be put in place or at least thought about. Haroon Lorgat, the President of the ICC, is a nice professional man from South Africa who has given the the Council a stable stewardship at the top but his optimism that the one-day game is still on safe waters seems rather misplaced and contrary to present-day empirical fact. If the optimism needs to translate into daylight, the ICC should not think twice about proposing some serious revamping plans for the one-day game which include, if nothing else, broad guidelines on everything from playing conditions to Power Play issues to the number of individual series a board can accommodate outside of the ICC charter. The ICC can set the trend itself by slashing the so-called mini world cup (a.k.a the Champions Trophy) and think about just one global tournament apiece for T20 and One-day cricket which is still too much but at least gives the impression of things heading in some direction. After all FIFA does not hold a World Cup every third New Moon and an example can be taken from that!

Whether ICC has the strength to take a stand even if it means defying authoritarian and notorious boards like the BCCI only time will tell. But if the game’s international governing body wants to save the one-day game, which as I said at the start is frankly not worth saving, I am not too sure if it even has the choice of dallying let alone not deciding. I do not know how many know; there used to be a tournament called Australiasia cup and it is close to a couple of decades since it went out of the calendar. Tourneys like the Asia Cup and such inexplicably mind-numbing one-day series need to follow suit in order to uproot the weeds to leave the soil for one-day cricket’s sane and justified continuity.

Having said all that the next ICC-Prez Elect is a certain Mumbai politician, more caricature than character - even if not a patch on Laloo - by name Sharad Pawar? What's the game coming to? Apocalypse? I hope not!