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 SSC saga and a malediction for bowlers!

So, the test match at the Sinhalese Sports Club is finally over. Save Rahul Dravid and V.V.S Laxman who would be cursing themselves for having missed an opportunity to escalate their averages and century counts, all the other batsmen enjoyed themselves, combining for close to 1500 runs for the loss of just seventeen wickets which is less than two bowled-out innings. And if Randiv never returns to play test cricket again, I will not blame him, although being a Sri Lankan I am sure he would be strong enough to treat the pitch at SSC as an aberration probably prepared by someone who carries psychological scars from his past inflicted by bowlers. And as the test series moves to P Sara Oval which is also located in Colombo, one wonders if the contest will get any better. Well, at this stage, it looks like even the concrete front yard of my house will be better for bowlers than SSC.

A number of things were wrong about the test match just concluded at Colombo, not the least of them being a surface that did not offer anything more than slow turn which barring Dravid everyone, including Mithun and Ishant Sharma, had time to tackle. Yet to blame SSC singly for hosting such drab test matches is to be purblind and willfully ignorant of grounds like that around the world. The Motera at Ahmedabad comes to mind and so does the Antigua Recreation Ground in the West Indies; the most recently played tests at both these venues produced results not far more or less insipid than the mind-numbing draw we witnessed at SSC. With the lone exception of Karachi, pitches in Pakistan too are flat, but at least they offer expected if not extravagant turn on the fourth and fifth days of a game. The Oval in London and the Adelaide Oval have also been batting havens for years but these pitches at least have true bounce given that they are in England and Australia and with occasional help from the weather bowlers at least have (half) a chance. In India, Sri Lanka and the West Indies when the summer is at its peak and batsmen are in full flow, there is absolutely no respite for bowlers let alone relief. It is precisely in these inhumane contexts that an extra layer of grass or a slightly less hard pitch may give the toiling bowlers a window of opportunity. 

As it is, test cricket is losing ground to its youngest sibling in the game, the T20s, and a number of detractors of the games longest version, including my shrewd co-author friend here, think that test cricket’s status as the game’s foremost format is but an artifact of unimpeded history and little else. If test matches like the second one between Sri Lanka and India become the norm – not that contest-less run fests are just exceptions, which is a cause for concern – then the game’s governing body can kiss goodbye to the format sooner than they may anticipate and focus full time on marketing the game played under floodlights, with glitzy jerseys and with a lot of éclat even if with comparatively less demands on substance. This is not to say that I despise the game’s newest format or that it is corrupting the game or even that it is superficial. If the game needs to spread globally, for instance, T20s are the only option. Even as an ardent fan of test cricket I am sensible enough to admit and understand that the game’s coffers and traditional values are situated in different places. So each format has its own raison d’ etre and is required for the meaningfulness of the game overall. But what I regret is the rapid dwindling of crowds in test match cricket as evidenced during the test at SSC. 

I had written earlier as well that if ICC is really, not just academically and rhetorically, interested in salvaging test cricket as a format, let alone as the most preferred one (a status which I believe it has already lost!), pitches are an area that the governing body should bring under its broad aegis. I am not too sure if there already is a pitch-related ICC committee, and if there is I do not see what it is doing. There is a touch of irony too in that when it comes to high-scoring games which end in predictable one-hour-before-close, not last ball, draws, we protest vociferously but the sonority fades soon enough. But when one ball rears up awkwardly like it did at Ferozshah Kotla, everyone goes gaga about it and fifty experts speak about how dangerous it is for batsmen to have such pitches! I am not encouraging pitches like those prepared at Kotla for the one-day game against Sri Lanka and India that was later abandoned. Sir Viv Richards Stadium in Antigua and Sabaina Park in Jamaica have also hoisted test matches over the years that have had to be called off barely an hour into the game because the pitches were underprepared. But the point is if some pitches are considered unsuitable for playing because they are a threat to batsmen’s physical well-being, then the pitches we have at the Antigua Recreation Ground, Sinhalese Sports Club, Ahmedabad and Faislabad should be considered unsuitable too because they are a threat to bowling itself. To relegate the latter form of unsuitability as an epiphenomenon just because it is less tangible than the possibility of physical injury betrays a want of commonsense and equanimity from those who are supposed to safeguard the interests of the game, which lay among other things in there being a contest between bat and ball.

While the sub-continent continues to host matches which are played in conditions that remain hell for bowlers, Pakistan’s last test match against Australia at Headingley and the ongoing one against England at Trent Bridge show how keeping the bowlers in the game interested is the only – commonsensical – way to ensure results in test cricket which in turn may bring more crowds to watch it. Indeed, one cannot expect groundsmen in India, Sri Lanka, West Indies or Pakistan to get the same sort of wherewithal that pitch curators in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa or England get; the opposite case is true too. It is needless to say that weather conditions play a part and these are beyond human control. But the fact remains we can still prepare pitches that give something for the bowlers. The Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore is a great example. Nobody even presumes that it is like Perth or Gabba; it does not need to be. But the wicket always has something in it for the quick men, at least first thing in the morning, is beautiful to bat on once you get your eye in and offers appreciable but not threatening turn during the last day and half. 

At the end of the day, it is balance between bat and ball that one asks for, not a historical reversal where batsmen get repeatedly shot out for less than 250 nine times out of ten. I prefer low-scoring thrillers to high-scoring ones any day, but that is not the point. Getting a five-for or a hundred and fifty in tests, both should entail some effort in the game’s toughest format. If five-fors happen once in ten games but double-hundreds come around every fourth innings, there is something fundamentally wrong about the equation. This is precisely what has been happening for years, at least in countries known to produce flat pitches, and unless corrected soon, the plague may come to haunt the very heritage of test cricket in these parts of the world.

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!         

   

Chin Music!

As an ardent fan of the Indian Cricket Team who backs the team to perform consistently well, it is tiring to talk about the topic time and time again. And yet, neither do we stop talking nor has there been any improvement over the last couple of years in terms of what I refer to. And if you need a most recent example that will animate your memory more than ancient ones, the Indian top order's dismal showing against the West Indian quicks at the Kensington Oval in Barbados on Sunday (May 9, 2010) is a case in point. And what was pathetic to see was that even someone like Gambhir, who has become very accomplished over the last two seasons, looked ungainly against the short stuff although one must admit that the delivery that got him was a jaffa; lesser batsmen may not have got a glove to it.

Although we did not give away many wickets to the short delivery directed well, the discomfiture and the toad-hopping was visible for all to see. Consequently, the Indian batsmen could not put the bad stuff away. Vijay got a half tracker which he hit right down the throat of the man at deep square-leg - the only man there. Yusuf Pathan later in the day, when all was almost beginning to get lost, once again showed his vulnerability against the shorter stuff as he holed out at square-leg. 

One can go on forever about selection - not only about the composition of the playing eleven but also the fifteen member squad picked for the tournament but India's display in this T20 World Cup is likely to once again herald a discussion that unfortunately seems undying as far as the new generation of Indian batsmen are concerned. Harsha's words summing Raina's discomfort against quick short bowling can be justifiably generalised to every other player, perhaps with the exception of Yuvraj Singh (who has not been in form) and M. S. Dhoni who at least tries to attack short-pitched stuff: "This is a generation of cricketers which looks extremely good only in some conditions..." I could not agree more. Bhogle's tweets this morning signify much the same as well.

I have no disrespect for the Rainas, the Rohit Sharmas or the Yusuf Pathans; but what one fails to understand when they go slam-bang in batsman-friendly conditions in the IPL back home is precisely what one understands when one sees them settle back to mortality against world class quick bowling. Some may say that T20 and one-day internationals are the lot for these cricketers but that is not only a parochial way of looking at it - for most of these cricketers may want to match wits with the best at the test level some day - but entirely misses the point. Excuses are the quickest way to sink down a bottomless pit and shamefully enough we have always been good at giving them.

The problem, however, has its parentage in the times of which these cricketers are a part: short boundaries, flat pitches to encourage high-scoring affairs which somehow inexplicably - and abominably - attract big crowds, curtailments on a bowler's freedom (as if the game were not batsman-friendly already!) and all the rest of it. For batsmen from the subcontinent in particular - and I include Pakistan and Sri Lanka too for they have not played the short stuff all that well either - success in domestic cricket gives a false sense of security and lulls them into a state of achievement, or worse, even complacency. That is because not only do they not get to see anyone who is even a shadow of a Steyn, a Jerome Taylor or a Lee but they also play on wickets which are either square turners or have nothing in it for the bowlers. This cannot be good preparatory ground for any cricketer.

Some may tell me, and have told me so in the past: what's wrong in playing to one's strengths? Since Australians never prepare turners and South Africa never prepares slower wickets when Sri Lanka or India visit thereabouts, why should we prepare sporting wickets? I am tempted to answer the counterpoint in two ways. Playing to one's strength is NOT wrong at all and the analogy of other countries playing on conducive backyards is indeed an argument which holds some tooth. However, at the domestic level playing 'only' to one's strengths turns out to be detrimental, not for anybody else but for domestic cricketers who grow up in those backyards. At the end of the day, a ground curator may get a glare or a stern rebuke; the board may get away with some uncharitable headlines from the media; but domestic cricketers when they travel abroad to make the cut fail to make the grade. And that is a terribly sorry state of affairs.

I am candidly unconcerned about the prosperity, or lack of it, of T20 cricket. I am a self-proclaimed supporter of the game played hard, tough, patiently and diligently in whites across five days. And despite the frenzy the game's quick bite format has created, I still think we have not come to a stage where players may consciously abandon the idea of playing test cricket which shows how much esteem the game's traditional format hold's in everyone's heart. But the developments elsewhere in the game may soon bring a stage where some are just not good enough for the long format and the long haul.

A Mahela Jeyawardena or a Jacques Kallis epitomises those who have made the shift from being class test players to fine T20 cricketers. And yet the game also has Yuvraj Singhs who do not just have the right temperament, or in fact the technique, to handle the sustained belligerence of good fast bowling in a test match. A Virendra Sehwag - even though he does not play the hook or the pull - is an exception, and exceptions are better left alone. And if the indications of the modern breed of Indian middle order batting is anything to go by, I shudder to think of the day when Dravid and Tendulkar will both have hung up their boots. I know no individual is indispensable and the Indian Cricket Team, like any unit of many members, will survive their retirement. But if we want to make the transition anywhere near smooth, the BCCI has to do some quick thinking on a lot of fronts. It has had to do that for a number of years and has not done it. One hopes at least that the continued barrage of bouncers against the mid-twenties of the Indian batting line up and their obvious maladroitness in handling it wakes up some dull minds and sets some constructive action in motion.