Scrappers, not LOSERS!

Daniel Vettori, bespectacled, more studious in appearance than sporting, seems like the sort of man and captain who has his heart in the right place. And it did not therefore seem like an exaggeration when he said, after the attrition-filled Quarter Finals victory over the Proteas, that a sixth semi-final berth at the cricket World Cup was an "amazing achievement" for a small country like New Zealand. You weigh those words in the context of where New Zealand cricket seemed to be headed a few months before the World Cup and they seem to acquire even more significance. And yet, New Zealand's being in the final four of the 2011 World Cup would surprise few who have followed the Black Caps' cricket with anything more than cursory attention. In a sport played by teams that usually boast two or three very good names, if not great ones, on whose reputations alone games sometimes sway, the Kiwis have always represented a study in the theorem "a team is more than a sum of its parts." How else can one vindicate the almost invisible consistency New Zealand, a team of batsmen who seem to bat to kill boredom and bowlers who (with the notable exceptions of Shane Bond, Sir Richard Hadlee and Chris Cairns in his prime) have at best bowled at medium pace, has maintained in major ICC tournaments?

My earliest memory of the New Zealand cricket team goes back to a pre-dawn telecast in Chennai of a cricket match between a team in yellow flannels (Australia, of course) and another in bright grey way back in 1992. On the day, the captain of the team dressed in grey, which I later learned was New Zealand, Martin Crowe, smashed a ton, giving Kiwis a victory over Australia in the inaugural contest of the Benson and Hedges World Cup. I recall that New Zealand were incredibly consistent during the league stages and played some thrilling and innovative cricket, with Mark Greatbatch heralding pinch-hitting in the first fifteen overs (before Sanath Jayasurya and Kaluwithara poached the badge in the 1996 World Cup!) and Dipak Patel opening the bowling consistently, the very first example of an international outfit starting with spin in one-day cricket on a consistent basis. New Zealand would bow out in their semi-finals clash against the eventual champions Pakistan but they had done much better than co-hosts Australia in the only World Cup to have been played in the region so far. That was the beginning of something remarkable from a team which has fielded men with normal skill but extraordinary well.

Almost two decades have gone by since the last World Cup Downunder and if anything New Zealand's share of match winners has only dwindled during the time. For a long time, the likes of Chris Cairns and Nathan Astle could lock horns with the best in terms of all-round abilities and batting respectively and come out on top. With a steady-minded, but not flashy, captain in Stephen Fleming and sparkling, but never consistent, performers like Craig McMillan and fill-in men like Chris Harris, Gavin Larson and Dion Nash, New Zealand still kept their place in world cricket there or thereabouts. Although one should not be too unfair to the names above, none of them, it seems fair to say, elicited the awe of a Tendulkar, the raptures a Brian Lara left, the stupefaction a Shane Warne commanded, the thrill an Alan Donald delivery triggered or the feeling of disbelief a Gilchrist innings left as residue among spectators and opposition alike.

Given that background, it is all the more creditable that the New Zealand team has hardly been trounced abroad (until recently), has been more than steady at home (once again until lately) with its persistent swing bowlers doing the job and has won a Champions Trophy. In fact, tomorrow's clash against Sri Lanka will be the Kiwis' fourth in a row at the World Cup after 1999, 2003 and 2007. No team other than the decade's best team, Australia, has even come close. You can have all the money in the world to get the best support staff and equipment for analysis (read 'India'); you can have the finest talent bursting at the seams on paper (read 'India', 'Sri Lanka', 'South Africa' and bowling talent in 'Pakistan'). But the great beauty of sport lies in its sleepy disinterestedness in history, records and the like and its knack of evening competitors on the day. It it in this connection that the Kiwi endurance in cricket tells its own unique story; not too attractive, but quite inspiring. 

Even as I was trying to find out how many World Cup semi-finals the Kiwis have reached before, I was surprised to find out that the one they play against South Africa tomorrow will be their fourth in a row. But even with New Zealand's blue-collared approach to the game, the slipping of some of their fine performances under the radar says a lot about the powerhouses of cricket (and their parochial aggrandisement of achievements by their players matched only by their humungous blind eye towards others' achievements) and how New Zealand has, like a wicket keeper who does his job so efficiently that he does not even seem to be physically present on the field, gone about its cricket with focus and without fanfare. Nowhere was New Zealand's taciturn efficiency more visible than their Quarter Final win over South Africa recently. If the Proteas' mid-innings pandemonium that eventually led to their loss was a typical South Africa reminding them of their psychologically brittle days, the Kiwis' resilience to shut the door and turn the key was also typical New Zealand - scrapping but stubborn. The signs had been there even when Jesse Ryder and Ross Taylor, both men of belligerent ways, settled on more workmanlike ways of run scoring. In the end, the two batsmen's vigil counted in the final analysis as much as Oram's brilliance with the ball and Nathan McCullum's on the field. 

The New Zealand cricket team, which has never been large on ego, had stooped when it had to and conquerred the occasion when the opportunity presented itself. Here was a team that journalists targeted for having a soft underbelly, people teased and tauinted randomly on FB and twitter and the world at large seemed to have forgotten as a prospect worth reckoning in the World Cup. Here was a team that lost 4-0 to Bangladesh and followed it up with a 5-0 mauling at the hands of India in games that were intended to be prelude to the World Cup. Here is the only non-Asian team that has qualified to the pre-summit clash of the 2011 World Cup!

There was a muttering in some circles following the 5-0 defeat in India that the Kiwis did not bat long enough and John Wright, a man who knows more about "long batting" than most was appointed the national coach; Allan Donald took on the reins of the bowling which was never going to be Goliath slayers but which could with some aggression, in the words of White Lightning himself, go a long way. And the change in personnel seems to have worked like a charm. It needs to be kept in mind that a team's skipper and support staff are only as good as the on-field outputs and not efforts: but that is modern sport and harshness is its other name. Irrespective of what happens tomorrow, the Black Caps will be a happy lot.

The Kiwi vice-Captain Ross Taylor strongly believes that his team can reach the finals. Sri Lanka, with a ten wicket thumping of England under their belt and the chafing home conditions at the backdrop, may represent an altogether different proposition vis-a-vis South Africa with a known disposition to crumble under pressure. But the Kiwis will go into the match knowing that they have nothing to lose. Oftentimes, those without fear of defeat are like killers on the run: they can rubbish the odds, mutter a profanity and do something that defies credulity. Much of New Zealand cricket has been about de(i)fying commonsense and if it takes them all the way, few can grudge them the achievement.

Thirty-four!

If you have quietly excursed around the twitter timelines, Facebook walls and blogs of Indian friends who are cricket fans over the last sixteen hours or so, you would have probably thought that the Indians have won the World Cup. And you would be excused for thinking so. And so would the updates and updaters for elevating a quarter final victory over Australia to stratospheric heights. The ecstatic reaction to the gritty and successful Indian chase at Ahmedabad, which resulted in Australia being knocked out before the semi-finals of a World Cup for the first time in nineteen years, shows how much a Quarter Final victory at the World Cup means to Indian fans, especially given that it came against India’s fiercest rivals during the previous decade.

But there is another interpretation to the reaction too which should not be slid under the carpet: it gives the world yet another chance to appreciate and take stock of what the Australian teams of the previous decade has achieved. That Ricky Ponting, who we Indians love to hate not in the least because he seemed for a while to be the only batsman who could match (if not better) Tendulkar’s batting records, was at the forefront of his team’s (losing) battle, would have come as no surprise save for Ponting’s most unabashed detractors and/or those with a very short sporting memory. This post is specifically intended for the latter faction.

When Australia last lost a World Cup game, also against Pakistan (before the one they lost last week), I had just completed feel-struggling my way through my second teen-year. What remained of my teenage saw no Australian defeat at a World Cup match; and during the first half of my third decade in the world, the pattern would remain as obdurate as my Mathematics scores (which never once crossed six percent). The worst or best thing about the Australian dominance, depending in your vantage point, was the Australians never looked like dropping a game after THE tie in the semi-finals and Gibbs’ dropped catch of Steve Waugh took the men in yellow to the finals of the 1999 World Cup. The final was a one-sided affair with Shane Warne flummoxing the Pakistani batting order which had stalwarts like Ijaz Ahmed, Saeed Anwar and Inzamam Ul Haq into submission. The two other major Asian teams would suffer similar fates in the summit clashes of the 2003 and 2007 World Cups: if the 1999 World Cup final was about giving one of Australia’s toughest cricketers and fairest captains, Steve Waugh, a fitting farewell, the 2003 final at the Bullring was about Ponting hitting the crescendo on the perfect occasion against India and the 2007 final about Adam Gilchrist “feigning” form to only stun the Sri Lankans in the final at Barbados with a hundred out of nowhere.

The one-sidedness of the last three World Cup finals shows a lot about the Australian attitude to the game which we know has, until lately, been manifested in the way they play, also yielding phenomenal results. Not for the Australians the jerks of added pressure in knockout games because when someone failed there was always someone else to step up to the plate; but not for them either the letting up during ‘less’ important games, for no game was more or less important to the Australians: we want to win every game was the mantra and it worked like a cure. Yes, the Australians sledged merrily (leading the world in gamesmanship as well); yes, McGrath often roughed up the opposition’s best batsman even before a contest began; yes Gilchrist walked and others didn’t; yes it is unfair that Shane Warne took up leg spin than become a sorcerer; and yes many teams never realised – and if they did, there was little evidence of it – that the best way to ‘down’ Australia was by playing the ball and not the reputation of the players they had. But to simply attribute Australia’s remarkable, nay perfect, success rate in the World Cups to any/all of the aforementioned reasons or to an extended love affair with Fortune is to miss the point.

The truth is between 2000 and 2008, the Australian cricket team fielded some of the fiercest competitors that have turned out in the game even by Australia’s own high standards. That in turn is thanks to a tough domestic cricket setup which meant that cricketers were battle-hardened even before they wore the yellows, something Allan Border and company envisaged late in the 1980s when Australian cricket was at one of its lowest ebbs. The truth is the Australians made no bones about their love for winning, shared it as a collective vision, were led by a man who breathed meanness in order to remain fixated about his team’s goals and went ahead and played hard cricket. Result: 34 WORLD CUP games without a loss, with one no-result in between. We dance in the Isles if India beat New Zealand 5-0 in a One-day series!

I am not even sure how one can put an unbeaten streak of 34 matches in a game’s biggest tournament into perspective. But let me try. A tennis player who wins four grand slams within the space of two or three seasons may come to achieving something which in its magnitude is similar to what the Australian team achieved. Maybe, it is akin to a senior golf pro winning three or four of the biggest circuits on the trot. As far as team sport goes, however, what the Australians have done is beyond compare. For starters, the last three World Cups have been played in vastly different conditions. Besides, as the previous decade wore on, the seniors in the core group – the Haydens, Gilchrists and McGraths – were becoming only older. Add quirks such as Shane Warne missing the 2003 World Cup after testing positive for a banned drug on the eve of the tournament and we will understand that the Australian dominance, despite the number of match winners the Kangaroos have had in their ranks, has never been about one man (like it is in India with Sachin Tendulkar!) or a few men. Whether or not a 34-match unbeaten run is replicated time will tell; but being bloody-minded as a team and enjoying teammates’ successes as one’s own is something every team and every individual playing in a team sport can learn from the Australians.

Now that the tiring succession of Australian triumphs is over, we can look to more ‘open’ cricket matches and more unpredictability in the game. But while we do that, we need to understand that the various Australian teams post-1999 have left cricket with a proud piece of cricketing history that is not likely to be expunged in team sport, least of all cricket, in the foreseeable future. If it is obliterated and I am alive when that happens, I will surely write about it from (and in) some corner of the world.

For now, though, I hope the Indians can fend off the Pakistan challenge in the semi-finals at Mohali. One can never tout Pakistanis to win or lose any game. However, it would be fair to say that they have been the best team on view in the tournament besides South Africa. If the contest is anywhere near as exciting as the league game in the 2003 World Cup, where Tendulkar went berserk and decided the issue before his innings was cut short by the combine of cramps and Shoaib Akhtar, the fans will have been treated to some cracking cricket. And just for the record (with the uninitiated, of whom there may not be many, in mind) India has yet to lose a World Cup game against Pakistan. MSD & company would hope that India’s own little unbeaten run (against their neighbours) continues at least for one more game.

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.         

  

The Wait is over and the weight of expectations have begun!

After more than four lousy years the world cup is back. When it was announced a few years back that the sub-continent would be hosting the WC, i was in school telling my friends “No matter what happens, we should stay together and watch the world cup” The statement has become true to the extent that we are able to see the matches together on TV, thanks to the inflated ticket prices and food prices inside the stadium. We will get a spanking of our life if we asked for a 1000 from our parents for watching the match at Chepauk, added to the fact that i am supposed to be preparing for my IPCC exams in may, so that i wont be sitting jobless at home for another 6 months. Thank GOD! Me and one other friend were lucky enough to watch a lousy warm up match between SA vs ZIM, some dancing from Morkel and Ray Price blushing every time the crowd cheered his name :-D

   Within a few minutes the World Cup will be kicking off and I WILL have Goosebumps when the first ball is being bowled. World Cup gives me some fond memories. It was only in 2003 WC, I fell in love with the game and started playing it. I used to mimic “The Zaheer Khan jump”,  “The Shane Bond load up” and “The McGrath Approach to the wicket” That’s how i learnt the game.

  However, the next WC in the Caribbean in 2007 didnt quite live up to the standards SA had set in hosting the previous WC. It was not just that the Indians got kicked in the middle out of the first round but it produced some pretty boring matches and hell a lot of controversies. Damn! I hated watching the Aussies dominating every other team, not that WC 2003 was any different :-D

   Now that the tournament has finally comeback to the place where people know their cricket team captain and not their president, I hope it is a success :-P At the same time it is really disappointing and annoying to see Chepauk hosting no “important” matches and Why should it always have to be Mumbai that gets the cake! Why not a Feroz Shah Kotla? Why not an Eden Gardens? Or even the only ground SL play cricket in “The Premadasa” hahaha :-D

  As far as the team winning the title, I’ll tell where my money is not definitely with, Australia! They are only a shadow of themselves now. Goodness gracious me! They were trembling in front of the spinners. We witnessed something which was not new, Mr Punter complaining about the pitch or the saltless salad he had at dinner! If you are expecting the Aussies to comeback like they did last time when they lost 3-0 to NZ and dominated the WC 2007, it aint happening.

NZ, hmm what shall I say?! They’ve gone from “one of the worst” to “The worst”, talk about loosing 4-0 to Bangladesh. Their usual Semifinal exit looks like a villain’s chance to win over Rajni! They are not going beyond Quarters. WI have tough competition with Bangladesh and Ireland to make it to even the Quarters let alone winning the cup!

  Like every other WC, SA are once again favorites to lift the cup. One could light up a colony with tube lights with the number of “chokes” they’ve committed. Ghosh! They made me cry in 1999! Every time an ICC event happens they make their fans go into depression! 

The Teams I think, will have great a chance are India, Srilanka and England. I say India purely because of the talent they’ve got, the lesser the hype, the better they’ll perform; Srilanka because they won it when it was last held in the subcontinent. Let’s face it, they play all their cricket in a city which has 3 grounds, a ground near the beach and another somewhere in the middle of the jungle and score truck loads of runs. There would also be one lousy camera man showing us crows, which we see plenty here in Chennai and the same old places like they are showing it for the first time.  Personally I dont like the SL cricket team but I hate to admit that they have a nice chance this time! I would fall into an abyss of depression if they actually manage to win it. England are probably the most balanced side in the tournament and the last ICC event they played, they ended up taking the spoils.

  Oops! I almost forgot Pakistan. That has been the case for the past few years, hasn’t it? They can turn from paupers to prince and then back to paupers again in just a single innings. Winning or making it to the business end of the tournament would be nothing short of a miracle!

  I simply dont care who takes the title as long as it is not SL but it would be all the more special if India end up winning it because that would be the best retirement gift that the master blaster will ever get!

The Verdict: My Opinion!

I am not a lawyer and I do not understand what the suspension clauses of the sentences to Salman Butt and Mohammad Asif mean. I also do not understand the hue and cry from some quarters about how the punishment given to Butt is lenient and the one handed down to young Mohammad Amir is too harsh. In any case, the ICC tribunal headed by Michael Belof (QC) has, I am confident, gone through the case as carefully as possible and even made sure they have not jumped into conclusions taking time before passing the verdict. And I am fully in support of it.

The wheels of judiciary will, however, recommence in two directions. The players would most likely appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (Switzerland) against the bans imposed by the ICC. Plus there is the complication of the case pending against the players by the British Crown in London. Subtracting the legalese, what this means is we have not seen the end of this sad spot-fixing drama nor have we seen the last of these three players in terms of the present case. Be that as it may, it is important to look into the implications of the judgments handed out in the case for the general health of cricket at large and ICC in especial.

From Ian Chappell to Giden Haigh to individual cricket boards to sometimes the average cricket fan, just about everyone concerned with the game has had a slingshot at the International Cricket Council, pooh-poohing it as an organisation that, to put it short, is good for nothing. On the one hand there is this prevailing impression, one which does have a grain of truth in it, that the ICC as the game’s official governing body is not making enough crucial decisions and not making them assertively enough, giving room for powerful and notorious member boards to exercise their own muscle power in the running of the game. The lack of a firm stand by the ICC on the (non-)use of UDRS is a case in point and has come under the hammer recently from cricket analysts, players and former players alike as the Indian team, backed by an unhealthily potent BCCI, continues to deny its use for reasons the world and its uncle cannot fathom.

Allowing teams to play local and international games arbitrarily outside of the FTP window, lack of monitoring over the increased number of one-sided pitches around the world, failing to clamp down more stringently on drug abuse in the game and mishandling of corruption are only some of the important issues the ICC has been found wanting in. That ICC’s top jobs have increasingly had a political slant to them with someone like Sharad Powar at the Presidency, and John Howard’s Vice-Presidency candidature splitting the cricket world right down the middle, have only contributed to exacerbating matters.

In this context, the ICC’s efforts in leading the charges of corruption against the three Pakistani cricketers to their logical conclusion were as necessary a few months back as they are commendable now. That the ICC has had at its helm a CEO like Haroon Lorgat, who is at once a discreet administrator but a forthright speaker, as the fixing controversies raised their ugly hood again after ten years is probably a blessing. Irrespective of whether the verdicts stay as they are or are modified after appeals or are completely overturned, the tribunal’s judgments against the discredited Pakistani trio could yet turn out to be a landmark in ICC history as an example of the governing body’s no-nonsense attitude against corruption.

Although I feel for Amir, and a lot of fans (including many Indians, surprisingly) who thought he was the next young Pakistani fast-bowling magician in the making, his surprise at being given a five year ban for bowling “just two no-balls” rings more rhetorically than sensibly to me; and in the process it also rings with that inalienable “convenient” tune of our times, the hesitancy to square up to one’s mistakes and accept them even at the brink of disaster.

The issue that is at stake is not whether an inconsequential illegal delivery was bowled or whether a match was deliberately lost; if that were all at stake then the amount of attention given to the case by the ICC and cricket fans, leave alone an ever-hyped and –hyping world media, would seem absurd. The issue is one of principle, of upholding fairness as one of the most important virtues of the game not in the least because it is belief in the game’s fairness and its tendency to even things out that makes heartbroken fans still come back after a depressing loss and route for their team. Violation of that fairness, even if only for something miniscule and even if for money that is not somebody else’s daily meal, is a violation of the spirit of the national flannels one plays in, of the unspoken trust that connects a sportsperson with other sportspersons and the world that worships him, and of sport’s greatness in general. Sport, as is often believed, does not test only human strengths; it also tests whether one can tide over one’s weaknesses and in that respect Butt and Asif are perhaps more to be blamed than the rookie Amir but none of them is above the game. It is also sad that three Pakistani cricketers, three of their better ones arguably, were caught red-handed at a time when Pakistani cricket was already in doldrums. But examples needed to be set and one hopes the judgments have sent out the right signals to the generation of young and upcoming cricketers.

In less than two weeks, the attention will shift inevitably from these and other issues to the 2011 Cricket World Cup, as the one-day game’s most coveted prize returns to the sub-continent after fourteen years. Even as one prays that it should not be the Australians lifting the cup for a staggering fourth time in a row, I will settle for a tournament where cricket alone will talk: if that is ensured, whoever wins it is a secondary issue. I would obviously love it if India goes on to win it but the tournament’s conduct is far more important than its eventual result.



The Power of Three!

Two test series in the Southern Hemisphere ended within a space of half a day at the behest of time zones. And here I was in the Northern Hemisphere trying desperately to look for similarities between the two. I got only as far as the word “historical”, as India drew their first ever series in South Africa and England won their first Ashes (series) away from home in twenty-four years, and gave up:

One was as tightly contested a test series as they come and the score line 1-1 was, I am sure even by the standards of most neutrals, fair. The only grudge was that here was another three-test series between the titans which appeared like an extended trailer in lieu of the blockbusting movie it should be. The other series was anything but a tight contest and at the end of it both the teams would have wondered if Perth was an aberration, the final throwback to a recent era of Australian dominance, or just comic relief. Despite the dissimilarities, the two series together gave us an idea of the teams to watch out for over the next two winters at least, and, perhaps, at most. While Australia plummeted from one low to another nadir with  the same sort of drastic and dramatic regularity they displayed while scaling those incredible highs, we realised not only that a once great team was now barely competent but also that the days when a single team dominated world cricket are all but over.

Although the Sri Lankan cricketers may demur and justifiably, what with the team never getting the share of test cricket it deserves, I firmly believe that England, South Africa and India are the top teams going around now and will be for a while. I am obviously restricting my view to test cricket for every other form of the game, including the upcoming ODI world cup which is likely to be a pointless ritual of batting practice with scorecards that might rival Manhattan intended to test who gets to snooze first on the ground, seems to be a mundane overdose.

If you ask me which among the three teams is the best, I would say the following: India (and it does not take great shakes to say so because they are ranked number one and have not lost a test series for a while and because I am an Indian); South Africa (purely based on the unbelievable bowling strength they have and a solid, if slightly nervous, batting line up) and England (for being arguably the most consistent team in the circuit).

Hair-splitting apart, I think England has an edge (don’t look at me like that for saying it, but the days when “edge” would have definitively referred to an English middle-order man’s bat are behind us!) simply because there is variety in the bowling department, doggedness and flourish with the bat, a gritty wicket-keeper batsman in Matt Prior and a coach who knows a thing or two more than others about wading through difficult water. Their bench strength is fabulous as well and all the mentioned pluses came together at different points in the Ashes where England played as single-mindedly and clinically as I have seen any team play in recent memory. Admittedly, the English dominance appeared exaggerated because of Australia’s at times painful – for the fan – otherwise wan struggle in choosing between explosion and implosion on the pitch, and some inexplicable selection bloopers off it which made one wonder at times whether the board in charge was the ACB or PCB. Owing to Australia’s mediocrity, I believe that the edge England has over India and South Africa is slight. Thankfully for them England understand that winning the Ashes in Australia is just the sort of prelude, albeit historical, to better things and not an end-all.

Among South Africa and India, South Africa is likely to have less worries; any team with an evidently ever-in-form – sometimes pretending-to-be-out-of-practice – Jacques Kallis and Dale Steyn is not bound to have too many headaches. But even apart from these too big names, who once again drilled their presence over the Indian team in the recently concluded series, the South Africans will be in good cheer. Although Kallis and Tendulkar had a stupendous 2010, made even more memorable by their age and longevity, Hashim Amla was for me the batsman of 2010. He scored runs everywhere, against all attacks and at first-drop, a tricky and challenging position to bat and one owned by greats such as Bradman, Ponting, Sangakkara and others: his three hundreds in the two test series against India in India last year with the twin hundreds Eden Gardens may be mistaken for the stuff of a marathon man than a simple shy Moslem from Natal. Smith and Petersen have formed a decent partnership upstairs; AB De Viliers scored South Africa’s best test score recently and is by no means old; and Mark Boucher’s return to form with the bat ticks most boxes for the Proteas.

The Indians on the other hand have more forebodings than their stoical skipper would care to admit: for me, the greatest of them is the over-reliance on Zaheer Khan which was abundantly on evidence during his absence in the first test at Centurion where the Indians bowled without heart, inspiration, swing or bowling commonsense. While Khan’s record of injuries is itself a source of concern and frustration for him and those around him, the team clearly needs a second spearhead. Harbhajan’s 7-120 at Newlands is a relief but I hope it spurs him on to be the leader of the attack in home conditions and a potent ally to quick men abroad. But the concern is, as it has always been in India, in the fast bowling department: for all that was said about him, Sreesanth was brilliant in South Africa but all with due respect I do not see his head being made for leading an attack. Ishant Sharma was disappointing to say the least and although the young man has time I hope, for his sake and the country’s, that he does not become another case of an Indian quick in the “what-might-have-been” category than the “what-is”.

From the batting perspective, some major surgeries are required: old age is India’s biggest problem and because it is an all-or-nothing issue piecemeal solutions will not thankfully last. At 37 Tendulkar had his best year in the decade, and while it is cause for celebrating the Master all over again it is also cause for concern. Dhoni said that “comebacks” are the stuff of this team but great teams do not put themselves in a backs-to-the-wall scenario three times in four tests. Each of those times, and once with an injury, it was Laxman who had to bail India out. Having a single bogeyman for all occasions does not augur well in a team sport. Despite his 192 and his palpable attempts to fight it out in South Africa, Dravid would know he had an ordinary year and that his records in South Africa and Sri Lanka, like Ponting’s and Warne’s averages an India and Sampras’ record at the French Open, would remain a blot: if it is not time to go yet, at least it is time for him to drop down the order. It is too early to judge Pujara or Raina but their ascent is going to be difficult. The only settled thing about this team is the opening pair, with Murali Vijay waiting in the wings with strong intermittent performances as well. Despite that little consolation, India may be headed half-way to the sort of place the Australian batting place was in during the Ashes – and rest assured, it will not be a good place to be.

Apparently, India play tests in four more continents this year, including Europe, America and Australia. For this team, or at least its three elderly statesmen, this represents the best chance to win matches in a row in varied conditions and show that there is more to the No. 1 ranking than ICC’s method, which with reference to most things (apart from perhaps the UDRS), borders on madness. I do not know about South Africa and England’s schedules but one can be sure that they will be at India’s heels, chipping away.

Barring the four intolerable months that will be spent in the sub-continent in determining the best team in the world in 50 over cricket and then the best Indian-by-name-but-international-by-names team in IPL, under conditions that might make dry bread look more appetising than it ever was, the year promises fascinating cricket for the purists. And something tells me that India, South Africa and England will not remain as close this time next year. If they do, they will have played some unbelievable test cricket which will of course be brilliant for test cricket and for fans of test cricket like me who want it do far more than just survive as a residue of the game's glorious evolution.

A Tasmanian Titan: Ricky Ponting!

Inspiration is often derived from leaders. But to construe inspiring as an objective of leading is to miss the point. And it is precisely in this context that followers of Australian cricket probably put Steve Waugh in the list of its greatest and finest captains even as Ricky Ponting is given his due grudgingly especially by followers of the Australian team outside of Australia. Those who compare Waugh’s tough but honest ways and Ponting’s victory-at-all-costs approach put the New South Welshman in the “fair” category and Ponting in the “unfair” category.

Ask any Indian, and he will swear by the senior Waugh twin’s name just as he will swear against Ponting. Sydneygate is just one of those nasty sporting episodes that went too far and any skipper would have been made to look like a goose: that Ponting refused to back down made him appear more so. Ponting (and in his company others) might have been wrong as South – and they have never claimed to be saints – but to fail to give the little Tasmanian his due wholeheartedly using the fairness argument seems to be a subversion of fairness. Indeed, this author believes firmly in fair play himself and can possibly never love Ponting. One should not however forget that sport owes its remarkable richness to the variegations of its characters.

And discounting the rise of Ponting from being Tasmania’s blessed but notorious prodigal son to the leader of the finest one-day and test teams in Australian cricket history is to miss an important chapter in all cricketing history. Every great has had a failing: Tendulkar’s has been, till recently, his inability to complete matches; Lara’s reportedly was selfishness; Bradman missed the immortal 100 as average by 0.6 but he missed it all right; Ponting’s crime evidently is that he has been ruthlessly single-minded in charge of world beaters who shared the vision with fixity. And it is a better crime than having a soft underbelly like some Indian teams of the past.

When Ponting broke through with 96 about fifteen years ago at the WACA against Pakistan, he was already touted to be one of Australia’s future greats. But not every young genius deals with early accolades with the shoulders of a giant like Tendulkar did. One of the reasons why the Indian Little Master is revered the world over has to do with the poise with which he has kept the extra-cricket elements he has received through cricket away from his game, thereby being wedded to it and it shows in his staggering consistency. Lara’s career which concurred with a period of petty politicking in Windies cricket that ultimately affected the players, however, swung between the sublime and the subterranean, often within the same series. Ponting’s issues were off the field. Alcohol is no alien to a Punter nicknamed so on purpose and did its job; the Australian skipper, I still remember, even got a black eye once. But rather than dilly-dallying like Jesse Ryder, the New Zealand left-hander who has himself dealt with issues relating to alcohol lately, Ponting came out, confessed his vulnerability, worked his way out of it, married a lawyer and took charge of his life. And as the new millennium arrived, Ponting’s fitness in the field and hunger for runs were already eliciting comparisons respectively with Jonty Rhodes and contemporary Herschelle Gibbs and Lara and Tendulkar. Some would die to be compared with the likes of those for just a day; Ponting has managed to keep the comparisons going, often rising about them, for a better part of his tremendous career.

His fiasco against the Turbunator in the epoch-making 2001 series in India, a place where he has not set the scores ringing, was an aberration and he made up taking toll of bowling attacks round the world making big runs when Australia needed it the most. Arch-foes England met a new Ashes champion, one who would by the play of irony be the first captain to concede the Ashes (possibly thrice) in several years, and had no responses but nor did the Indians. To sum up the World Cup 2003 finals was a no-brainer: Ponting (who was already skipper of the one-day team) launched a blitz that left India clueless. Harbhajan Singh was particularly mauled and revenge was sweet. And though India drew the historical Steve Waugh farewell series later in the year, Ponting was thick with runs becoming the first Australian since Bradman to score consecutive double hundreds.

Through the rest of the decade, leading upto 2008 Ponting played many other stellar innings besides pouching catches – at gully, the slips, point, and just about anywhere – he was not supposed to take and hitting the stumps with staggering consistency. The need to review Ponting’s runs assumes significance because it is said that a leader is only as good as his team. Half a Ponting would still have led Australia to the 2007 Ashes whitewash, the 2003 and 2007 World Cup wins or a number of other triumphs which I forget because of the consistency with which victories came for the Australian juggernaut. Messieurs Warne, Hayden, Langer, Martyn, McGrath and Gilchrist are not names that need to be led. But Ponting still towered in a team of greats by being the team’s best batsmen. That he scored his runs at number 3, played only in fourth gear and was still prolific meant that Ponting was the opposition’s most prized wicket, the noughties’ highest run scorer and world’s most prolific number 3 in terms of runs and second only to Bradman in averages.

And now the great run machine is on the wane; or perhaps as the soothsayers, naysayers and associates say, he has waned. It is hard to blame the factions from which those whispers come: after all, they have high-credentialled names like Ian Chappell. Grapevine and the media, and it is difficult to fathom whether they are different these days, say that Ponting may call time if they strip him of the captaincy. Ponting has an ego the size of the international batting colossus he has built but the problem is that the ego was fed by the very runs that fortified it.

The colossus sadly does not seem like Work in Progress anymore. Its construction struck everyone with awe and may soon stand “completed” for everyone to stand and judge. Ponting as the world and its uncle knows has never been a master strategist as a captain and his lack of runs have therefore been doubly accentuated. Unlike India where Dravid, another fabulous number three who seems to be going nowhere with his mind or runs, has managed to hold onto the wreckage, Australia will not give a magnanimous rope and Ponting who has emerged from and lived with the hardnosed system will know it better than most.

That his runs have reduced to drips when the rest of the batting line-up, barring to some extent Hussey senior, Haddin and Shane Watson, too is in introspection mode has made Ponting’s insipid run-scoring phase seem balder for not long ago did Ponting score those fine fighting half-centuries in India or the brisk 50-odd in the second innings of the first Ashes test at Brisbane. With Ponting staring at the third Ashes defeat as a captain and the first at home – and Ashes Echoes has it that neither is simply another dubious distinction to be forgotten with time like King Pairs or having a Chris Martin batting average –, the drought seems even more cruel especially as Ponting’s young opposite number keeps Trotting along, almost making it seem like the Aussie bowling is a feast for him. But such is the irony and ire that sport is ordained. To not await the destiny and deal closure speaks of prudence; to stay on, linger and change it is fortune that a few – like Tendulkar or Muralidharan – are blessed with; for the rest, the ending is grey and dragged out, a nostalgic reproduction of glimpses of a golden age rather than the spontaneous sunshine of fluency.

Only the most absurd optimist or skewed mystics who can make rains can prevent England retaining the urn at the end of the Boxing Day test. Even if that happens, there is no assurance Australia will win at Sydney; Perth last week already seems like a hyperbolic fluke and a rude joke played on the Australians. To cut it short, Ponting’s undeniably superb legacy as a captain is all but lost: he will be remembered not as the guy who supervised a 5-0 Ashes whitewash of England but as the man who lost the campaign thrice not least because the human memory is fickle and remembers only the most recent tidings. But Ponting’s batting legacy should not be lost in a heist of commonsense or bitterness. Whether the Sydney test is Ponting’s finale or the beginning of the end only time and selectors can tell.

Eventually, Ponting’s end will come. Steve Waugh once said that Ponting would overtake Tendulkar’s hundreds. To even spare a thought to that prediction evokes titters or tears now – as the case may be – but Waugh would not have foreseen either Tendulkar’s incredible second wind or Ponting’s simultaneous autumn. And armed with a technique that could charitably be described as grotesque, Ponting would not find his place in the list of the game’s graceful greats either. We have spoken enough of his charred legacy as a skipper and his lack of popularity as a player. All the same, Ricky Ponting’s cricket at its peak was aggressive, forthright and single-minded, qualities which characterise the Australian landscape. He may not be missed in due course even by the Australian team for dispensability is taken too literally in sport. And irrespective of when the sun sets over Ponting’s extraordinary career, the little Tasmanian’s membership in the company of the world’s greatest batsmen is a formality now as it has been for some years. Gainsaying his greatness – with or without a #Pontingface – would amount to the gainsayer’s being diagnosed with cricket’s own strain of partial amnesia.

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!