Desicritics Author: Kartikeya

Sporting Bindra, Unsporting India

Kartikeya — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:41:12 EDT

Abhinav Bindra gave an interview after his winning effort at the Beijing Olympics, in which he basically underlined the fact that the Olympic medal was just one moment in his life, and that in his sport, the difference between winning and losing is so miniscule, that some luck is inevitable to success.

I think it is an important and non-trivial distinction between wanting to be better at something relentlessly, and wanting to be an Olympic champion. The former is an aspiration, the latter is a reward.

The overwhelming narrative about Abhinav Bindra has focused on his ambition and his success against the odds (tremors, a tampered gun). This narrative misses the point and in constructing a bollywoodesque hero myth, does Bindra serious injustice.

The whole point of Abhinav Bindra's success, as revealed in his interview, is that he wants to be the best shooter that he can be - that he's obsessively interested in training and working hard, enjoys the tough training regimens and has basically committed his life to his sport. The Olympic Medal or the World Championship Medal (both of which he has won now) are merely the biggest prizes on the way.

This is not unique to Bindra.

There is a difference between focusing on a given contest when it is at hand and bringing the entire might of one's powers to it, and aiming for it obsessively — coveting the prize. The point of being a sportsman is not being an Olympic champion. The point is to be the best sportsman you can be. Because we don't seem to understand that, we are unable to respect those athletes who have qualified for the Olympics but may not come away with podium finishes.

I have read more than one news article in the last couple of days which says something to the effect that "Indian athletes have a habit of not performing when it matters". That is not only rude, it is also hopelessly misguided.

There is a whole other aspect of this issue which has been written about ad nauseum, and Dileep Premachandran has this version of it. It refers to unprofessionally run Sports Associations which makes a complete pigs breakfast of managing and helping athletes compete at the international level.That is a bureaucratic problem, and as such is not too difficult to solve.

What is far more important, as Rajaraman points out, is our view of sport and sporting ambition. Cricketers who wake up in the morning in distant suburbs in Bombay and make their way to dawn training sessions on the maidans in town don't do it thinking about playing for India at every stage. They do it because they love playing the sport.

What does this mean? It means that there is inherent value associated with participating in sport — serious, organized sport — that contributes to the sport as well as to the sportsman. School cricket is competitive in Bombay and children who are serious about cricket move to better cricket schools, in order to pursue better cricket. A very famous cricketer once moved from IES English in Bandra to Shardashram Vidyamandir in Dadar in the mid-eighties, so that he would be able to play cricket. A illustrious friend of his travelled 50 kilometers a day to study at the same school so that he could play good cricket as well. Both went on the perform well for Bombay and India.

They did this not because they were driven by the ambition to play for India, but because they were interested more immediately in playing cricket, and in being as good at it as they could be.

Gold and Cash

We have to stop this medieval, feudal practice of showering winners with gold and cash, for it reveals a very poor attitude towards the sport.

All these agencies, which have been falling over each other to announce cash awards to Bindra (these awards range from the absurd to the downright silly), should stop and think about the other Indian athletes at the Olympics. Instead of giving the money to Bindra, they ought to contribute it to a corpus of some sort which athletes can dip into if they want to go somewhere to train or buy expensive equipment.

Bindra's Wikipedia page provides a summary of the awards he has won:

"Bindra was rewarded by various Indian state governments and private organizations for his achievements. These include the state governments of Punjab - Rs 10 million (approx. US $250,000), Harayana - Rs 2.5 million, Maharashtra - Rs 1 million, Karnataka - Rs 1 million, Tamil Nadu - Rs 0.5 million, Madhya Pradesh - Rs 0.5 million and Chattisgarh - Rs 0.5 million."

The Wikipedia page also highlights free life-long railway and airline passes from Indian Railways and Spicejet Airways, respectively.

The states of Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh have absolutely no connection with Bindra. Neither does Amitabh Bachchan. Bachchan has, in fact, gone one step further, by drawing attention to his silly World Tour in the process.

Everyone wants a piece of Bindra right now. Nobody really cares about the other Indian athletes at the Olympics, neither is anyone really interested in the sport that Bindra competes in. I'm pretty sure that none of the luminaries in question will be able to write or speak one coherent paragraph about the sport of shooting.

Misguided Souls

In short, nobody really cares about sport. Everybody cares about the winner. In doing so, they contribute nothing to the sport - indeed they undermine it at every turn. They are no different from those misguided souls who burnt effigies of Indian cricketers after the world cup. To them, as to those vandals, sport is merely a site of prestige - it has nothing to do with joy or skill or excellence.

The bureaucracy, associations, etc. etc. are all secondary issues. There is a reason why cricket is a thriving sport in India - because it is played on the streets, by middle-class kids with proper bats and balls, and by poor kids with makeshift stumps and handmade balls. Because interest in cricket goes above and beyond India winning or losing. Because Ranji Trophy cricketers can make a living playing domestic cricket in India today. In such an atmosphere, it was a matter of time before India's bare fast-bowling cupboard filled up.

The BCCI manages cricket quite well, but cricket thrives in India because it thrives in communities. That's where other sports have to gain a footing. Otherwise, all we will have is parasites like Amitabh Bachchan clinging on to Abhinav Bindra's gold medal-wearing back.

Elliot-Sidebottom and Sporting Character

Kartikeya — Wed, 2 Jul 2008 13:05:49 EDT

Gideon Haigh writes about the recent Elliot-Sidebottom episode during the England-New Zealand ODI series, where the bowler Ryan Sidebottom crashed into the batsman Grant Elliot, bringing him down mid-pitch, after which the English fielders executed the run-out and Paul Collingwood claimed it, resulting in Elliot's dismissal, and judging by Haigh's article, a sense of queasy unease. After all, this is the England Captain we are talking about, not the Australian captain or the Indian captain, or even the West Indian captain. Here is the video of the event. Note the commentary - Nasser Hussein and Ian Smith (i think its Ian Smith, though if it were Martin Crowe, it would be even more entertaining)

There is little or no truth to Haigh's claim that "New Zealand's Grant Elliott sets off, stops, restarts, then is inhibited from running wider by his on-rushing partner, and pushed perforce into Ryan Sidebottom's path." The non-striker, judging by the video above, was admirably blameless, and merely sought the shortest route to the batting end - straight down from his starting position at the non-strikers end (Sidebottom bowled left-arm-over).

What was actually happening, was that the striker Elliot, was trying to run between the bowler and the ball in order to reach his usual inside line while taking a run (between the non-striker's line and that of the wicket). As Haigh writes in his article, it has usually been accepted that the batsmen have the right of way, as long as they don't actively impede the fielding side. Batsmen have stretched this privilege over the years (there was the notable incident with Shoaib Malik making a strikingly wide turn on one occasion, inadvertently impeding Zaheer Khan).

Interestingly enough, Law 37 states that "Either batsman is out Obstructing the field if he willfully obstructs or distracts the opposing side by word or action." The Run-Out Law (Law 38), stipulates that "Either batsman is out Run out, except as in 2 below, if at any time while the ball is in play (i) he is out of his ground and (ii) his wicket is fairly put down by the opposing side.

The operative word there being "fairly". It is debatable whether England put the wicket at the non-strikers end down fairly. I should say at the outset though, that i don't think either Sidebottom or Elliot meant to run into each other. In fact, if anything, it is likely that Elliot was running in a line between the bowler and the ball. As Haigh points out, this is in accordance with convention, which in this instance happens to be at odds with the law (The line Elliot takes would fall squarely within the purview of Law 37, if interpreted harshly). It should also be clear, that the Umpires, and Collingwood acted within the letter of the Law.

But the whole thing looks so unfair - Grant Elliot, not one of the heavyweights of international cricket, walked away shaking his head, and New Zealand, after winning the game thanks to their last pair were probably thinking about it as poetic justice, and decided not to make a big deal about it. I just wonder what the reaction might have been, had it been say Mathew Hayden who'd been run out in the same manner.

There are two ways of looking at this, and in my view, neither one is morally inferior. The first is to see it Collingwood's way - the collision was not intentional, and therefore the run-out was legitimate. Indeed, a case could be made that Elliot was trying to get in between the fielder (Sidebottom) and the ball as batsman usually do with cheeky runs. The other, is to say that Collingwood should have withdrawn the appeal, because, intentional or not, the collision meant that the batsman did not have a fair opportunity to make his ground. I guess the second option would have been the more gentlemanly option, and indeed, in an amateur game, it might have been the norm. Collingwood though behaved professionally, because no law had been transgressed.

In the long run, the Spirit of the Game, as it is written in the preamble to the Laws of Cricket, is best seen as an additional bulwark against blatant transgressions of written Law, but not of accepted custom. So if Kevin Pietersen's switch-hit explicitly illegal? As the law is written, it is not. Is it against the spirit of the game? Most definitely not. What is undeniably is, is something which has punch a big gaping hole through a number of crucial laws (wides, fielding position restriction, LBW just to name three), which were written with a side-on game in mind.

Collingwood's decision to claim the run-out, is another such example, even though he has not identified any loophole. What it does bring to light is the whole question of right of way when the ball is in play. Should Cricket burden the Umpires more explicitly in the matter and have them rule "dead-ball" in the event of any inadvertent collision? This is not as simple as you might think, for it could introduce into cricket a whole new dimension, a bit like "diving" in football. On the other hand, maybe we should just say that since it is acceptable for batsmen to run between the fielder and the stumps, or between the fielder and the ball (as Elliot did), they ought to take their chances with the odd collision and live with the consequences.

In any event, it is difficult to judge which choice is more or less moral in this case. Haigh's article is a different matter though, and his attempt to compare India's vote on the Zimbabwe situation to Collingwood's decision to claim the run-out (the former appears to be rock-bottom in the morality stakes in Haigh's view) is a sneaky, inaccurate and somewhat flippant reference to what is a fairly serious issue. I don't know if the issue interests him enough, but if he chooses to devote an entire article to the subject, dealing specifically the connection between the internal workings of Cricket boards and the relationship of this to a decision by the ICC to kick them out (by this count, should the ICC have kicked Pakistan out at some point during the past 8 years or so?, or at some point in the early to mid-eighties)?

It is strange, somewhat unfair article from Gideon Haigh, about a hard but ultimately fair decision by Paul Collingwood.

Switch-Hits and Misguided Motives

Kartikeya — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 07:01:38 EDT

Cricinfo reports today that the MCC has approved Kevin Pietersen's so-called "switch-hit" reverse slog for six which drew so much attention this week, because it raised several interesting problems within the existing Laws of the game. This is not the first time Pietersen has used this stroke. Indeed, he has been playing the stroke for over a year now, and i wrote about the problems this raises on this blog on May 20, 2007. That post has drawn a number of hits over the past couple of days, yet the most interesting thing is that nothing that the MCC has said addresses any of the problems raised in that post (Laws wise) which arise as a result of Pietersen's switch hit.

The cricinfo story does acknowledge problems with the LBW Law, which one would think is a fairly fundamental, consequential alteration (the Law was modified only once in the 20th century as far as i know). What is troubling though, is that if one went purely by the quotes offered in the Cricinfo story, then the MCC was swayed by Pietersen's skilfull execution of the innovative stoke, than by legal considerations, which is precisely the sort of thing that the law making body should have discounted in their considerations. Pietersen's innovation is different from the modification of the bowling law, because in the case of the bowling law, new technology brought new information to light and thus rendered the old position untenable. The response to the new information in terms of the new Law is problematic, but at least it was based on serious information.

This is the gist of the MCC's response -

The committee concluded that the "superb execution" of the stroke should not disguise its difficulty. "It incurs a great deal of risk for the batsman. It also offers bowlers a good chance of taking a wicket and therefore MCC believes that the shot is fair to both batsman and bowlers."

This risk argument is not relevant the question at hand. This is because as the Law currently stands, it is precisely because the risk of the LBW is mitigated with balls pitching outside leg-stump that Pietersen and co. can attempt the stroke with impunity - with almost no risk of dismissal.

The tone of the MCC's argument begs the question - what if it was some batsman other than Pietersen playing the stroke? Would they have responded in a similar way? Given all the hoopla in England about ball-tampering with Wasim and Waqar and reverse-swing and the horror with which that innovation was viewed, this is a question worth asking. But it is also a question which is unlikely to ever be answered satisfactorily, so lets set it aside.

It might be more useful to ask - why not allow bowlers to tamper with the ball (they are already allowed to apply spit and/or sweat on the ball, and are also allowed to shine the ball - both actions involve manipulating the condition of the ball), if the switch-hit (which cause huge problems from the point of view of existing Law) is to be allowed simply because it is a fine innovation?

The switch-hit ruling is a slippery slope. Here's why. Lets consider a situation, where the law has been changed - that switching hands (i.e turning from a top right hand to a top left hand), opens up the possibility of the LBW for the left arm spinner (for example) bowling over the wicket, into the rough at the right handed batsman. Now consider a situation where you have a right handed batsmen facing a really good medium-fast bowler, bowling over the wicket. A 7-2 field is in operation and the bowler is aiming to keep it tight outside offstump, and try the occasional off cutter to see if an LBW is possible. What is to stop a batsman in such an event, from switching hands on the bat handle, every time he shoulder's arms? This way, he would never be out LBW even if he was padding up to an off-cutter coming back into the stumps after pitching outside off stump, because the "switch" would be in operation.

So the switch-hits brings with it two very bad options - one, where the batsman is able to counter bowling into the rough outside his leg-stump and effectively sweep without the risk of the LBW, or it could create an opportunity for a batsman (an anti-Pietersen, if the MCC would like) to completely negate the contest between bat and ball as it stands today. Either ways, allowing the switch-hit skews the contest further in favor of the batsman.

All this arises from the misguided (in my view) notion that fours and sixes are what entertain people. Every significant rule change in the modern era has been in favor of the batsman - the rule limiting bouncers, the front foot no-ball rule, the rule with regard to over-rates, ball-tampering rules. Some of these are admittedly good rules, others are problematic. The only rule change in the modern era which can be said to have been to the bowlers benefit is the new bowling law, and this law has in my view been a disaster. The response, given new information has involved defining what is legal, instead of further refining a description of the what is illegal as far as the bowling action is concerned. The old law explicitly described the illegal delivery. The new bowling law, while it has accomodated Shoaib Akthar, Mutthiah Muralitharan and a host of other bowlers, has made Cricket more rancorous and more uncertain.

This switch-hit rule promises to do the same.

IPL, Cricket and Corporate Efficiency

Kartikeya — Tue, 13 May 2008 00:23:26 EDT

Charu Sharma was fired by owner Vijay Mallya as the CEO of the ridiculously named Bangalore Royal Challengers franchise in the Indian Premier League. Yet, the most bizarre part of this story, if you actually think about it, is that Charu Sharma was hired as "CEO" in the first place! The ever reliable Wikipedia encyclopedia describes Mr. Sharma as "an Indian cricket commentator, cricket administrator and quizzer". I suspect that the "cricket administrator" bit comes from Sharma's stint at the Bangalore Royal Challengers.

Charu Sharma has been a fixture during Cricket broadcasts (when the players take a break), goading inarticulate experts (former players) with provocative suggestions and liberal references to shame, spines (lack of) and guts, unless of course he has Miss Noodle Straps for company. This was the case during most of the 2003 World Cup, and with his looks and her brains, they proceeded to reinvent the old English game with all the imagination of a Bollywood B-movie script writer (Ok .. maybe B movie scriptwriters don't deserve this comparison).

Among Mr. Sharma's salient efforts as CEO of the Royal Challengers is this comment about cheerleaders:

The whole controversy is irrelevant. Frankly speaking, it is a trivial issue and doesn't deserve the attention it is getting. All those creating such a big ruckus are looking for publicity and the least we can do is not to allow them to get away with it

"the least we can do is not to allow them to get away with it" - if you can make sense of that statement, then you deserve to be in the Civil Service. I suspect (in all humility), that Mr. Sharma started off trying to point out that the whole issue with cheerleading was much ado about nothing. The latter portion of his quote suggests that inaction would be a bad idea. Now, this in itself, if one chose to be pedantic is not implausible. Of course, cheer leaders perform public service and have nothing to do with publicity. And Mr. Sharma making public comments about the so called "detractors" gives them less publicity, not more. So, Mr. Sharma in effect suggested that people who were uncomfortable with the fact that he had hired cheerleaders for publicity purposes in a public arena, were in fact, merely seeking publicity (my aunts don't think its a good idea, and they want no publicity).

It gets funnier. When the grand divorce finally happened, the Bangalore franchise tried to put a kind spin on Mr. Sharma's departure, suggesting he left on his own. It would have meant lesser publicity for all concerned. But what does Mr. Sharma do? He comes out in righteous anger to correct his former employer, and explains precisely what happened - "I was summarily dismissed". Publicity anyone?

While many commentators, like Sharda Ugra, have discussed this episode, nobody has actually questioned why the glib tongued Mr. Sharma was hired as CEO in the first place. For years and years now, the BCCI has been consistently pilloried for being "unprofessional" and "amateurish" (these are some of the less offensive terms), because it is run by elected officials who are not necessarily joined at the hip with Cricket. Ms. Ugra observes :

"The free market hawks will interpret the Sharma sacking as the advent of a new ruthlessness and accountability that cricket lacked"

The more interesting and more consequential question i believe is whether Shah Rukh Khan or Priety Zinta or Mukesh Ambani or Vijay Mallya or anybody else is any more qualified than Mr. Pawar to be at the helm of Cricket. At least Mr. Pawar is accountable to Cricket community in India by way of elections and a board. The same free market hawks that Ms. Ugra refers to have long decried the influence of the likes of Mr. Pawar on the BCCI. But this is business now. So what if the owner knows little or nothing about cricket, as Mr. Mallya himself admits, albeit as a way of explaining why he had to throw his CEO under the bus. It's useful to note here that the public pronouncements from all parties in the wake of firing put even Mr. Lele's worst efforts to shame.

So, at the end of the day, Mr. Sharma getting sacked as CEO of the Bangalore Royal Challengers, is about as ridiculous as him getting hired as CEO of the Bangalore Royal Challengers. Which in turn is about as ridiculous as Mr. Vijay Mallya owning a Cricket team, and then making hiring and firing decisions while explaining that he knows nothing about cricket.

Any publicity is good publicity for Charu Sharma, Mr. Mallya and for the IPL. The whole thing is a show anyways. Just like the WWE.

SlapGate, Suspensions, Referees, and Code

Kartikeya — Fri, 2 May 2008 13:58:21 EDT

They are falling like nine pins. Players are getting banned, suspended and fined. They're blaming each other for using delaying tactics (in a 20 over game). Sachin Tendulkar meanwhile is still injured (and is being spared all this nonsense).

It emerged in the midst of SlapGate, that even though the IPL had all the trimmings - on field umpires, third umpires, fourth umpires and match referees, they didn't actually have a code for the referees to enforce. The garrulous Farrokh Engineer eventually used the ICC Code of Conduct in his ruling on SlapGate. It now appears that the IPL has appropriated the ICC's Code of Conduct for Players and Officials and further extended it beyond the ICC's wildest dreams. What we have, is the first ever instance of a referee suspending an umpire in a game of cricket! Farrokh Engineer has suspended the on-field umpire Pratap Kumar for heeding Sourav Ganguly's request to refer a disputed catch to the third umpire.

It began with this incident involving Shane Warne and Sourav Ganguly. Warne's side claimed a catch against Ganguly. Ganguly wasn't sure if it was clean, and didn't leave the wicket. The fielding side was convinced that it was clean, as was the square leg umpire (Rudi Koertzen, no less!). It all rested with the umpire at the bowler's end who needed to be convinced that the watch was clean. Now, if the umpire at the bowlers end was convinced that it was clean, he should have given the batsman Out. Usually, if the umpire at the bowler's end has been unsighted, he will take the word of the umpire at square leg. In any event, Ganguly requested that a referral be made (which he ought not to have done), and a referral was made.

So far so good. Farrokh Engineer has effectively ruled that Pratap Kumar went against his own better judgement and was influenced by Sourav Ganguly's request in making the referral. Is it really possible to prove that sort of thing? Also, if it is infact proved, is a suspension enough? Shouldn't Pratap Kumar get kicked out?

In any event, the most breathtaking thing here is that the Umpire has been dragged by the match referee into the fray, along with the players. This is unprecedented ground - where a referee sits in judgement of an umpire. Given Engineer's decision, why should he not suspend an umpire if a couple of LBW's are given wrongly, especially if in both cases, you have the batsman showing his bat to the umpire as the appeal was in progress (indicating an inside edge)? The whole premise of the Umpire, is that they are above the fray. They are not in competition with the players, and hence cannot be judged alongside the players. Referee Engineer has done just that.

Shane Warne's suggestion that Ganguly asked the Indian umpire to make the referral (as reported by Cricinfo), is dragging the whole matter down further into a charge of favoritism. Since the catch was taken by Graeme Smith, and the square leg umpire was Rudi Koertzen, why would a similar charge of favoritism not apply when considering the case of the square leg umpire immediately ruling that the catch was clean? This is especially interesting given that the third umpire, Asad Rauf eventually ruled in favor of the batsman, against Rudi Koertzen. With Farrokh Engineer enforcing his adopted British voice in the matter, what we seem to have is a perfect commonwealth brouhaha.

Of course, all these charges of parochialism are absurd, but that is what this seems to have descended into. The whole thing seems to closely resemble World Wrestling Entertainment, which resides deep in the bowels of Cable TV, with its make believe umpires and contests. The convenient application of the ICC's Code of Conduct to grant an element of seriousness to proceedings, coupled with the complete moral and logical relativism which marks Farrokh Engineer's treatment of the umpire, is just one more signal that the IPL is not serious about Cricket.

Protests and Sport

Kartikeya — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 07:56:26 EDT

Major sporting occasions are high visibility showcases, and naturally invite attention from most interested agencies. International sport has always been fertile ground for political protest and dissent from Jesse Owens in 1936, to the Black Power salutes in the Mexico Olympics of 1968, to the current protests in cities around the world in support of Tibet in the lead up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

International Cricket has had its share of protests. India playing Cricket with Pakistan has always been a touchy political issue, both from the point of view of refraining from playing, and from the point of view of using a series as a political statement (the Friendship Series in 2004). Australia and the West Indies did not play in Sri Lanka in the 1996 World Cup, for security reasons. A combined team from India and Pakistan played an exhibition ODI against Arjuna Ranatunga's Sri Lankans in response to this. This was at the time when India and Pakistan were not playing bilateral series. The selection of Basil D'Oliviera in the MCC touring party for the Test tour of South Africa in the late 1960's caused the series to the cancelled after the South African government protested D'Oliviera's inclusion. This came to be known as the D'Oliviera Affair and led to South Africa being banned by the ICC until 1992.

The issues are many, and in the significantly less urgent, and less critical arena of popular sentiment, the question invariably seems to be - should politics and sport mix? Colin Cowdrey for example, writing about the D'Oliviera Affair in his autobiography, took the view that they were simply trying to play cricket, and that politics and sport ought not to have been mixed. Many have taken the view in the recent China-Tibet issue, that once the Olympics had been awarded to Beijing, it is incumbent upon the rest of the world to help China make it a success and not let it be disrupted. Richard Gere, Hollywood superstar turned activist, makes the counter argument succinctly. He suggests that the Olympics are China's opportunity to showcase their society and their country, and while the violent clampdown continues in Tibet they ought not to be allowed to produce their show unmolested.

Nasser Hussein wrote feelingly about the Zimbabwe controversy during the 2003 World Cup in his autobiography. In his view, at the time, there was a clear distinction between the British Government making a firm decision that the English team would not play in Zimbabwe, and the British Government merely suggesting that the English team not play in Zimbabwe, and leave the burden of the actual decision on the ECB. What actually happened was the latter with the result that Hussein's England were left in the lurch and lost valuable points through their Zimbabwe boycott.

Clearly, this is a complex issue, and as with most significant, charged issues, emotions run high. I remember being very upset that India's cricketers were being used for public relations purposes by the Indian Government in the hastily arranged 2004 tour to Pakistan - the so called Friendship series. But then again, why should they not be used for public relations purposes? This, as i think about it now, is not as clear cut as it once was. Public protest, as has been the case with the Tibet protests, adds another dimension to the whole thing.

How are the protesters disrupting the tour of the Olympic flame through the cities of the world by trying to extinguish the flame and or impede the bearer of the flame (Sachin Tendulkar is scheduled to be one in Delhi), different from the people who vandalized the Wankhede stadium pitch a few years ago to emphasize their disagreement about Pakistan and India playing cricket? Most of us will doubtless view the pro-Tibet protesters favorably (i do), while many (if not most) of us think that the people who dug up the pitch and poured oil into it to be vandals (i do). How do we reconcile these two things?

Many critical observers will jump at these comparisons, and indeed, this post does offer only an extremely short, extremely superficial and brief view of this complex issue. The Olympic Charter explains why Sport is important and there is little disagreement on this. Protest, in my view, and the principle of offering protest where injustice is observed or percieved, is equally important. If you think about it, Sport and Protest are two arenas which are remarkably similar, for both entail the expression and exposure of character - both are outward expressions (often direct and instinctive) of one's inner most, core being.

Something to think about...... for all of us. A great sportsman like Tendulkar should know better than to carry the Olympic torch when others like Kiran Bedi have refused to do so. We can blame the politics of it all, but the simple point is, that it is our Government, and it is our character which is revealed. We ought not to sacrifice it at the altar of "interest".

On Cricket Commentators

Kartikeya — Thu, 3 Apr 2008 04:37:54 EDT

A very famous Marathi playwright once remarked that the value of anything that is said is determined not by the merit of the statement itself, but by the identity of its author. This is admittedly a pedestrian translation - the original Marathi is masterfully simple and lyrical. I hope you got the gist of it though, for this notion goes to the heart of the automatic legitimacy that "expert" commentators have.

These are usually ex-cricketers. What they say is considered valuable, purely because they bring with them the experience of having played the game.

Cricketer-Commentators have proliferated in recent years, especially since the advent of Cable TV. They come in all shapes and sizes, and represent all points of view. They are joined occasionally by non-cricketers, who must perform subordinate roles. Harsha Bhogle is the most storied of these subordinates and has become a respected voice in his own right. Mandira Bedi brings up the other end of the subordinates spectrum. The point of her noodle-strapped presence is all too obvious. Unlike Mr. Bhogle, she has no claim to being a journalist. But this post is not about these subordinate bit players.

It is about cricketing giants from yesterday posing as narrative giants of today's cricket. They deliver their olympian insights about the heat of battle from the cool confines of specially constructed commentary boxes at the Test Match grounds.

They participate in multi-national commentary teams, purporting to bring to us cricket in its best international flavors. Some of these commentators are truly great former players - Barry Richards and Sunil Gavaskar, to name just a couple. Some others among them have built their own personages anew as commentators. The strokeless wonder that was Siddhu morphs into an elegantly attired, loud, colorful bloviator, specializing in some truly unconventional cliches.

Expert Commentators broadly fall into three categories. These have nothing to do with their playing record. The only area where their playing record might come into play is in the richness and depth of their bag of anecdotes, but you'd would be surprised as to how little impact that has.

The first category is that of the commentator who seems to speak from memory all the time. They sit there in front of the game, watching it with all this amazing technology and statistical know how at their beck and call, and yet, seem stuck in their own narratives, which they repeat endlessly. It is almost as if it is irrelevant what's actually happening of the field. These are the commentators who tend to say the same thing about the same player over and over and over again, game after game, week after week, season after season. They also tend to speak a lot. These commentators seem to think it is their duty to speak ball by ball, producing dull mind-numbing monotony. In short, they show all the signs of being intellectually lazy, and seem plainly bored at having to watch cricket a lot of the time.

The second category is that of the commentator who seems to speak from a limited, but highly personalized database of cliches. Members of this type sound very interesting at first, but invariably end up appearing to be loud, truculent and confrontational. Of the three types of commentators, members of this type are most likely to completely ignore events on the field if they don't appear to support their chosen narrative of that day. Members of this group also tend to think that things were better in their day.

The third category is the most sparsely populated, and consists of commentators who actually watch the Cricket that they are commentating on, and see it before they say something about it. What they say seems to depend on what they see, and so, they tend to say less than their colleagues who belong to the two types described above. Because they bother to look out for what is actually happening, they tend to prognosticate less, and they also tend to find new ways of describing events. They are least likely to resort to cliche. It is not that they don't have a point of view. It is just that they seem to actually follow John Arlott's dictum of explaining the game to the viewer - the actual game in progress that is, not one which lies in the figment of their imagination.

The tragedy of it is, that this third, highly desirable band of cricket commentators are invariably paired with members of the first two tribes during commentary stints. As a result, Ii tend to watch international cricket on mute for the most part.

The White Man's Burden

Kartikeya — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 14:52:02 EDT

The White Man's Burden is a poem written by Rudyard Kipling about the US conquest of the Philippines. Theodore Roosevelt, later to become one of the most celebrated of Presidents of the United States of America called it "rather poor poetry, but a good sense from the expansion point of view". Cricket has long been removed from its colonial, imperialist roots. Ashis Nandy observed that Cricket is "an Indian game, accidentally invented by the British". Now, it appears that Kipling's "white man" is seeking subaltern status.

Christopher Martin Jenkins, writing in the Times laments about the impending appointment of Mr. Bindra as Chief Executive of the International Cricket Council (formerly the Imperial Cricket Conference), soon to be followed by the election of Mr. Pawar as the Chairman of the ICC. Neither of these appointments are foregone conclusions, but both are certainly likely.

CMJ, went to Marlborough, which as Wikipedia informs us was a boys school for a very long time, until the winds of modernity reached its doors and made it co-educational in 1968 (that tumultuous year). Other illustrious alums of Marlborough College include Sir Mark Tully. He was captain of the cricket team at Marlborough, and once made 99 against Rugby School at Lord's. 99's can be life altering experiences (unless you are Sachin Tendulkar, who, true to his middle class roots takes the pragmatic view that a 99 is better than a 19), and i speculate that his experience with a 99 prompted CMJ to fire off a letter to Brian Johnston at Test Match Special on the Marlborough letterhead asking him for instructions about becoming a commentator.

CMJ is clearly concerned by the impending disaster - two Indians running Cricket! There is an essential duplicity in opinion's such as CMJ's, for it is grounded in concerns which essentially boil down to the preservation of the five Test match long Ashes series. England have been regularly hammered in these contests for over 20 years now, with the exception of 2005, as all those MBE's commemorate, and it must be a measure of their desperation to preserve the primacy of the Ashes (especially in the context of the Border-Gavaskar trophy, which has become a series of battles in a long standing war now), that 6 Ashes Tests have been scheduled for the next series. England may yet regret it, for some one like Mathew Hayden may decide that he wants to sign off from Test cricket making 1000 runs in the 6 Test series, but this is besides the point. Why are England interested in preserving the Ashes? This is mainly because it is an extremely popular contest in England and Australia. Many fans in both hemispheres say that even though India - Australia Test Matches have been hard fought in recent times, the Ashes is the most important contest in their view. Thus, the commercial opportunity of the Ashes Tests, couched conveniently in tradition, has been preserved inspite of the Future Tours program being imperiled by it. There is discontent about BCCI doing the same with series against Pakistan, and while it could be argued that BCCI have over done it with a series every 12 months for the last 4 years (2004, 2005, 2006, 2007), the Friendship Series follows much of the same logic as the Ashes series does. (I use the Ashes here as a surrogate for the idea of Anglo-Saxon dominance in Cricket)

The duplicity, is because CMJ's essential point is that Sharad Pawar and Bindra won't really care about Cricket, and that if the clout falls officially into India's hands, then it could change Cricket forever, given India's financial clout, while those in the ECB and CA who care enough about Cricket to preserve the 5 match Ashes series in the FTP may get marginalized. His desperation is apparent from the weakness of his argument, which essentially boils down to - "Bindra should not be ICC Chief Executive, because even though he's capable and has accomplished much in the area of Cricket Administration, there are others who are equally good candidates, and more importantly, he will be joined by Mr. Pawar in two years time at the helm of the ICC". The obvious irony here is that he proposes a former South African "with a successful career in cricket and business" (an obvious reference to Dr. Ali Bacher), or Imtiaz Patel, also South African. The (ethnic) choice which Mr. Patel represents is according to CMJ a "compromise choice"!

The audacity of the argument is breathtaking. In essence, CMJ's point seems to be to beg to be allowed to continue fulfilling his white man's burden. The best reason he can offer to support his case, is that without being allowed to do so, he (i used "he" here to refer to the anglo-saxon clique that CMJ represents) would be divested of his agency as a cricket man - reduced in essence to the status of a subaltern! This loss, i speculate might be embodied in the Ashes being clipped to being a 4 Test series like most other Test series. Of course, England have historically disliked playing the Ashes for less than 5 Tests at a time. Indeed, when the Packer Australian's returned in 1979-80 to challenge England's hollow Ashes victory of 1978-79 (5-1), England refused to play for the Ashes, because the 1979-80 series was scheduled for only 3 Tests. Greg Chappell's Aussies thrashed England 3-0. Dennis Lillee took 23 wickets at 16, and Greg Chappell made 317 runs at 80.

That this rationalization of the Ashes in line with the rest of the cricket world would greatly help the Cricket calender is obvious. Many people criticize the cricket calender, but it is important regulation in my view - an essential balancing instrument between the desire to preserve Test cricket and ensuring commercial success. This theme of threat pervades a lot of CMJ's writing. He has called Twenty20 "a fast Frankenstein of a game", but only in the context of the enormous amounts that it seems to attract. From the purely cricketing point of view, the only comment by CMJ that i found was that "it's not much of a game for bowlers". So, Twenty20 as an innovation was probably Ok, until it began to attract big money - money which Test Cricket could not compete with. Had Twenty20 been a format originating out of India, one can only imagine the kind of scorn it would have attracted.

Just like India have done with Cricket as whole, they have appropriated Twenty20 as a format from England, and the BCCI has turned it into big business. Business which in CMJ's view threatens to disrupt the traditional Cricket calender - incidentally a calender tailor made for England and Australia (the cricket seasons are essentially the English Summer and the Southern Hemisphere Summer). Martin-Jenkins is an influential Cricket writer. He was invited to deliver the Cowdrey Lecture in 2007, where he covered a lot of ground and referred favorably the ECB "pioneering Twenty20". He also referred to the danger of journalist's being conned into "becoming spin machines for Premiership" - a reference to the dominance of the English Premiership coverage at the cost of interesting cricket news.

Isn't it ironic then that Christopher Martin Jenkins is unable to see the dangers of his own spin, and that of many other writers in England and Australia, who seek manufacture "India's arrival", there by feeding the sort of racially charged jingoistic frenzy which gets whipped up in the aftermath of contentious incidents like the recent Sydney Test Match? The enduring story of this Indian summer in Australia has not been the repeated childishness on the field, but the relentless jingoism off it. By building the BCCI up as this marauding tycoon seeking to take over cricket, writers like CMJ feed the prejudices on both sides. It does great disservice to the global game, much more than Twenty20 will ever do (unlike CMJ, i believe there are plenty of things wrong with Twenty20 as a cricket format).

There is no threat to the global game from India. At most, BCCI influence will make it a truly global game. Christopher Martin Jenkins ended his Cowdrey Lecture quoting Shakespeare:

"They are as sick that surfeit with too much, as they that starve with nothing" (The Merchant of Venice)

The problem with the current cricket calender and the current cricket establishment, is that it is surfeit with a deeply pervasive Anglo-Saxon influence, while the problem with the Twenty20, is that it is too little cricket. These are probably two of the greatest concerns in modern day cricket. It is a measure of the limitations of CMJ's anglocentric view, that he is on the wrong side of both these concerns. The great threat to cricket is not that two Indians may run the game, but that relics of the Raj like CMJ will use their enormous influence to discredit such an enterprise.

I certainly hope that more objective Indian observers than myself do not see any wisdom in engaging in a quasi-racist attempt to appoint the other man. It would do Mr. Bacher or Imtiaz Patel great disservice.

India In Australia: ODI Series In Review

Kartikeya — Wed, 5 Mar 2008 02:44:23 EST

In my preview of India's tour of Australia, i speculated that the expectation of Indian cricket fans for this tour was that India would be competitive - that they would give the Australians a run for their money. This was written with the Test series in mind. For the ODI games, the outlook was possibly even more bleak.

India's ODI side was in disarray and the patchwork solutions which Dilip Vengsarkar had to resort to after he became Chairman of Selectors had not worked. It was expected that the selectors would pick a new team, with younger players, and leave aside some of the senior pros. As it happened, they did exactly that.

This week India will return from Australia having lost the Test Series 1-2, and having won the ODI tournament featuring the two World Cup finalists. They beat Sri Lanka 2-1 in their head to head match ups, and they beat Australia 3-2 in head to head match ups. All in all, it was a sterling effort. Captain Dhoni said in his post match conference - "This was very important, because this is the building stage of my team". The one phrase that stood out in that sentence was "my team".

Dhoni has been praised for his captaincy on this tour, and while I do not believe that his captaincy (tactically speaking) was groundbreaking in any way, he seemed to know what was going on, and most importantly, he seemed to have a good grip on what his players could do for him. Every captain needs some good fortune, and Dhoni had that bit of luck in the Twenty20 World Cup Final, when India won inspite of Joginder Sharma bowling a horrendous last over against Pakistan in the Final.

This time around, with the game on the line, Dhoni went with the temperament of Irfan Pathan. It probably helped that Irfan had actually bowled quite decently earlier in the game (two outside edges, and one set of 5 overthrows didn't help his bowling analysis). In fairness, Australia were always behind the clock once they lost Michael Hussey. So the decision to bowl Irfan was not that big a gamble. It was not a case turning a game which was slipping. At no stage did that situation arise yesterday.

Here's where I think the secret of Dhoni's success so far lies in. He has a young team which is able to match the opposition in the field, he has a strike bowler in Ishant who is top class, and he actually has players who can deliver in in different kind of situations. This is a contemporary ODI team, something which a team consisting of Dravid and Ganguly can not be, simply on account of their fielding.

This was in effect what Chappell and Dravid tried to achieve. Their move succeeded at first, but then backfired spectacularly for well known reasons. This is the second attempt at that same project. How well has it succeeded?

Only time will answer that question in its entirety.

However, at this point it is possible to identify a couple of characteristics which distinguish this team from the Team of 2005-06. The only new player to emerge from that line up was Suresh Raina to some extent. The other players were already known entities - Yuvraj, Irfan, Dhoni and Dravid. This generational shift has also been marked by a generational shift in captaincy. I wonder what might have been if Sehwag and not Dravid was offered the captaincy after Ganguly. Rightly or wrongly (i believe rightly), Dravid was offered the leadership mantle.

In this series, atleast two new players have emerged - Ishant Sharma and Rohit Sharma. You could argue that Gautam Gambhir with a century each against Australia and Sri Lanka has matured, and that Praveen Kumar has forced himself into the reckoning amidst India's burgeoning fast bowling bench strength. Robin Uthappa has not been entirely convincing opening the batting, but he will hopefully improve with an extended run in the top slot.

Nothing characterizes the paradigm shift more than Dhoni's decision to drop Virendra Sehwag in favor a 5 bowler strategy. In effect, Dhoni chose Irfan Pathan over Virendra Sehwag, and it is hard to fault his thinking. When playing in India, he may well choose the reverse. It also marks a refreshing shift away from the question of whether a "profile player" like Sehwag can or should be dropped. There are good arguments in favor of persisting with him, not least the fact that he's capable of winning a game in a hurry on his day. Sehwag's ODI batting record does not help him, and as of now he does not fit into India's first eleven, even though there is little doubt about his place in the squad.

The other impressive feature about this generational shift, is that India won the psychological battle against the Aussies. Beginning at Sydney during the Test Match, they chose to hit back and answer every word, without ever performing out of character. None of the Indian players behaved unlike their normal selves. The Australians by contrast were falling over each other to stand up for their mates.

Gilchrist publicly supported Hayden and defended the indefensible weed comment. If Hayden is still " one of the most respected" players in the Aussie dressing room, especially in the light of the weed comment, then something is wrong with the Aussie players sense of right and wrong. Through out this series though, this has been the theme. The Australian claim on borderline behaviour as well as the moral high ground has been jarring. What is more, the Indians have picked it apart at every opportunity, without making any sort of claim for themselves at any stage. Hence Dhoni's matter of fact comment after Ishant was fined - "sledging is an art and we need to learn it".

Being competitive alone is not enough though. There had to be the telling performance with bat and ball. The killer display of skill. For India, these displays came from Ishant Sharma and Praveen Kumar with the ball, and from Sachin Tendulkar with the bat. As badly as Australia's batting performed in the finals, without Tendulkar's batting, India might have found themselves on the wrong side of a 2-0 result today. He shepherded both the batting innings in the finals, after playing the telling innings in the must win game against Sri Lanka.

After a lacklustre ODI series, he finished with 63, 117* and 91. Every time he makes runs of this magnitude, people says the Tendulkar of old is back. They miss the point. This was a calculating Tendulkar. He played strokes that he didn't know how to play 5 years ago. More importantly he did not try to play strokes which he could play 5 years ago. With Praveen Kumar swinging the ball both ways and producing wickets, Ishant was not missed in the finals. Sreesanth had a good day as well. His effort in Australia has been reassuringly understated. Piyush Chawla is technically solid as a bowler, and produced two steady spells with the ball after being thrown in at the deep end in the finals.

Results such as this are important in the life of a team, especially a new team like Dhoni's. If India are to truly transition to their next generation ODI side, they must learn to win without the great man from Bombay. The challenge now lies in developing the new players, while the safety net of the killer skill of Tendulkar is still available.

After the stillborn attempt to force the spring two years ago, lets hope that Dhoni's team emerge as a successful ODI side in the near future. By all evidence, the ingredients are in place.

Purist Entertainment, Twenty20 and Cricket

Kartikeya — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:42:30 EST

Harsha Bhogle casts the debate about IPL as one between the traditionalists and the reformists among cricket watchers. He deftly claims for himself a view on the sidelines of this debate, and yet proceeds to find cause with reformists.

I am unable to get interested in Twenty20 as a cricketing contest. I believe that Test cricket is the supreme cricketing contest, which probably places me squarely amongst the Mr. Bhogle's traditionalists.

I am uncomfortable with this, for i would like to think that i am sympathetic to the aspirations of the BCCI and Cricket in general to approach the same level of financial well being as any of the great European or American professional sports. I like a watching a good slog as much as the next viewer. It is this correlation between Test Cricket and some kind of arcane cricketing orthodoxy or dogma which i find troubling.

A connoisseur is one who is especially competent to pass critical judgments in an art, particularly one of the fine arts, or in matters of taste. Such a person can discern the exquisite from the ordinary, and is often viewed by the unsympathetic as a self-styled arbiter of taste. To illustrate the ultimate stereotype of the "traditionalist" or connoisseur, he or she is one who savours and celebrates a rare cover drive on an afternoon of slow cricket - both the exquisite beauty of the stroke, and the rarity of it.

Mr. Bhogle's central argument seems to be that "good cricket" requires good pitches, proper sized grounds and good coaches running good teams. If these conditions are met, then Mr. Bhogle suggests that cricket will have kept its part of the bargain. The onus will then be on us - the spectators, to reveal whether we actually love cricket and are able to buy into the reformist sentiment embodied by the franchise driven multi-million dollar IPL. The problem with this, is traditionalists by and large agree with Mr. Bhogle's prescription for good cricket. I contend that the distinction between the traditionalist and the reformist is a false one when it comes to this issue of Twenty20.

Twenty20 is a format devised in England, which has been adopted by the ECB to run alongside its regular county championship. The major reason behind its adoption was to compete with Professional football and other sports in the UK. The ECB used Twenty20 to bring attention to county teams. India has no such competition. They have no trouble filling grounds for ODI games or even for Test matches. When India played Australia recently, the Test matches were nearly always played to full houses. It is hardly "reformist" to appropriate the format and use BCCI's present ability to lure in the big bucks, so that Shah Rukh Khan and Vijay Mallya can have some lucrative entertainment.

Instead we have a format where the slog - a daring charge, made by a batsman inspite of a real risk of losing his wicket and the consequences of the loss of that wicket, one which is made in order to deposit the bowler out of the ground, loses all meaning and significance, because there is almost nothing to stop a batsman from charging a bowler every ball.

Twenty20 devalues the wicket, it devalues the slog, and therefore it devalues the contest. The point of the slog, the excitement of the slog comes from what it signifies, not from the number of runs scored. The excitement comes from the statement that is made due to the slog attempt - an insurrection against the imposed will of the bowler - an act of desperation, an attempt to change the balance of the contest - to "break the shackles" as todays commentators like to say. There are no shackles in Twenty20. A lofted six over cover is no more significant than a forward defensive. Twenty20 is the game of reckless charge and counter-charge, with the victor being chance.

Good cricket requires a fair contest between bat and ball. Even with good pitches, proper sized grounds and good coaching (which contribute to the fair contest, but do not guarantee it), Twenty20 would hardly provide that. Bowler friendly pitches are hardly the answer. The contest would then be even more of a lottery, not less.

The Indian Premier League does not represent the "reformists" anymore than I represent the "traditionalists". One can only hope that it represents only a lucrative sidelight, which will not not blind the actual show with its gaudy glare. Meanwhile the actual show - Cricket - goes on.