A busy week in Indian Cricket…..

For those of us who are interested in Cricket, this has been an interesting week. India are playing Pakistan, South Africa host New Zealand and the Australians host Sri Lanka. The old rivalry is a bit muted this time around, largely because India seem to play Pakistan very often. South Africa v New Zealand is one of the more interesting series in Cricket – both sides play a very similar brand of cricket. The difference this time around is that both sides have a quality spinner. Australia have just rattled up 550 against the Sri Lankans on a flat pitch at Brisbane, handing Murali his worst mauling in living memory. India’s pacemen continue their woeful form. This time the beneficiary is Pakistan. Since India won the Test series in England, India’s pacemen have built up the following record:

Zaheer Khan – 15 games, 14 wickets at 53.21, econ. 5.47
R P Singh – 12 games, 16 wickets at 34.75, econ. 5.58
Sreesanth – 4 matches, 9 wickets at 27.11, econ. 6.77
Irfan Pathan – 9 matches, 9 wickets at 42.22, econ. 5.29
Ajit Agarkar – 6 matches, 9 wickets at 40.77, econ. 6.92
Munaf Patel – 3 matches, 6 wickets at 23.83, econ. 6.50

Of the 17 games played, India have won 7. This inspite the fact that the batsmen have done really well – including Uthappa and Gambhir – two newcomers. Will someone please ask Venkatesh Prasad what’s going on?

Anil Kumble has been named Test captain. He’s clearly the second choice. Tendulkar was the first choice. His refusal was expected, except by the Vengsarkar-Tendulkar-Mumbai Lobby conspiracy theorists. We have a strange situation right now – 4 persons have refused/quit the top posts in Indian Cricket this year – Chappell quit, Dravid quit, Tendulkar refused, and Ford refused. Many more candidates whom we know nothing about have probably refused as well. So we end up with a 38 year old leg spinner with another year of cricket in him at the most as Test captain, and a young wicketkeeper-batsman with nothing to lose as the ODI captain. This may even bring great success. I just wonder however – why is it that so many top people think it isn’t worth their while to captain or coach India?

Kumble also becomes India’s first bowler captain in 31 years. This in itself will bring with it many firsts and many interesting issues for those who are interested in them. Spin bowler captains are rare – Benaud, Illingworth, Inthikab Alam, Bishen Bedi, Venkatraghavan and Daniel Vettori come to mind as spin bowler captains. There hasn’t been a single one in World Cricket between Venkatraghavan and Vettori, except for stray games where spin-bowlers have been stand-in skippers. Kumble’s appointment marks a milestone in the spin revival led by his generation of spin bowlers after the barren 80’s. He has been a great bowler, and has the experience of over a hundred tests. He’s probably one of the most respected cricketers in the world at the moment. It will be interesting to see how he handles his side in the field in a Test match. I also wonder whether Kumble will still do the nightwatchman’s role if such a role is required. He may just tell the batsmen to deal with the music themselves!

I only wish that he hadn’t been given the captaincy after Tendulkar had publicly refused it. Not because it will cause any trouble within the team – it won’t, but because he will always be viewed as the second choice. BCCI might have been more tactful – Tendulkar himself might have kept his position to himself until BCCI made the announcement. What makes things even worse was Tendulkar’s comment about the suitability of looking for a younger captain.

Coming back to the ongoing ODI series, we can expect more of the same from India – good batting, rubbish bowling, ordinary fielding. That the selectors have named an unchanged side for ODI’s 3 and 4 suggests the futility of naming a side for just 2 ODI’s in the first place, and also the lack of pace bowling options (since that would be the area where a change would be warranted). India currently possess a group of 6 or 7 pace bowlers who are all equally unpredictable, and are all just short of being good enough to command a regular place in a top international cricket team. If anything, matters have taken a turn for the worse under Venkatesh Prasad – everybody seems to be uniformly inconsistent now, and no single bowler seems to be in good form in any game. I don’t remember the last time an Indian paceman was difficult to score off in an ODI.

All in all, there has been a flurry of activity this week, just like there is in the Civil Service bureaucracy. One should expect a similar maintenance of the status quo as well.

A bolt from The Blue!!!

The man who gave India Test series wins in England and West Indies, a first Test series win against Sri Lanka in 12 years, and managed a tough transition where many of Ganguly’s champions went through the first serious troughs of their careers (Harbhajan, Sehwag, Kaif) and some of the great players showed marked decline (Tendulkar, Ganguly), has decided to quit as India captain. He says he didn’t enjoy the job anymore. Like it happened with Ganguly, the captaincy wore him down. Ganguly let it destroy the batsman in him – Dravid is unwilling to do so. It is the difference between the two men.

His decision itself, coming as it does on India’s earth shattering Twenty20 contest against Pakistan, makes it potentially a field day…. nay field weekend for the press. They get Dravid’s decision in the morning, India v Pakistan in the evening, and a weekend of high circulation. In the Twenty20 slog, India seem to have started as though dazed by their captain’s decision to quit, and are 5/87 in 13.3 overs right now. But thats irrelevant. I cannot bring myself to consider Twenty20 which so mangles the contest between bat and ball as cricket worth thinking about or commenting on. Dravid though, is another matter.

The man himself has reported shut himself off from the world. That in my view has been one of Dravid’s great strengths – his dealings with the press. There is much that future India captains can learn from Dravid in this regard. They couldn’t “run” Dravid. He would give them only the most exasperatingly correct lines and only occasionally was roused enough to be “candid”. They didn’t like it when he was candid, and the public seemed to be plainly flummoxed, because they weren’t used to such candor. Just the temerity to call armchair critics “armchair critics” – the cheek of it… with Dravid, when the press thought they had a story, they didn’t seem to know what it meant.

So why did he resign? The reason he has given is unlikely to be sufficient (even though it is in all probability accurate and complete). It is in two parts: the first being that he has stopped enjoying the job, and the second being that he wanted to concentrate on his batting. The third issue is the timing. He could have resigned immediatly after the world cup, but it is a measure of the man that he didn’t – that he led India to a first ever overseas series win against SA, and a series win in England.

I don’t blame him for not enjoying the job. With all the rubbish he has had to deal with after the world cup (and to a lesser degree after every defeat), i don’t blame him at all. When you consider the fact that both his Test and ODI records were, in toto, superior to every other Indian captain before him, you would probably forgive him wondering why people think of him as having been uninspiring and unsuccessful. His refusal to fit into the Ganguly mould was neither understood nor respected by the public. The job wore him down and wore down his batting. He couldn’t match his own extraordinarily high standards, and like Sachin Tendulkar in 2000, finally threw in the towel. In both their cases, their job was not under pressure – nobody was going to sack Tendulkar in 2000, and nobody was likely to sack Dravid today. We must ask ourselves why two of our greatest cricketers quit the captaincy because “they stopped enjoying the job”.

His recond reason stems from the first. Ganguly himself is the perfect example of this. Only in his case, he fooled himself into believing all was well (or so we must believe given his comments about batting well and referring to centuries against Zimbabwe to support his case towards the end of his reign), and in the process destroyed himself as a batsman. It affected his judgement as captain, and was bad for the team. There are those who will view Dravid’s decision as “selfish” – but they are most likely to be those who feel that “killer-instinct” is all that is required to play good cricket and win. I have little time for this argument, because it seems to be a cop out to me. Batting poorly and bowling poorly are invariably the most compelling reasons for defeat. Dravid knows that. He knows that he is a valuable batsman for the side. It is to his credit that he has the foresight to check himself and take stock.

All in all, it marks the end to a fine era. Where many of the promised gains of the Ganguly era were finally realized. Dravid won more than he lost against good opposition in both Tests and ODI’s, and broke new ground for India in both as captain.

Sadly he will be remembered only an alleged World Cup “debacle”. Those who view that as a crime are fools. And those who view that as a great failure don’t have a clue about the cricketing contest.

Thank you RD…… would it be possible to see a few more of those classical hundreds that you specialize in?

"Slow" Batting and the nature of Cricket Analysis…..

I was contemplating a follow up to the earlier ramble about percieved “flair” and “imagination” in Captaincy, when i came across this article about Tendulkar’s slow batting. It is my contention that analysis about a particular player/team is cricket is a function of how much is known about that particular player/team. Some teams are more minutely analyzed and written about than others, as are some players. These teams and players (they include most of the top test teams and most of the top players) therefore fall prey to stereotypes – because beyond a point, analysis refers to previous analysis and not current performance. Now, that previous analysis is invariably dipped in the euphoria of a great victory or in the despair of crushing defeat. The Cricinfo article is a classic example of an imagined stereotype about Tendulkar becoming the dominating reference point for discussing his innings against Bangladesh.

Bangladesh as an opposition were irrelevant – that was the expectation given that they were minnows, and that became evident during the series. They have only 2 players who can threaten good opposition – Mortaza and Ashraful, and Ashraful has serious problems with temperament. So, as a series to determine the quality of any Indian cricketer, this was quite irrelevant. Four Indians made hundreds. Wasim Jaffer’s was a typical understated innings – the innings of a seasoned first class cricketer. Nothing excites or bores him enough to disturb him. Dinesh Karthik was like a Cat on a hot tin roof, and like anyone on a hot tin roof, he exhausted himself very quickly. Rahul Dravid was the luckiest of the lot. He played the post tea and pre lunch sessions against a tired and demoralized attack and made the most of it (made 88 runs in the 37 over post tea session, if he had known, he could have joined Farokh Engineer in making a hundred in a session in a Test). Tendulkar played two consecutive sessions, and like every other player who did so, suffered in the process. The first session brought him 54(91) while the post lunch brought him 38(79). The post team session brought him 21(25). He was clearly tiring in the post lunch session and against fields set purely for containment on a slowish wicket, it was tedious going.

The Mortaza – Tendulkar contest was intriguing, in that Tendulkar was unwilling to hook the short ones. This was possibly due to the fact that the bouncers were not quick, indeed the ones that he left were loopy, there by indicating that it might have been hard to time a hook shot. It was by Tendulkar’s calculation an unnecessary risk. Increasingly, that has been the hallmark of Tendulkar’s play – calculation. His batting is extremely measured – mindful of his own limitations and constantly referring back to his own experience. His has been troubled by SLA bowlers before – bowling into the rough. The most intriguing contest in England will be between Tendulkar and Panesar. Panesar’s predecessor Giles was content to be bull-headed and attack leg stump from over the wicket – a SLA’s leg trap if you will, while Panesar, especially without the influence of Duncan Fletcher, might be unwilling to do that.

In essence, the Cricinfo article suggests that “this is not the old Tendulkar”. They are quite right. Today’s Tendulkar is not quite the rich mans Mohammad Ashraful that he was 10 years ago. If analysis involved what analysis should involve, then this reference to the Tendulkar of 1997 of 1998 might have been easily dismissed. When Tendulkar says that he plays for the team and that his role has changed, it seems to be ignored. The evidence suggests that he does indeed play for the team, and that he has changed his role, keeping in view his declining competence. What we are seeing in the case of Tendulkar is accumulated experience trying to compensate for the wear and tear of time. That in itself is rare.

Now, you might think that i am trying to paint Tendulkar’s efforts in a brighter light than they command, and if you have observed the decline in his batting as i have, then you would probably be right. But it is here that the crux of the matter lies. You might ask – If he is in decline, should he really even make the Indian side? Now, that is not a useful question – because his selection to the national side depends on whether or not he is better than anyone who he might be replaced with, not on whether he is as good as he was 10 years ago. Tendulkar is in decline, but ever the student, he is attempting to be a different batsman, and not just a lesser batsman. That suggests that he still really does want to play. Add to that the fact that he is still miles ahead (thanks to his experience and his understanding of his experience) of next batsman in India (barring Dravid), and it is clear that his place is not under threat. Put very simply, if the realistic range of results which Tendulkar is capable of achieving is superior to that which anyone else is capable of achieving, then that is the framework within which Tendulkar’s place and his quality should be discussed.

If you extend that to captains – the argument becomes very simple – any discussion about the quality of captains which ignores the realistic range of results which the batsmen and bowlers in the captains team are capable of achieving, does not do them justice. Because this range is a difficult and complicated reference, stereotypes cast in hackneyed prose are the norm. Thus Tendulkar is slowing down, Dravid the captain is unspiring and every other cricketer who ever achieved anything is one thing or the other……