Eye on Cricket

Angry Kohli

2012-01-27T08:30:00.003-05:00

From the perspective of the Indian fan, the second session of the third day's play in Adelaide, when India lost only one wicket and that too at the very end, was probably the most satisfying couple of hours in the India-Australia series so far. I certainly enjoyed it. Not very much happened: no blistering strokeplay unleashed, no mountain climbed, no dominance established, just survival and a semblance of grit. That tells you something about how we've had to revise our expectations.

After tea, Virat Kohli got his hundred, and a very good hundred it was too, even if it came in hot weather on a fine batting wicket on which Ponting and Clarke had just hit double centuries. But Kohli celebrated like he had just reached 300, and appeared to call somebody (probably nobody in particular) a bhainchod. Frankly, it was embarrassing. Earlier, upon reaching fifty, he had acted like he had scored a century. A fifty used to be worth a nod and a little jab with the bat; now Indian batting has fallen so low that Kohli did a full pirouette. Bradman cometh, mofo.

I have nothing against a certain amount of emotional release on the field. (I liked the fact that Ganguly did a strip-tease at Lords.) Kohli seems to be a promising batsman, he has a personality, and a bit of fist-pumping and swearing is just fine. But there has to be some perspective. When your team has performed like a bunch of lost club cricketers for a full series (actually, two full series) and there is every indication that you are going to lose the last Test as well, the excited-Tarzan act at a personal milestone only makes you look like Sreesanth: a little unhinged and laughable. We're done laughing at this team and I wish they would just, you know, go away and lick their IPL contracts where nobody can see them.

The horrible thing about this series is that it's still not over. The T20 and ODI segments remain to be played, more celebrations are in store every time somebody takes a wicket or scores a fifty. These guys are very lucky that the farce will not be played out before Indian crowds. Australians are likely to be more forgiving.

Satadru Sen

No More Whisky

2012-01-13T21:06:00.007-05:00

There was a time, not very long ago, when following an Indian innings in a Test match on a foreign tour came with highly pleasurable rituals: you made time, poured yourself a drink or a cup of tea, gathered plates of snacks together, and put your feet up. You knew you were watching a brittle line-up and that the chances of victory were slender, but you also expected a measure of brilliance and four or five sessions of batting. Sometimes what you got was epic: Tendulkar in Perth in 1992, Azharuddin and Tendulkar in Cape Town in 1997, Ganguly, Tendulkar and Dravid in Headingley in 2002, Sehwag in Melbourne in 2003 and in Multan in 2004. No more. Those rituals are no longer viable. Half the team is back in the pavilion by the time the first drink is finished, which forces you to either forego or hurry the second drink. If there is any drama, it is farce, not tragedy. A combination of disbelief and disgust sets in. Surely it can’t, won’t, happen again, the fan thinks, pouring his whisky faithfully for the next match. But it can and does.

When the Indian cricket team returns from Australia in a few weeks, the Customs and Immigration officers at Delhi or Bombay or wherever their plane lands should give the players, along with Duncan Fletcher, a good public beating. Then Srikkanth should be summoned to the airport to receive his own thrashing, for screwing up the bowling attack. What is the source of his bizarre attachment to Vinay Kumar, who was selected for the tour ahead of Irfan Pathan (who had an excellent domestic season, can bat, and is familiar with Australian conditions to boot)? Why did Srikkanth, Fletcher and Dhoni pick Vinay for the Perth Test ahead of Ashok Dinda (who is close at hand, reasonably fast, and also coming off a very successful domestic season)? Did Vinay’s father make a phone call to the PMO? Why were Rohit Sharma and Dinda taken on the tour if they were going to be held back even as the others fail repeatedly? Why does Vinay wear zinc cream? Does he not understand that zinc cream is Antipodean war-paint, not make-up for posturing tourists? Not that playing Irfan or Dinda would have made a difference in a situation where the wheels have come off so abjectly. I am picking on poor Vinay Kumar only because he is a symptom of something bigger: a sign that the money-addled people who run Indian cricket have now, incredibly, begun to see the T20 arena as a recruiting base for Test cricket.

This is not an essay about what ails Indian cricket. The Internet is awash with those at the moment, and rightly so. It is a brief rumination about sport, fandom, expectations and anger. Cricketers at the highest level of the game are, after all, entertainers, engaged in exhibiting extraordinary skills to a paying public. In that sense, they are not unlike circus performers, musicians and actors. We might appreciate a Laxman-and-Dravid special or an Imran Khan spell much as we appreciate seeing Mallika Sarabhai dance, hearing Bismillah Khan play the shehnai, or watching Nasiruddin Shah act. In fact, that is the ideal of cricket: the ‘true fan’ is a fan of the sport as much as he is a fan of a particular team, and he is expected to enjoy the display of skill regardless of which player or team it comes from. The failure of a great player on either team is ideally to be met with disappointment even when it brings satisfaction. This is not an empty ideal: I know Australians who are sorry when Tendulkar gets out cheaply, and fans in Bangalore and Chennai still applaud the opposition, even Pakistan.

Anger has no place in circus performances. Nobody would have become angry if Amitabh Bachchan had put in a sub-par performance in a particular movie. If there was a succession of poor performances (like there was towards the end), fans might have stopped buying tickets, but it would not have occured to anybody to become furious with AB. Yet here I am, wanting to see M.S. Dhoni and company lathi-charged on the tarmac by the CISF. It’s all very irrational and boorish. But it is, of course, an inescapable part of the experience of modern sport.

We get angry at athletes because unlike with actors and trapeze artists, we cannot not buy tickets. By virtue of being members of modern communities – nationalities, student bodies, city dwellers, immigrants – we have already bought our tickets. We live in atomized social fragments, yet are compelled to wander constantly in ever wider worlds of strangers and impersonal agencies of humiliation: bureaucracies, police forces, transit lounges, international finance. In our loneliness and insecurity, we clutch at proxies who will represent us with greater power and glory than we can muster. As entertainers who are also our representatives, athletes are our entertaining, fantastic selves. And they reveal to us that we are not alone. Even an angry community is a community of solidarity. So in spite of its spectacular collapse over the past year, the Indian team has been doing its job.

But those other expectations – excellence, artistry – cannot be banished. Even the banal expectation of entertainment cannot be dismissed. And with representation comes the expectation of dignity, which is after all the source of the anger: the otherwise absurd feeling that we have been ‘betrayed’ by a bunch of traveling performers. When all of these expectations come to nothing more or less simultaneously, it is a sign of something quite rare. It signals the imminent collapse of a cultural institution.

Tickets, even season tickets, can be returned, and for the past year we have been approaching the point when Indian fans will return the ticket they have collectively bought over many years. The case of Indian hockey – internationally triumphant between the 1930s and the 1960s, and endowed with players of near-magical ability and reputation – comes readily to mind. India still has a hockey team, they still play international matches, but they mostly lose, and nobody cares or even notices. Give or take a Dhanraj Pillay, the players are anonymous. Indian cricket is a bigger cultural phenomenon than hockey ever was in the days of Dhyand Chand and Roop Singh: followed by a much larger demographic, infused with incomparable wealth, and carried on an enormously powerful and pervasive media structure. Within Indian sport, it has a hegemonic status that has no counterpart in Britain, the US or Australia. As such, the edifice of Indian cricket is less vulnerable to collapse than hockey was when the Astroturf revolution hit and the Olympic medals dried up. But it is not invulnerable. It will merely die more painfully and slowly. And because the edifice is financial and political as well as emotional, the death will reverberate, affecting not only ordinary fans with their poignant/pathetic need for artistry and dignity, but the BCCI bosses, the corporate advertisers, and even the regional aspirants and foreign stars who feed at the IPL trough. (What drives the IPL is the presence of Indian stars, not foreign players, and without Test cricket there will no Indian stars.)

It is difficult to imagine anybody pouring a drink and putting their feet up, grinning with anticipation, when Virat Kohli or Rohit Sharma walk out to bat in a Test match five years from now. Even I will stop, or become sporadic in my stubborn attachment to such atavistic rituals, when Tendulkar, Dravid and Laxman are gone. Elvis has left the building, and I am about to throw away my season ticket.

Satadru Sen

January 13, 2012

Book Project Update

2012-01-10T13:31:00.000-05:00

As I announced on this blog in October 2010, I have been working on a book on the changing face of modern cricket (contracted to Harper-Collins). Last year, in September, I sent the draft manuscript for editorial comments. I've received those comments now, and have started revisions. The comments are, I'm happy to say, quite positive: VK Karthika , my editor, quite likes the book's analysis but (almost inevitably) wants me to revisit my (in her words) "academic" language in Chapter 1. This is a hard one to take on board, especially as I had worked pretty hard to make sure I didn't sound too academic. But I'm happy that that remark wasn't directed at the rest of the book. A greater challenge for me, quite honestly, is keeping the book's analysis up to date. I feel like a great deal has changed just since September (India's continued decline in test cricket, the termination of an IPL franchise, poor crowds at Indian venues etc), that has the potential to affect my analysis, and I'd like to do justice to all of it. I also have comments to work through from Russell Degnan, Rohan Mascarenhas, John Sutton, Satadru Sen and Sankara Krishna - thanks again guys!

In any case, revisions are underway, and I expect to send the draft back in four weeks or so. If all goes well, the book will be scheduled for a June/July release.

Should Have Stayed on Vacation

2012-01-06T07:57:00.002-05:00

Last year, while traveling through India, I was able to sporadically follow India's Boxing Day triumph over South Africa (I bought a newspaper, at Cochin's airport, detailing India's win at Durban). This year, I was traveling again over the Christmas/New Year's break; and again, I was able to remotely track India test cricket in the holiday season. This time, of course, it featured a defeat at Melbourne (I sent text messages, from Puerto Rico's Culebra Island to a bunch of friends asking for scores and details; the responses, even if not the scores, were gratifying).

On my way back from Puerto Rico, I noted (to my mysteriously less-than-enthusiastic wife) that even if I missed the first two days of the Sydney test, I would be able to watch the rest of the action once I got home. Well, the Sydney test is over; one day of cricket action has not been used; and really, when I come to think of it all, it might just have been best if I'd stayed on vacation and ignored the cricket altogether.

Two more heavy losses overseas, and for many who will not have paid sufficient attention to the home series against the West Indies, it will seem like the 4-0 thumping of the summer has now been transformed into a running 6-0 scoreline (and perhaps one equally deserving of a response consisting of equal parts hilarity and grief). I will conduct my best impression of the mature, sage, experienced, reasonable, long-suffering Indian cricket fan soon enough, and urge patience, forbearance, and sympathy. Soon, but not just right now. For now, I'd like to just indulge in a bit of chest-beating and wailing (if you have speakers, turn them down now; the terrible keening sound I'm emitting is truly ghastly.).

What makes this all so terribly embarrassing is just how old-fashioned it all is. Imagine that India had lost to a pair of off-spinners on a New Zealand green-top, or perhaps they had conceded a 230-run victory target to a pair of Bangladeshi or Zimbabwean openers. Then, we'd all be chuckling about the novelty of it all, about how the Indian cricket team had somehow contrived to pull off a unique loss, one unprecedented in its cricketing history.

But the problem is that even that minor comfort of disastrous novelty is not present in the current circumstances. For the Indian loss at SCG was made singlularly rank by the utter familiarity of it all: India are playing overseas; when their batsmen bat, the pitch turns green and hilly; when the opposition bats, a squad of alert groundsmen runs out, flattens the pitch and mows the grass; when India bat again, the gremlins take up their usual positions underneath the pitch. The batting line-ups crumble; the fielders (when they are not giving the crowd the bird), stare blankly into space; the chief traffic-policeman (sorry, fielding captain) is a flurry of brisk arm direction; and finally, at the end, there are the bromides of the post-match ceremonies. And the wait, equal parts horrified anticipation of the remaining games, and resigned acceptance of the inevitable home-series triumphs that will make the memories of the overseas disasters a little more palatable.

Plenty is going wrong right now, plenty to be picked through and dissected. Who could sift through the debris of this latest disaster adequately? Only those who have recovered from the grinding weariness of similar efforts conducted through the summer. A brave, if not very numerous, bunch.

Chronicle of a disaster foretold ....

2011-12-29T03:09:00.004-05:00

Here is what I wrote on my Facebook message just as the day's play was about to start at the MCG:

"I have this horrible feeling that all will go wrong. Hussey and tail will add another 50+ Sehwag will fall early. Dravid will potter and potter and get out. Sachin will flatter to deceive. VVS will fall and act as if it was the greatest delivery ever. Dhoni and Gauty will give slip catching practice and Virat will smack a full toss down mid-wicket's throat. I expect to be in deep despair in about three hours' time. So pray tell me: why do I watch????!"

Barring some trivial changes, the above could well be a report on the actual proceedings as they unfolded rather than a prediction. There's got to be something wrong with a team when an average fan can predict how the day will go with such accuracy.

Top Ten Reasons Why Empty Stands Are Bad for TV

2011-11-14T10:00:00.001-05:00

Ten reasons why low attendance at cricket games (test, ODI, T20) makes for a poorer television spectacle:

Soundtrack for boundaries is missing
Soundtrack for falling wickets is missing
Soundtrack for bowler-plus-crowd appeal goes missing
Soundtrack for dramatic entries or exits is missing
Colorful backdrop for action shots of batsman turns into rows of seats
Backdrop of exuberant fans with arms raised as bowlers celebrate a wicket is missing
No witty banners, no outrageous costumes; in short, no carnival
Soundtrack for feats shown on large screen televisions at ground is missing
No standing ovations possible
Television spectator likely to wonder why he is wasting his time watching a game that one seems to care enough for to actually watch at stadium

The Kotla Test moves on

2011-11-08T08:38:00.000-05:00

Yesterday on Twitter (@eyeonthepitch) I predicted India would win by four wickets on the fourth day. I'm still happy to stand by that: the West Indies were never likely to do well in the second innings against the spinners, and India were unlikely to bat as badly again. India are now 152-2 chasing 276, and with a well-set Dravid and Tendulkar at the crease you'd have to back them. But given that an out-of-form VVS and an always-shaky-against-spin Yuvraj are in the wings, things might get a little sticky if early wickets go down.

There is also the worry that MS Dhoni might offer a draw and even worse, Sammy might accept.

On India's bowlers: Both Ojha and Ashwin took five-fors in this test and strange as it might sound, it does my heart good to see Indian spinners dominant at home as they should be). Yadav's pace shows promise though his action is quite ungainly; he seems to derive little from his run-up and delivery stride and instead, gets all his pace from the upper body, a method that is unlikely to work over the long run. Coaching seems required, much as I hate to say it.

Meanwhile so much has been written about the incompetent ticket selling at this test that I can scarcely add more, but this neglect of common sense is no longer benign, it is positively malign as far as test cricket is concerned.

Chain novels and significant numbers

2011-11-03T07:56:00.002-04:00

Forgot to make the usual updates here on Eye on Cricket which note posts that went up at The Pitch. First up, a post on writing a cricketing chain novel, and then, a post on Curiously Significant Numbers.

Spot-fixing and sentencing: The injustice of it all

2011-11-03T07:24:00.001-04:00

Spot-fixing gets you sent to jail. That much has been established. The world of cricket has now paid witness to a historic trial, which has resulted in three Pakistani cricketers, Salman Butt, Mohammed Asif and Mohammed Aamer being sentenced for their roles in last year's no-ball scandal. This has, besides the usual grim humor, sparked some plaintive complaints who suggest the sentences were a) too harsh "jail time for no-balls?" or b) too unforgiving "Pakistani cricketers live such unimaginably hard lives, they practically had to fix a match or two in order to make it to the next day". Another theme is that this scandal shows cricket administration in a poor light (its hard to know whether to describe this as a theme or as the latest emanation from the We Like Shooting Fish in a Barrel Brigade). Lastly, there are some confused mutterings about cricket being hypocritical: we send fixers to jail but we don't crack down on all these other bad things: sledging or not walking, for instance.

Right. It might be useful to keep things straight. Fixing has long been a scandal in the game, and its continued presence has always threatened to render the game a joke. That this sorry mess went to trial was a relief; it afforded a break from the usual sequence of matchfixing scandal followed by board cover-up (usually carried out by the PCB). The accused had legal representation (some of it expensive and of high-quality); the trial was fair; the legal procedures for due process were followed and sentences have been announced. The three cricketers broke the law of the land (where the games were being staged) and have been punished by the law. There has been no suggestion of railroading, of a kangaroo court, or of any sort of legal impropriety.

So, I'd like to get clear on something: Where is the injustice? Are the laws unfair? Should Great Britain not have certain laws on its books? Should charges not have been filed? Or does the injustice lie in something rather more cosmic: Economic inequality in the world of cricket, which makes Pakistani cricketers do bad things? The unfairness of an incompetently run cricket world bearing witness to an efficient dispensation?

New Twitter Feed

2011-10-31T09:22:00.000-04:00

I have a new Twitter handle, on an account (#EyeOnThePitch), on which I plan to track blog posts made here and on The Pitch. My motivation for the name should be apparent; at times it's seemed like all I was doing on Eye on Cricket was tracking posts on The Pitch. I'm not sure how busy I will be on Twitter but at the very least I will post links to my blog posts there.

Pakistani Fast Bowler Factory Still Functional

2011-10-18T14:07:00.001-04:00

So I woke up this morning to find that a new Pakistani paceman is in town: Junaid Khan, who has taken five wickets against Sri Lanka (at Abu Dhabi; it's a long story, don't ask). Khan has an impressive action, decent pace, and from the little I managed to see, a very good short-pitched ball. Yet again, there is a fast bowler in Pakistani ranks who looks like he has undergone some pretty impressive finishing at fast-bowler-production facility. I have no idea of how it happens again and again, but it has. Make sure you catch some of the test match action that will now be available in this series; fast bowlers are always fun to watch.

Back in Business?

2011-10-11T12:17:00.000-04:00

Things have been, shall we say, a tad slow here at Eye on Cricket. I notice that the last post went up more than a month ago, which is a bit shocking. But not really that surprising. The academic year started, classes kicked off, and I became more busy. But that's not all. I also finished my book manuscript then, and sent it off to the publishers. And at that stage, I realized that I was really, truly, sick and tired of writing about modern cricket and needed to take a break. Writing a book uses the brain cells as blogging, and I was saturated. (To be honest, I've become sick and tired of following modern cricket on the Internet; the endless bickering about the same old issues again and again is wearing me out).

I haven't entirely idle of course; I've been blogging at The Pitch at Cricinfo, and in the past few weeks have put up: a piece on how the modern cricketing archive enables the cross-checking of one's childhood memories; a celebration of discovering old cricket books on a trip back to India; a tribute to Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi; my tuppence on the recent Akhtar-Tendulkar imbroglio; and lastly, a note on a particularly obsessive manifestation of cricketing fandom.

I will still be blogging regularly at The Pitch, and with this post, hope to get back to more regular blogging. I'm recovering slowly from my sated feeling (I couldn't bring myself to write anything about the Champions T20 tourney for instance).

Conversation with Fake Indian Player (from Pitch Invasion)

2011-09-06T09:05:00.001-04:00

A couple of days ago, Anupam Mukherji (formerly known as Fake Indian Player) of Pitch Invasion called me up and we chatted for a bit about all things cricket. The conversation is up at The Pitch Invasion - please check it out.

Little Beginnings at The Pitch

2011-09-02T16:09:00.001-04:00

A new post on dramatic 'little beginnings' by openers is up at The Pitch.

Why I love my American friends

2011-09-02T09:30:00.007-04:00

While discussing (over email) soccer's possible growth in India (and chatting about a wonderful documentary on the New York Cosmos, Once in a Lifetime), my good friend Tom Connell wrote to me:

I think I heard that India really took it on the chin in a recent test against England, although perhaps they came back since there was more to be played. Probably just a lull after their World Cup triumph. I'm sure they want to give the rest of the world the illusion that they can catch up!

Cricket sighting in administrative law ruling

2011-08-25T09:15:00.002-04:00

From EPA vs. Universal Circuits, (Clean Water Act, Docket No. CWA-IV-88-001, April 11, 1990).

Administrative Law Judge Frank W Vanderheyden, as part of his ruling, notes:

Both the Act and penalty policy speak of economic savings as benefits resulting from the violations. In the context of the facts of this case, few wickets could be stickier.

What maakes this quote interesting is, a) it is found in an American legal dispute b) the judge, doesn't seem to be from a cricket playing country (he graduated from NYU in 1952). Perhaps a Dutch family member told him about the game? But "sticky wickets" aren't such common knowledge. Quite intriguing, I think.

Pace

2011-08-23T13:34:00.026-04:00

By Satadru Sen

When the team that you support has had an unbelievably bad series, and the angry and serious post-mortems are out there for all to see, the sporting thing to do is to look for the brighter side of the whole affair. The India-vs-England Test series is over: that is a joy. It is also surprisingly helpful to remember that the world is no worse that it was before: waking up to a 0-4 whitewash is not like waking up to unemployment, a divorce or a death in the family. Godzilla has not ravaged Tokyo. And best of all, Varun Aaron has declared that he enjoys hitting batsmen on the head. Ah, an Indian-accented echo of “I like to see blood on the pitch.” Aaron is a 21-year-old fast bowler from Jharkhand, M.S. Dhoni’s home state. He is, by most reports, seriously quick. He is not Jeff Thomson, of course, and in these days of helmets it’s unlikely that he will send many batsmen to the hospital or shatter a good batting line-up with pace alone. Still, the boy – who is on his way to England to beef up the Indian team for the ODI section of the Magical Disaster Tour – has the right idea about bowling, and my heart rejoices.

Pace bowling is the great Indian mystery and obsession, mainly because it has been rare in India. That rarity is cultural, in two senses. One is negative: it is not a national-biological peculiarity. The other is positive: Indian failures with fast bowling, and its moments of success, have generated a mass of writing, regret and fantasy built around the desire to hit a batsman on the head with a shiny ball going 150 kmh.

If bowling fast was an ethnic accomplishment, pacemen would be as common among Indian Punjabis as among Pakistani Punjabis, and there would no apparently India-shaped hole between Imran Khan in the northwest of the subcontinent and Lasith Malinga in the southeast. Also, if we look at where Indian quick bowlers have come from in the past couple of decades, the distribution is pretty wide: Bombay, Baroda, Gujarat, Delhi, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Haryana, Bihar. They have come, in other words, from all over the country, not a particular region or ethnic group.

But like any other form of culture, modern sport is the stuff of myths, especially the myths of what-we-are-like. As the most overtly physical aspect of cricket, fast bowling cannot escape the discourse of bodies and ethnicity. In Bengal, a region particularly hard hit by the colonial theory of ‘martial’ and ‘effeminate’ races, there was an early and enduring obsession with bowling fast. (Ramachandra Guha made this connection many years ago, so my observation is not original.) Spin was for sissies in Bengal, even in the heyday of Indian spin. Not coincidentally, the first really promising Indian pace bowler after the era of Mohammed Nissar and Amar Singh was Sarodindu ‘Shute’ Banerjee. Banerjee’s career was a casualty of the world war, and he was unlucky to miss out on the 1948 tour of Australia. By then he was already past his prime, and it is ironic that he is remembered primarily for a batting record: a last-wicket stand of 249 with Chandu Sarwate against Surrey in 1946.

After the Partition, with a large chunk of Punjab and its ‘martial races’ lost to Pakistan, a crisis of fast bowling seemed natural and unavoidable. The solution, too, seemed obvious: Sikhs. One enthusiastic cricket administrator declared that given a few Sikhs to train and feed, he could ensure an adequate supply of pacemen for the national team. (Unfortunately, except for Balwinder Singh Sandhu and that surly, burly fellow in Lagaan, the Sikh fast bowler has proved elusive.)

It is not that quick bowlers no longer existed in India. Ramakant Desai could be disconcertingly fast on his day, and as a Gujarati not much over five feet tall, was a living rebuttal of the ‘ethnic’ theory of Indian bowling. Indian cricket fans revere Anil Kumble for bowling with a broken jaw (against the West Indies), but Desai did it first, against New Zealand in 1968. Shute Banerjee’s legacy continued in Bengal’s Subrata Guha, who had an unremarkable Test career but took 299 first-class wickets at just over 20 per wicket, including 209 Ranji Trophy scalps at an average of under 15, and eleven wickets in a zonal match against the West Indies in 1966-67. Amazingly, he was not selected for the next Test, which began in Calcutta three days later. Bowlers like Desai and Guha, who played in India’s pace-bowling wilderness of the 1950s and 60s, were casualties of culture as much as of their own limitations. They barely registered in the consciousness at a time when crowds, coaches, selectors and journalists alike saw no pace bowlers in India and teams were packed with twirlers. And that semi-invisibility became a self-fulfilling prophecy; without supporting quicks to keep the other end going, both men were severely overbowled. Desai bowled 49 overs in his very first Test innings. Guha bowled 43 in his.

Kapil Dev played in a different cultural reality. To a considerable degree, he created that reality, with his skill, hard work and undeniable success. But it is worth remembering that Kapil Dev’s career began unspectacularly; he did not take many wickets in Pakistan in 1978. In an earlier era, that could very well have been the end of the experiment. But the context of Indian pace bowling had changed, partly because that tour of Pakistan snuffed out the hegemony of Indian spin, partly because the simultaneous emergence of televised cricket generated a growing audience for the excitement of fast bowling, and partly, I would suggest, because Gavaskar’s burgeoning status as an opening batsman who could hold his own against Roberts, Holding, Thomson and Imran – and his displacement of Bishan Singh Bedi as the dominant personality on the national team, which Bedi is yet to forgive – made Indian fans more interested in pace, and the team more hospitable to pacemen. So even very limited talents like Karsan Ghavri and Manoj Prabhakar got extended runs as Kapil’s partners.

Much has been written about the place of Kapil Dev in Indian cricket history and I need not go into that. I will limit myself to a simple observation. Kapil brought to the Indian supporter an element of joy that goes beyond results. My favorite image in all of cricket is Kapil Dev in delivery stride: side-on, airborne, athletic, kinetic, a freeze-frame of aesthetic perfection. (See top of page.) My three favorite memories from Indian cricket are all Kapil-centric: the seven for fifty-six in the second innings against Pakistan in Madras in 1980 (which was also the first time I listened to an entire Test match on the radio), the five for twenty-eight on painkillers in seventeen straight overs against Australia in Melbourne in 1981, and a brief, intense burst in the dying minutes of the fourth day of a losing Test at Lords in 1982, when he ripped out three English wickets (immediately after scoring a murderous, 55-ball 89 in the Indian follow-on).

That kind of irrational air-punching pleasure, even when it comes crackling out of the radio, is closely connected to fast bowling itself: its violence, the element of explosive release that one feels vicariously in the muscles of the arm, shoulder, back and leg, the touch of madness. Kapil Dev did not walk down the pitch to glare childishly at the batsman, and he did not sledge: he did not have to. To quote Jeff Thomson again, he just wound up and went whang, and while his whang was more modest than Thomson's, it lasted longer and took more wickets. And he did not clutch his hamstring and limp off the field every three Tests like the present generation of Indian bowlers. Nietzsche would have approved – almost. Almost but not quite, because the Indian cricket fan’s attitude to the game is invariably tied up with ressentiment, the need for revenge against history and discourse, which goes against the ethos of the Ubermensch. Varun Aaron’s pleasure in hitting batsmen on the head – or rather, the Indian fan’s satisfaction at Aaron’s desire to crack heads – is slightly different from Thomson’s pleasure at seeing blood on the pitch. That’s just fine; ressentiment on the cricket field is better than ressentiment in fields of actual slaughter. Cricket without a frisson of revenge would be boring, hardly worth the late nights with radio static.

A generation after Kapil Dev, Indian cricket is again in a crisis of pace bowling. Promising quick bowlers keep losing their pace and turning into 120-kmh trundlers: a tendency that began with Venkatesh Prasad and has now become an epidemic, thanks to a calendar that burns out players’ bodies and gives them no time to recover, and a trend in coaching (influenced, no doubt, by the ascendency of limited-overs cricket) that emphasizes line-and-length bowling and sees pace as an indulgence. The resulting run-fests may have enriched the coffers of the Indian board and its corporate cronies, but it has impoverished the serious fan by taking away a basic pleasure of the sport. This was all too evident in England in the past few weeks. The humiliation of losing a series or a rank is nothing compared to the humiliation of having a fat, slow R.P. Singh open your bowling. Perhaps Aaron will turn out to be ineffective at the highest level of the game. Perhaps he too will be a medium pacer by the time the BCCI is through with him. But until then, break some helmets, kid.

Close-in fielders need not apply

2011-08-19T10:58:00.003-04:00

I've complained so often about the lack of close-in fielders for Indian spinners in recent times that I'm going to sound like a stuck record, but what the heck, here we go again. The fields set for Amit Mishra are utter shite. And MS Dhoni has to be the most defensive Indian captain I have ever seen in this regard. Someone shoot me please: no close-in fielders for a batsman, in his nineties, facing a leg-spinner?

PS: That post linked to above is from Different Strokes but I've mounted this complaint before on Eye on Cricket. I'm just too lazy to find the posts in question. Mea culpa.

Plumbing New Depths

2011-08-18T23:59:00.003-04:00

By Sankaran Krishna

Even the most cynical and inured of Indian cricket fans will have to gasp in astonishment at the spectacle unfolding at the Oval. I'll confine myself to making a few points: (1) What exactly is Munaf Patel doing in the team if, despite injuries to both Zak and Praveen, he cannot make the playing XI? (2) The coach, the captain and the selectors knew before the series that Sehwag was not going to be able to play the first two tests and possibly the third. How then do they pick a team with 2 openers - one who made his test debut a few weeks before the series and the other quite untested in English conditions? (3) How do you take someone who is fresh out of shoulder surgery and has not played any cricket at all since his rehab (which had not even ended) and fork him in as opener in a test match? (4) How on earth does RP - who was not deemed good enough to be selected for the tour in the first place and has not played anything longer than a 3-hour T20 in half a year- being called to open the bowling at the Oval? Why not throw the ball to Ishant or Sreesanth at least? (5) How does one justify bringing on Raina before Mishra during the first day? (6) Given what we've seen of Raina's batting so far this series, its obvious that he's now in shell-shock. If Graeme Swann were to bowl a bouncer at him, he'll probably cough it up into the gully after averting his eyes from the ball. Why not give Virat a shot?

Its all rather depressing, and yet a tale foretold. Back in '74 we fell to pieces in similar fashion. Then too we came into England riding high - on the success of three series victories, two of them abroad. Its very likely that Cook or (God forbid) someone like Bopara is going to take us for a double- or triple hundred. Believe you me - the worst is yet to come.

Court transcript for Greig vs. Insole

2011-08-18T09:28:00.004-04:00

One of my biggest regrets with regards to the ICL fiasco was that the ICL didn't long last enough to trigger a court case or two. It would have been interesting to see what courts (in any jurisdiction) would have made of the various national boards' actions during that sorry mess. The Indian Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Commission, had of course, launched an investigation into the BCCI's actions but I have no idea if a report was ever submitted. A pity; a proper legal dispute would have clarified board-player relationships and also enabled an examination of the contracts players all over the world sign (I'm particularly curious about the BCCI contracts - has anyone seen one?).

Meanwhile, for your reading pleasure, here is the transcript for perhaps the most important labor dispute in cricket history: Greig vs. Insole from 1977, shortly after World Series Cricket was launched. Here is a little summary. Here is little Wikipedia article on World Series Cricket for all the young 'uns out there (this also includes a very useful summary of Greig vs. Insole).

Here are some other significant legal disputes in cricket.

Podcast Number Three - Oval Test plus Gavaskar/Shastri/BCCI

2011-08-17T22:51:00.004-04:00

I think this file got clipped at the end; sorry about that. I'm not sure why Audacity played up like that. I just had a few sentences after that where I say "conflict of interest is pretty simple really; look it up!".

The hangover of a Test defeat

2011-08-14T12:51:00.002-04:00

A new post on the "metaphysical hangover" associated with a heavy defeat in Test cricket is up at The Pitch.

Pant khule diyechhe

2011-08-13T21:33:00.016-04:00

by Satadru Sen

There is a Bengali expression that goes ‘pant khule diyechhe.’ It refers to being suddenly deprived of your pants, and indicates a particularly comprehensive defeat. The expression is hybrid and slangy, but it is also very culturally appropriate. It conveys, for instance, not only a sense of violation, but also a combination of exposure, embarrassment and shame that is perhaps more comprehensible to Asians than to Europeans.

It would not be inaccurate to say that in England over the past three weeks, the Indian cricket team has been pantsed. It has been so thorough that it raises suspicions about whether the emperor of world cricket had been wearing pants to begin with. If this had been a Japanese team from a couple of generations ago, Dhoni and company would have been expected to commit seppuku with sharpened stumps. Being products of a shameless time and place, they are safe. Nobody will resign: the captain will probably not step down, neither will the coach, let alone anybody in the BCCI. There is too much money at stake; giving up the captaincy means jeopardizing future endorsement deals.

It may be unduly bloodthirsty to call for heads to roll. This is neither a war nor a bank meltdown. It is, as I wrote in the last blog, only a game. But you know there is a problem when you feel obliged to repeat that cliché in successive blogs. So now I want to touch upon two related aspects of the problem, or of any problem: explanation and responsibility.

On the face of it, the explanation for the ongoing Indian debacle in England is very simple: India has consistently played very badly, and England has been excellent in every facet of the game. But when we look a little under that surface, things are not so clear. The cores of both teams are unchanged from what they were three or four years ago. England is still built around Petersen, Cook, Bell, Prior, Strauss, Anderson and Broad; India is still Tendulkar, Dravid, Laxman, Sehwag, Dhoni, Harbhajan, Zaheer, Yuvraj. No new Tendulkar or Murali has emerged on either side, and the old Tendulkar is still where he was. Even the supporting cast is made up of veterans, give or take a Swann or a Praveen Kumar. The roots of this England side go back to Nasser Hussain’s team, and the Indians are based largely on Sourav Ganguly’s outfit. While both men were outstanding team-builders, Ganguly undoubtedly had the more brilliant eleven. The tables have now turned emphatically, but they are still the same tables.

Obviously, one group of men have got better, and another have fallen apart. England’s improvement has been quiet and steady, rather than dramatic. Cook and Bell are fine batsmen. They have scored a lot of runs over the past couple of years, but they have done it against ordinary bowling attacks; nobody would mistake them for Sobers or Richards or Lara. Anderson, Broad and Bresnan are very good bowlers, but they are not Holding, Marshall and Roberts. Yet here we are: the Indian team, which includes the two highest run-makers in the history of Test cricket, have just made them look like Richard Hadlee bowling in tandem with Keith Miller with McGrath and Botham as back-up. And the Indians are all about drama, spectacle and superstars. You cannot get more dramatic than Sehwag’s ‘performance’ in this series: flying in late to save the team and promptly making two first-ball ducks, at least one of them due to horrendous shot-selection.

And then there is the Indian bowling. Earlier this summer, when the Indians were touring the West Indies, Andy Roberts rather unkindly called Munaf Patel a spinner. Munaf, mind you, was once impressively quick. But now Roberts is more or less correct. When he made his ‘spinner’ comment, my thought was that the rapid death of Indian pace bowlers was an aesthetic loss. Fast bowling, even fast-medium bowling, is one of the great pleasures of watching cricket, and the Indian bowling attack has ceased to be entertaining. (By way of comparison, you might recall Irfan, Balaji and Agarkar less than a decade ago. Or for that matter, Ishant Sharma bowling to Ponting in Australia more recently, and Sreesanth bowling to Kallis in South Africa last winter.) This year everything has suddenly gone flat, and in England it has become apparent that the loss is more than aesthetic. A boring attack will also, inevitably, be an ineffective attack.

In both batting and bowling, the team had lost its pants even before it reached England. Anderson, Broad and Cook merely pointed it out. The proven performers were patchy, and the others barely showed up to play, plagued by injuries, absences, exhaustion, under-preparation, and technical deficiencies. This is a side in which the ‘quality element’ is aging, ill-used and not replenished, complacency is endemic, and there is no joy. If the BCCI was inclined to be merciful, it would bring them home early from England.

This brings us to the issue of responsibility. I do not think that the players are blameless. If a Test cricketer like Tendulkar is going to pick and choose the Test series in which he plays, then he ought either to retire or to do a better job of staying ‘in practice.’ Ultimately, however, the fault lies with the Indian board, which has taken a great team, destroyed it by reckless overuse and artificially induced distortions (such as flat wickets tailored to maximize television revenues, and the IPL nexus of greed and intimidation that bribes and pressures players to hide their injuries until they are exposed by the longer game), and totally neglected the domestic first-class game without which the Test side can only wither away. The BCCI has, in fact, shown itself to be fundamentally unprofessional. It is driven by a corporate money-making mindset, it celebrates the new India of ‘brands’ and ‘products,’ but in its search for immediate returns, it unfailingly ignores the need to protect and nurture its most fundamental asset - the team – over the long term. It is, in that sense, the perfect example of an immature capitalism that is not responsible even to itself.

As a bureaucracy, the BCCI is perhaps impervious to the basic aspect of being pantsed, which is the experience of shame. It is institutionally averse to any admission of responsibility, and Sharad Pawar is after all a politician. All the more reason, then, for Dhoni to take responsibility. He should step down as captain immediately and speak candidly about what has gone wrong. (And while we're at it, Duncan Fletcher should be given his money and kissed goodbye.) This is not because a better captain is waiting in the wings; frankly, no automatic candidate jumps to mind, and we would probably get another mediocre one. Personally I would like to see Laxman given a crack at the Test captaincy in the time that he has left before retiring. But more important than getting a great tactician immediately is establishing the principle of responsibility in leadership.

Legal interpretation and cricket

2011-08-11T07:46:00.004-04:00

In responding to the post on the possible legality of the Trent Bridge Test match, reader joseph_kaye first posted a dismissive comment, suggesting the entire exercise was a waste of time (check comments), and then on my asking him to offer an argument, wrote:

Yes, Samir, but what's the use? Which of these two scenarios is more likely here:

1) A terrible miscarriage of justice has occurred, and only the penetrating Pushkar Pendse has seen it. Well, the result of a test match, and potentially the #1 ranking, hangs in the balance. This is no joke! He needs to inform the ICC at once!

Or,

2) It's perfectly clear to anyone what happened, and Pushkar Pendse is too too-clever-by-half in an incredibly tedious way.

In simpler words: it's an amateur's move to forget that the rules serve the game, not the other way round.

First, I think there is a third option. There hasn't been a terrible miscarriage of justice, and it isn't perfectly clear to anyone whats happened. People are still disagreeing about whether the ball was dead or not, whether Strauss or Flower were justified in going to Dhoni to have the appeal revoked. Perhaps we have a situation where an ambiguity in the laws has been exposed and the cricketing community needs to figure out an interpretation of the laws that makes it less ambiguous in the ways that Jonathan and Pushkar were attempting in their discussion. This is perfectly standard in legal practice: we have laws on the book, a situation occurs which does not appear to be covered by the rules they provide, and an adjudicator offers an interpretation that clarifies matters largely by showing how the rule is to be applied. Pushkar was offering an interpretation, perhaps a contested one, but given the lack of some sort of definitive or algorithmic interpretation of the laws (notice that Jonathans' reply depended on offering a particular charitable interpretation of the laws that would circumvent the possibilities raised by Pushkar).

Second, JK says "the rules serve the game, not the other way round." Really? What is this mythical "game" you speak of? A game, any game, such as it is, is defined by its rules, it is bound by them. If it isn't then we don't have a game on our hands, we just have some arbitrary activity going on. Not everything involving a ball and twenty-two players on a field is called "soccer". Sometimes it is called "hockey", sometimes it is called "cricket". Which appellation we use depends on the rules we apply, the rules the players follow. If I see ten folks on a court tossing around a ball, I only get to call it basketball because it follows the rules closely enough to be termed so. Otherwise, its something else, perhaps a variant. Thats why we say things like "3-on-3 basketball". If you change the rules of volleyball enough, you get sepak takraw.

Rules don't serve a game, they define it. Contesting an interpretation of the rules to contest the legality of a particular denouement of a game is most emphatically not an amateur's move. You might disagree with the interpretation, but you still need to offer a better one, one that makes sense of the situation, and describes how it sensibly accords with the rules so that the alleged violation has not taken place.

Well done MS, now do it again

2011-08-10T11:18:00.003-04:00

I hope MS Dhoni is learning a lesson from the little demonstration that he has put on today: he invariably bats better when he bats aggressively. He will always be an unattractive batsman (though his hooking is a real throwback with its off-the-eyebrows emphasis) but he is capable of scoring runs when he allows himself the freedom of the lashing stroke.

Newsflash: England have a very good bowling attack

2011-08-10T09:07:00.003-04:00

My angst over the comprehensive drubbing being handed out to India in this series has prevented me from being more generous. Churlish really. But England's attack is superb, well-balanced and very threatening. Not only are they taking wickets they have managed to expel any and all thoughts of any sort of counterattack from the Indian batting line-up. Well done.

Pathological altruism, test cricket, and MS Dhoni

2011-08-08T16:57:00.003-04:00

I shit you not. Three days after my post questioning Dhoni's judgment in recalling Ian Bell at Trent Bridge went up at The Pitch, I received an email announcement from Barbara Oakley regarding her new book _Pathological Altruism_ From the book's description:

Hyperempathy - an excess of concern for what others think and how they feel - helps explain popular but poorly defined concepts such as codependency. In fact, pathological altruism, in the form of an unhealthy focus on others to the detriment of one's own needs, may underpin some personality disorders.

All facetiousness aside, the book does look interesting, and I might even attend Oakley's talk at the Community Church of New York in New York City, on East 35 Street, between Madison and Park, on August 11th, at 6:00 PM.

New post on The Pitch

2011-08-08T12:12:00.002-04:00

A new post, on the passages of play that make up a Test match, is up at The Pitch.

Zimbabwe most definitely have a pair

2011-08-07T10:05:00.002-04:00

Zimbabwe's declaration at 291-5 was definitely a bold one. At 69-1 Bangladesh might be making them look a bit silly, but I'd say odds are still favorable for the Zimbos. Well done lads. Leaving-the-door-open declarations always spice up the game.

Brewing crises and cold comfort

2011-08-07T08:29:00.005-04:00

"The sense of growing crisis". That is a nice turn of phrase; I've stolen it from the Independent. I suppose its an apt way to describe the developments of the last day or so on India's tour of England. For we have been treated to the news of a county side making 200 for the loss no wickets against India's "back-up" bowling attack, the recall of a flabbergasted Rahul Dravid to the India one-day international side, and the final, sad denouement to a catastrophic series for Zaheer, who is now, finally headed back to a therapist's table.

Sometimes things go wrong in in clusters. This is certainly one occasion. All the makings of an epic disaster are in place: injuries, selectorial panic, an out-of-form captain, a determined opponent, an away tour, a hostile media (both the opponent's and one's own), the sense of being the target of schadenfreude. One vital ingredient is missing thus far: internal dissension and strife. (Well, the Dravid selection announcement might have upset a few folks). If things continue to heat up, we might see that as well.

Where then, is one to find comfort in all of this? I suggest the answer lies in a knowledge of history, especially that of the Indian team. By that I don't mean the usual, facile bullshit that has been quite fashionable in the past few years "Oh, we are slow starters, we always come back". No, comfort needs to be found in two facts, one perhaps specific to the Indian team, the other common to all fans of sports.

First, the history of Indian cricket is a history of ups and downs, of new dawns and familiar depressing twilights. This year has been no different. India started the year (or rather ended 2010) with a great, hard-fought test win, and then almost immediately showed an inability to close the deal. They won a World Cup, and then were unable to convincingly put away one of the weakest sides in the world. And now this. This pattern of trough and crest, crest and trough, should be familiar by now. Sometimes I forget about it, and express voluble disappointment on this blog. But too many factors operate in the Indian cricket environment to make true consistency possible: inconsistent selection, persistent injury and fitness problems, crowded schedules, the list goes on. The Indian fan should reconcile himself to this roller-coaster ride. Yes, the Indian team has been more consistent in recent years, but even within this period, we've seen many blips. Many more await. Take a deep breath.

A small historical note: in 1969-70, India lost 1-3 to Australia at home. We then proceeded to beat, in 1971, the West Indies away, then England away (Ray Illingworth's side, then the strongest in the world possibly), and then England at home; we then lost 0-3 to England in 1974, and then, after being 0-2 down against the West Indies at home, came back strongly to make 2-2 before losing 3-2. A year later, after going down 0-1 to the West Indies in the West Indies we pulled off our most amazing victory chase of over 400 at Port of Spain. Sometimes when I hear modern, younger fans of Indian cricket try and convince me the current outfit has got it all, and are doing something so unique, so amazing, so singular, I am stunned. What did they think was happening in the period I've just described?

Secondly, these triumphs and disasters are part of the inevitable lot of a fan. The bitterness of this summer should make the next triumph sweeter. Perhaps the one-days will go better. Perhaps India will do well against Australia away. (It won't, for me, make any triumphs at home sweeter; I am, sadly, one of those Indian fans who is tired of wins at home. So sue me).

Lastly, I would like to offer a prediction: Duncan Fletcher will not last long as coach. And after his departure, we will hear stories of just how bad things were in his regime. I'm not a huge fan of the coach system, and within that, I'm not a huge fan of Fletcher. His appointment was a mistake, and I think we will soon hear why so.

Podcast Number Two

2011-08-06T13:20:00.004-04:00

Small edit: I seem to say "effective off-spinner"; I am actually trying to say "ineffective off-spinner"!

Dentures needed at Northampton

2011-08-06T11:00:00.002-04:00

Northants 201-0 in reply to India's 352. Just when you thought it was safe to go back on the pitch.

Zimbabwean bowling attack is quite good

2011-08-06T10:42:00.004-04:00

Today I tuned in to watch a bit of the Bangladesh-Zimbabwe action from Harare, and was pleasantly surprised and impressed by the left-right combination of Kyle Jarvis and Brian Vitori. That pair could be a real handful in bowling conditions to their liking. Nice movement off the pitch, some nippy pace, and smooth bowling actions. Well done Zimbos. I look forward to seeing more of these guys in the second innings (when, by the look of things, they'll be pushing Zimbabwe to what looks like being a win, given the control they have managed to exert in this test so far).

Pendse on the Legality of the Trent Bridge Test Match

2011-08-04T15:31:00.004-04:00

Pushkar Y. Pendse, a graduate student at the University of Maryland, has sent me an interesting take on the legality of the Trent Bridge Test. Please do take a look; comments are welcome. They can also be sent to Pushkar at: pypendse AT gmail DOT com

I have not yet read the piece with sufficient care but I figured I'd get it out there anyway. I hope to do so soon.

Joke-Shoke, Yaar

2011-08-01T18:31:00.010-04:00

By Satadru Sen

When you have the opposition eight wickets down for 120-odd on the first day of a Test match, and still manage to lose by more than three hundred runs on the fourth day, questions must be asked. Are we to laugh, or to cry, for instance. (India supporters learn, over the years, to do both simultaneously. My upstairs neighbor is a West Ham fan, for no reason other than an accident of birth. He understands.) Other relevant questions might be, was it a terrible wicket (no), was the match fixed (I wish it was), and, well then, what the hell happened to what is supposedly the best team in the world?

Clearly, the ‘number-one team’ tag is now something of a joke. But it is a joke worth taking apart, because India’s rise to the top of the Test rankings has actually coincided with a fall in the absolute quality of the team. Now the decay has reached a critical level and become inescapable. After the first two Tests of the India-England series, cricket writers have typically pointed to weaknesses in the Indian bowling attack, and there can be little doubt that this is not quite a ‘number-one’ attack. With some exceptions, we have gone backwards to the days of dibbly-dobbly bowlers like Madan Lal, Karsan Ghavri and Roger Binny. The reason is new, however: utility bowlers can hold their own in T20 cricket, which casts its shadow on the Test team in more ways than one. Zaheer Khan, of course, has acquired a deserved reputation as a great swing bowler, but since the Man of Glass hardly ever shows up to play, that is irrelevant. It is one thing for a fast bowler like Dennis Lillee to break down once in a while, quite another for somebody who usually bowls at 125 kmh to be injured more often than he is fit. One hears Zaheer is a fitness fanatic, and shudders to think how he would have played if he was not.

But the thing is that even with Zaheer out of action, the Indian bowlers did alright, putting England on the mat twice before letting them get back up. And at Lords, the fault lay less with a depleted bowling attack than with the Indian captain, who inexplicably took Ishant Sharma off just when he was cutting through the England batting. M.S. Dhoni, too, has a reputation that is not quite right. India has won a lot of Tests with him at the helm, and the World Cup victory has put him in a position that is unassailable for the moment. He has been praised as a great leader and a genius of sorts. All this is highly misleading: Dhoni does not have Sourav Ganguly’s desire to fight, Mike Brearley’s analytical nous, M.A.K. Pataudi’s daring, Imran Khan's mentoring touch, or the all-round excellence of Mark Taylor. This is not to say that he is a poor captain, but to say that he is a very ordinary one, both tactically and strategically. (The decision to abandon the chase in the fourth innings of the Dominica Test is still fresh in my mind.) For a man who cultivates a cavalier image, he is a curiously timid leader: a sort of straw man, a typical product of the corporate age in Indian cricket. He has had the good fortune of being the Indian captain when the major teams in world cricket have been in decline, both absolutely and relatively. (England is the exception: they have clawed their way up the rankings quietly, without superstars, by getting the basics right: reliable fast-medium bowlers, a decent spinner, resilient batting, good fielding.) Dhoni's successes have disguised the fact that India, like Australia, Pakistan and the West Indies, have been in sharp decline as a Test side.

The batting, more than the bowling, is the best evidence. It seems to have escaped the attention of cricket journalists that the last time India scored 400 in an innings was in the first Test against South Africa last year. Since then, seven Tests have gone by. Five have gone by without a score of 300, including three against that farce of a West Indies bowling line-up. (You know it is a farce when the best West Indian quick is actually an East Indian.) In fact, some big warning bells should have gone off after the West Indies tour, instead of the smug grinning and posing with trophy-stumps after a highly unconvincing 1-0 win. A few years ago, India would post 500+ scores almost routinely, both at home and away. Not anymore. The selectors and the BCCI have contributed to the problem, as always. Why was Tendulkar ‘resting’ in India when he should have been in the Caribbean? Apparently he could have used the batting practice. The so-called new breed – Mukund, Kohli, Vijay – are a joke. (You see, I am still laughing.) Ultimately it has come down to Rahul Dravid, who has quietly reminded us why he deserves to grouped with the all-time greats of the game: he learned to bat when Test cricket still meant something in India. I take back everything I muttered before along the lines of ‘why has the bugger not retired already.’ If the Indian team that went to Australia and Pakistan in 2003-04, probably the best ever to represent India, was reassembled in England tomorrow, they would do no worse than this current lot.

Having been quite harsh to M.S. Dhoni earlier in this essay, I will close by trying to be fair to him. Samir wrote recently that Dhoni was excessively generous to England by withdrawing the appeal against Bell. I understand Samir’s point, but after turning the incident over in my mind a few times, stick to my first impulse that Dhoni did the right thing. The reason has to do with how one defines sportsmanship. There are, I think, two ways of looking at it: one can say (like Americans generally do) that sportsmanship is about strictly observing the rules of the game, or say (like C.L.R. James) that it is about going above and beyond the law to what is loosely called the 'spirit' of the game. The spirit of an institution is necessarily a less well-defined thing than the law, but perhaps it is also the more important thing, because it can anticipate situations that the law cannot.

The Bell episode was different from Mankading. In Mankading, you run out a batsman who is attempting to gain an advantage by backing up early. Bell was not attempting to gain an advantage of any kind. He was at most being a little foolish. ‘Dead ball confusion’ is rare but it happens. If there had been unpleasant incidents on the field already, Dhoni’s gesture would have been unjustified, but so far there have been none in this series. (A bit of sledging and glaring do not count, and Zaheer and Sreesanth give as good as they get.) It should be said, however, that it was undignified and unfair of Strauss to ask Dhoni to withdraw the appeal in the first place. Strauss should have chewed Bell out for being absent-minded and left it at that. But under the circumstances, a request having been made, it would have been churlish to refuse and Dhoni made the call that is most compatible with the spirit of the game. Not every series needs a Monkeygate equivalent, and Dhoni has done his bit to reduce the risk of genuine bitterness on the field. It is, after all, a game.

www.satadrusen.com

A correction to "Dhoni the sucker?"

2011-08-01T09:26:00.002-04:00

A small correction to my post on "Dhoni the sucker?" It was Srikkanth's second innings in test cricket - but in his debut test nevertheless.

On an unrelated note, I am betting every Indian cricket fan born about 1964 or earlier is waiting for us to cross 42.

Dhoni, Ian Bell and the run-out

2011-08-01T08:02:00.004-04:00

A new post on the Dhoni and the Bell run-out incident at Trent Bridge is up at The Pitch

Over at Ducking Beamers, Rohan doesn't much like my analysis. Since the confusion that Rohan displays in his objection is exceedingly common in all negative responses to my post, I'm going to respond here. (Incidentally, I'm a little surprised that Rohan, who is such a serious and intelligent blogger, begins his response with the flippant "I don’t know much about Aristotle; I never cared much for the Ancients").

There are three points in my article, which people can't seem to keep apart:

1. Was Dhoni a sucker? Yes. You don't give and give in circumstances when you are not expected to, and don't need to and where giving compromises you. A mother that denies food to her child because she keeps giving it away is being foolish. It has nothing to do with the non-transactionality of morality. One could easily argue she is being immoral (but we don't need to do that - the virtue of generosity does not require you self-abnegate).

2. Is the invocation of the spirit of cricket justified? Yes, on pains of inconsistency and incoherence.

3. Does generosity demand reciprocity? Yes, otherwise free riders bring all systems of generosity to an end. If you take something out, you put something back in - that keeps the system going (or you get the tragedy of the commons - too many free riders on a system bring it to a rapid end). Otherwise it becomes one-way exploitation. Read the rationale behind the terms of the GPL license in free software/open source world (which responds to the "Why don't you just give me your code, without asking me to release it under the same terms when I make modifications and release! Boo-hoo, you are not really being generous, you are restricting me!" complaint). If Strauss and Flower do not reciprocate, and a similar incident occurs later in the series, will Dhoni feel like doing the same? I'm guessing not. Will anyone blame him for that? No. End of sportsmanlike gestures, I'm guessing.

Dhoni the sucker?

2011-08-01T07:45:00.003-04:00

There's been tons written already on Dhoni's decision to withdraw the appeal against Bell. The broad lines of opposition are between those who think he was suckered into it (by far the majority view) and a smaller group who think he did something quite in accordance with a rapidly eroding entity called the 'spirit of the game.' I feel a few things need to kept in mind: firstly, there was an interval looming right after the ball had been played; secondly, there seems to have been a fair amount of confusion amongst many - not all - of the players whether the ball was dead; and thirdly, the umpires too didn't seem terribly certain that it was a clear case of a non-dead ball. Under the circumstances, the Indian team seems to have viewed replays of the incident on TV and concluded that getting Bell out in this fashion would leave them with a bad taste in their mouths. Hence, they collectively agreed to withdraw the appeal. For a group of young men who had spent the best part of the day on a hiding-to-nothing on a really hot day, to so rapidly see this aspect of things and withdraw their appeal speaks greatly of their class and maturity. That almost none of this class and maturity will ever be reciprocated by English teams - now or in the future - is another matter. I think Dhoni and his men should be commended for what they did - it was rare and it was truly classy.

I was in the stands when Srikkanth was run out by Emburey that morning a long time ago. Cheeka was making his test debut and a stripling of no more than 20 or 21. Yes, that was his very first test innings. As was his hyperactive wont, he defended a ball into the gully and set off down the pitch to pat down an imaginary bump or two when his stumps were thrown down. The English fielders shamelessly giggled and snickered as they sent the young man on his way. I don't know if Cheeka learned any lessons that day - but I kept thinking there was another way to handle that. I could imagine someone like a Sobers or a Worrell going up to the debutant - after running him out - and saying "we're going to let you off this time, young man- but remember this in the future." That would have been the right thing to do.

Lambs to the Slaughter

2011-07-31T22:29:00.003-04:00

When England began the day at Trent Bridge, they were 43 runs behind on the first innings, with 9 (possibly 8, given Trott's injury) wickets in hand. They have ended the day 387 ahead with four wickets in hand. The aforesaid Trott has come and gone. Before him, and after, England have handed out an ass-whipping to a team that looked like they would much rather be back in the West Indies, dealing with Darren Sammy's outfit.

India never looked like restricting the runs, taking wickets, or showing imagination in field placings. Lines on eyebrows were stretched tight early, the shoulders were fighting a losing battle with gravity early on, and the fielding ran ragged, hither and thither.

England flogged, and flogged. 400 runs in a day's action in a test is rare. (England did it in the 2005 Ashes too on a day when Ponting lost the plot, not just McGrath's Ankle).

England do not have to declare tomorrow. They can blast away, lose their last four wickets in a flurry, and set India something close to 450-475, if not 500. Then, cry havoc.

This wasn't a good test in which to show two of your biggest weaknesses (letting opponents tails prosper; having a tail with the resilince of a limp noodle), to miss another bowler because of injury (while Harbhajan didn't look like he was going to take wickets, it did mean the other bowlers had to be bowled into the ground).

Someone has to find the wheels and put them back on.

Cheating Indians

2011-07-31T10:51:00.006-04:00

Might as well get it out of the way. But Bell was out, just like Kris Srikkanth was out (eons ago against England, if I'm not mistaken) when he went walkabout after playing the ball.

The problem of course, is that Bell didn't try and take the fourth run. But neither was Srikkanth.

Is this "sharp practice"? I suppose. But wasn't it "sharp practice" when Srikkanth was run out? Back then, everyone seemed to agree Srikkanth had been shown up to an inattentive, silly young lad, who forgot the rules of the game.

Anyway, no word on whether India will ask the umpires to overturn the decision. The summer hots up.

And well, well, India have taken back the appeal and Bell is not out. Phew. There you have it.

That sinking feeling

2011-07-31T09:36:00.002-04:00

As England appear to run away with this game thanks to a wonderful ton by Ian Bell and some characteristically mixed stuff from KP, India appear to be flagging. Part of the problem, of course, is that everyone on the field is cursing themselves internally for having stuffed it up two days in a row. Resilience is needed but with a noisy crowd cheering everything the *other side* does it isn't so easy. The other thing that doesn't help is the knowledge that England bat very, very deep, and India bat very, very shallow.

When MS Dhoni won the toss and put England into bat, he was gambling on seizing the early edge so that India could take a decisive lead and negate the fourth-innings disadvantage of batting last. That fourth-innings advantage is now firmly back with England, and with them scoring at almost four runs an over in this session, its been further cemented.

Not a great feeling to watch a team fall apart so quickly - but as Sreesanth misfields again, and Harbhajan can't even be bothered getting angry, its getting worse.

You superstitious loon

2011-07-31T06:35:00.003-04:00

Yesterday, with the score at 267-4, I chatted with Homer for a bit, exulting in the good position India were in. As we talked four wickets fell. We agreed our chatting had caused the collapse and promptly clammed up. Today, as I put the last post up, Strauss was dismissed by Sreesanth.

Why does cricket tempt me with belief in superstition?

Careful Man, Thats My Initiative You're Handing Back

2011-07-31T06:24:00.003-04:00

Over at Trent Bridge, India have managed to play themselves into a position, where they could lose by a day to spare. On the first day, they had England by the throat at 124-8 and then, thanks to a Stuart Broad counterattack and a rather depressing reappearance of what I can only term "the eight-wickets-down-blues" saw them get away to 221 (by this I mean bowlers stopped doing whatever it was that had gotten them the eight wickets thus far, the captain's field lacked imagination and the fielding grew ragged). Yesterday, thanks to the Dravid-Yuvraj partnership, India looked like building up a 150 run lead, and then suddenly, spectacularly, everything went pear-shaped. Broad was back again; this time with a hat-trick, sparked off by the Indian captain's dismissal. Dhoni continues to have a poor series; one wonders how he is going to dig himself out of this hole.

A lead of 67 with more than three days left in the game is simply not good enough (as I write this, England are already 57-1, and have been rattling along at almost a run-a-minute this morning). Chasing anything over 200, given the flakiness in the current line-up, is going to be supremely difficult. More to the point, the team chasing is going to have to work hard to move their minds on from the thought that they never should have been in a sticky situation.

This is a test match; strange things happen. Initiatives are gained by hard work, and handing them back is never a good idea. Especially away from home, and especially when you are 0-1 down.

Poetic justice in hat-tricks?

2011-07-30T19:13:00.003-04:00

Some ten or so years ago, Harbhajan Singh brought about India's first test hat-trick: he dismissed Ponting, Gilchrist and Warne. Today, Harbhajan became a member of the triad of victims in the first hat-trick ever achieved against India in test matches. But the similarity doesn't end there. Harbhajan's second victim, Gilchrist was out LBW, even though he had inside-edged the ball onto his pads; today, Harbhajan was the second victim of this hat-trick, and he too, was LBW, off an inside edge. What the hat-trick gods giveth, they sometimes taketh as well.

Captain's Log: Trent Bridge - Day 1

2011-07-29T06:51:00.005-04:00

Dhoni should be standing up to Praveen Kumar. I won't say it again. Promise. I'll try. I really will. (That LBW call against Pietersen shows why)

Ian Chappell quoth : "a bowl-first decision is vindicated by 4 wickets at lunch and an all out on the first day (given the fact that you give up the fourth-innings advantage)". Dunno where he said it, but I remember it, and it sounds right.

0848AM EDT: Pietersen gone after lunch. Nice fast bowler's dismissal - Sree again. When this kid can hold his noggin' together, he can be a handful.

0945AM EDT: I missed logging the Kumar dismissals but this Sree ball to get rid of Prior has finally woken me up. Jeez, what a beauty.

Why is India bowling?

2011-07-29T06:20:00.003-04:00

Oh Good Lord, why is India bowling at Trent Bridge? Green pitch? Grey skies? Jeez, deal with it, get to lunch. This looks like a pretty defensive move. One hopes Dhoni's Midas touch, which deserted him at Lord's has returned.

PS: the last time I groaned this much about an Indian captain winning the toss and electing to bowl was Rawalpindi 2004, and that turned out OK. That precedent is about the only thing that makes me hopeful.

As I write this, Cook is gone. Phew. More please.

Podcast on Trent Bridge Test

2011-07-28T17:56:00.007-04:00

Ok, here we go again with yet another podcast. Its about seven minutes long, I'm sending this up as a trial balloon. Please let me know what you think (sound quality, silliness, etc)

The Indian XI for Trent Bridge (according to moi)

2011-07-28T11:26:00.002-04:00

Zaheer is out and Gambhir looks doubtful. If Gautam can't make it, then, well, here we go. In batting order:

Abhinav Mukund
Rahul Dravid
VVS Laxman
SR Tendulkar
Suresh Raina
Yuvraj Singh
MS Dhoni
Harbhajan Singh
Praveen Kumar
Sreesanth
Ishant Sharma

This is not a good position to be in, but it is the best there is.

Two bits of gratuitous advice for Trent Bridge

2011-07-28T10:19:00.005-04:00

In no particular order: Bring back Sreesanth; set attacking fields for Harbhajan (including a silly-point, a backward short-leg and a silly mid-off).

Oh, what the heck, one more: stand up to Praveen Kumar.

Kesavan on Dhoni

2011-07-28T06:24:00.004-04:00

Mukul Kesavan, in fine form as always, writes on MS Dhoni and a Lord's test he needs to put behind him, and quickly. More to the point, Dhoni can.

Later, in private conversation, on matters related to the subject of my post yesterday, Kesavan, speaking on the triumphalism on display after the first test, said:

I think Boycott, Brenkley and the happily hyperventilating tribe of English cricket writers are enjoying a moment of virility. Given that the English team has been a troop of earnest submissives for the longest time, who can blame them?

Who indeed?

Advance whingeing (after a win, no less!)

2011-07-27T08:24:00.005-04:00

If India comes back in this test series, it will be because of bad umpiring, which thanks to the lack of a DRS, will go uncorrected:

Flower is fearful that England might lose out later in the series. "We almost saw it happen in this Test match. It would have been wrong if the outcome of the game had been seriously affected by a couple of those decisions."

Or, it will be because of Duncan Fletcher:

It will be fascinating to see how India respond. You never know, it might be the result that Duncan Fletcher needs. Maybe he can exert more influence. I’d never easily write off a side with him as coach, that is for certain.

Lets see: unbalanced triumphalism after a win, excuse-making in advance, and assignment of praise in case of an Indian win to an ex-England coach (can't you already see the headlines "Fletcher's tried and trusted English methods enable India to win!"). Yes, all is set for a wonderful test series.

Incidentally, Andy, how English have you become that you feel the need to whinge after a win?

Rahul Mehra vs. The BCCI (Some Documents)

2011-07-26T08:28:00.000-04:00

Many Indian cricket fans will have heard of Rahul Mehra and his famous Public Interest Litigation against the BCCI. If you haven't, here are a couple of articles that will be useful.

Against the Rape of Indian Sports.

Prem Panicker's Blog on Mehra

Wanted a Board of Control to Control the BCCI.

Here are the suggestions that Mehra offered the BCCI after the conclusion of his case, which ruled that the BCCI is subject to similar PILs (and subsequent writs issued by Indian courts).

Here is the actual ruling by the court.

Please spread the word about these documents; they are essential reading for any Indian cricket fan.

A Little Less Commentary, Please?

2011-07-26T07:25:00.001-04:00

A new post on the possibility of commentary-free telecasts is up at The Pitch.

Small potatoes

2011-07-22T10:07:00.003-04:00

Despite India's struggles in the field and their depleted bowling attack, England have not managed to score at even three an over. That has to be some encouragement. Small potatoes but crucial.

Praveen Kumar, easily scorned, will kick your ass

2011-07-22T09:52:00.004-04:00

Surest Prediction for the summer: Praveen Kumar will make the scorners, the disdainers, eat their words. The man was born to bowl in English conditions.

A tribute to Azeem Hafeez

2011-07-18T09:21:00.001-04:00

A tribute to Azeem Hafeez, the Pakistani left-arm quick of the 1983/85 period, is up at The Pitch.

The Pitch: A New Blog on Cricinfo

2011-07-13T09:52:00.002-04:00

Folks,

I have a new gig over at Cricinfo i.e., a new blog. Its called The Pitch. Check it out. Bookmark, RSS feed it, Twitter, Facebook Like it. Or whatever it is that folks do now.

Comments, as always, much appreciated.

The first post, on the pleasures of neutral encounters on satellite television is up.

Great video collection

2011-06-30T08:51:00.003-04:00

Over at YouTube, user robelinda has put together an amazing collection of cricket videos. Check out his collections here and here. Some highlights: Kim Hughes' 100*, a collection of Ponting run-outs, McGrath shots, test series recaps etc.

Bridgetown Blues

2011-06-28T12:07:00.002-04:00

Over at Bridgetown, we have a scoreline that makes for interesting reading: India are 44/4 after 27 overs. A certain VVS Laxman has 23 off 52. I have no access to video, but word has it there is plenty of bounce in the pitch. Interesting days lie ahead.

Cricket in Ladakh

2011-06-22T09:02:00.003-04:00

Games of cricket happen everywhere, even at 11,500 feet in Leh, Ladakh:

On Eggs, Geese and the IPL

2011-06-04T13:07:00.015-04:00

So many voices have been raised lately about the threat to cricket posed by the IPL that it is a little difficult to come up with a new perspective, but the need for perspective has not gone away. The IPL has been controversial since its inception and most of the pros and cons have been thrashed to death already. Now, four years on, one would have thought that the hullabaloo would have died down and the tournament would either have been scrapped or accepted as a stable fixture of the global game. Instead, the IPL continues to exist in the nature of a circus and a country fair that have come simultaneously to town: impossible to ignore, hugely disruptive, uncertainly legal and even less certainly legitimate, materially undeniable but nevertheless ephemeral, like a mirage or some other impermanent visitation.

As a historian, I am reminded of two analogies right away. One is Babar in Agra in 1526. He had arrived, this brash interloper who was better than a barbarian but not by much, not only in an established civilization - Hindustan - but an established, if weak, political universe: the late Delhi Sultanate, which we can categorize as 'late' only retrospectively, with the unfair knowledge that it was already dead. Its death was not evident at the time. Babar after Panipat I was a contender who could not be ignored, but he had the appearance of a temporary disruption. He himself was not certain that he would not turn around and go back to Kabul, the summer heat worked its deadly magic on his soldiers' morale, and the major powers of India - the Sultanate nobles, Mewar, Gujarat - all held their breath, expecting that he would soon go home. They imagined he would leave a shaken but otherwise unaltered political landscape, and hoped the shake-up could be made to work to their advantage. What came instead was three decades of turmoil and false starts, until the radical transformation of Indian political culture after Panipat II. The circus then became the city, and it was a good thing.

The other analogy is America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: a new kind of Wild West brought on by the explosive and largely unregulated growth of corporate capitalism. Regulation came slowly and in stages: first in the era of Progressive politics, and then more decisively during FDR's New Deal. But until then, there was a glorious, calamitous free-for-all: three or four decades of robber-baron tycoons, spectacular feats of industry, the sudden emergence of wealth and vulgarity beyond the wildest imagination of preceding generations, and the rise of an irresistible new media endowed with its own stars and technologies (the Hearst newspaper network, radio, the first flickering of cinema). It was glorious because it was exciting, rewarding (for many), and culturally hyper-productive. It was calamitous because it was also a time of runaway exploitation, labor unrest, state repression, corruption, organized crime and economic irresponsibility. It would implode in the Great Depression. When it was over, as far as these things can be said to be 'over,' a sort of method had been bestowed upon the madness of American capitalism, largely because FDR was able to build a consensus that without method, order and regulation, the larger structure would collapse into revolution. That reinforced, reined-in structure is still with us, in spite of the shudders induced by Reagan and the Clintonistas.

India, the new Wild East, is at the height of its era of unregulated madness. (Or perhaps the height has not yet been reached.) The 'unregulatedness' is not simply a matter of weak rules of corporate conduct. It is ultimately a lack of moral regulation, an anything-goes attitude that includes, at the most basic level, a powerful pseudo-consensus that regulation is undesirable. I call it a pseudo-consensus because its extent is highly contextual, unreliable and probably quite limited. The middle class, which endorses it (or many of its effects) and quite reasonably has no affection for the red-tapism of the Nehruvian economy, is also anxious enough about it to call periodically for radical (or reactionary) forms of regulation. There is probably a very small core of hardline support for it, but enough ambivalent and contingent support can typically be mobilized at any time by the corporate media to give the appearance of a genuine consensus. So we have a dominant culture of unashamed narcissism, hedonism, boosterism and excess, in which greed is widely believed to be not so much 'good' as beyond the purview of petty moral judgments. In such a cultural climate, responsibility is an obsolete killjoy and robber barons are celebrities. The BCCI - the godfather of the IPL - is one such robber baron. It is also, of course, a club of individual robber barons, operating in an environment in which robber-baron hegemony has substantially been achieved.

It is not difficult to see that the IPL has disrupted the institution of global cricket in many, many ways: the disruption of batting technique and bowling skills, the disruption of the calendar and paramountcy of international fixtures, the exacerbation of political and economic inequalities in the ICC, not to mention the exploitation and bullying of players, who are now being offered very large amounts of carrot but also being threatened with a very big stick. There is no need to go into the details of all that here. What is more relevant is that, first, the status quo is not sustainable; international cricket will either descend into organizational chaos or be radically altered. Second, there is no consensus yet on whether radical change is desirable, let alone what it should consist of. Third, such considerations are irrelevant to the BCCI, because they involve responsibility and regulation, and robber-baron capitalism is indifferent to the first and hostile to the second. It exists for the here-and-now and the bottom line, and killing the goose that lay the golden eggs is often par for the course. It is either assumed that there will be other geese, or the size of the golden egg on hand makes the future blank, beyond planning. (The bankers who crashed the American economy are, in that sense, the close cousins of Indian cricket administrators.)

Under the circumstances, responsibility - which is inseparable from a certain kind of conservatism, because one takes responsibility for something that already exists, with a view to conserving it in some form - is irrelevant. Saving Test cricket is irrelevant. Rationalizing the international calendar is irrelevant. Protecting and nourishing Indian cricket, which is the golden goose, is irrelevant. What matters is the egg, i.e., the IPL, which can conveniently be confused with the goose. Regulation of the BCCI - the New Deal solution that might preserve the existing structure by reining in its excesses - becomes positively evil, an apparent violation of the pseudo-consensus on the here-and-now. Heaven forbid, therefore, that owners of IPL teams be barred from policy-making positions in the BCCI, or that serious questions be asked about why politicians and fiscal high rollers should control the organization, or that the BCCI be made answerable to Parliament and the office of the CAG (Comptroller and Auditor General).

I want to be clear: these things will probably not happen in the foreseeable future, because that would go against the Indian Zeitgeist. We will instead have Babar versus the Sultanate nobles, i.e., a period of turmoil, uncertainty and breakdown of a familiar order. This breakdown, it must be emphasized, is only the other side of opportunity for a few (the Lalit Modis and Sharad Pawars), nationalist pride for a few more (we are the strip miners and wrecking crew of world cricket; take that, Gideon Haigh and Malcolm Speed), and the experience of consumer-culture for many. There may, of course, eventually be nothing left to consume, but that is the nature of the disposable-capitalist beast, for consumers no less than producers: squeeze dry, lose interest, discard, move on. This trajectory is the predictable outcome of the total transformation of culture (here, a sport) into commodity.

Frankly, I have little sympathy for Haigh, Speed and the rest of the Anglo-Australian whining brigade. For one, it is a little too obvious that their whining began when political and economic power in the international game shifted away from the cozy white oligarchy. The international game is being damaged now, but it was also damaged - albeit differently - by the old ICC, when the 'I' still stood for 'imperial.' That self-serving nostalgia is still very much on display every time there is an England-Australia series, and the English press (even more than the Australian) begins to act like choirboys at a bishops' conference, never mind the mediocrity of the teams. Did Flintoff share a fond cuddle with Brett Lee? O Holy Ashes! Spare us natives with our lowly Rubbers. (I'm fond of Brett Lee myself, I admit it.) For another, domestic tournaments that attract international players have always challenged the priorities of international cricket, whether it is the IPL or English county cricket. The problem is that whereas county cricket paid peanuts and could be negotiated with, the IPL is a financial gorilla. The basic organizational premise - that national boards will have to negotiate with their players and with a major foreign domestic tournament over scheduling - has not so much changed as shifted from England to India. It can certainly be argued that the fact that the IPL is a BCCI tournament creates a conflict of interest and gives the BCCI an unfair advantage in negotiations, but this is an unfair advantage that the MCC/ECB was loath to relinquish in the past.

I am more concerned with a different conservatism: a desire to conserve culture irrespective of its value as a commodity. And I want to emphasize, like the New Dealers, that such a project need not be at odds with capitalism. It requires, however, a longer-term, less hedonistic view of culture-as-capital. It might entail, for instance, appreciating the value of the first-class game as a nursery of talent and technique, and revamping the Ranji Trophy imaginatively, with participation by foreign players and ICC Associate teams, bigger paychecks and harder wickets, guaranteed results (two innings per team of 90 overs each should do it), floodlights and television advertising. It might entail spending some of that television revenue on local-level and school-level infrastructure, equipment and coaching. It might entail reviving the concept of a cricket season and not expecting players to play in April and May, when it's well over a hundred degrees in most of India. And most essentially, it might entail allowing or even facilitating the unionization of players.

What I am suggesting, then, is that the IPL is a knife that cuts both ways. The turmoil in international cricket will probably continue for a while, and during that time, we might see further abominations: more tragedies like Shane Bond's career, more Dilscoops, more sweat-drenched clothes in the colors of Amazonian parrots, further descent from the heights of the pavilion to the primitive depths of the 'dugout.' Perhaps we will reach a stage where players and coaches are encouraged to charge out of the dugout and brawl with the umpires and spit paan juice on the pitch. (TV audiences might like it; it would be very American.) But we might also eventually get reforms, because a thorough shake-up is potentially a good thing. Cricket is played in a world of capital, its transformation into a commodity is a fait accompli, and that is not altogether undesirable. The trick is to pull back from a total transformation, i.e., to leave some vital part of culture outside the marketplace. That, however, may have to wait until there is a significant change in the wider culture of Indian capitalism.

www.satadrusen.com

Forza Cricket! The New York Times on Cricket in Italy

2011-06-03T21:42:00.002-04:00

Always fun to see an article in the New York Times on cricket. This one has a bit of a twist; it involves the word "South Asians" sure, just like any other NYT article on cricket, but the "South Asians" aren't in New York, but in Italy.

Podcast on watching cricket in the USA

2011-06-03T20:48:00.001-04:00

A podcast on watching cricket in the USA is available at Bored Cricket Crazy Indians.

A little trivia quiz

2011-06-03T20:06:00.002-04:00

Batsman A: Opened for Pakistan

Batsman B: Opened for India

Batsman A's and Batsman B's fathers opened for the same side in pre-Partition India.

Name A and B.

Willow TV podcast from Bored Cricket Crazy Indians

2011-06-01T06:38:00.002-04:00

The podcast for Bored Cricket Crazy Indians' take on the Willow saga is up at Bored Cricket Crazy Indians.

Tape-delayed cricket in 2011

2011-05-26T08:40:00.001-04:00

A new post on tape-delayed cricket is up at Different Strokes.

The Willow TV Saga - update

2011-05-23T13:55:00.003-04:00

Sorry for the lack of updates on the Willow TV saga. As of now, here are how things stand:

After Devanshu's story on how Willow TV seemed to have gone out of business was posted, the Willow TV CEO, Vijay Srinivasan contacted both Devanshu and myself, stating that they were still in business
I spoke with Vijay on the phone, who went on to explain that the site had been undergoing back-end maintenance after the World Cup
I pointed out that a simple notice on the site explaining this to customers would have been useful, as would have an automated reply from the support account
Over the next couple of days, I spoke on the phone with support in India, who repeated some of Vijay's information, and also told me the Pakistan-West Indies series was in fact, not to be shown in the US. Again, I suggested a notice would have helped
As of now, it appears there is a notice that the Pak-WI series is not available for US viewers and finally, it appears monthly subscriptions are available again

Finally, I hope Willow have learned from this experience. If your website is the face you present to the world, it behooves you to keep it looking good i.e., informative, topical and easy-to-use.

Sources for the Willow TV story from Deep Backward Point

2011-05-18T11:40:00.002-04:00

Here are Devanshu Mehta's citations for the Willow TV story.

The Scoop on Willow TV

2011-05-18T10:01:00.003-04:00

Thanks to some intrepid journalism by Devanshu Mehta, who blogs at Deep Backward Point, we have the scoop on why Willow TV has gone dead. Read it and weep.

This constitutes a spectacular Jonty-like catch at Deep Backward Point. Well done Devanshu!

Willow TV Fail - Spreading the Joy

2011-05-17T11:11:00.003-04:00

As comments on my posts on Willow TV(on this blog and over at Bored Cricket Crazy Indians) show, its not personal. They aren't just dicking me over. Many of their customers are getting screwed. Yesterday I heard from Peter Della Penna, who runs the Stars, Stripes and Stumps blog over at Cricinfo:

[Your experience is] Pretty much a carbon copy of my experience, from historical failures to this current debacle for access to matches post-World Cup. I've been subscribing to Willow since 2006. They wouldn't know what customer service was if it came up and bit them in the ass. The fact that they've never ever had a phone number to call for customer service and instead rely only on the support@willow.tv address for (nonexistent) communication has always lead me to believe that this was a boiler room operation and that they are completely taking the piss when they say they have a headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. I used to subscribe to the Setanta Sports broadband package in 2007 to get Champions League and Rugby World Cup matches etc., and Willow is a million miles beneath the standard that Setanta provided in every way imaginable, from customer service to web site organization to stream quality. I'm not sure who has been a worse steward of cricket in this country, Willow or USACA. It's certainly a very competitive two horse race. I'm a strong advocate of buying proper services instead of going the pirate route, but just about the only thing Willow hasn't done to piss off anyone trying to follow that path is moon them. It would be wonderful if someone else took over the rights packages they still possess.

The Willow TV Fail Saga Contd.

2011-05-13T15:36:00.003-04:00

An update (a bizarre one, I promise you) on the Willow TV snafu has been posted over at Bored Cricket Crazy Indians (I'm trying to see if other folks in the US have had the same problem).

I'm really, really perplexed. Are the folks at Willow offended? Are they hurt? Why can't they answer emails?

Willow TV's Epic Fail In Gory Detail

2011-05-11T19:24:00.002-04:00

I've complained about Willow TV before. Here are the details of my latest complaint. For starters, check out www.willow.tv. It still advertises the World Cup, which ended 40 days ago. And it doesn't just advertise it, it is the main attraction, even though new offerings have shown up below it on the left hand bar. Right off the bat, thats a lazy, complacent website for you. Second, check out the new offerings, because thats where the trouble begins.

Three new tours are advertised. Pak-WI, SL-Eng, and India-Eng. So, like an innocent, I decided I want to watch Pak-WI, and clicked on watch. I get taken a to match menu. I click on one of the match buttons. I'm asked to sign in. I sign in. I'm told I am not subscribed to the package and should subscribe. Fair enough. I'd like subscribe. So I click on sign up. And then I'm told I'm already signed up. To the World Cup package! Right. So I email support. This is where the fun begins.

But, as prelude, note that on February 1st, I sent an email asking them whether their claim to be supporting all OS's was accurate. NO REPLY and on April 8th, I sent an email asking about IPL 2011, availability, NO REPLY,

Then the following sequence:

Mail#1, Dated April 21

Folks:

1. Is the Pakistan-West Indies series and the Sri Lanka-England series included in the monthly package or is it in the World Cup package?

In general, by signing up for the monthly package, do I automatically get subscribed to any and all cricket shown by Willow TV?

2. I watch Willow telecasts on my Roku box. When will the streaming interface through that be updated (right now it shows World Cup on the live portion and has nothing on upcoming). Will all live telecasts be available through this streaming interface?

In general, I would say your website needs some updating.

NO REPLY

Mail #2, Dated April 21

Folks,

When I click on the live video button I am told I am not signed up for the event. When I try and sign up, I'm told I'm already subscribed via the World Cup package. What is the real situation here?

Also, will this game be streamed live for those watching via Roku boxes?

Please reply at the earliest.
NO REPLY

Mail #3, Dated April 23

Dear Support,

This is my fourth email in the last couple of days trying to elicit a reply from you regarding the availability of the Pakistan-West Indies series on Willow. You website shows links for the live telecast but the Roku channel continues to show a button for the World Cup channel, which ended three weeks ago. There are no links under "upcoming" for the series either. Is the Pakistan-West Indies series being shown through Roku? (The fourth time I have asked this question without an answer).

Please reply to customer emails and please fix your Roku service. Googling for "willow" will show that in many customer forums online, people are frustrated with Willow's service.

NO REPLY.

The last email was copied to the owner of Willow.tv, Vijay Srinivasan, who I happen to know, from our IRC chatting days. No reply from him. Bizarrely enough, in the meantime, I had emailed him as well as follows:

Mail #1, April 21st:
Hey Vijay,

Whats up? Hope all is well. I'm just trying to figure out what is happening over at willow.tv. The Pakistan-WI series is advertised, but when I try and watch, it says I'm not signed up. When I try and sign up, it says I'm already subscribed to the WC package. My Roku box interface doesn't show a link for the game either.

I've sent multiple emails to support but haven't heard back yet. Any clues? The T20 game has already started.

Vijay wrote back:

Are you a Willow monthly subscriber?

I replied:

I can't subscribe when I click on the link to watch. It says I'm signed up already. In fact, there is no "sign up" button on the monthly package section, just a "watch" link. When I click on that, it says "not signed up". When I try and sign up, it says I'm subscribed to the WC package.

NO REPLY

I then followed up with:

Vijay,

Incidentally, I also sent an email to support, asking them about the IPL but never heard back then. I would say the website is a little disorganized at the moment, honestly. If you guys were not going to carry the IPL, you might as well have just put up a small notice. I'm sure tons of folks must have asked the same question as me!

BTW, I really enjoyed watching the World Cup through my Roku box. Great quality, nice interface. It'd be nice if we could get the same interface through Roku as we have on the website with links for highlights, replay etc. Or is that technically impossible/difficult?

NO REPLY

Frankly, this is easily the worst customer service I have encountered in my life. The disorganized website, the lazy updates, the poor interface, the lack of response, it all adds up to an incredibly unprofessional operation. If anyone has their ear, let 'em know they suck.

The best of times could be better

2011-05-11T19:14:00.005-04:00

First off, I'm glad to see Krishna is off the mark with his post, which makes eminent sense. One thing Indian fans are used to is the sinking feeling of the false dawn. Most great wins in Indian test cricket in the old days like Madras 1952, Kanpur 1959, Bombay 1964, Port of Spain 1971, the Oval 1971, and Port of Spain 1976, were heralded as the start of something new, but in most cases it turned out to be a case of one step forward, two steps back. With Kolkata 2001, a greater consistency entered Indian test cricket, and even though some depressing old patterns persist (like over-cautious captaincy, weak bowling attacks, and less-than-exemplary outcricket), the team did enough, and riding both the decline of Australia, and the failure of South Africa to transcend their own inability to seize the moment, have risen to the top. Those same structural weaknesses have meant that India's stay at the top is not guaranteed, and some key challenges still remain. Beating Australia in Australia for one, and repeating their 2007 triumph over England. So, even though its a nice feeling to be ranked No.1, January 2012 could feel even better if those tours go off well.

The Best of Times

2011-05-09T13:19:00.002-04:00

As this is my first blog on Eye On Cricket, its nice to be able to begin on a cheerful note. If you are an India cricket fan, times couldn't be better. Most of us are still walking on air after the World Cup triumph. For what its worth, according to the byzantine calculations of the ICC we are the #1 ranked test team. We won the T-20 world championships not that far back; triumphed for the first time in a one-day series in Australia; and came back from a South Africa tour with a tied test series. What is more, of late we've repeatedly snatched victory (or at least a draw) from the jaws of defeat instead of the other way around. This is heady stuff for those of us who remember entire decades going by with little or nothing to show - barring the odd individual performance. That we've managed all this with a fairly weak bowling attack and one of the least athletic fielding sides is remarkable.

I think we should take a moment and savor all this. Not merely because, chances are, its going to come to an end fairly soon but also because as fans we are so focused on what comes next that we forget to enjoy the present. We know that our brilliant middle order (Sachin, Rahul, and VVS) is saddling up to ride out into the sunset and that our only bowler who can take wickets anywhere (Zak) is aging fast. Unlike the Aussies under Waugh-Ponting or the legendary Windies teams under Lloyd-Richards, there is no question of India dominating world cricket for anything longer than a season or two. And even at that, 'dominating' sounds too strong a word.

So, every now and then, I've gone onto youtube and watched the final moments of the World Cup and the revelry that followed, or the highlights of the quarterfinal against the Ozs and the semis against Pakistan. Just to relive the moment and to appreciate what these guys have been able to accomplish. To put in perspective, I'd just like to remind everyone of the sort of pressure the India XI constantly play under. After his fabulous knock against Shoaib-Wasim-Waqar in the 2003 World Cup in South Africa, Sachin mentioned that he had not slept properly for the previous ten nights, and had been thinking about the match (or more accurately was constantly reminded about that match) for at least a year prior to that day. More recently when Dhoni was asked how various players reacted to the pressure of expectations, he said that it varied from person to person. And almost casually he went on to say that Yuvraj had been unable to keep his food down now for weeks now.

To be able to play their game as brilliantly, and win as often, as they do amidst such enormous tension and stakes, is just incredible. So, lets enjoy this while we can, and appreciate what the men in blue have been able to pull off in recent times. The good times will inevitably be followed by dark days - making it all the more important to savor this here and now.

Introducing another new blogger

2011-05-06T20:53:00.006-04:00

Folks, it gives me great pleasure to welcome yet another blogger to Eye on Cricket. This time it's Sankaran Krishna, who teaches Political Science at the University of Hawaii. Krishna's academic work spans globalization, postcolonial studies, nationalism, identity politics; in short, he's precisely the sort of guy you want writing on cricket today. On his webpage, Krishna says:

I am a life-member of the world’s largest club of the perennially disappointed – the Indian cricket fan – and firmly believe that behind every sub-continental academic lies a failed cricketer.

He is right, of course, and I'm looking forward to seeing him blog on here. (He has distinguished himself in the past in the comments section of Cricinfo as well! Seems like the few coherent ones do stand out).

Fire in Babylon - Teil Funf

2011-05-06T20:44:00.003-04:00

My last post, I promise, on Fire on Babylon! I still intend to buy the DVD; its still a lot of fun to watch, and the footage is great. It's still a must-see. So there.

Lastly, what a great feeling it is to be able to talk about a cricket documentary at all, here in the US. Just for that, I have to thank the Tribeca Film Festival and New York City. And Stevan Riley.

Fire in Babylon - La Cuarta Parte

2011-05-06T16:24:00.004-04:00

Over at Ducking Beamers, Rohan thinks Satadru and I don't appreciate the "amount of work" the filmmakers put in to make Fire in Babylon. I think I appreciate the amount of work they put in, but in any case, thats beside the point, surely? If a work of art fails, it fails; my job as viewer is to point out what I felt missing and why it didn't work for me in particular, someone that has a particular perspective on cricketing and West Indian history. When Martin Scorsese produced a bunch of turkeys after The Age of Innocence, I didn't think it was because he wasn't working hard enough; it was because he wasn't doing things right. Hard work can still go wrong; thats what makes producing good works of art so frustratingly hard.

Fire in Babylon - Take Three

2011-05-06T16:12:00.004-04:00

Russ Degnan, in responding to my wondering about the lack of good cricket documentaries, brings up the question of paying for archival footage. Indeed. Permissions for archival footage are perhaps the single biggest stumbling block in any documentary maker's work. The unfortunate extension of copyright terms in the US has made this business even harder. I remember attending a documentary on Sacco and Vanzetti a few years ago at the CUNY Graduate Center, and was struck by the filmmakers' frustration: they had spent more time navigating the thickets of permissions and rights than in editing and writing. This is an occupational hazard in that business and thanks to "intellectual property" talk having gone completely batshit in the US, its become worse.

But I don't think the problems in Fire in Babylon were due to lack of archival footage; they were due to bad storytelling. Matching up the wrong footage with the voice-over narrative; misrepresenting the facts; letting a story emerge that is considerably at odds with a narrative familiar to most cricket fans; these are what I would indict Riley of, not the lack of archival footage. The superiority of Burns as a documentary maker is not due to his having access to more footage; for the Civil War series, he had none. But he is a conscientious historian, one who makes sure he isn't compromising it in order to do justice to a feel-good agenda. And best of all. he manages to tell a crackling good yarn. I found the footage in Fire in Babylon compelling; the story that was being told about it suffered in comparison.

Incidentally, one interesting reaction I had while watching Fire in Babylon in an American theater was that of pride. Somehow, strangely, I felt vindicated. After years of listening to Americans talk nonsense about how cricket was a genteel game, meant for landed layabouts on village greens, here was the fire and brimstone of willow, leather and the cricket pitch. Thank you West Indies.

Premature Exits

2011-05-04T10:25:00.001-04:00

A new post on the perils of early abandonment by fans (of a game they are watching) is up at Different Strokes.

Patrick Eagar eye candy is here

2011-05-03T14:21:00.004-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, I splurged: I bought eight Patrick Eagar books through AbeBooks. Now, they are all here. Hours and hours of gazing at cricket photographs lie ahead; I will write a review very soon.

Misfire in Babylon - Part Deux

2011-05-02T21:45:00.005-04:00

I'm glad Satadru has written a critical view of Fire in Babylon; my initial take over at Different Strokes seems to have concentrated almost exclusively on offering thanks for being able to view the West Indies' might again in an era of rapidly sanitized test cricket and where the presence of the current West Indian team is a depressing reminder of what we miss. I do have a particularly emotional reaction to the West Indies because I've come to realize over the years that one's first contact with the game colors our perceptions of everything that follows; for me that occurred during the West Indian tour of India in 1974-75 when Andy Roberts became synonymous with 'scary fast bowler' and Viv Richards with "powerful hard-hitting batsman'.

But the more complex, and nuanced story that actually sits squarely at the heart of West Indian cricket is one that gets trampled in the process of providing us this wallow in past West Indian glory. For what it is worth, I think the Empire in Cricket documentary made by the BBC 'did' better history and framed West Indian cricket better.

In one of my closing paragraphs, I noted that purely as a documentary Fire in Babylon suffered; I suspect that is because Fire in Babylon works better as an extended photo album: look at the highlights, see the cricketers in action, but do not assume you are being a told a good, complete, or even accurate story. It is an extended highlight reel - and we don't use that for story-telling.

Indeed, I found, like Satadru, the filmmakers' claims (in the question-answer session that followed the movie) about 'authenticity' to be bizarre: why would interviewing batsmen, or noting Frank Worrell's contributions, have made the movie less 'authentic'? I think they were struggling to say that they wanted to tell the West Indian story, but how is that achieved by a one-sided emphasis on intimidation? Ironically, the emphasis on intimidation might make the point Christopher Martin-Jenkins sometimes seemed desperate to make: that the West Indies won because they battered their opponents into submission, not because they possessed genuine fast bowling skill. Its worth pointing out that Michael Holding's 14 wicket haul at the Oval in 1976 was achieved on a flat pitch during a hot English summer where temperatures hit the high 30s. Someone relying exclusively on the bouncer doesn't get to do that.

This complaint about Fire in Babylon reinforces one of my pet peeves: why can't we get a truly outstanding documentary about cricket? Why has cricket not produced a Ken Burns? There are gigantic archives of test cricket footage out there with the BBC, ABC, Channel 9, Doordarshan etc. Is it really so difficult to put something together that does justice to the needs of the historian and the cricket fan alike?

Misfire in Babylon

2011-05-02T21:27:00.017-04:00

Last week I had the pleasure of seeing Stevan Riley’s Fire in Babylon, a documentary about West Indies cricket that I had eagerly awaited. I had the added pleasure of seeing it with Samir Chopra and dissecting it with him afterwards over a cool drink on an unseasonably warm New York afternoon. Since Samir had already decided to blog about the film, I was a bit hesitant to write about it myself. Having read Samir’s piece, however, I think our perceptions were sufficiently different that there is no danger of redundancy.

Let me begin by reaffirming that Fire in Babylon is a well-made and very, very enjoyable cricket film. An important test for any good sports film is the question, is it fun for people who know nothing about the game? At the screening, I tried to put myself in the shoes of the native-born Americans in the audience and decided that the answer in this case is unequivocally ‘yes.’ (What American would not respect a game that apparently consists mainly of bloodthirsty crowds and stunning blows to the head and the crotch of the batsman?) For fans of game, especially people who remember the Clive Lloyd era, the film is a treat, with fascinating interviews with West Indies players and yards of spectacular footage. One slow-motion clip of Michael Holding in profile, running in to bowl, is nothing less than cinematic poetry.

            Ultimately, however, I was disappointed – to some extent with what the filmmakers did, but more so with what they did not do. In their quest of a fairytale about a team of black cricketers who triumph over a history of racism and adversity, they managed to iron all the nuance and complexity out of the most complex and richly nuanced sport of all. The film gave, for instance, the impression that intimidatory bowling had not existed before Lillee and Thomson subjected the hapless West Indians to it in 1975. Bodyline, anyone? Even Bodyline was not as unprecedented as the Australians made it out to be. And what about Gilchrist and Hall terrorizing batsmen in the fifties and sixties?
            Controversies about fast bowling were nothing new in the mid-seventies, and the West Indies were hardly naïve victims who belatedly learned to hit back. Just months before that tour, the same West Indies batsmen had faced Australia in England and made a mess of Dennis Lillee. Lillee and Thomson on Australian wickets were a formidable pace attack, but so were Holding and Roberts, and let's not forget that the one Test that the West Indies won (by ten wickets) on that tour was in the fast-bowler's paradise that Perth used to be. Not dealing with the context and setting up a dubious premise might provide a dramatically satisfying sense of novelty, but it effectively reduces the film to a work of feel-good fiction, not a documentary.
             Not surprisingly, the narrative occasionally takes a fictional turn: Malcolm Marshall is described as a 'youngster' (or something along those lines) first making an impact during the 1984 tour of England! Never mind that by 1984, 'Mako' was already established as one of the three best quicks in the world, alongside Imran Khan and Richard Hadlee. It's the only way the writers could find of fitting him into the story they've chosen to tell. (I dimly recall Marshall from his pre-Mako days in 1978, when he came to India as Sylvester Clarke's deputy. The seniors were playing for Packer. That's when he was a youngster.)

Fast bowling is at the heart of Fire in Babylon, as it should be, since it was at the heart of the Caribbean hegemony of the mid-seventies through the mid-nineties. But it is not enough to say simply that fast bowling won matches for the West Indies, or even that it generated black pride. Since Lloyd’s bowling tactics were undoubtedly controversial, the other side of the controversy ought to be explored, by interviewing cricket writers, umpires and opposition batsmen. Why does Tony Cozier not get a word? Is it not likely that Sunil Gavaskar, Anshuman Gaekwad, Geoff Boycott and Brian Close would have interesting insights about what it was like at the other end of the pitch? Were the Lloyd/Holding tactics in the Kingston Test in 1976 – bowling beamers, etc. – actually legitimate? Is there not an issue of 'sportsmanship' in bouncing tail-enders in the era before helmets? The footage goes from bare heads to helmets with nary a comment about headgear – surely a lapse when the subject is intimidatory bowling. How does bowling six bouncers an over affect the game as a whole? What effect did the relentless emphasis on pace have on spin bowling in the West Indies? Was Roger Harper teased in the dressing room because he bowled at 50 mph?

It was as if the filmmakers were terrified that somebody might say something critical about Lloyd’s juggernaut and disrupt the uplifting fairytale. That fear does not do justice to the West Indies fast bowlers: Gavaskar made appalling comments about Jamaican crowds after that Kingston Test, but he was also an open admirer of Andy Roberts and of Caribbean cricket, and he scored thirteen Test centuries against the West Indies. Likewise, it is unlikely that Boycott would be less than generous to his greatest adversaries. Even if some batsmen were critical, that would be valuable from a dramatic and historical point of view. Leaving out hostile and neutral voices (in the name of ‘authenticity,’ which to the filmmakers seems to mean ‘telling only one side of the story’) constitutes a lost opportunity to document an intensely interesting moment in the history of the game. One of the best parts of the film is the section on the South African boycott and the rebel tours of the early 1980s, because here, we get to hear not only from those who chose to honor the boycott, but also from those who joined the rebels. Colin Croft, who falls in the latter category, does not look like a greedy fool as a result; if anything, he comes across as sympathetic and human, showing what can be accomplished when the filmmakers have confidence in their subjects and in their own narrative skills.

On the subject of race, the film pushes too crudely, and not in the right places. Any discussion of race and cricket in the Caribbean has to be provided with a context that includes C.L.R. James, Learie Constantine and Frank Worrell. They, and not Clive Lloyd and Michael Holding, were the original insurgents. Sobers, leading the Rest of the World in Australia in 1971, was already the most respected cricketer on the planet and Clive Lloyd was on his team. There is very little of that in the film. Nor is there any acknowledgment of the other racial tensions of the Caribbean, such the black/Indian divide in Guyana and Trinidad, which consistently ensured local support for touring Indian teams. Cricket is not immune from these tensions, and it can make excellent dramatic material. The West Indies victory in Kingston in 1976, for instance, came on the heels of the defeat in Port of Spain, and there is a powerful, although not edifying, racial story in that sequence that deserves to be explored. It is also worth noting that Lloyd’s all-conquering team had no players of Indian origin at all; the list of great Indo-Caribbean cricketers has a longish gap between Alvin Kallicharran and Shivnarine Chanderpaul. The film also neglects the opportunity to pick up on the irony that the West Indies side is now indeed a paler shadow of its old self, with a suspiciously white batsman in Nash and an Indo-Trinidadian opening bowler in Ravi Rampaul.

During the Lloyd and Viv Richards captaincies, the West Indians were exceptional both as a unit and as individuals. Watching Holding bowl to David Gower, or Roberts to G.R. Vishwanath, was as good as cricket can get, and certainly we need some of that pace magic now. (Thank God for Dale Steyn, even if the South Africans don’t have four of him.) But the factors that made those teams great are also those that made them controversial and interesting. About Holding in Kingston in 1976, Gavaskar wrote that the man who looked like an angel running in to bowl had become the devil (or Dracula?) incarnate. It does Holding and his colleagues no favors to portray them naively as spotless, aggrieved angels. The devil is always more interesting than the angel (not least because he is a fallen angel), and as Mick Jagger knows, quite capable of holding his own when it comes to our sympathy.

www.satadrusen.com

Introducing a new blogger

2011-05-01T11:44:00.004-04:00

Folks, it gives me great pleasure to welcome Satadru Sen as a blogger to Eye on Cricket. Some of you might know Satadru Sen because of his academic work on South Asian history, including a wonderful book on Ranjitsinhji, which I reviewed over at Different Strokes. Others might recognize that name because he frequently pens thoughtful comments on Cricinfo blogs (those stand out, don't they?). Satadru is a friend, neighbor and colleague (he teaches at Queens College of the City University of New York) of mine, and I'm looking forward to his contributions here. (Oh, and yes, I'm hoping Satadru will post links to some of his other academic writings on cricket, all of which make for a good read).

Duncan Fletcher?

2011-04-27T07:07:00.002-04:00

Duncan Fletcher as Indian coach? First things first. I'm not a big fan of coaches. Second, Fletcher is a big mouth, prone to talking too much about his wards to the press. This has the makings of a disaster in India's media scene.

A review of Fire in Babylon

2011-04-27T06:19:00.002-04:00

A review of Fire in Babylon is up at Different Strokes.

Fire in Babylon, at last

2011-04-26T10:50:00.003-04:00

Satadru Sen and I saw Fire in Babylon today at the Tribeca Film Festival; a review should be up, soon, hopefully, on Different Strokes.

The commentator's sendoff

2011-04-24T14:47:00.002-04:00

Brad Hogg, to Parthiv Patel: "Patel, on your bike! Go have a shower". Chuckle-inducing, if only for the reminder it served for what Hogg must have dished out to opponents when he was playing.

Willow TV Fail

2011-04-23T14:37:00.002-04:00

I do not have the patience to type up my latest set of complaints against the holders of the exclusive rights to stream cricket over the net in the US. Suffice it to say their spectacularly disorganized website and non-existent customer service is really, really trying me at the moment. All the gory details very soon. Some numbers should help: 5 emails to support; 0 replies.

David Warner the Kulhaadi

2011-04-23T14:28:00.004-04:00

David Warner is what folks in Delhi call a kulhaadi player. That roughly translates as "axe" but a better translation to capture the flavor of that word would be "chopper" or "hacker". "Bludgeon" would be an even better description of Warner. I'm not sure that Warner will ever, ever, make it into the Australian test or ODI team, but his place with the Daredevils seemed assured, especially if he continues to make it easy for folks to apply local lingo to him.

I have never seen a pitch as green as the one on display in today's Delhi Daredevils v. Kings XI game - in Delhi. Harsha Bhogle is right; someone should have taken a photo of this for posterity. Why can't we see this in a test?

Another one bites the dust

2011-04-22T09:52:00.005-04:00

And Lasith Malinga will no longer be seen in tests. The formula is emerging: overbowl you best strike bowlers by making them play an impossibly crowded calendar, don't pay them enough for tests, then sit back and watch them retire from the longer version while they opt for better paychecks and more salubrious working conditions.

Farewell, Lasith. This summer won't be as much fun without you in whites, showing off your highlights.

If you play a T20 game, they will come. Not!

2011-04-21T15:01:00.001-04:00

Does the format of the game really matter? A T20 international is being played today in the West Indies and no one is there to watch it. Why does the world resent Indian "domination" of the game when they can't be bothered watching it, no matter what the format?

Inshallah, we will win in the Caribbean

2011-04-21T09:22:00.003-04:00

Back to bilateral international cricket, that species of the game, which increasingly finds it harder to justify itself if not part of a long-running rivalry. The West Indies and Pakistan square off today and it says something for the fall of West Indies cricket that one is not more excited. For these two teams have provided, in the past, some of the greatest test series of modern times. They are unlikely to provide any of the cricket or the intensity of those series in in the current encounter.

For one thing, the two teams present the cricketing face of two of the most dysfunctional cricket boards in the world and always manage to show traces of those forces that have systematically undermined the game for them. Pakistan still retains some of their flair; the West Indies struggle more than they do to bring their older panache and verve to the pitch.

Even more depressingly for this fan, the Caribbean does not seem to provide the right atmosphere at the ground either. Something has gone missing; and all the music over the PA, the banners, do not help. If anything they serve to remind us of the constructed nature of the excitement.

Still, I'll watch (if willow.tv, who deserve a scathing post on their own, can get their act together). Inshallah, some good cricket might just show up. A new Pakistani quick might decide to make an appearance (as you can tell, I haven't bothered to check team rosters); the West Indies might implode even more spectacularly. Cricket can feature a car-wreck or two as well as anything else.

Time to bite the bullet

2011-04-20T08:50:00.003-04:00

The ICC should bite the bullet on the World Cup: find a way to build in a qualifying tournament that lets Associates dream of making it to the Finals, and make the Full Members fight to get there. The details of how to make sure Associates get enough match practice to be able to compete with that afforded by the FTP to Full Members are important. If some Full Members are to be automatically qualified via rankings then those will come from the FTP schedule and Associates need something similar. But the most important point remains the same: let the Associates dream of the World Cup.

Too clever by half

2011-03-20T09:40:00.003-04:00

Opening the bowling with Ashwin and then bringing on Harbhajan in the 6th over, is a little too clever for me. Ashwin has a wicket now; lets see how the rest of Dhoni's bowling changes work.

7-50 is better than 9-29, n'est-ce pas?

2011-03-20T08:41:00.004-04:00

Well, well, the race is on. I thought I would quickly put this post up to mark India's collapse, and see if I could get it up before India were bowled out. But I didn't make it. For India are gone again, unable to use their 50 overs. So, who is going to buck the pattern? The West Indies to stuff up a run-chase or the Indians to stuff up a defense of a reasonable score (268, after being 218-3)? Another race is on.

Breaking the mold

2011-03-20T06:51:00.003-04:00

Well, by batting first, India have set up the first part of their template against non-minnows in this World Cup: bat first, get off to a good start, collapse at the end, and then fail to defend adquately. The early loss of the openers means there is a small blip in the template, and hopefully, there will be others. Otherwise, an unconvincing campaign will look even more insipid.

A new Bish

2011-03-17T07:18:00.002-04:00

My first sight of Devendra Bishoo, the West Indies' latest spinner. A leggie no less. So far, so good. A nice leg-break, good flight, some turn. And two very, very useful wickets - Trott and Morgan - thus far. I'd like to see more of him in this Cup.

Cartwheeler!

2011-03-17T06:50:00.003-04:00

Well, that was worth waking up in the morning for. Kemar Roach, perhaps the consistently, quickest bowler in the world, comes back for a new spell in the crucial England-West Indies game, and sends Ian Bell's off-stump flying with a peach of a delivery, that cut away just a bit. A nice cartwheel; if I was a gymnastics judge, I would have given it a couple of extra points.

Skipper not at the helm

2011-03-12T07:48:00.002-05:00

A curious display of rudderless batting by Cap'n Team India, MS Dhoni in the final stages of the game. And, yes, India 296 all out in 48.4 overs. Unfreakingbelievable.

Lekker fightback by South Africa

2011-03-12T07:44:00.002-05:00

After being 267-1 at one stage, India have made a sub-300 score (bowled out in less than 50 overs) a possibility.