BrawlGate and the Golden Mean

A new post on BrawlGate and the search for the golden mean is up at Different Strokes.

PS: I'm not sure I've said anything new in this post, but I still feel like I had to get it off my chest post-T20 WC.

Some thoughts on the IPL

As the third season of the IPL approaches, I've become increasingly convinced that the only way I could get interested in it was if the following conditions were met:

1. I should be the owner of a nice, large-screen television, preferably HD with a quality broadcast to boot
   
   
2. I should be back in India
   
   
3. I should watch the games in the company of a few like-minded friends
   

My cricket-watching environment, solitary, often with headphones on, sitting at my desk, looking at a computer screen, is only conducive to pursuing well-established passions like test matches. One-day internationals struggle in this setting, and it is only major tournaments that manage to retain my interest (in this regard T20 does well for I watched the World Cup last year with keen interest).

So the IPL will come and go, and while I will tune in for some of the games, I'm not optimistic that it will evoke any significant reactions in me. I almost wish IPL had started off as a purely domestic endeavor; I think I would have been quite pumped up about cheering for Delhi then (after all, there'd be the chance that we could stick it to Mumbai, and who wouldn't want that?).

Which leads to me another thought. What if the IPL, instead of starting off as a grand international league, had simply started off as an Indian domestic competition, on a smaller scale with a little less money (but just enough to make it worthwhile for the Indian international stars to play)? Perhaps the league might not have attracted the glamor, the big bucks, the attendant hoopla. Perhaps. But would the interest have been so minimal that it wouldn't have flourished? I don't think so. Given that, I suspect it would have eased into the world's calendar a little more smoothly. And perhaps in the second or third seasons, IPL owners/organizers could have announced that teams were allowed to retain one or two international players, who might have been attracted because of the decent money available for a few weeks work. Perhaps the IPL would have made a different sort of impact on the cricketing world's consciousness then?

What would the world's attitude to the IPL, to Modi, to Indian cricket, to the BCCI, have been then? What would the average Indian fan's reaction been? I'm not sure what the answers are, and I invite your thoughts and reactions.

A little Bradman pilgrimage

A little trivia note: I visited Petersham Oval yesterday. A good friend suggested we walk down there from her place; I wasn't sure why we were headed there (besides it being a cricket ground, and her knowing that I'm a cricket nut) but then was informed that it was the venue of Don Bradman's first-grade debut (the Don obliged with a 110 on debut). I'll post a photo of the commemorative plaque and moi very soon.

Yes, I know a very Indian thing to do: visiting Bradman-related venues in Australia. But in my defense, it wasn't my idea. And I didn't even know of it. So, there, I'm not such a Bradman nerd.

But I would like to visit Bowral someday.

A familiar situation

Watching India's incompetent performance on Saturday, and realizing that the Australia game was now a knockout affair, triggered a sneaking feeling: does India always start major tournaments poorly? It seemed to me that the Indian team has a talent for ending up in must-win (or dependent on run-rate) situations very quickly. I wasn't sure, so I went and checked just the World Cups.

The record looks something like this:

• 2007 World Cup - lost to Bangladesh (eventually knocked out in pool round)
  
• 2003 World Cup - beat the Netherlands; lost to Australia in the next, still needed to scramble against Namibia as a result; went on to final
  
• 1999 World Cup - lost to South Africa (eventually knocked out by Australia in second stage)
  
• 1996 World Cup - Beat Kenya, then beat the West Indies (eventually knocked out in semi-finals)
  
• 1992 World Cup - Lost to England, did not qualify for semis
  
• 1987 World Cup - Lost to Australia, knocked out in semis
  
• 1983 World Cup - beat the West Indies, won the cup
  
• 1979 World Cup - lost to West Indies, knocked out in pool round
  
• 1975 World Cup - lost to England, knocked out in pool round
  

Not a pretty sight. In nine world cups, India have only won their opening game three times. Two of those wins have come against minnows, and in one of those occasions, they still painted themselves into a corner by losing the next game. The one time India began their campaign with a win against a major team, they won the cup.

I know this is neither here or there but it was an interesting exercise nevertheless and told me I wasn't completely deranged in thinking the situation India find themselves in today was a familiar one (at least for fans!).

Can't we all just get along?

A new post on creating a Rodney King moment in the India-Australia relationship in cricket is up at Different Strokes.

Still looking for an IPL team

A new post updating my difficulties in finding a team to cheer for in the IPL is up at Different Strokes.

Iain O'Brien and English military history

Reading Iain O'Brien's blog on the T20 games against the Indians is a bit like reading English military history. For the guiding principle of the English military historian is that glorification of a vanquished opponent's abilities can only redound to the praise of your own (c.f Wellington on Napoleon, Montgomery on Rommel etc). Its an art in its own right, not mastered by all yet. Gloating is silly, and for short-sighted chumps. And in this case, premature. But the central lesson is truly worth imbibing: humility adds to glory.

Slumdog Millionaire and the Indian cricket fan

The reaction to my post (below; over at CI's Different Strokes) on the cricket question in Slumdog Millionaire, is informative in a couple of ways. Besides the obvious one that blog posts will always be misunderstood by a certain fraction of your readership, it also tells me my age is showing.

For I genuinely believed the cricket question in Slumdog Millionaire was an easy one, and infuriatingly so. But in doing so, I think didn't recognize that I was thinking of a kind of fan that I used to be very familiar with a long time ago: one that got a lot of his cricket information from magazines and books, that spent a fair amount of time perusing statistics columns, and read a decent amount of cricketing history. That fan didn't have that much information to cricket on television, and so to get his cricketing fix, he turned to textual sources and in so doing developed a set of interests related to cricket that almost invariably involved cricket statistics (and a lot of fantasizing about games he couldn't possibly be exposed to). Back then too, there wasn't that much cricket played, so keeping up with statistics was a little easier.

Now the modern Indian fan gets most of his cricket from the net or from television (if you live in India, you can pretty much watch cricket 24 hours a day from Neo, ESPN, Star Cricket). While interest in cricketing history hasn't gone away, its perhaps not as intense as it was, and it can't be, when there is so much cricket going on. Our cognitive apparatus simply isn't geared to let us keep glorying in the past when we have so much in the present to process. And the relationship to the game has to change when one's primary sources are not textual any more. Sure, the net is a rich source of information, but people use it to check scores, watch video clips, live streams and the like. I doubt the modern Indian fan uses the net to read about the history of the game. If the history is present, its incidental, like the little specials that show up on CI every once in a while. And if you have a interest in statistics, it tends not to be historical, but rather the kind that is interested in some sort of quantification of the qualitative i.e., can we come up with an all-rounder's coefficient that will settle the Kapil vs. Botham vs. Hadlee vs. Imran question once and for all? (Witness the debates on CI's statistics blog for instance).

And perhaps the modern Indian fan doesn' t give a rat's arse about all those Dead White Cricket Players that were such a source of fascination for me when I was a kid. They have tons of heroes now; they were born after India had become World Champions in cricket; the Indian player is ever more a hero at home; the relationship with the rest of the cricketing world has changed. More power to them.