During the time when he was trying to cement his place in the Indian team, I reckon it must’ve been the most difficult thing to be in his position in the dressing room. For variety of reasons, and almost all of them very right, the places of Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly were indisputable in the team. And so, every time a player did well in the domestic cricket, he was assumed to be challenging Laxman’s slot in the team. The only way Laxman could keep his place in the team was by creating innings which gave the viewers, selectors and his teammates long memories. The 167 he scored in Sydney was one such innings. The 130 he scored in Antigua was another. They were followed by several more throughout his career. But the innings all of us will forever remember is the 281 he scored at the Eden against the Australians. A lot has been written about it, so I won’t repeat it here.

I believe he mastered the art of creating innings that were not only memorable because of the unbelievable strokes he played but also because they saved his team time and time again from many tight situations. The memory of us, the watching public, is tinged by those supple wrists and elegant, almost poetic, boundaries he scored, but I believe the memory that his teammates would have is of a man who bailed them out so many times in his illustrious 134 Test matches long career. In many ways, that’s the memory he would forever cherish.

Perhaps fifty years down the line, statistically-minded historians will be perplexed by his record. An average of 45 during the 2000s indicates a very good batsman, but not a batsman who was great or even truly ‘special’. They might look at his seventeen hundreds and say that that is no sign of greatness, because there were so many who scored more. They might even look at his records against England and South Africa and say that they weren’t anywhere close to the kind of dominance he had over the Australians. And that’s where the difference between history and memory would be obvious. While history largely records facts, memory embeds emotions, and there weren’t many innings more emotional than the ones he played in Eden Gardens, in Mohali, in Sydney. Where many a great batsman of his era would be a statistician’s delight, VVS would always be in the heart of a cricket romantic.

Today, he leaves behind a legacy that is hard to recreate. I wonder who amongst the current lot can give us the kind of memories VVS gave. With due respect to Virat Kohli and Suresh Raina, their innings have a tendency to fuse into one another. The one man who is capable of doing so, Rohit Sharma, is a perennial underachiever, unlike the man whose batting position he might one day inherit.

So long VVS, you were truly very very special because of the memories you gave us!

It was a World Cup year and I believe that’s what would be a central piece for any year-end review. But there were events that happened on the field and off it, both cricketing and several not so, that threatened to steal the World Cup’s thunder. Before the marquee event of the calendar began, the world had all but put an R.I.P. sign on the freshly prepared grave of One Day Cricket. The doomsayers predicted another tepid event and a swift subjugation of optimists who still believed the ‘old new game’ (read one dayers) still had life in it.

How wrong they were! We had a pulsating World Cup with some of the most memorable acts performed by new and old guard. Tendulkar finally had his mighty and longing hands around the trophy. He was carried around the loving Mumbai stadium by men like Virat Kohli and Suresh Raina who were learning C for Cat and not Cricket when the great man lost his first shot at world glory back in 1992 Australia. It was the most poignant sight, especially if you were an Indian spectator. I bet there weren’t too many dry eyes in the country then. Englishmen provided the greatest entertainment in the event – losing to Ireland but beating South Africa and World Cup success owes to their completely mid-cap campaign.

The best innings of the World Cup, maybe even the year, wasn’t essayed by the usual suspects, but by an unknown Irishman, Kevin O’Brien, whose countrymen are routinely puzzled by the fact that cricket is a game of two versus eleven. It was an innings of such audacity, such bravado, such Quixotic temerity, that the viewers first cheered him on, then started guffawing and ultimately were awestruck by it. Virender Sehwag was always expected to score a double hundred if you drop a few catches off him. But O’Brien wasn’t supposed to score a hundred. Not in a World Cup. Not chasing a three hundred fifty plus score. Not with a strike rate of two hundred. Not, certainly, against the old enemy England. He did. And created a masterpiece for posterity.

Much has been written about India’s victory and how some old and terrible ghosts (2003 and 2007) were laid to rest. So I won’t repeat it here. Although the romantic in me wants to reminisce about the sweet sweet victory India achieved over their old nemesis, Australia. Some good things come to a tragic end and Australia’s undefeated march in World Cup ended with Rick Ponting trying to bury his head in the ground (literally, there is a picture) and Yuvraj Singh, the much maligned colossus, letting out a primal victory cry.

Now, the worst thing. The IPL started five days after Indians celebrated a night they would never forget. Two days after the epochal victory, we saw M S Dhoni in the canary yellow of Chennai Super Kings, answering questions about how he was going to ensure a repeat of last year’s IPL success. Who the hell cared! It was like Genghis Khan talking about painting the walls of his palace after he had conquered the world. It was bizarre and gut wrenchingly unfair on the Indian team, especially its great captain, to not soak in the moment. How many world cups would you be winning in your lifetime? Ask Jacques Kallis about it.

The fact that IPL was a failure, both as a cricketing tournament (which its key stakeholders never thought it ever was) and as a consumer product was the best justice that was ever done. The cricket, and I guess we can safely call it that because it has bowlers, batters and fielders, was poor quality. The viewers were perplexed to see their favorite players suddenly wearing different colors and representing different teams. They were totally sated after watching the tri-color being hoisted at the pinnacle of glory in the World Cup. Would you eat a hastily prepared meal in your local mess right after devouring the greatest dishes ever prepared by the best chefs? You wouldn’t. No sane person would. But the people controlling cricket in India thought we, the viewers, ought to be taken for granted. Very much like the traders and bankers who thought real estate prices never came down before the sub-prime crisis came back to bite them where it hurt the most. The result? For the first time in the history, we had more policemen than spectators at Eden Gardens.  It was heart breaking. Unbelievable. Akin to people in Chennai refusing to watch a Rajnikanth movie. It can’t happen. Shouldn’t happen. Please, the powers in Indian cricket, the BCCI, please – don’t let it happen again. EVER.

This article wouldn’t be complete without talking about the most enigmatic force in the cricket world – Pakistan Team. Since 2006, when Inzamam soul destroyingly forfeited the Oval test, they were one big train wreck of a team.  Nobody wants to tour their country. Nobody trusts their players. Nobody wants them to make money in the IPL. But they keep winning. This year, they have defeated teams that were thought to be far stronger than them. Their opponents were certainly in better frame of mind. Pakistan have proved that the age-old adage of ‘talent can overcome all’, still has great relevance even today. This is the age of ‘High Performance Coaches’ and ‘Specialized Drills’. But nothing beats the good old ability to swing at great pace. This Pakistan team seems to have a great deal of resilience in them and are being led by a calm and insightful leader in Misbah. Younis Khan and Shahid Afridi have made up their mind that they would talk and do sensible things after Ijaz Butt was stopped from any further damage. The historians, ten or twenty five years hence, might look back at the sentencing of the three cheap merchants of their honor, Amer, Asif and Salman Butt as the cleansing that was necessary and course altering. That’s what makes this year curiously quirky. Good and bad things happening in parallel, maybe even feeding off each other!

Two proud test cricket powerhouses, India and Australia were bullied into submission by the common enemy, England. Indians and Australians had made a habit of pummeling the Englishmen in the past, and this year they gave it back with interest and penalties. Several reputations were scarred (Ponting became the first Aussie captain with three Ashes defeats, Dhoni faced the ignominy of a humiliating whitewash) and many weaknesses were exposed (India’s inability to bowl without Zaheer and Australia’s lack of depth in batting). Zimbabwe played a test match after almost seven years, and incredibly, almost won it! New Zealand beat Australia in Australia with a team in which no one was called Richard Hadlee. Sri Lankans realized life without Murali was so impossibly difficult to live. The bizarre deterioration of Mahela Jayawardene was saddening to watch. He, along with VVS Laxman is the guardian of artistry on cricket field. And sadly, both are fading away.  This was the year when Dale Steyn told the world that there is him at the top, a large vacuum follows him, and the rest take the remaining positions. Off course, with due respects to a born again Jimmy Anderson and always threatening if fit, Zaheer Khan. The spinners fared poorly. Harbhajan Singh couldn’t sustain the great form he showed in South Africa. Graeme Swann failed the great Indian ‘Can-you-threaten-them-when-Warne-and-Murali-couldn’t?’ batting test, even when every Indian batsman in England looked as if he had gone into a worm-hole only to come out of other side to realize he had bat in his hands and was supposed to use it. Nathan Lyon has shown immense promise but he too would be facing the same test very soon.

I reckon, the two speeches delivered by Kumar Sangakkara and Rahul Dravid would echo for a very long time. Two well read, thoughtful, insightful and erudite men with immense class created the blueprints for what cricket ought to be in simple yet awe inspiring manner. I wish the ICC was listening to them.

Some random highlights:

Best Team of the year: By far England. Not in One Dayers though. That’s India.

Best Innings of the year: Kevin O’Brien’s hundred in World Cup. Across the formats of the game.

Best Match of the Year: New Zealand vs Zimbabwe test match that Zimbabwe agonizingly lost

Best debutante of the year: Pat Cummins. I reckon he would be the natural heir to Dale Steyn in days to come

Best Batsman of the year: Ian Bell in tests. A B Devilliers in One Dayers

Best Bowler of the year: Dale Steyn, period.

Best quote of the year: “Sachin has carried the nation’s hopes for twenty years on his shoulder. It was time we carried him on ours” – a teary eyed Virat Kohli after winning the Cup that matters.

Best coach of 2011 as per Ganguly: Greg Chapppell, because he is coaching Australians

Best underwhelming quote from Sehwag: ‘I thought I was hitting the ball well.’ This, after he had scored a mere 219 runs in Gwalior.

Best ‘Oh No’ moment: Graeme Swann telling the press he thought Pietersen was a lousy captain

Best ‘You Gotta Be Kidding’ moment: When Md. Asif told the court with a straight face that it was pure coincidence that Mazhar Majeed correctly predicted the no-balls. This, after someone told Asif that it was actually a one in ten million chance for that to happen.

Let’s hope we have many great centuries in 2012. Let’s hope we have devastating five wicket hauls. Let’s hope Pat Cummins, Virat Kohli, David Warner, Umesh Yadav, Darren Bravo and other young turks stake the claim to greatness. Let’s hope Australians send off the titanic Ricky Ponting with grace. Let’s hope we see an exciting spinner dominating the bowling charts. Let’s hope Sachin Tendulkar, Jacques Kallis, Rahul Dravid, Kumar Sangakkara and Mike Hussey still remain integral parts of their teams come 2013.

Lets hope IPL 2012 doesn’t make us lose interest in this great sport.

Lets hope…

]]> http://www.sportskeeda.com/2011/12/28/cricket-in-2011-a-year-for-the-historians/feed/ 3 350940 http://www.sportskeeda.com/2011/12/23/india-v-australia-will-we-wake-up-at-5-30-a-m-in-2014/ http://www.sportskeeda.com/2011/12/23/india-v-australia-will-we-wake-up-at-5-30-a-m-in-2014/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 12:39:58 +0000 rohitgore http://www.sportskeeda.com/?p=92046

I can never forget the time when I fell in love with cricket. It was in 1991-92, when Indians were getting regularly hammered in Australia. India lost a lot in those four months, including the terrible World Cup campaign (where they realistically didn’t have much of a chance). But the prospect of a stunning quality live telecast with Richie Benaud and Bill Lawry commentating made me get up every day at five in the morning to watch it live. The crowds were chock-a-block at the stadia, the Australians wore sunshine yellow, Indians wore cobalt blue, (unfortunately, only one dayers were telecasted live by good old Doordarshan. Does anyone watch it now?), Sachin Tendulkar was young and unencumbered and was hitting the likes of Craig McDermott and Merv Hughes to hitherto unknown areas of the cricket field, Kapil Dev proved to the world that he will fade away as a great (although he faded too slowly and sadly), and India discovered Javagal Srinath, the quintessential Indian fast bowler – so much promise but so less achieved.

Since then, every tour Down Under has been an event in life, to be savored while it lasted and then to be cherished. I belong to the generation that grew up with Tendulkar, and for him a tour to Australia was the epochal moment of his career and by extension for us. The fact that Australia see the rising sun far sooner than us has helped – no prospect of getting interrupted by inane Saas Bahu Soaps on TV!

So what do we have here? Australians don’t have the kind of blokes who can make atrocious claims like 4-0 ( a la Glenn McGrath) and not look ridiculous. They don’t have the hulking pirate Mathew Hayden and his edgy parrot perched on his shoulder, Justin Langer, at the top of the order. They don’t have the original most feared Test buccaneer, Adam Gilchrist, at number seven. They don’t have the assured class of Damien Martyn at four. They don’t have the crafty general, Mark Taylor or Alexander The Great of cricket, Steve Waugh. They don’t have the mesmerizing magician and the loveable lout, Shane Warne. They don’t have the metronome Glenn McGrath, the slinger Gillespie and Bullet Lee. Their lone great in the team, the titanic Ricky Ponting, is fighting for his place with Lilliputs (Dan Christian? Who?) and is losing.

What they have is a team of honest triers. But in that, lies the danger. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Indians, well they have everything to lose, don’t they? They have the middle order selectors of most countries would kill for. In Sehwag they have the batsman who makes bowlers question their chosen path in life. In Gambhir they have a potential great. In Kohli they have a potential master. They have a far better bowling attack led by the modern Sultan of Swing Zaheer, and a Srinath clone in Ishant (both in potential and performance. Have you observed? All the alphabets of Ishant’s name are there in Srinath’s?). In Dhoni they have a far mature and assured leader, accepted by the veterans, rookies, selectors and public alike.

My guess? 2-0 Australia. Or 2-1 at worst.

The reason?

Simple. Indians are such poor starters that it would be a miracle if we either save or win the first test. Going by the poor planning we are known for, I am sure they would’ve planned for such miracles. There is a huge question mark on the longevity of the bowling attack, and I am not talking about careers here, but the four tests of this series. It won’t be a surprise if the third or fourth test bowling line-up reads: Vinay Kumar, Abhimanyu Mithun, Ashoke Dinda and R Ashwin. Sehwag and Gambhir aren’t clicking together as often as they would want to, and the history has told us that Test matches are won by bowlers and openers. With due respects, Dhoni as the wicket-keeper batsman doesn’t have the aura Gilchrist or Andy Flower or Kumar Sangakkara or Matt Prior have/had.

It will all come down to how the holy trinity of Tendulkar, Laxman and Dravid blunts the new, shiny and scrubbed bowling attack of Australia. But they can’t win the games.

To win games, India will have to take roughly sixty five Australian wickets. Can they? I don’t think so.

So there. I am kind of sticking my neck out here. 2-0 Australia.

And if India wins it, you can make me eat the humble pie. I like pies!

But one thing is for sure, I wonder how many would be too keen to get up at five in the morning come 2014. There won’t be Sehwag then. No Ponting either. No Laxman and possibly no Dravid.

And why would we get up if there is no Sachin?

And I am going to make a sacrilegious exemption here: I am not going to blame the government for not doing many things it ought to do. Some things you just need to accept as the reality and move on – something all Indians have done brilliantly in all other spheres of life, except sports.

Let’s first look at the number one dimension responsible for this: Indian Culture. We are a country obsessed with movies and masti. The youth of this country (and before people snicker, I must say I am 34 and truly qualified to call everyone around 25 as ‘youth’) don’t do sports. And not for a moment am I discarding the fact that there are several kids who are happily crowding the playgrounds, but that isn’t serious sports. Our neighborhood galli cricket culture is the epitome of masti. We are out there to have fun, and cricket or football or any other sport for that matter is just incidental. Perhaps, the true purpose of sport is pastime, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. However, such culture will never create no. 1 teams. The problem lies in the fact that not many of those masters of galli graduate into ‘season ball cricket’ or ‘club football’. On another note, is there any other sport that is subverted so enchantingly as cricket? From using tennis ball, to narrow lanes, to the legendary ‘one tappa out’ version, I believe no other sport has propagated so many mutant forms.

Our families don’t believe in something called family sports outing. Maybe the lack of proper facilities like good grounds with good sanitary arrangements are entirely lacking, but that doesn’t entirely absolve the potbellied fathers and the haggard mothers from their weekly excursions of dragging kids to the nearby cinema with daylight-robbery-priced popcorns followed by a couple of thousand worth of dinner with generous dollops of oil and cream. The family-sports is an alien concept here and the only physical activity we do with our folks is to walk to-and-fro between the car parking and homes. You will never have world’s no. 1 basketball team emerge from this kind of general lifestyle.

The damage of scoffing at or even dreading the option of kids choosing sport as a career can never be underestimated. This has very valid reasons. Everyone is pointing at the IPL as the source of great riches. It certainly is, but we have to remember that it is so for a very few and a select set of people. All put together, ten IPL teams can have at the most three hundred players, and not all of them are getting ‘sold’ like exotic slaves of the medieval era. Just look at that number: 300. With an approximate population of a hundred million kids (give or take), that’s a measly number to aspire to be part of. And our ancient survival instincts aren’t going to take such odds. While the young Indian fathers would never discourage their kids from pursuing a sport, even excellence at it, but if the kid says he won’t study for his SSC because he needs to practice hard for the weekly game, I am sure a spanking would ensue and the severely reprimanded kid would quickly abandon any thoughts of being the next Tendulkar.

If you look around and see the countries that are ruling the world of sports have rich sports culture. US, China, Japan, Australia, Britain, Germany, heck even the several countries in Africa with a GDP equivalent to my housing society’s annual income have amazing sports culture. And none of these countries are champions at just one sport and pathetic in others. Kids learn to be competitive and most importantly, stay fit and understand what ‘loosing’ means at a very early age there. As a result, they are very good when they compete at the highest levels. Sports academies are dime a dozen and fiercely promote sports.

So, in essence, it was a beautiful dream that an amazing bunch of men in Indian cricket achieved entirely on their own – being no. 1 in at least one sport. They were once in a hundred years band – Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly, Kumble, Laxman, Sehwag and Zaheer. And sadly, they achieved that dream in the first decade of this century. After they are gone, India would soon assume normal service – of being third grade at sports in general and below average at cricket (test cricket i.e., the only form that matters).

The biggest contention was around two names, both from India. The first was Virender Sehwag’s as the opener and the second, perhaps a bit more vociferously, of Kapil Dev. Quite simply because there are two names that are always penciled in when creating an ‘all time team’ by every non-Indian (or every non-Asian) – Sir Don Bradman and Sir Gary Sobers. While there are multiple slots for a batsman, there is generally only one for an all-rounder. So it was a sacrilegious, as many alleged that a slot so rightfully Sobers’ was usurped by Kapil Dev. We would understand if it were Imran Khan or Ian Botham, many said. But Kapil Dev? You got to be kidding us! To this I have a fan’s ‘flight of belief’ for the first issue here – that of Kapil being in the team. And I have a very solid grouse against the second issue – him being considered inferior to others.

When Kapil made his debut, India was a sum-total of ridiculous clichés to the western world. We were a country of snake charmers, sadhus, mystics, rope tricks and Delhi Bellies. The film makers of that era often pandered to these western sensibilities towards India. We were perhaps happy to know that the Westerners even thought about us, even if it was in the most demeaning way possible. If you see the not so grainy Technicolor images of Hollywood movies of that era (most notably the James Bond caper ‘Octopussy’) you will see what I mean here. In cricket, its equivalent was ‘a country of mysterious spinners’. The cricket administration perhaps taking the cue from the film-makers, never encouraged anybody to bowl fast, lest we challenged the cherished perception of ‘land of tweakers’.  The pitches were made to crumble after lunch on the first day and on more than a few occasions, Sunil Gavaskar and Eknath Solkar were asked to take the shine off the ball on the first day of a test match. If ever, in the history of sports, there has been the equivalent of a messiah, it has to be Kapil. Quite simply because like all messiah’s he made people dream a new dream – that of opposition teams worried about an Indian fast bowler. And he realized that dream spectacularly.

Kapil Dev

Here was a man, a young, lithe athlete, who had a run-up of more than the proverbial few steps of a spinner. Perhaps for the first time, the opposition batsmen saw the Indian wicket-keeper standing way back. I wonder how many people looked at the scenes unfolding before them and thought this was all a show. No way can this man bowl fast. He would trundle a few overs of pretentious fast bowling (not unlike Madan Lal) and surrender the ball to Bedi and Chandra to start wheeling away. How wrong they were! Because Kapil was fast. And before some people start uttering the names like Lillee, Thomson, Holding, Roberts, I must say, he never was lightening fast, but if you asked batsmen of that era, especially between 1979 and 1982, they would nod their heads vigorously – he was fast. For Indians he was much more than that. He was the miracle they had been waiting for. The sight of an English batsman hurrying to get his bat out of the way of a Kapil outswinger was eye rubbing-ly astonishing.

In many ways, Kapil channeled the spirit of Sobers. The great Barbadian walked into the West Indies team of sixties like a godsend. Till then they were derogatively called the ‘calypso crciketers’, a term I find condescendingly indulgent. West Indies were supposed to be a bunch of charming men who would bat brilliantly for short durations, bowl a few fast overs and lose charmingly. Sobers showed the world that they could not only bat like a dream, they could bat like that for a long time too, and they could win. The Bajans of the Windies embraced Gary like they had no one else, and quite rightfully, Sobers transcended from being just a great cricketer to become a folk hero. And if you were to just forget the last two years of Kapil, he was, and will be Indian cricket’s and even Indian sport’s greatest folk hero. Sunil Gavaskar will be remembered as the quintessential khadoos Mumbai batsman who never gave his wicket away and became a beacon of hope for the middleclass bourgeois majority of India who believed in the principles of conservation and Spartan living. Sachin Tendulkar added controlled aggression to Gavaskar’s values and became the most revered cricketer ever. However, nobody has managed to become a folk hero like Gary Sobers and Kapil Dev. And before my English friends almost correctly want to add Ian Botham’s name to that list, I must say there is a big difference – Botham bowled seam-up, something several Englishmen have been doing very well before and have done so after him. There is no denying that he did it with great sense of drama and skill, but it wasn’t a miracle. Not like Sobers or Kapil. Imran Khan was Britain educated, was fortunate to get trained in England, and even living in upscale British salons (legend has it that he visited Pakistan when they were playing international matches).  He is the greatest cricketer Pakistan has ever produced, but the title of the Pakistani folk hero goes to Javed Miandad.

While we are on the same topic, let’s dispense with the nonsense that Kapil was inferior to other all rounders of his era (although I do wish Kapil had retired a couple of years earlier, before we faced the ignominy of watching Phil Simmons hammering him for sixes). While bowling Kapil averaged 25 against Australia and West Indies, two strongest teams of his time. It compares favorably with Imran (25 against Australia and 22 against Windies) and is far superior to Botham’s (28 against Australia and a whopping 35 against Windies). And as a batsman Kapil averaged 26 against Australia, 31 against West Indies and 42 against England. Imran had 37 against Australia, 35 against England and 27 against West Indies. Botham loses out spectacularly on one front – his batting record against West Indies. He averaged a measly 21 against West Indies with no centuries. Does it ‘figure’ enough?

I feel, Sobers’ slot in the ‘All Time Greatest’ list is reserved for the champion of the masses, the folk hero who came out of nowhere, was completely indigenous, lived on for a long time and became a legend for the sheer pleasure of watching him ply his art. And if ever there was a man who could be considered in the same league, it has to be Kapil Dev.

As India stand on the brink of a whitewash in England, arguably test cricket's greatest exponent stands helpless, fighting his own demons

 A year back when I was in the UK, one of my colleagues, a die hard cricket fan (a rarity, really, amidst the British who think there is just one sport worth following – football) and I had made a series of bets. He had said: The English team will beat India 3-0, one of the four matches would be a tense draw, India will always score less than 350 with Tendulkar scoring two hundreds in lost causes, Steve Finn will be the leading wicket taker closely followed by Zaheer Khan, and Andrew Strauss will be the man of the series. Well, as it has turned out, he has been wrong on all counts. India is going to lose 4-0, India has scored less than 300 in all the innings, Tendulkar has made no centuries, Zaheer Khan has taken more wickets than Steve Finn who has ‘closely’ followed him despite not playing at all (just a difference of 2 wickets between them), and the man of the series could be any of the Englishmen. I am actually embarrassed to write what I had bet with him. The fact is, we both have lost our bets.

I remember the tour of 1999 in Australia. India had a youngish team then, with the forgotten and forgettable men like Devang Gandhi and S Ramesh opening the innings, Rahul Dravid, VVS Laxman and Sourav Ganguly still in the category of ‘young and good’, and Sachin Tendulkar saddled with the dual role of being the lone true great and the captain. They were facing a set of bowlers (McGrath, Warne, Fleming, Lee) capable of skittling an all time great batting lineup, let alone a nervy bunch of young Indian batsmen. The Indians failed miserably, regularly failing to cross even 200. Although their bowling led by Kumble and Srinath more often than not put the Australian top order under pressure, but quickly resorted to defensive lines once a partnership started building because they had so meager runs to bowl with.

The current England tour is worse than that tour. This is not a team of ‘young and upcoming’. The batsmen, barring the unfortunate Abhinav Mukund, are veterans and know English conditions very well. And with due respect to James Anderson, he is no Glenn McGrath and neither is Stuart Broad close to what Brett Lee was even a young tearaway. Then why do we have the disgrace of a whitewash? And is it a disgrace to the people who are running the show? I am not talking about Dhoni and Fletcher here. They are like the ragged puppets in the greedy and greasy fingers of the unseen puppeteers. They would be made to dance ceaselessly and when they crumble, they would be thrown away. There would be many like them, the puppeteers must be saying to themselves.

Perhaps, for the first time, I am a bit disappointed with Sachin Tendulkar. I know he has surprised us with several comebacks, and more likely than not he would surprise us again, but I am not really bothered about his performance in the series. There was a bit of inevitability to it. Quite simply because, Sachin, regarded the greatest Test batsman after Don Bradman (in my opinion he is the greatest, but that’s another matter), placed Test cricket secondary to the jamboree called IPL. For the first time he decided that he needed rest and missed three tests. Time and tide really wait for none and three tests are as valuable as they can be at his age. With his ability and greatness, I am sure he would play at least five more IPL seasons, but he would never get to tour West Indies again. What does he do? IPL over Test cricket. And in that one instant, nobody, not even perhaps he, realized what kind of tempting the fate act he had set in motion. Sachin didn’t miss three Windies tests. He has missed four more, just that they were in England. And what he has in return is a series of confusing memories: a triumphant victory at the World Cup, an endlessly vacuous nightmare called the IPL, and a forever scarring of being humiliated in Test cricket.

Test cricket deserved better than what it’s greatest exponent decided to do. It’s a message he is sending to the youngsters, who revere him that it is okay to let go of a few tests in places like West Indies, maybe New Zealand and even Sri Lanka if IPL precedes them. What he might not have considered is that you don’t really succeed at the topmost level, a level that enables you to beat England, if you decide to not care for the lesser challenges from the likes of West Indies. He has taken a side, while Test Cricket looks on forlornly.

After a long time, in fact after more than a decade, I am getting the hollow feeling I used to get when India toured for test matches. There was a sense of inevitability to those sojourns in the nineties. Indians would have an individual brilliant knock in the first innings, mostly by Sachin, combust in the second primarily by the bouncing ball and lose the match by a big margin of either runs or wickets. A trend that went on for a long long time, and sadly, is threatening to rear its ugly head back.

It will be easy to blame Dhoni. But if ever there was a man who shouldn’t be blamed, it is he. He is a shrewd, amazingly calm and an articulate man and captain. And in some cases he has shown that he is capable of some superhuman acts. However, this tour, quite simply was beyond him. If it is beyond him, it is beyond anybody in India, or for that matter in the world. It was akin to a hugely successful but overworked CEO being asked to retain the market leadership of his company while all his vice-presidents, the very people who were responsible for the company’s ascent to the top, being removed from their positions for burnout and novices being appointed instead. And, oh, by the way, the CEO will have no say in the planning.

The Indian Officials need to ask themselves: Do we really care for the team’s five day cricket supremacy? The key word here is the ‘supremacy’. All the boards across the globe make the right noises about caring for test cricket, some of them seriously so, like Australia and England. I am sure many people in the Indian Board care for Test Cricket and they would continue organizing test tours. However what they need to ponder over is whether it is really worth it to chase the supremacy in this format. If the answer is yes, then something has to give in. Either the 74 match seriously tiring cricket masked by the shindig of filmstars and wannabes called IPL or the pointless one day matches against Sri-Lanka and West-Indies. Because they can’t win it all. And especially can’t win it all by preparing badly. My vote is for the pointless one dayers being done away with. Indians should return after the test series in England.

I fear a white-wash in this series. Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar and VVS Laxman don’t deserve a white-wash at this stage of their magnificent careers or even a 0-3 scoreline. What the people who have charted the itinery have ensured is that these men, who are national heroes, face the terrible ignominy of returning home with their heads hanging in shame after a resounding defeat. They would never admit it, but it would forever scar them. They wouldn’t mind the hit and giggle of IPL (they wouldn’t giggle really), but if you asked them what they value the most, it would be India’s test performances, especially overseas. I guess, we will continue with the shameful tradition of mistreating the honor of our heroes. Be it the ones in armed forces, or social services or in sports.

This article cannot be complete without paying a tribute to this superlative England team. They could well be the best England team of the last 25 odd years. A team that has Graeme Swann coming in at no. 10 and I am sure he wouldn’t be too chuffed about his batting slot. There must’ve been a debate between Broad and Bresnan about who deserves the number eight spot. Matt Prior is the best wicketkeeper-batsman in test cricket and a depressing sight for the opposition to see walking in at number seven. Pietersen is prepared to grind his way through and Bell is on his way to become a right handed David Gower. They have vanquished India without their openers firing, Jonathan Trott having a sub 40 average for the series and Swann having a bad time with his spin. And they have vanquished India, make no bones about it. Apart from the session in Lords when Ishant Sharma discovered why he is considered a real threat, and a few sessions in the second test, they have dominated India. It is a contest between unequals, quite simply because England ‘eleven’ is made up of ten batsmen and four bowlers whereas Indian ‘eleven’ is playing with four batsmen and three bowlers.

Let’s pray that Sehwag strolls back into this depressed and jaded team and uplifts them with a marauding double hundred at Edgbaston. Gambhir returns at the top and brings with him his true grit. Crucially, Zaheer Khan returns to take his share of premium English wickets and lead the young bowling attack. Let’s hope they drop Harbhajan and bring in Munaf Patel who would at least keep the things quiet or Amit Mishra who might not do worse than the turbanator. This neutering of Harbhajan’s threat by English batsmen is heartbreaking to watch. I wonder if a drop from the team might just be the tonic he needs to bring back the sting in his tweakers.

And most importantly, the team and its tired captain summon every ounce of skill and determination to avoid giving a haunting memory of a disgraceful defeat to Tendulkar, Dravid and Laxman.

Ian Bell dismissed

For a few mad moments, Bell thought his wonderful knock had bestowed upon him an authority to dictate how the world should operate and he decided that they all should enjoy a cup of Tea. Sorry mate, doesn’t work like that. Umpires decide when you have that well deserved cuppa, even if you have scored frigging thousand runs. That’s the rule of the game and you signed on to it. Let’s ask some simple but hard questions here. Did Indian fielders obstruct Bell from completing a run? No. Did the umpire signal a boundary? No. Did the umpires call it tea by removing the bells? No. Did Mukund and Dhoni have the right to appeal? Yes. Did the umpires have the right to accept the appeal and apply the rules? Yes. The situation couldn’t have been simpler. However, it was far from so. Incredibly, all the logic was discarded by everyone and the appeal was overturned. Ian Bell resumed his unquestionably sublime but legally completed innings, added fifty odd more runs in a partnership with Morgan, rubbed salt and mirchi on India’s wounds, and walked back to the dressing room acknowledging the cheers of an ignorant and bullying crowd. From today, the English, at least on the crowd front, have lost all moral grounds to criticize the public behavior in the subcontinent. The so-called knowledgeable Englishmen in the stands booed and jeered the Indian team when they should be doing that to their own batsman.

What is this bloody ‘spirit of cricket’ that everyone is saying has been spared the indignity of being violated by this legal appeal? Is there a document that states what it means? Is there a secret parchment written by Leonardo Da Vinci, or hidden archaically in some of his paintings that explain this abstract concept? I know I am sounding a bit pedantic here, but I believe there is no such thing. This spirit is more often than not invoked by people who believe their ignorance and foolishness should not only be pardoned but rewarded. I am totally amazed by the English commentators and press who are going on record saying that this selfless act by Dhoni has resulted in upholding the great holy spirit of the game. I hope, from now onwards, every inappropriate appeal by an English player will ensure proclamations of grievous injury to the spirit. If say, Stuart Broad tomorrow appeals for an obvious inside edge LBW, Strauss steps in and rescinds it. Then, dear English press, we will talk about the spirit. But I am sure that won’t happen. In fact, what we will have are casual assaults on integrity of VVS Laxman by the likes of Michael Vaughan.

Odysseus, when brutally questioned by Achilles about his dubious decision to side with the despotic Agamemnon had said ‘When you are a king, your choices are very limited’. Dhoni will be admired, as he should be. It is very easy for all of us to have an opinion on this matter, but he doesn’t have those privileges. In his heart, he knows he was right to appeal, when for the briefest of moments, he had thought of himself as merely a cricketer who was playing the game as it should be played – fair and within rules. Like Achilles. But for that ephemeral moment, he forgot that he was the king who had very little choices – much like Odysseus. And in this case it meant indulging the fool.

                This article isn’t an attempt to criticize Dhoni. All said and done, armchair critics like me, or for that matter all critics have lost any rights they had to censure Dhoni. He is the captain who won India the World Cup with an innings of such luminosity that its light will never fade away from our collective conscience. He is the man who led an underachieving team of greats and brilliant performers to the top of the Test rankings. He has defeated Australia in a Test series. Twice. He has drawn a series in South Africa. And most importantly, Sachin Tendulkar believes Dhoni is the best captain he played under. It is the greatest endorsement one can get. Like Mr. Spock, the faultless and superhuman being, telling Captain Kirk, a man full of flaws, that he is the greatest commander of Starship Enterprise.  However, what we have today is a defeat. A defeat that could’ve been avoided. This isn’t an outcome of five days of tantalizing contest. The seeds of this defeat go way back. The five days were just an extended culmination. This article is an examination of ‘the avoidable’.

Dhoni was asked, and I say ‘asked’ in its truest meaning because he wouldn’t have wanted to do it this way, to defend the no. 1 ranking he and his team of old but great warriors had painstakingly achieved over several bloodying battles. And he was asked to do so against an enemy that had systematically, and more importantly, passionately planned to engineer the downfall of Dhoni’s team (it is time we start calling this team Dhoni’s). However the no. 1 team in the world went about assembling its troops like we do when we round-up guys in our mohalla for an evening of a tennis ball cricket match against a rival mohalla. Tendulkar came back after an extended and well deserved holiday, albeit an avoidable one. Gambhir walked in after an avoidable injury. Sehwag never did. Zaheer returned with avoidable weight on his ageing fast bowler’s body and had an avoidable injury on the field. Great armies were always primed and ready for the battle. Jenghis Khan never had to summon his best combatants from things they weren’t supposed to do.

Ishant and Praveen bowled with an avoidable lack of rhythm on the first day. This, unforgivably, is the most avoidable of all aspects. Dhoni and the five wise men (the selectors) must’ve had a very good idea of the starting eleven at Lords at least a month back. And most of these five wise men and the Board they represent know that it is so difficult for a young cricketer who hasn’t played much cricket in the Old Blighty to get adjusted to it. Why did Ishant and Praveen play the pointless one dayers in the Caribbean against the second string of an already inferior team? Why didn’t they get into a two match contract with a county, heck even UK’s highly competitive village cricket teams, before they wore the Indian shirt at Lord’s? Avoidable, this lack of acclimatization, given the unpardonable single practice match before the Test. Alexander the Great never marched into a battle without knowing what he is leading his men into. And when he did in India, it led to his inglorious defeat. That lesson is unfortunately lost on the people who matter in Indian cricket.

It is very easy to criticize the IPL for everything that is wrong in Indian cricket. However that would be foolish. It is the most unavoidable thing in Indian cricket and in some aspects, it is even essential. It is a tournament that will never go away from the Indian team’s calendar. In fact, several things about it are very very good and I am not going to belabor on either the good or the bad about the IPL. What everyone who control the Indian cricket need to definitely belabor upon is how to find a way to a happy co-existence of IPL and the No. 1 Test ranking. One shouldn’t be sacrificed for the other and neither one should be treated in a cavalier manner. Both are fantastic achievements and shouldn’t be creating camps of players and officials who essentially treat the other entity as evil. This, surely, is avoidable. Great corporate firms never sacrifice a product or service line for the other. HP didn’t sacrifice its low-margin PC business because they thought high-end servers were more classy or vice-versa.

Andy Flower must be a happy and contented man today. He must’ve told his team of determined Englishmen that Dhoni’s great team was imminently beatable. He must’ve known that his adversaries are busy doing avoidable activities. And with ruthless precision, this England team has achieved it. I say ruthless because most of the members of this team executed conscientious reversal of roles and it must’ve taken them a lot of time to do so. Pietersen did the unthinkable – swallowed his pride for a scratchy and almost timid first century. Broad overcame his cultivated and a little ridiculous image of ‘the enforcer’ and bowled a fuller line. Prior launched a blistering counter attack when everyone including Geoffrey Boycott’s grandmother would’ve expected him to let a rampaging Ishant Sharma roll over himself and the tail. Andrew Strauss even exposed himself by courageously padding up for the practice match against the Indians ahead of the Test. It shows a plan, a strategy in place by the England team. And if the first test is of any evidence, then this strategy is a sound one and has been in place long before the first ball was bowled in the 2000^th Test. This will surely give England what they aspire to be – the No. 1 ranking. This could be the most unavoidable result!

Though, maybe, just maybe, the crazy diamonds of Indian cricket – Sachin, Rahul and VVS would shine one last time together in England. Any bets on that being unavoidable? However, the real question that needs asking is, how long would we keep planning miracles and heroics when the opposition is planning for the victory?

For a country that was passionate about its independence, always rightfully so and many times violently so, Indians on the cricket field in the decades after that night of 15^th August, were strangely almost deferential to the Englishmen.  One can’t think of men like Merchant, Hazare, Mankad or Umrigar, fine men fluent with the English language and class exponents of an essentially British pastime, making news for ‘sledging’ (a modern and polite word for the more traditional ‘abuse’) their opponents, although one can only imagine what they must’ve got from the likes of Trueman and Statham.  Perhaps it was a result of India almost always bereft of bowlers who were even remotely fast, what with Mankad and Hazare opening the bowling. Hurling abuses while bowling at speeds below 70 MPH is like a Pomeranian dog trying to intimidate by barking. Or perhaps they were men much like their fledgling country – wary of offending anyone, least of all the former rulers. Surprisingly, this continued for a long time, barring the exceptions of a determined and bullheaded Sunil Gavaskar, and a gifted and pacy Kapil Dev, prompting Bob Willis to once say at a press conference in ’82 that they don’t really chunter against Indians on the field because the Indians are a bunch of such nice blokes. As a result, there never was, what the modern commentators say, a ‘needle’ in the contest between the two countries. The English dominated whenever Indians toured, barring the exceptions of Wadekar led team of early seventies and Kapil led team of mid eighties.

Things changed sometime in the nineties.  India suddenly found itself shaking off its socio-economic development ideology, which had long turned into a sustained and dispiriting obsession, partly due to the external forces and partly due the shared vision of the current PM and the then PM.  In the nineties and especially in the first decade of the new millennium we have seen perhaps the most intense but underrated cricketing rivalry between the two countries. The leaders from both sides, proud men like Nasser Hussain and Michael Vaughan, Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid, were strong characters who never backed down. They were ably supported by the feistiness of the likes of Andrew Flintoff and Kevin Pietersen, Virender Sehwag and Zaheer Khan. Anil Kumble, the greatest Indian spinner played his part too. And then there was Sachin Tendulkar. He was playing test cricket for India when License Raj had damned a nation to decades of obscurity after the British Raj had suppressed the Indian spirit to subservience, the Berlin Wall was still erect and the USSR was actually on the world map and not just in cold war era novels.

India vs Australia, India vs Pakistan, England vs South Africa and, of course, The Ashes always got higher billing. England vs Pakistan was intense for all the wrong reasons, some of them quite disgusting (Inzamam’s Darrell Hair induced rage and subsequent abandonment of a test match) and some threatening the very existence of the sport (the spot fixing and the heartbreaking loss of Mohammad Amer and Mohammad Asif – men who were potentially great cricketers but were cheap merchants of their souls). Through all these, India vs England has been the true advertisement of what Test cricket is all about – a stern test of character, and not just the kind of character that Amer and Asif so woefully lacked. There have been dazzling instances embodying this – the astonishing Phoenix act by Sourav Ganguly in 1996 in scoring two back to back centuries when he was the most derided young cricketer,  Nasser Hussain’s I-will-bloody-show-you century at Lord’s in 2002 when he was being riled by the British Media to vacate his position for younger men, the all elements conquering  (the pitch, the weather and a world class bowling attack) century by Rahul Dravid in the same summer of 2002 that set him on the course of greatness at Leeds, Andrew Flintoff’s joyful twin fifties in Mumbai, 2006 which ensured a 1-1 scoreline for his under strength and written-off side.

And perhaps the most poignant of them all –  four  innings in the same test in Chennai, 2008. One by Sehwag which was an astonishing assault on English bowlers who, within a span of a few overs, abandoned the thoughts of winning. Even IPL club level bowlers would fancy their chances when defending a score of close to 400 in the fourth innings, and these were no club bowlers –Anderson, Harmison, Flintoff, Swann and Panesar.  The two most cruelly forgotten centuries by Andrew Strauss. Very rarely has such a feat been obscured by other happenings. Strauss, as he has done so many times in his career with the diligence of a hard-nosed accountant obsessed with the entries on credit side, had all but ensured that the victory was just a matter of accounting for ten Indian wickets on the last day. But Destiny, that most fickle of Goddesses, had decided to correct one transgression she had inflicted on India’s favorite son a decade back. Fourth innings, a hostile bowling attack, a wearing pitch in Chennai and Sachin Tendulkar. Remember 1999 and the Pakistanis? If Sachin’s career was a living being, this would be the greatest wound it had ever suffered. But there was to be no such injury this time. Sachin scored a hundred, made sure India won and perhaps exorcised the ghosts of 1999.  The Englishmen weren’t the losers, far from it. In fact, they won something that perhaps mattered the most – a billion hearts. They toured India right after the soul numbing attack on Mumbai by fifteen misguided and murderous men. An attack so vicious that it had left a country of a billion people in a state of hopelessness like no other since that momentous night of Independence more than six decades ago. But this time, the old enemy had returned as a great friend. The England team toured India after days of uncertainty and with that single act of great courage and camaraderie they became the greatest winners who ever came to the Indian shores. Pietersen, who was their captain then, doesn’t get the credit he deserves. That 2008 touring party of fifteen cricketers would never assuage the pain inflicted on a country by a loathsome bunch of fifteen terrorists, but they ensured that a hurting nation had some moments of joy to watch their greatest Hero, Sachin Tendulkar, uproot the stump as a souvenir of a poignant victory with a smile on his face and tears in his eyes. For that, we would be forever grateful.

So then, any guesses who would be victorious? My money is on England. Call it sacrilegious, if you will! England have a bowling attack with every member capable of a minimum 200 test wickets career and as a unit can breach the great Indian middle-order, something they haven’t achieved for a decade or so. Raina is untested at six, and Dhoni is a fair distance away from having the impact or presence Gilchrist had at number seven in tests. Though expecting him to do so is a bit of an injustice, but we are a demanding populace and what more can we expect from India’s miraculous and greatest captain? Gautam Gambhir could well emulate what Dravid did ten years back – start the transition from being merely very good to being truly great. But then, again, that would be expecting a bit too much. The English batting has never looked more robust, something they perennially lacked in the nineties. Andrew Strauss seems to have spawned two run making mutants in Alastair Cook and Jonathan Trott who are just like him in many ways and even better in several aspects. Pietersen seems to have understood that greatness isn’t his by right but something he needs to toil hard to achieve. Ian Bell is blossoming into a batsman, and more importantly, a man, English experts always believed was hidden inside him. And most dishearteningly for Dhoni Fortune seems to be wearing the England jersey, with Virender Sehwag, the most feared warrior in modern cricket, being felled by the evil monster called the IPL. What Sehwag does to the opposition captain is part of the folklore and Andrew Strauss must be surely smiling a lot more these days. But then, something similar must’ve been said in 2002 and 2007, wasn’t it? And India returned with their head held high both the times.

So, onto some ‘thrilling test cricket’, a term fast becoming incongruous!