Where's Warne when you need him?

I have just watched Virender Sehwag – (62 matches, 24 wickets at an average of 39) deliver an unplayable off-break to Australia’s number five Michael Clarke.

With a puff of dark-brown dust the ball bucked off a good length: it turned viciously back into the batsman at an angle of 45 degrees, flying over Clarke’s gloves as he dropped his hands at the last second, and then past Dhoni behind the stumps. It ran away for three byes.

This was the 97th over of Australia’s first innings, on the third day of the match.

If this is what Virender Sehwag – a batsman not noted for delivering spitting cobra’s – can do, then what is Cameron White doing in Australia’s team with Beau Casson and Nathan Hauritz playing state-cricket back in Australia? How bad must they be? Neither would win a series, but playing White is like England going into a Test with Ian Blackwell as your front-line spin option.

Sehwag has just bowled Hussey – well set on 53 – with a ball that pitched on middle - gripped and turned, and cannoned into the left-handers off-stump. Where’s Shane Warne when you need him?

SRT and his records

As Sachin Tendulkar glided the first ball after tea down to third man in Mohali today, the euphonious sound of his bat hitting the ball was drowned out by momentous roar from the crowd. Tendulkar, who made his debut as a mere 16-year-old child against Pakistan in 1989, is now the leading run-scorer in the history of the game. The shot and the record entirely justified the sobriquet: “little master”.

I was younger than Tendulkar was on his debut when I first saw him play. South Africa were hosting India at the Wanderers in a One Day International in 2001 and my family’s recent acquisition of Sky Sports meant a new world of international cricket was now open to me. I spent more than a week eagerly anticipating it.

On the morning of the match I slumped in front of my food at breakfast with my head resting on the table. I recall making guttural sounds as mother came to fuss over me to ask what was wrong. I told her I had stomach-ache and could not go to school. My acting skills were superlative. I was soon laid on the sofa with a heavy blanket over me, and the yellow bucket by my side that always seemed to accompany illness in the family.

Tendulkar had always evoked something sublime and mysterious in my young mind. I had heard his name discussed endlessly in newspapers and on television. I knew of his batting feats and how he always delivered for India. Some said he was the greatest player of his generation. But I had never seen him play. I did not even know what he looked like. Instead of constructing an image of him in my head, my imagination was rife with impossible shots and huge scores.

We all know the line that when Tendulkar walks out to the middle he carries the hopes of a billion people on his shoulders. “Cricket is my religion and Tendulkar is my God” his fans cry. In the Bulling that day he also had a 14-year-old English boy for company as well.

I actually remember little about the game itself – the expectation was everything. Tendulkar and Ganguly opened for India and both scored hundreds. The only shots I recall are Ganguly marauding down the wicket to dispatch innumerable balls over long-on for six. I also remember Tendulkar got out the ball after his century, while I was still high on adrenaline. It seemed as if he had scored those runs just for me. This would have felt the same whether I was 14 or 41. I had invested so much expectation into this innings that when he delivered it was almost personal. It didn’t even matter that India went on to lose the match: Tendulkar was a hero. This is my insight into the Indian cricket fans Tendulkar-cult.

Much can be made of Tendulkar the phenomena. The Marxist Mike Marquese has argued the Tendulkar cult in India is about more than cricket: “unwittingly and unwillingly, he has found himself at the epicenter of a rapidly evolving popular culture shaped by the intertwined growth of a consumerist middle class and an increasingly aggressive form of national identity.”

Cricket is certainly a central articulation of Indian identity, but this analysis is so far removed from his sublime stroke-play that it completely bypasses why Tendulkar is worthy of celebration in the first place. Tendulkar is not a historical construct: he is a glorious batsman.

When you watch Tendulkar bat you invest an expectation in his performance like no other. When the ball is delivered to him your knee bends and your foot inches forward in anticipation of classical drive or a stinging cut-shot. If he edges a ball through the slips, your heart-races as if it is you yourself that has just received a let-off.

The writer Soumya Bhattacharya captures the essence of the Tendulkar-cult. He says he was the first hero he ever had who was younger than he was. Hero’s are supposed to die with your youth, but Tendulkar’s batting has the power to make you feel young again. Record breaking feats aside: this is his marker of greatness.

This article can also be found at The Corridor (a cricket blog)

Statistics can lie

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics” alleged former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.

I’m not sure if Disraeli was a cricketer: perhaps this was said in response to a particularly bad season in which his batting average belied the way he was striking the ball in the nets? One thing is sure: statistics hold a powerful grip over the mind of the cricketer and the cricket fan. You don’t hear Manchester United fans discussing Cristiano Ronaldo or Wayne Rooney’s respective goals-to-shots ratio. Be it bowling averages or strike rates, we are obsessed, and this obsession often clouds our judgement of a player.

Ricky Ponting, Australia’s captain, began the current series under a cloud. Prior to the first Test he had scored a grand total of 172 runs in eight matches against India in India, at a dismal average of just 12.3. Much was made of this statistic in the pre-match posturing between the sides, and Ponting himself was obviously acutely aware of his past failings.

“Ponting’s poor record is an advantage for us,” Zaheer Khan told an Indian news channel. “This could be his last series as a captain, [and] if you see his statements in the press you can make out he is under pressure.”

As proved by his 123, past records can often count for little on the day. Commentators could have spent more time examining his play in the nets or the state of the pitch when making pre-match predictions. All but one of Ponting’s previous matches in India came before 2001 – back when he had only scored 2500 Test runs, and was averaging 43. He has changed markedly as a player since then. He has scored 7500 further runs, made a staggering 28 hundreds and raised his average to a lofty 58. His average against India in Australia is over 70.

Like a batsman who just received a ball that kicked-up off a good length and must play the next ball entirely on its merits - we must take a step back before making our judgments on a player before a series. Ponting’s record tells a story - it shows us his early weakness against spin, and the grip Harbhajan has held over him. It didn’t, however, tell us how this series was going to pan out. Ponting is an exceptional batsman and his innings yesterday wasn’t just redemption - it was a return to his brilliant status quo (if more tempered and watchful than usual).

Another player whose pre-series statistics masked his undoubted talents was Ishant Sharma. Before this match he had taken 23 wickets at an average of 36 from nine matches (the standard for a good fast bowler being under 30). There is no footnote next to these figures saying: “NB: bowled a great spell against Ponting at Perth a year ago - very good prospect”. If his career had ended before this match, a casual observer of Wisden in 20 or 30 years time would have assumed he was dropped for indifferent form. His four-wicket haul showed true class as he bowled beautifully on a slow surface.

Statistics are an indelible part of the game - they are recorded for posterity and will be your marker when you are gone. But they are only numbers. The game isn’t just about runs and wickets - it’s about people, places and stories. Is Michael Hussey the greatest player since Bradman? No he is not, but his average could make you think so. The two team’s final batting and bowling stats for this series will tell us who played consistently – but they might mask a crucial five not out by a tail-ender that won a pivotal test match. Put simply: they say the stats don’t lie, but sometimes they do.

This article can also be found at The Corridor (a cricket blog)

Forget the scoreline

India versus Australia can no longer be spoken of as a burgeoning rivalry: the history, the animosities, the personalities involved – this is one of the great cricketing contests of modern times.

Forget balanced bowling attacks, or whether to pick White or Krejza. Forget the swansong of the old guard. These are only topical subtexts flowing alongside a greater narrative: a story that can be traced through Sachin Tendulkar’s mastering of Shane Warne, VVS Laxman’s 281 and Australia’s eventual storming of Nagpur back in 2004.

Each new chapter has proved to be as compelling as the last. This is a narrative of such glorious ebb and flow that every cricket fan will be glued to his television or his computer over the coming weeks to be a part of the ensuing drama. India and Australia have yet to disappoint us in these duels.

As George Orwell famously wrote in 1945: sport, as we know it, “is war minus the shooting”. When England meet Germany or India play Pakistan there is so much more to the game than is being played out on the pitch. Sport bears the incredible burden of history. This is what makes such games and series so fascinating to the outsider, and so important to the partisan fan.

India and Australia may not have faced each other down the barrel of a gun, but their recent cricketing battles – both on and off the pitch – mean history is as overt and consequential in this series as in any other between rival nations. When the coin is finally tossed in Bangalore tomorrow the collective intake of breath across the sub-continent will be powerful enough to suck up the Bay of Bengal. Such feelings are the foundations stones upon which this series stands, and which makes it so iconic.

As to the cricket itself, I think India’s chances are over-rated and that Australia will surprise those who describe their bowling attack as weak and their batting as undercooked.

Brett Lee, Stuart Clark and Shane Watson all have the control needed for success in India, and it isn’t often that Australia’s batsman fail to perform. Simon Katich, for one, has been Bradman-esque in state cricket for the last year or so. Their spinners look poor, but it was their pace attack that won the series in 2004. I also remember the last time the Aussies chances were played down. They replied to the tune of 5-0.

For India, barring Gambhir and Virender Sehwag, their batsmen have been poor in recent times. Lee’s pace, like Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel’s for South Africa recently, will unsettle them. Even if MS Dhoni, for example, were to score a brilliant hundred tomorrow, the focus will still be on Rahul Dravid, Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly to prove their doubters wrong. This will surely eat away at the team.

I predict a victory for Australia, but this is a series which is about so much more than the eventual scoreline.


This article can also be found at The Corridor (a cricket blog)

Scarborough Fair – A Return to Reality

“Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme,
Remember me to one who lives there,
For she once was a true love of mine”

To the cricket fan - and a Yorkshire one at that - Scarborough is not the setting of a Simon and Garfunkel song, or indeed a fading seaside resort, it is one of the remaining vespers of county cricket long forgotten. Yorkshire’s home is Headingly in Leeds, but since 1876 the North Marine Road Ground, a six-hit from the North Sea, has played host to a handful of Yorkshire matches each season. It has seen many great feats: a Bradman hundred, two one-day internationals, and Yorkshires first Championship victory for 33 years in 2001. In early September 2008 I visited Scarborough myself to see Yorkshire play Somerset in what was to be Darren Gough’s final game for his county.

I was in search of the atmosphere and the intricate pleasures of the game forgotten in a summer spent watching Sky Sports. I wanted to be as far away as possible from Premier Leagues and Stanford millions. I wanted to experience cricket as I had been reading about in the time-weathered articles penned by Cardus, Arlott, Kilburn and others.

Kilburn once wrote an entire article solely about Walter Hammonds walk to the wicket, saying of it “in no possible way could Royal progress have been more regal”. Viewing cricket on television obscures this sight as the break in play a wicket provides is deemed an appropriate time to push an advert down the viewer’s throats. Sir Viv Richards walk to the crease was one of the games great sights; masculine posturing to the extreme – and will be commented on until time immemorial. Modern television coverage would miss it.

Navigating the metal turnstiles as I enter the ground (no doubt the same ones my grandfather wandered through in the fifties) a smattering of spectators greet a four with gentle applause. I feel immediately comforted and at ease.

The Twenty20 game is great; it is fun, fast and entertaining, and exactly the injection of adrenaline the game needs to sustain itself. But, and this is crucial, it must not become the be-all of English cricket. There is a cricket far beyond the television: a game played in schools, clubs and back gardens across the country. Here is to be found the last vestiges of the cricket played for the last one hundred and fifty years - here retained and incubated in the safe confines of an East Yorkshire seaside town.

I take a seat on a wooden bench on the edge of the playing area. Former England captain Michael Vaughan stands in front of me - arms tea-cupped waiting for Tim Bresnan to bowl. This is a far cry from his televised departure from the England captaincy. These are not mediated images of him crying or snippets of interviews in which he bares his soul. There are no cameras to be seen; nobody is watching him but me.

In a break between overs he bends down towards a man sat a few paces to my right. He has a quiet word and emerges with a strawberry. Sky television may have multiple camera angles, ten commentators and High Definition television – but it leaves the viewer detached from the humanity which makes the game so compelling. Later, as Ian Blackwell sweeps a ball for four an audible “oh yer bastard” rings out as the ball beats him to the boundary.

On television you cannot appreciate a young Yorkshire bowler in Tim Bresnan running in for a crucial spell, flanked by over 400 Test Wickets worth of experience in Hoggard and Gough at mid-off and mid-on respectively. Watching them clapping encouragement and shouting sage advice: “pitch er up Brezza” was as intriguing as the game itself. Such intricacies are lost in the standard televised view of the bowler and batsman.

In India television and money hold such a grip over the game that reality is lost altogether. After every over a television advert is sent into the living rooms of millions. Late this winter Monty Panesar may have given Tendulkar hell for six balls - making him play and miss out of the rough. The very next ball (or so it will seem) the same batsman seen struggling will be watched driving a bowler for an immaculate four in a Pepsi or Coke commercial. The tension dissipates and the collective intake of breath that took 4 or 5 over’s to develop is let out.

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan argued in the 1960s: “the medium is the message” – the symbiotic relationship between art and technology means the medium through which art is consumed influences its meaning. The relationship between sport and technology is no different. Cricket through television has changed indelibly to become evermore influenced by the medium through which it is consumed. Packer, Sky and Stanford are evidence enough.

“Remember me to one who lives there” sang Simon and Garfunkel. Television has changed the game so much for the better that it would be a tragedy if it destroyed what makes the game so compelling: a young bowler being helped by his elders, a former captain at ease with himself and the collective tension created by a session of rugged ebb and flow. The spectators and the game are one; they interrelate and play off each other. The cricket is not remote in the middle, viewed through the kaleidoscope of images vetted by editors and cameramen.

Hopefully the county championship, a thrilling one this year as last, will survive, as will the intimate out-grounds like Scarborough. If they do not then what makes cricket such a wonderfully absorbing game may be forgotten and reality may be lost to the game forever.

Rashid’s Non-Selection Was The Right One

Alongside Essex’s ever maturing Ravi Bopara there was one notable absentee from England’s pre-Christmas touring party to India: Yorkshire’s leg-spinning all-rounder Adil Rashid. Despite the consternation's I’ve heard since from some Yorkshire supporters, the decision was made in the best interests of both England and Yorkshire, and more importantly the player himself.

The debates surrounding the merits of picking this spin prodigy for the national team will not be alien to the supporters who have regularly watched him over the course of the last two summers:

• 62 First Class Wickets in 2008 at 31 runs apiece
• Fourth highest wicket taker in 2008
• No other bowler took more than his 4 five wicket hauls this season
• A higher strike-rate than any other spin-bowler in England, with wickets coming every 59 balls
• In 2007 he scored almost 800 runs at an average of 46
• A relegation-saving century and 9 wickets in the final game of 2008
  

Have the selectors then made a great blunder in not picking him? These figures are compelling, especially when you consider that his competition for an England place alongside Monty Panesar was a piebald group of ageing county pro’s, nearly-men, journeymen and promising youngsters.

Others players discussed included the 33-year-old Gary Keedy averaging 41 with Lancashire and Samit Patel with only 12 first class wickets all season. Rashid’s figures surpass both these candidates – along with the eventually chosen Graham Swann who managed only 32 wickets this season (almost half Rashid’s eventual total). So why was he not picked? And more importantly, why was this a good decision?

Warne – I will hear some cry – was thrown straight into the Australian Test team. Why not do the same with Rashid and see what happens? I agree that faith is needed in young players. Warne, however, was a once in a lifetime cricketer. Look at those spinners thrust into the limelight too early: Chris Schofield and Yorkshire’s own Richard Dawson – both had faults found in their game, both suffered from lack of confidence as a result and both slipped out of the county game in their mid-twenties. Young spinners – especially leg-spinners – need watchful man-management.

India is also a difficult place to tour. Warne himself struggled with conditions that seemed felicitous for him, averaging 43 in his 9 matches in India. Facing Tendulkar, Dhoni and Sehwag on flat, if dusty, pitches would be a stern test for anyone, let alone a bowler in his first series.

Australia play a four-test series before England’s arrival and look set to hand a debut to the young off-spinner Jason Krejza. In a recent match against an Indian Board XI he bowled 31 wicketless overs for 199 runs. That is to say, very few spin-bowlers are ready to deal with the rigours required of them by an Indian tour – let-alone a young man still learning his trade.

While Rashid has enjoyed his most bountiful season to date, his form has varied markedly throughout the summer. In 2007 he was disappointing, averaging over 40 runs per wicket. This season he improved, but it was largely down to a late-season surge that he moved so highly up the wicket taking tables. With a recently remodeled action following a serious back injury he needs more time to define his difficult talent. Leg-spin is an art, but it does not come solely from talent and flair. Like any artist with a paintbrush or a composer with a piano, the leg-spin bowler needs hours of practice to control and temper his Dionysian qualities on a cricket field.

Ajantha Mendis, Sri Lanka’s new spin bowling dervish, is perhaps an unfair comparison in that he possesses a wholly remarkable delivery of the ball with a flick from his middle finger। However, despite his prodigious talent, he did not receive international recognition until he was 23 – and that is with a first class average of 15. Similarly Monty Panesar did not play until he was almost 24 – following several seasons of cricket with Northants in which he was taunted as being England potential. Rashid is still just 20.

It is worth repeating the mantra again and again: spin bowlers need time to develop, or you risk them having their confidence dented. The glare of innumerable television-camera’s at international matches mean problems are magnified by the swath of ex-professionals turned commentators, and not treated in the nets. Let us be right – Rashid is good enough to one-day play for England. But he is also young enough to be given a few more years of county training before his eventual selection. This will not just benefit Yorkshire, but also the England team for years to come.