The empire strikes back in 20 overs

T20 is the revenge of the colonized over the colonizer, says the Wall Street Journal.

In the end, it’s not the cheerleaders or the long balls that most upset the English cricket establishment. It’s that the cricketing world has moved on. Losing control over their pastoral, class-obsessed ideal of the game means in some profound way losing their place in the world. In May, when West Indies captain Chris Gayle expressed a preference for T20, Andrew Strauss, England’s test captain, said, as if there were Stukas in the air, that it was his “duty” to defend test cricket.

Sriram Dayanand, to whom I owe this link, recently channeled the Beatles in a piece on the sea change in Indian cricket; it’s a good read at the surface level and the fun quotient is added to when you try to spot the song titles, lyrics and other Fab Four trivia seeded throughout the article. Enjoy.

Windies bound

The team: Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Dinesh Karthik, wicket-keepers; Gautam Gambhir, Rohit Sharma, Yuvraj Singh, Abhishek Nayar, Murli Vijay, S Badrinath, Yusuf Pathan and Ravindra Jadeja (batsmen and batting all-rounders);  Harbhajan Singh, Pragyan Ojha, RP Singh, Praveen Kumar, Ishant Sharma and Ashish Nehra.

Interesting lineup: Suresh Raina has been dropped for injury, the nature of which is at this moment unspecified. Murli Vijay has been brought in, possibly to open alongside Gambhir [though I wonder if India will punt, at least in a couple of games, with Dinesh Karthik, freeing MS of the burden of keeping?]. Rohit Sharma, Yuvraj Singh and Yusuf Pathan along with MS will claim middle order berths, likely in that order. Zaheer has been rested, so Ishant Sharma and RP Singh will likely lead the pace attack with Ashish Nehra and Praveen Kumar alternating; Pragyan Ojha and Harbhajan Singh, not in that order, will make the spin combination.

So a likely playing XI could read: Gambhir, Vijay, Rohit, Yuvraj, MS, Yusuf, Abhishek Nayar/Ravindra Jadeja, Harbhajan Singh, Pragyan Ojha/Praveen Kumar/Ashish Nehra, RP Singh, Ishant Sharma.

Fair enough, and the team gets to move on to the 50-over format, and see if it can build on its successes of the last couple of seasons. More to the point, the team knows it has four more games before it can take a break for rest, recuperation, and corrective action in the nets — which should be the happiest thought in their minds just now.

Update: The Cricinfo report is here.

This selection is also an important show of faith for Ravindra Jadeja, who drew a lot of flak for his 35-ball 25 in the game that India got knocked out of the World Twenty20. Nayar has been a consistent performer for Mumbai in both forms of Ranji Trophy, and showed glimpses of his ability during the IPL too. The biggest success stories from the IPL, though, are Nehra and RP.

But more interesting are the choices that the selectors made, not the ones they were forced to make. Munaf and Irfan were dropped from what has been a successful ODI side, and that should worry them. Munaf’s form veered from the effective to the ordinary during the ODIs and the Tests in New Zealand, and accordingly he was not taken to England despite his impressive work for Rajasthan Royals in the IPL. Munaf’s Test spot will also be on the line, especially if RP starts doing well. Irfan, though, played in the World Twenty20 but was not included in the final XIs for India’s last two games.

Scratching our itches

Every once in a while, senior journalists feel the compulsion to be “reasonable”, to “see the other side”, to “take a balanced view”.

Vir Sanghvi has just been bitten by the bug, against the backdrop of India’s abrupt exit from the T20 World Cup.

Here’s his latest column. And here’s my beef:

Consider the case of a public limited company. People invest in them – literally. They put their hard-earned money in them, unlike in the case of the cricket team [What precisely is our investment in our team? The time we spend before the TV screen, sipping beer?]. When a company does badly, people sell their stock, hammer down its value. Fair enough – that is how markets work, and to extend that analogy, if non-performing players are dumped by their employers, namely the BCCI, that is how professional sport should work, too  [Funnily enough, we bitch about non-performance, but try dropping one and suddenly half the country is burning effigies – but let that be for now].

But even at the height of the stock market crash, how many instances can you recall of the houses of company honchos and their family and relatives being demolished? None? I thought not.

Okay, how many effigies were burnt? Again, none?

Fine — how many stories were crafted out of thin air, suggesting that the company’s poor performance was due to factionalism and feuding, because the CEO and CFO weren’t seeing eye to eye? The answer is, surprise, surprise, none.

All of the above and more has happened to various members of the national cricket team – and Vir says, fair enough, the public is holding them accountable? You mean the same public that takes the loss of sizeable portions of their life’s savings with far more equanimity?

No one is suggesting that teams and players are above criticism; some would even say I’ve spent a good part of a decade playing perennial scold.

But where is the ‘legitimate criticism’? For 48 hours before the World Cup, the only thing you saw in the media was the story of the rift between Dhoni and Sehwag; of how Sehwag had ‘hidden’ an injury so he could have an all expenses paid holiday with wife and child, etc.

That is the ‘criticism’ Vir wants the cricketers to take, because after all they are making millions off us?

The day after the defeat, what we saw were news clips running in endless loop of Dhoni effigies being burnt — effigies prepared and the burning orchestrated by media groups uncaring of how dangerous the knock-on effects of such “spontaneous” reactions could be.

Remember this?

We are like this only.../AP

“Yes, the English are more restrained. The Australians are more mature. But show me an England or Australia player who makes the kind of money that Dhoni does and I will concede the parallel.”

Okay. Per the latest contracts, Ricky Ponting will make $1.3 million a year. Not Dhoni territory, but a fair chunk of chump change [And I am not factoring in what Ricky makes with his endorsements, and also what he makes off the IPL etc]. That amount is in fact much more than the Indian player gets per his official contract. How many effigies were burnt when Oz got dumped in the first round, again?

When Brazil failed to make the final round of the World Cup, I don’t recall anyone writing articles asking if the country was “unreasonably obsessed” with soccer. Yet, man for man, the Brazilian’s obsession with soccer is way more than the Indian’s obsession with cricket — that business of one billion fans is pure crap, by the way; less than a quarter of that number – and that is an optimistic estimate – seriously follow cricket.

I tend normally to ignore such ‘think pieces’ – but the problem here is that it institutionalizes a dangerous, and spreading, mindset.

Consider the same article, in précis form: Cricketers make millions. Somehow [let’s not sweat inconvenient details

...When we are not like this

here] we are the ones who put those millions in their pockets, therefore [again let us not too closely examine the causal chain] it is our money those guys are living high off the hog on.

Therefore, they are answerable to us.

And hence, when they do not satisfy our demands, anything we do to them — from booing to stoning their homes and attacking their families — is “fair enough”.

That is a reasonable summation of Vir’s argument. And with due respect to a senior journalist of considerable pedigree and achievement, that is pure crap.

“I lost a game of tennis, nobody died,” Boris Becker famously said after his second round defeat at Wimbledon circa 1987. Exactly. As my friend Salil Tripathi wrote, our reaction to defeat says more about us than about the team we are reacting to – and what it says is not complementary.

PostScript: Here’s George Binoy, on the mercurial nature of the Indian fan.

Dhoni understands our relationship, though. We’ve been through it all together: the despair of our 2007 World Cup campaign, the delirious celebrations after the World Twenty20 that year – did you see us jam the roads of Mumbai when they returned from South Africa? Dhoni understands us and remembers. “It’s not the first time it has happened to me or the Indian team,” he said. “When expectations are so high, these are the reactions you get. If they didn’t boo, that would have been unusual from the crowd today.”

We’ll be watching them in the West Indies too. Waiting for an opportunity to cheer madly again.

And just for one last aside on the tangential topic of cricket criticism: Amit Varma of India Uncut and My Friend Sancho in a recent email thread narrated a priceless cricket anecdote relating to a game Pakistan had lost. Apparently the local journalists were on Inzamam’s case; one in particular stood up and produced a long litany of all that Inzamam should have done that he did not do, and all that he did not do that he should not have done.

At the end of his harangue, apparently recalling that he was supposed to be asking questions, the journo tailed off with ‘Aapne yeh sab kyun nahin kiya?‘

To which Inzy — and even without having been there, you can picture the man responding, with the deadest of dead pans — replied: Aapne yeh sab pehle kyun nahin bathaya?

Twenty twenty vision

Peter Roebuck, who in course of this World Cup has been beating a drum for the shortest form of the game [earlier column] says it is time focussing on the star players and their mega-million paychecks: the real value of T20 cricket lies in the way it has opened the game up to regions previously uncharted.

If the commentators are occasionally hard pressed to find the mot juste, they can follow in the footsteps of a Xhosa commentator, who, called upon to describe a match to an attentive audience back home and finding no ready translations for silly mid-off or short cover, came up with “under the nose” and “road block.” Before long, ABC colleagues were copying him. The game is enriched by these fresh voices and eyes. Twenty-five years ago a Frenchman coaching a lowly team at a Sydney school unknowingly defined bowling figures in terms of runs and balls delivered, a custom that only came to light when an opponent was dismissed for 67, of which Jones was deemed to have taken 5 for 84. Now strike-rates are widespread. Mind you, he did also instruct his charges to use the back of the bat better to fool fieldsmen, a habit that has not caught on.

The success of this 20-over World Cup cannot to be judged only from its effects on the main players and the leading nations. Regardless of its outcome it will help to achieve the wider aim of strengthening the game where it has taken hold, and might even make converts.

His argument is that the rarefied nature of cricket, with just eight top teams, renders the game too vulnerable to forces outside of its control [as witness the problems in Pakistan and its impact on the game]. If the game is to survive, he argues, more people in more countries need to play it — and T20 with its concentrated thrills is the perfect proselytizing tool.

Except to participants and the more zealous nationalists (a dismal and destructive lot), the outcome of this Twenty20 world cup hardly matters. By thrilling youngsters from many cultures and countries, it is improving cricket’s popularity and widening its scope. It is a worthy aim and essential to the game’s health. In all its glories and vulgarities, Twenty20, and especially this World Cup, will advance the game in the places where it matters most.

Read on.

Belief systems

Commentators talking of the fabulous run India’s limited overs teams have had since the first edition of the T20 World Cup invariably bring up all-round bowling skills, improved fielding and most importantly, a deep batting lineup of incandescent stroke-players.

There is one other quality to that team, unquantifiable, hence largely unmentioned — self-belief. Time and again, the team had pulled off wins where earlier versions would have given up the ghost; batsmen ranging from Yuvraj to Raina to Rohit and Yusuf have shrugged off steepling asking rates and air-tight bowling, tapped the ball around and timed their explosions to a nicety. They won because in every situation, against every opposition, they seemed to believe they could win; because for them defeat did not seem to be the faintest blip on the mental radar.

It is this quality the WC version of the team appears to have lost — as dramatically exemplified by the stumble when chasing a mere 131. Grant that the wicket was tired, slow; grant too that the South African bowling lineup had been strengthened further by the inclusion of Albie Morkel; and above all, grant that the all-star South African fielding, where even the tall fast bowlers are assets in the deep with their speed across the turf and additional reach on the dives and slides are worth an extra 25 runs to the side.

Even, for argument’s sake, grant that the team must be on a mental low after their unexpectedly early exit and, for all that commentators talk of playing for pride, it is difficult to get your game on when the outcome makes no difference.

Even so the middle order stumble, after being 47/0 at the end of the power plays [the ask at that point was 84 off 84 balls with ten wickets in hand; even with the inevitable slowdown after the PPs, India went into the second half of its innings needing just 73/60], was uncharacteristic.

Once the two set openers got out to adrenalin overdose and injudicious strokes, those who followed — Suresh Raina, MS Dhoni, even the normally imperturable Yuvraj Singh — seemed to bat in a state of near panic. That mindset was best underlined by Harbhajan Singh who, promoted ahead of Ravindra Jadeja, swatted Dale Steyn over extra cover and then hit the kind of straight six back over the quick’s head that a front line batsman would have been proud to add to his resume. Clearly it was all in the mind — and Bajji’s was, on the day, the only one uncluttered enough to see the task for what it was: doable.

This mental choke was all the more inexplicable because in the first half of the game, the team had looked sharp, more focused than it has been for a while.

Having overslept once while in Chicago to attend a journalism conference, I dashed into the hall to attend the opening keynote, grabbed an inconspicous seat at the back, and sat for a bewildered few minutes before I realized that I had accidentally gotten into the wrong hall. It was the annual convention of the American dental association.

There was that same air about the Proteas during their innings — that sense of having accidentally wandered into a spinners’ convention as, starting as early as the sixth over, they were treated to every gradation of ‘slow’ by Ravindra Jadeja, Rohit Sharma, Suresh Raina, Yuvraj Singh and Harbhajan Singh.

AB de Villiers’ knock was worth a big hundred, in context: he was the only one among the Proteas who scored at over a run a ball, because he was the only one who absorbed the pressure of the spinners’ chokehold, didn’t mind looking silly while he struggled, and had the mental fortitude to ride the rough and wait for opportunity where his mates looked to somehow muscle their way out of the fix. AB, in fact, alone had what the Indian team lacked on the day.

Other problems have been addressed by, among others, George Binoy here, and Ayaz Memon here; the days ahead will likely bring a lot more in the form of comment and criticism. Meanwhile, the Indian selectors meet today to pick the squad for the West Indies — there is an expectation of rolling heads, but I suspect the committee will treat this for what it is — a bad stumble, admittedly, but still just a stumble — and be reasonably conservative in their picks.

PostScript: In India, familiarity breeds orchestrated effigy burnings. In Trent Bridge, the stands overflowed with cheering Indians for a non-contest; MS Dhoni was booed right at the end, but handled it with gentle humor.

PPS: Busy day, mostly away from desk. Back on here much later.