The more things change…

“You know how it is, boss — nothing has changed,” Robin Singh told me.

He was not talking the day after finding out in the papers that he had been sacked as national fielding coach — this comment was made in 2003, when Robin and I [and Wasim Akram] were guests of the Michigan Cricket Association at its tournament finale and awards gala.

At the time, Robin had not yet officially retired from international cricket, but he had known for a while that his playing career was over, and had made the transition to coaching. He had just had a very good stint with the national under-19 team, so I was surprised when he told me he was in the US seeking a coaching gig with USACA.

I thought you were set as the U-19 coach, I remarked. That is when Robin, with that trademark lopsided grin, told me “You remember how in our playing days we used to call you guys up before every team selection to know if we were going to make it? Nothing has changed — I still need journalists to tell me what is happening in my life.”

‘Robin’ and ‘sad’ don’t belong in the same sentence — his chief characteristic is his equipoise, an ability to take whatever comes his way with a smile and a joke. And yet, that was among the saddest things I had ever heard from a professional.

He had, Robin said, been coaching U-19 on someone’s say-so. A board official called him up and told him he had the job; he did it. Through that period, he had no formal meeting with anyone in the board, no contract spelling out his duties, no idea who if anyone he was supposed to report to, and certainly no idea what he was going to be paid and when.

And when it was all over, Robin waited. “I thought someone would call, tell me if they were satisfied or not, tell me what I was supposed to do next. No one called — how long am I supposed to wait?” And so he was in the US, shopping for jobs.

History repeated. Just before the 2007 tour of Bangladesh, Robin got a call telling him he would be fielding coach for the side — a job he has done for a little over two years with no official letter, no contract, and a non-negotiable compensation that was often paid only when Robin reminded the authorities of his existence.

He wasn’t answering his phone last night; had I managed to connect, it is a fair bet that he would have said, “You know how it is — nothing has changed.”

Hiring and firing its employees is of course the BCCI’s prerogative. [Though you have to wonder if they apply to themselves the standards they hold others to. To cite the most recent instance, it is the BCCI's head of the pitches committee, Daljit Singh, who worked from April this year till date to personally produce a wicket at the Firozeshah Kotla that is, not to mince words, a disgrace. All we ever heard on the subject was a laconic 'Oh, new pitches take a year to settle down,' from the man himself; not a yip out of his fellow honchos in the administration.]

But is it too much to ask that the BCCI follow basic principles of human decency while carrying out that function? Would it have been too much for someone in the board to have called Venky Prasad and Robin Singh and told them they were due for the axe, to have spared them the humiliation of finding out from the media?

I’m not making the case that they should have been retained — I don’t know how effective they were. But then, neither does the BCCI — and that august body took its decision without consulting the two people who were in a position to know: the captain and the coach.

Various officials — who, of course, only speak to the media on condition of anonymity — have pointed at the dramatic decline in form of the likes of Ishant Sharma [Cricinfo breaks down his performance] and RP Singh to justify sacking Prasad. In a post on Sreesanth a couple of days ago, I’d linked to Alan Donald’s comments about the bowler’s training habits.

Donald said they had extensive talks about the training routine, and reckoned Sreesanth had plenty of areas to work on. “First of all, his training habits are not good and the way he goes on to the field need to change. Then, he doesn’t put enough time on specifics.”

I’m willing to bet the same is true for Ishant, RP, Irfan and others. Prescribing the training routine and monitoring it is certainly one of the functions of a bowling coach. Was it done, in each of these instances? Did the player concerned follow the coach’s prescription, or just flip him the bird and do his own thing? What are the reasons for the dramatic decline in form of various promising bowlers?

Answers to these and related questions [What lines and lengths does he prescribe for the bowlers for each game, for instance, and how effective is he in identifying what his bowlers need to do in any given set of conditions? For my money, the most effective bowling coach we ever had was Bruce Reid -- who handled a young Irfan and his mates brilliantly on India's tour of Australia, working with the raw newcomers on skills and techniques, and also using his knowledge of local conditions to guide them on how they had to bowl each day, in each game] are the basis on which you can evaluate a bowling coach’s performance.

Did the BCCI carry out such an analysis? No. Did it even seek opinions from the captain, coach, senior players and the bowlers themselves? No.

So what was the basis of the decision to sack Prasad? A whim of the moment. Everyone’s talking about the decline in Ishant, so let’s “take action” — that just about sums up this latest piece of rank idiocy. [Incidentally, if Ishant's bowling is now so beyond the pale as to justify the sacking of his bowling coach, why is the bowler himself still in the team?]

Take the case of fielding standards. For me, one of the joys of IPL-2 was watching the byplay between Herschelle Gibbs at point and Rohit Sharma well inside the ring at cover. They showed off for one another, they took obvious delight in each other’s exploits, they put on a show — and in the process, lifted the overall standards of the team.

Great all-round fielding is a ‘team culture’ thing. You can have very good fielders in a team — Yuvraj, Rohit, Raina — without it being a great fielding unit [Adam Gilchrist, speaking during the presentation ceremony after the Chargers' last loss, said the basics, like good fielding, which "the good teams take pride in", the Chargers just didn't do]. Just as great individual fielding lifts a team, lackadaisical fielding lowers the standards of even the best — and ‘lackadaisical’ is a mild word to describe the Indian team in the field.

How much of this is the fielding coach’s fault? [By way of disclosure: Robin is a friend of long standing]. What training techniques, fielding drills, does the coach use? How rigorously are these prescriptions followed? What authority does the fielding coach have to haul up errant, chronically lazy, players? Can he enforce discipline?

[Some years ago, when our fielding standards or lack thereof became so bad even the apologists ran out of excuses, Jagmohan Dalmiya as then BCCI head made a pompous announcement. He said the national coach and physio had been empowered to be strict with the players; that at the start of the preparatory camp each player would be put through the beep and other tests, and any who failed would not be considered for selection. The outcome? Five senior players flat out refused to take the test. The coach called the selectors to report. The selectors called Dalmiya. Dalmiya instructed them to pick the players anyway. All five were selected.]

None of this concerns the BCCI. It hired a bowling coach and a fielding coach when it felt like it; it sacked them, ditto.

And to compound the irony, it says it is in no rush to hire replacements. Explain this to me?

Item: Our bowling standards have fallen off. Item: Our fielding is pathetic.

So ‘action’ is taken — the bowling and fielding coaches are sacked. \

And we now head into a seven-game series against the world’s number one outfit with a pack of off-form bowlers and hopeless fielders — and the board says there is absolutely no hurry to provide them with coaches in these two disciplines?

Cognitive dissonance, anyone?

PS: Happy Diwali, everyone. Heading into a three and a half day weekend; barring an odd post or two later today, am off blog till Tuesday.

Blog on a breather

Bad back, hence. Likely spend the day resting — any random thoughts that occur, here.

Why franchise cricket is not a zero-sum game

While posting this take on the changing face of cricket yesterday, the memory of an excellent article on the subject I’d read a while ago kept nagging at me. Here it is — Amit Varma on Cricinfo, March 2008. [A facet of all really good writing is how well it ages -- and this piece by Amit, even more relevant today against the proliferation of badly argued diatribes about players turning into "money-grubbers", is a classic example].

PS: Am likely to be off blog for the rest of the day. Back tomorrow.

The space between your ears

The flip side to that is I see a generation today, some at least of whom are totally content with the perks of being a cricketer without having to do the hard yards — the glitz, glamour, Bombay party circuit, all of that.

We are also seeing a generation coming, I saw it first in IPL 2, where there were some three, four players who didn’t want to play Ranji Trophy for the two months before the IPL for fear they would get injured and miss out they just wanted to go to the NCA and train, and these are the players who in IPL 2 were bigger and slower than they were in IPL 1.

The word goes around quickly, even though I am not part of the hard core circuit, the word goes around that these were the guys who didn’t want to play domestic cricket.

That clip is from a cricket conversation I had with Harsha a few weeks ago. Yesterday, the board’s chief administrative officer Ratnakar Shetty expressed similar concerns:

Shetty said the lack of focus was an issue the BCCI would have to look at. “You can see the change in attitude and focus which seems to have gone to things other than cricket. They are attracted by the different style of entertainment that is part of these events. This is worrisome.

“Some of these youngsters have become very big. Some of them feel that playing in Ranji Trophy is not as important as playing in the IPL.”

Concern is good, in the limited sense that it shows the administration is aware of the problem. But concern is merely the first step — the second, equally important, step is to act on that concern, and this is where the board needs to step up. Clearly, as Harsha pointed out, the problem is pervasive, and the fact that it exists is common knowledge; the corrective measure should be for the BCCI to issue norms that address this ill, and ensures that players who skip domestic tournaments, when not occupied with international cricket, will not be allowed to play in the IPL and similar leagues.

Man management has been an area the board has consistently fallen down on, and the problem Shetty has pointed at is merely one aspect. The latest escapades — with Ramesh Powar, and Dhaval Kulkarni — involving Shantakumaran Sreesanth is another. The latter has drawn a fine, and a ‘final warning‘. A clip from the Powar incident:

He returned in the afternoon to lead Rest of India’s revival with yet another probing spell. He later said that after his stint under Allan Donald for Warwickshire, he has tried to concentrate on his own bowling rather than on what the batsman is doing. There were just a couple of occasions when the old fiery Sreesanth threatened to crack open the lid of self-control.

The first came when the umpire denied a plausible lbw appeal against Ramesh Powar. He stared at the umpire, turned and looked at the batsman, then to his fielders and then back again at the umpire. He slowly trudged back and stood at the umpire’s position and had a look down the track as if he was trying to gauge the umpire’s field of vision as he played back the ball in his mind. It was pure drama. The holiday crowd roared at the sight of the old Sreesanth. They had tried baiting him at the boundary the whole day but he remained stoic – on only a couple of occasions did he indulge them with a wave and a disarming smile.

Senior national players will tell you that the problem had its genesis in this incident:

The fans loved it. The media — especially television, which knows to milk viral video clips when it stumbles on them, but is not too concerned with the fruits of their actions — replayed it endlessly to the accompaniment of talking heads screaming hoarse about how this typified the ‘new India’. We were told that this ‘new India’ is aggressive; that it will give back in kind and with any interest any slights others might inflict on it.

In casual conversations a couple of veterans told me at the time that the incident and its aftermath created a monster. An accurate paraphrase of their comments: The crowd loved Sreesanth for it, and he got carried away by the adulation. From then on, he really began to play to the gallery, and the more the crowds roared at his antics the more he acted up — not just on the field of play, but even in the dressing room. Some of us would take him aside, and tell him to watch his step; we told him that if he bowled well and batted as he was capable of when he put his mind to it, the adulation would naturally follow. But for him, winning approval through his antics, through throwing tantrums on the field and devising new ways of celebrating a wicket, was more fun than putting in the hard yards to stay on top of his game. On a couple of occasions when his behavior was really over the pale, we had even discreetly suggested that the team manager on behalf of the board haul him up before he went completely out of control, but no one did anything. The result is a total waste of seriously good talent.

That harks back to the point of man management. A friend who till not long ago was a senior administrator in the Australian board once told me a story of Damien Martyn. Apparently when he was on his first tour of England, he wasn’t picked for the first Test despite batting like a dream, and being the lead scorer in the two warm-up games. When he scored again in the side game following the first Test but was not picked in the playing XI for the next, Martyn went to pieces: binge drinking, being loud and obnoxious in the team hotels, flipping his senior birds the mate, misbehaving at team meetings, the works.

The ACB acted immediately. Martyn was hauled up before the board representative on tour; he was given a paper that itemized the problem areas in his conduct and told that any further instances would entail an immediate exit from the team. Further, the tour manager switched Martyn’s room-mate [another junior player] and lodged him with senior pro David Boon, who was given the job of kicking the youngster’s butt and ensuring he behaved. The result: the ACB and the team, working in harness, saved a seriously good talent before Martyn went totally overboard.

In my time of following cricket I’ve seen several talented players [think Sadanand Vishwanath, L Sivaramakrishnan and Maninder Singh to name just three of the more obvious; Yuvraj Singh is a contemporary player whose lack of discipline coupled with the lack of a firm management hand on the reins is responsible for his being occasionally brilliant, without ever plumbing the depths of what is indisputably an incandescent talent] go off the rails — and heard administrators of the time tut-tutting about how youngsters don’t know how to handle instant fame. When I tried arguing that the board stood in loco parentis to these youngsters, and had a measure of responsibility in their cricketing and personal upbringing, the most common response would be an incredulous ‘Huh’?!

Alan Donald, who worked with Sreesanth during the latter’s Warwickshire stint, is very perceptive on the question of what ails the lad. Excerpts:

Donald was well aware of Sreesanth’s abilities with the ball and his excitable nature, having witnessed the Indian’s spectacular performance in the Johannesburg Test in 2006, where he took five wickets and helped India to a dramatic victory. “We wanted someone who could overstep the line a little bit and we know how Sreesanth can do that. But I knew I could control him, and we chatted about it quite a lot.”

Donald said they had extensive talks about the training routine, and reckoned Sreesanth had plenty of areas to work on. “First of all, his training habits are not good and the way he goes on to the field need to change. Then, he doesn’t put enough time on specifics.”

Donald also said Sreesanth needed to work on his attitude, and his tendency to lose the plot when things didn’t go his way. “I know he is aggressive, he is passionate and I know he just boils over with emotions in the heat of the battle. There is nothing wrong with that but I just think sometimes he lets himself down.”

At the start of the Irani Cup last week, Sreesanth declared his intentions of working hard to keep himself calm. By the end of the game he had been fined 60% of the match fee for using abusive language against Mumbai’s Dhawal Kulkarni.

Donald said coaches and team-mates were bound to get frustrated with Sreesanth’s temperament, and that he was likely to fall out of line with the team management as well. “It is frustrating in a way. I do have a problem with that because it is not the real him,” Donald pointed out. “It is false in the way he conducts himself. You need to be in serious form to back your body language. Off the field he is a little kitten – he speaks the right thing, comes and says ‘sorry for this and that’. But my message to him is he cannot come off the field and apologise. It is too late.”

‘It is not the real him’ is particularly perceptive — the real Sree is a friendly, happy go lucky fellow who genuinely loves playing the game, and as genuinely wants to do well. The metamorphosis comes when he crosses the line, and the crowds egg him on.

The good bit is he hasn’t lost all his talent yet — he bowled really well in the Irani game, following on from a good stint in English county cricket. It’s now time the board took a hand in his rehabilitation — instead of merely issuing a ‘final warning’, the administrators could with profit talk to the player, give him a clear understanding of what is at stake and what he stands to lose, and use senior players and even support staff to assist in the recovery. For instance, where is it written in stone that the mental conditioning expert who now forms part of the support staff should only work with members of the playing squad?

We appear to operate under the assumption that there is an endless pool of talent in the country, and therefore there is no real need to conserve, and promote, whatever talent comes to the surface — if something goes wrong with a player, there’s plenty more where he comes from, sums up the prevailing mindset.

Guess what — there isn’t plenty more where a Sreesanth, an Irfan Pathan and such come from: check out how we struggled to put together a decent attack in recent times, including in the Champions Trophy.

When smoke gets in your eyes

Pakistan has an interesting way of dealing with terrorists.

First, it “means business”, but points out that action will “take time”. Then, it “arrests” him – or at least, “verbally” tells the culprit to stay put at his residence, No: 116E, Mohalla Johar in Lahore City in this instance. Verbally, too, the detainee is told there is no problem if he wants to lighten the tedium of such harsh incarceration by attending the occasional party.

During this time, various apologists make considerable noise about how the arrest du jour shows that Pakistan is taking severe action against terrorists.

And then, in a Hitchcockian twist, the detainee is released. [Déjà vu all over again – this is the second time Hafiz Saeed has been arrested and released after 26/11].

It is only following the release that we learn he wasn’t charged with terrorism-related offences after all [though during the ‘trial’, news reports presented a totally different picture – so now you know why these hearings are always held in-camera].

Saeed was merely charged with making speeches that could possibly incite violence [you know, like a Pakistani version of Varun Gandhi] and with trying to raise funds for what Islamabad says is a perfectly legitimate organization.

The word “legitimate” is used loosely here. Check this out, from the story of Saeed’s release:

He was also accused of appealing for funds for a banned group. Mr. Saeed currently leads Jamat-ud-Dawa, an Islamic charity widely viewed as a front for Lashkar-e-Tayeba.

His lawyer, A. K. Dogar, said he had argued that the government had not banned Jamat-ud-Dawa and therefore it was legal to solicit donations for it. “The court accepted my contention,” he was quoted by news media as saying outside the court.

An absolutely valid argument, and one with considerable legal force. The question it begs is: why did Pakistan not ban the Jamat?

Islamabad wanted to – or at least, it said so. It said, too, that it could not take action until the UN told it to [Why Islamabad required the United Nations to green light action against a terrorist outfit on its own soil is a question best left unasked].

“After the designation by the Indian government of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa under 1267, the (Pakistani) government upon receiving this instruction shall proscribe the JuD and take under (sic!) consequential action as required including the freezing of assets,” he [Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations Abdullah Hussain Haroon] said.

That was on December 10.

A day later, on December 11, the United Nations Security Council put it official seal on the contention of India and the United States that the Jamat-ud-Dawa is merely the Lashkar-e-Tayeba by another name [a deft bait and switch operation carried out in 2002 under the nose of then President Pervez Musharraf, when the UNSC named Lashkar-e-Tayeba a terrorist organization].

Even China, which had on three previous occasions blocked India’s bid to have the J-u-D proscribed, finally stopped objecting in the aftermath of the 26/11 attacks and voted in favor of putting J-u-D on the proscribed list. Pakistan certainly cannot claim it didn’t know about this, as the fact of the ban was no secret – in fact, within hours of the ban, a J-u-D leader reacted with a press statement that can be summed up in two terse words: F**k off.

So that’s the story: The J-u-D was proscribed in December. Pakistan said it would ban the J-u-D in December. Immediately after the UNSC resolution, Pakistan acted [Note that the word ‘act’ has more than one meaning]:

It placed Hafiz Saeed under house arrest, as the New York Times describes; it froze the J-u-D’s assets in true horse, stable door style, as the WSJ reported;  and if the outfit remained open for business, well…

Pakistan has made no secret of why it took these ‘stern’ actions.

Defence Minister Ahmed Mukhtar on Friday said the government acted against Jamaat-ud-Dawah in accordance with the United Nations Security Council resolution in order to prevent the country from being declared a terrorist state. “We are part of the international community and cannot afford confrontation with the whole world.”

Now, 10 months later and with the danger of being labeled a terrorist state averted, the courts say there is no problem with Hafiz Saeed proselytizing for the J-u-D because hey, the organization is not banned after all.

So what then were those proclamations of ‘action’ all about?

From the story of Saeed’s release:

India has given Pakistan evidence, based on its intelligence and the testimony of the sole surviving gunman, that it says showed that Mr. Saeed provided detailed instructions to the militants who carried out the attack. But Pakistan says there is not enough evidence to charge him.

Check out the highlighted bit. Without going into details, Home Minister P Chidambaram in an interview with Barkha Dutt discussed the nature of evidence India had built against Saeed.

Firstly we know when Kasab first met Hafiz  and where. We know what Hafiz Saeed told the trainees. We know at least a couple of places where the training took place. And that  Hafeez Saeed visited these camps. We know that it was Hafiz Saeed who gave names to buddy pairs. The final farewell call was made by Hafiz and Hafiz Saeed even tested Kasab and others on their training achievements. A terrorist actively, and demonstrably, involved in 26/11 testified that Hafiz Saeed played a role in prepping him and his mates for the attack. The testimony, and other details, has been passed on to Pakistan.

Further, the sole surviving terrorist involved in 26/11 testified to the meetings he and his team had with Saeed.

The dossier quotes from Kasab’s confessional statement before the Mumbai’s additional chief metropolitan magistrate in which he claims to have first met Hafiz Saeed in December 2007 at a 21-day training camp.

According to Kasab’s statement, he subsequently met Hafiz Saeed at other training sessions in Chelabandi, Sevai Nallah and a place called ‘Baitul Mujahideen’ where he ‘selected trainees and supervised their training’.

According to Kasab’s testimony, after the completion of training Hafiz Saeed formed five pairs of 10 fighters for carrying out attacks in Mumbai and gave the attackers operational instructions, including the hijacking of a boat and the timing of the attack.

He is said to have specified targets on a large screen in a ‘media control room at the training camp’.

Fahim Ansari, who was originally arrested on Feb 9 last year in connection with the Rampur camp attack case, also claimed in his statement that Hafiz Saeed had visited the training camp and exhorted the trainees to launch a ‘Jihad against India’.

It would be understandable – on a relative scale – if the courts had deemed that the evidence presented was not enough to convict Saeed. What is inexplicable is that the evidence is not even deemed enough to charge the man.

It’s a strange place, Pakistan. A land where you can get 14 years in jail if you make jokes about Mr Ten Percent President Asif Ali Zardari, but where you can walk free if you plot the killing of hundreds in a foreign land. [While on jokes, it is good to see that the sense of humor of the average Pakistani is not dead yet – check out this absolutely Onion-esque ‘news report’].

None of this should come as a surprise – the only truism about Pakistan’s “actions” against terrorists is that it is all smoke and mirrors. The state will act only when it has no other option; the action will last only as long as the perceived threat remains [vide Ahmed Mukthar’s honest, and disarmingly naïve, explanation cited earlier on why Islamabad acted against the J-u-D]; the moment the coast is clear, the terrorists will be freed either by the courts or by some other mysterious means.

Consider two recent incidents. On March 3, 2009 a suicide attack was launched on the Sri Lankan cricket team as the team bus approached the gates of Lahore’s Gaddafi Stadium. And earlier this month, on October 10, armed gunmen stormed the holy of Pakistan’s holies – the heavily fortified military headquarters in Rawalpindi.

Pakistan says its military officials have arrested one Aqeel, aka Doctor Usman, who led the raid on the army HQ. Authorities say, further, that they believe Doctor Usman was likely linked to the attack against the Lankan cricket team.

I’m no lawyer, but I’ll defend this Doctor Usman for free – and guarantee to get him out. Here’s how:

On October 25, 2008, authorities ‘arrested’ four people in connection with the September 20, 2008 bombing of the Islamabad Marriott. One of them was Doctor Usman.

He could not have been part of the attack on the Lankan national team in March, because even five months later, on August 11, he was still in custody — it was on that date that the Anti-Terrorism Court completed its hearing into the Marriott bombing case.

And on September 22, 2009, the ATC rejected Doctor Usman’s plea for acquittal in that case.

Thus, your honor, my client could not have attacked the army GHQ last weekend even though he was actually captured on the premises, because he was demonstrably in ATC custody at the time. Or did someone fudge the books and let him out? If so, why is that person or persons not charged with complicity in the army HQ attack?

The problem with the smoke Islamabad keeps blowing in its farcical ‘war on terror’ is that it is increasingly getting into its own eyes.

Cricket clips

I love ‘democracy’ — you actually get a mid-week holiday to go vote! Fully intend to enjoy the unexpected mid-week break, as soon as I am done with this post.

Courtesy a Cricinfo conversation, I stumbled on a Ray Jennings motivational video prepared for the RCB. As under. In passing, with yesterday’s win, RCB joins Delhi Daredevils in the list of IPL teams that started off slow but will, IMHO, get better as the tournament progresses and the players bind once more into a ‘team’.

Elsewhere, Jacob Oram becomes the latest cricketer to opt out of Test cricket so as to conserve his energies for ODIs and T20.

“The last few years have shown that my body cannot handle the strains and stresses that come with being an allrounder, playing all three formats for up to ten months a year,” Oram said. “For the sake of longevity I have had to make a decision that will decrease my workload, so I can concentrate all my efforts on the shorter forms of the game.

“The decision to choose limited-overs cricket over Test cricket has a lot to do with playing opportunities. The Black Caps play a lot more limited-overs cricket than Tests, and there’s also the opportunity to continue playing in world events such as the World Cup, World T20 and Champions Trophy, as well as the IPL.”

Cue more alarmist talk about cricketers turning ‘mercenary’, I’d imagine. Greg Baum’s diatribe, in fact, anticipates this event and suggests that as ever more cricketers are seduced by that dirty word, ‘money’, and as national duty takes a back seat in consequence, the game will lose its fans.

Go, freelance away, but don’t be surprised if in a while, no one cares, and if in another while, because no one cares, there is no one to watch. The whole sporting fantasy depends on the conviction of fans that the stars are playing for something other than money; that they are playing for you, me and the idea of us. But the fantasy becomes less easy to believe if the stars were playing for someone else last week, and will be playing for someone else again next week, and in the meantime make it clear that they begrudge the interlude in national colours because it jeopardises their earning potential.

An interesting argument — but one, IMHO, that won’t wash. I wonder if those who follow soccer, to cite one instance, care overmuch for the size of Christiano Ronaldo’s pay packet. He has, in a brief career, moved from CD Nacional where he debuted to Sporting Clube de Portugal, from there at age 18 to ManU for a £12.24 million fee. So when he jumped ship and transferred to Real Madrid for a cool £80 million, did the fans desert him en masse, turning up their collective nose at this display of vulgar ‘money-grubbing’? Did it bother them that he was not “playing for something other than money”?

The hell it did — when Ronaldo plays I watch, because of the compelling skills he puts on display. And I frankly don’t give a damn whether he is doing it in the red of ManU or the white of Real.

Journalists routinely sneer at such ‘vulgarity’. Yet, offer that same journalist a three-fold hike in his salary to join a rival paper and see how fast he jumps [But of course, when we do it, it is with lofty motives, "like wanting to better deploy our skills and experience in a fresh arena that provides more scope for our talents"].

The fact is that a sportsman’s career is incredibly finite. To be really good at his chosen sport, the player has to make the choice — that is, gamble — very early in life. Long, hard hours of practice allied to whatever natural talent he has just might make him good enough to break into the big time. When he does — if he does — he has about eight, ten years tops to make the most of it. And every one of those days is beset by doubts and fears: Will someone with better skill sets come along to supplant him? Will his own skills mysteriously desert him for no reason he can pinpoint? Will an injury sustained on the field of play put premature period to his career?

I became a journalist at age 30, and have been doing this for 20 years now. I can conceivably go on doing this for the next 30, provided my typing fingers and my mind continue to function [and some would say 'mind' is an additional, but by no means essential, requirement]. It is difficult for me, therefore, to understand the fears that plague a young man who knows, going in, that he will be redundant in his chosen field by age 30, 35 tops.

But maybe it is time to try. Maybe it is time to see things through the eyes of an Oram, a Flintoff, a Symonds. Maybe it is time to understand that this situation would not have come about if those who govern the game had spared some thought for the players, instead of making them dance on every available lap while the ‘nation’ — or more accurately the board — pockets the lion’s share of the revenue.

Earlier, the player had no choice. He played when and where he was asked to play, he took whatever the home board in its benevolence paid him and when he got hurt, he sat at home and sweated, not knowing if he would recover sufficiently to be able to play earn again, not knowing if his board would pick him even if he attained full fitness. Like the proverbial hamster, he hit the treadmill and he ran until he could run no more — and then, in what for everyone else would be the prime of life, he retired to his home to spend the rest of his life in an extended anecdotage, chewing the cud of memory and driving his family and few friends nuts [or, if he was very lucky, got a gig on television where he got to talk of how great he had been to a wider audience].

Today, that player has a choice. Multiple choices. And he is taking them — so, mate, just suck it up. And don’t worry about the fans — as a full house showed in Hyderabad the other day, they don’t give a hoot in hell that ‘Symmo anna’ [or for that matter Adam Gilchrist, their 'Gilly Bhai', showed great foresight in ending his national career while still at his peak, so he could earn far more money for just a few weeks of work each year] has become a “money-grubbing” mercenary; what turns them on is the electricity he produces on the field of play.

In passing — an interesting read.

PS: Back tomorrow, after the break.