Boy, burning deck, et al

This year’s Ranji final turned out to be one of those games where, the minute the result was known, you felt sorry for the team that had lost.

Fair result overall: Bombay won more of the crucial sessions and showed the ice-in-the-veins quality that separates champion sides from the rest; Karnataka in contrast stuffed up on key sessions when things were going in its favor, took control only to surrender it  again, and when push came to shove, the collective nerve just didn’t hold.

On a helpful pitch, bowlers on both sides produced scintillating spells — but at the end of it all, the man you felt sorry for was young Manish Pandey. Faced with the task of scoring a record number of runs to upset the champions, the Karnataka batsmen came to the crease intent on survival; the ‘game plan’ seemed structured on the lines of if we hang around out there long enough, the runs will come and the target will be reached.

Bad move, on a wicket that afforded considerable assistance to bowlers of all types. Manish alone appeared to have figured out that you have to actively pursue a target, and he alone had the skill — phenomenal skill, really — and the nerve to play his game his way.

The one image that will remain after all others — outstanding deliveries, some scarcely credible fielding efforts, and even Manish’s silken stroke-making — are forgotten is something I saw on the TV screen earlier today. The camera swept across a full house at the Glades, then panned out and across to long lines of spectators outside the gates, queuing up to get in.

That one image gives the lie to what we are constantly told — that in this country there isn’t enough interest in domestic tournaments featuring unknown names; that the only time crowds will come is when the superstars turn out for international duty.

Clearly, that is not true. Clearly, it is not about who is playing. At least, it is not entirely about who is playing as much as it is about the expectation of witnessing some great cricket.

If our domestic competition hasn’t drawn crowds, the fault then is not with the lack of marquee value of participating players as it is with an administration, national and local, that has neither the will nor the inclination to provide the sort of conditions that can make for gripping contests.

In recent times, the BCCI has repeatedly revised its domestic structure. Maybe it is time now to revise its mindset; to instruct its curators to prepare good wickets; to spend some energy publicizing its domestic calendar as opposed to hyping the next dozen India-Sri Lanka games; to build a buzz around the domestic circuit and to give spectators a reason to turn out.

Build it, and they will come. As they did here, while an ‘Idea Cup’ went largely unwatched.

One final regret: Zaheer Khan was busy with one-day duties — but imagine what this contest could have been, with Dravid turning out for Karnataka and Tendulkar [and even Rohit Sharma -- surely the Indian team could have found someone else to bring out spare bats?] for Bombay.

In passing, check this out [the video I wish I could throw up is a pull young Manish played last evening, off the front foot to a short ball from Agarkar, smashing the ball in the arc between mid wicket and mid off -- tangentially apropos, read Osman Samiuddin on the pull as played by Ponting]. And in watching the video, forget the flying through the air stunt — keep an eye, during the replays, on what the fielder does as soon as he gets the ball in hand while still airborne — the wrist curving down to ensure the ball wouldn’t hit the turf, in the midst of all those acrobatics: awesome!

Do the dew

Aakash Chopra on countering the dew factor:

The thing about dew is, the leather of the ball takes longer to get damp than the seam does. While water takes time to seep into the leather, the seam turns wet as soon as it gets exposed to the outfield. Gripping the ball then becomes tricky. The umpires won’t change the ball on the account of a wet seam. They will wait till the entire ball gets too wet to play with.

Now if only our commentators, who keep waffling on about the ‘dew factor kicking in’, were half as insightful and a tenth as specific…

For spinners, the challenge is in gripping the ball and imparting spin while delivering. It’s like bowling with a bar of wet soap. Maintaining a good hold on the ball is relatively easier for a finger spinner than for a wrist spinner; the latter have less control to begin with, and the wet ball rules out their contribution to a large extent. The finger spinner’s job isn’t easy either, and the attack tends to become one-dimensional. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an offspinner or a left-arm spinner: the ball usually goes straight after pitching. The only difference is the angle from which the ball is bowled.

There’s very little a spinner can do once the ball gets as wet, as it did in Bangladesh. As a spinner, one can only try to make the ball land on the right lengths as much as possible without thinking about too many variations. The only thing, perhaps, is to vary the pace. The wet ball, to a certain extent, allows you to bowl it a little slower or faster.

This series by Aakash, now 19 articles and counting, that looks at the game through the eyes of a player, is outstanding — and will hopefully grow into a book.

Defining the decade

Ricky Ponting has been named ‘Player of the Decade’ — and the evidence below, read with Christian Ryan’s appreciation, seems to suggest that he deserves the accolade:

Ponting scored more runs and centuries in both forms of the game than any other batsman in the decade, and he was the only one to go past the 9000-mark in both Tests and ODIs. In 107 Testsbetween 2000 and 2009, he scored 9458 runs at 58.38, and 32 of his 38 centuries. Ponting and Kallis, along with Mohammad Yousuf, were the only batsmen to average more than 58 in Tests in the decade.

I don’t know, though. Ponting is a brilliant batsman, arguably among the best of his era — but surely an accolade of this kind has to extend beyond personal achievement and take into account the player’s influence on the game itself?

It is on that measure that Ponting comes up short. He has, both as player and as team leader, done more to bring the game into disrepute than anyone else in the period in question. Examples abound, but I’ll leave you with one — the catch that wasn’t, and Ponting’s ludicrous claim to an integrity that he manifestly did not possess.

That personal example, that it is alright to do whatever it takes in order to win, has rubbed off on his team — and again, here is one instance of several.

Under successive captains — Ian Chappell and his brother Greg, Allan Border, Mark Taylor, Steve Waugh — Australia has played the game hard, with no quarter ever asked or given. Their game has been characterized by a desire for total dominance over the opposition, by a willingness to be ruthless in pursuit of team objectives.

Yet, underlying that uncompromisingly hard attitude, there has always been an element of fairness — till Ponting took over. He changed the paradigm; under him, the Australian team plays hard, and fairness be damned. The chief weapons are the sly, and the slimy; the chief characteristic a willingness to push the boundaries as far as they can without actually getting caught — and sometimes, even then.

A favorite tactic of this Australian team is to abuse — consistently, and in ways no self-respecting individual can swallow. The team has perfected the art of doing this on the sly, without getting caught out by the cameras [I sometimes wonder if they train for this just as hard as they train at batting, bowling and fielding] — and then, when someone breaks, and retaliates, to present the picture of injured innocence. Again, examples abound — the most recent one being the incident involving Suleiman Benn.

The Aussie press, on that occasion, castigated the team for its tactics. And not for the first time this decade, Ponting got all pious and issued a statement that he would be talking to his mates — an exercise in gratuitous hypocrisy, since it is clearly Ponting himself who has set that example, and encouraged his mates to kick over the traces.

With all respect and admiration for Ponting’s undoubted skills with the bat, is he really the one the cricket world wants to hold up, as the player who typifies the decade just ended?

PostScript: Gratuitous bad behavior appears to have become the norm; champion teams seem to believe that they cannot be defined by results alone. Mumbai — locked, at the time of my writing this, in a gripping contest with Karnataka in the Ranji final, is an exemplar. There were reports of some unsavory incidents in an earlier game against Hyderabad; yesterday, this happened.

Maybe the Player of the Decade jury knew what it was doing after all; maybe Ponting does exemplify the cricketing spirit of the decade.