Dravid | Tendulkar | Laxman – The Last Stand

This wasn’t in the script. The series was supposed to be deadlocked at 1-1 with 1 to play or even 2-1 in India’s favor going into Adelaide. The top 6 were to have fired, with a couple of Sehwag cameos and big hundreds from the big 3. The Indian media was supposed to be working itself into a frenzy over a series win and potential retirement announcements. Instead, the media is working itself into a frenzy over “the obviously over-the-hill players blocking the path of the shining new stars of India’s test-batting”.

The likes of Ajinkya Rahane and Rohit Sharma should savor this. They will never again see such effusive and confident assertions of their potential.

In a way, it is comforting to see sport not being obsequious to the occasion. Gorging on an inexperienced bowling attack bowling ineptly  would hardly add to the legacy that is Tendulkar, Dravid and Laxman. Instead, a feisty attack has bowled good lengths and the batsmen have paid the price for being lackadaisical in their footwork. They will know this better than any of the experts dissecting their videos.

• For Dravid and Laxman, there might be the realization that the reflexes aren’t firing the way they used to, that judgment of length and line is taking that fraction of a second longer resulting in an inability to cover for movement after pitching
• Maybe Tendulkar is letting it sink in that its getting harder to concentrate for long periods of time and the lazy false shot is increasing in frequency

That said, any writer is about as qualified to make these guesses as they are to pilot the space shuttle.

Adelaide will be the last test they’ll play in Australia. While a 4-0 result would be a likely and apt representation of the series, the flattest track in Australia should put thoughts of at least one final commanding innings in each of their minds. They need to think back to times when more than one top-class bowler has stood, hands on hips, a weary expression on his face as the ball has whizzed to the boundary. When their technique has looked impenetrable, their shot selection, immaculate.

There is this scene in the 1998 movie “Man in the iron mask” based on the three musketeers and their failed attempt at replacing the tyrannical Louis XIV with his twin brother. After their attempt fails, the 3 slightly “past-their-prime” warriors break into the castle to rescue the imprisoned brother. After some helter skelter running the three are cornered in a little cul-de-sac in the palace, with the royal guard covering them on all sides. After summarizing their situation as hopeless, D’artagnan says “If we must die, let it be like this…” as he holds his sword, tip on the floor in the center of the circle formed by his comrades. A brief pause ensues as his old friends realize what he means and place their own swords in the circle. A moment later they raise their swords, let out a blood-curdling war cry and charge the regiment arrayed against them. The captain of the regiment, a student of D’artagnan himself sees the charging musketeers, says quietly, almost to himself “What magnificent valor!“.

Adelaide 2012. Fluent stroke-filled 100s for Tendulkar and Laxman and a typically stodgy, “I’m not getting out come hell or high water” 100 from Dravid.

“What magnificent valor!”

They owe it, not to us, but to themselves. At least that’s what my script says.

The pitch. The hype. The WACA.

Western Australian Cricket Association. No other venue in test cricket evokes the buzz that this serene looking ground, situated in probably the most isolated big city in the world does. Cricket writers suddenly turn war correspondents using phrases like “lethal”, “pace battery” in describing what’s in store for batsmen. Talk of “all-pace attacks” start to do the rounds. Cricinfo posted a picture 2 days before the game with the curator crouched in front of what looked a section of the outfield but was in fact the playing surface.

Relative newcomers to the game would be forgiven in thinking that maybe the ground had been built on an old improperly cleared minefield.

A cursory look at two numbers puts things in perspective. In 38 test matches at the WACA, 1234 wickets have fallen, 32.5 wickets / test match at an average of 32.58 runs per wicket. In comparison, at the innocuous sounding Wankhede in Mumbai, 725 wickets have fallen in 22 tests (33 wickets / game) at an average of 29.58 runs per wicket.

Hard bouncy surfaces are not the stuff of nightmares for good batsmen, and the Indian lineup is a good one, make no mistake. The ball coming on to the bat with true bounce on a fast outfield should get more than a couple of the batsmen thinking “big-daddy hundreds” as R Shastri likes to call them. Batsmen can play back to fuller length deliveries knowing that the ball will still arc over the stumps should they miss the line. That said, seam bowlers have the luxury of knowing that any edges will carry to the slips and can afford to bowl a fuller length while still hitting the shoulder of the bat.

What can unravel visiting teams is uncertain footwork from batsmen standing and hanging their bats and bowlers pitching too short. The Indian team will do well to block out the hype surrounding the nature of the pitch and just play the ball instead of the tons of newsprint. What will be harder for India is to get the likes of Umesh Yadav and Ishant Sharma to bowl a full length, which with a hint of seam or swing can be incisive.

With 31 results in 38 test matches, one thing is certain. There is no place for timid defensive cricket at the WACA.

Sachin Tendulkar – “The Best Ever?”

The Sachin Tendulkar ODI Debate – Download the free ebook!

 

This is (yet) another attempt to answer the oft-asked question “How GOOD is Sachin Tendulkar, really?” From trying to take an objective look at the question about what makes a good ODI batsman to determining the frame of reference to compare Tendulkar with his peers, this ebook tries to combine good ol’ common sense with basic career statistics to answer the question.

Comments are welcome!

Open letter to Mohammad Amir

You’re 18 years old. Tall, thin to the point of anorexic. Left handed. And you are part of an endangered species. You can bowl a cricket ball at blinding pace, and make it do things in the air and off the pitch. In your last 11 innings where the opposition involved Australia and England at home, you’ve taken 30 wickets at an average of 19.80. You’ve made some of the best batsmen around look very circumspect and have received praise from some of the game’s great quick bowlers. Even in the arcane world of Pakistan test team selection you are guaranteed to be among the first 3 names down on the team sheet as your more experienced peers start to show the unmistakable signs of age and substance abuse.

What do you do next?

It’s really not a trick question. You concentrate on staying fit, look at adding some muscle to sustain your bowling, you watch and learn. You bowl frighteningly fast and you enjoy it. In the process you arouse many a marketer, publicist and IPL team owner to pay you obscene amounts of money to endorse shampoos, wear jerseys held together by sponsor logos. You pay off your family debt, buy swank pads in downtown Lahore, custom-order Lamborghinis. For your other urges, you blow off steam at IPL parties and partake of the buffet of ‘international’ escorts, ahem, models, all in the name of contractual commitments.

But, always! You always get back to the nets the next morning and wear your ego on your sleeve as you try to knock the batsman’s head off.

What you don’t do, you damn fool, is to agree with lesser talented team-mates, to bowl rigged no-balls. Don’t you get it?! Or we’ll have nothing but the middling medium pace of the Kulasekharas, the Praveen Kumars and the Tuffeys, the coma-inducing finger-tweaking tedium of the Swanns and Jadejas. The front-foot swagger of the Dilshans and the Rainas as they cart yet another six over midwicket. You fuckin’ idiot! Cricket needs your kind to survive!

Neutral venues, neutral supporters, better sport

The best thing about being an Indian viewer of the Football World Cup was that you were there only for the football. Sure, I had my evolving list of favourites through the tournament.I started off as a staunch Argentinian supporter, donned the German black-red-gold tricolour from the rounds of 16 upto the semifinal and ended the tournament hollering for a Dutch equaliser. In between I whooped when Drogba took the field, injured shoulder and all for Cote D’Ivoire (conveniently called Ivory Coast) and watched in awe as Portugal steamrolled the North Koreans. I was able to quickly turn up my nose at the poorly prepared French and the Italians and watched them fittingly eliminated in the first round. All I was interested in was, good football.

Cricket has seldom afforded us that luxury. Be it the world cup, a tri-nation or a bilateral series, an Indian cricket fan is burdened with expectations of victory.

It didn’t matter if a victory was only made possible by an opposition more efficient at self-destruction than our own or an inside edge that skims the varnish on leg stump before snaking to the boundary to accrue the winning runs.Win and all was well, lose and it was doom and gloom.

How many Indian viewers would be able to recall any good passages of play from the 2007 World Cup in the carribean, especially after India were dumped out in the 1st round? This tendency is not limited to just Indian cricket fans but to the legions of passionate team supporters around the world.

The advent of neutral test matches seems to have changed that for me. As India set out to cross the pond to play yet another series against Sri Lanka, Pakistan ‘hosted’ Australia in England and played some stirring cricket. Compared to hour  after hour of tedious uninspiring cricket in Sri Lanka, watching the Mohammeds, Asif and Aamer, the former wobbling seaming circles around the batsmen, the latter hurrying through them  for pace, was way more satisfying. The Australians done with Pakistan continues to play entertaining, albeit, inconsistently against England. India and Sri Lanka in the meanwhile, grind on, intent on avoiding defeat than to take games by the scruff of the neck. Is it a coincidence that the team with the most potent bowling attack in world cricket today has had the least exposure to the shimmer of the IPL? But that’s another discussion. For now, I’m much more keen to watch the next England V Pakistan game while probably not even bothering with following the other one online.

Maybe we need more neutral venues classified on the basis of competitive conditions and inspired teams rather than compulsory ‘watching grass grow’ series like the one on in Sri Lanka.

Getting punched in the nuts

You know how it is when watching one of those shows titled “World’s wankiest bloopers” or similar. Where people send in video evidence of their attempts at getting eliminated from the gene pool. The skateboarder coming down the metal railing of the staircase to be met with an immovable object. Or a father and toddler dancing to some music before the son punches the father in the nuts without warning. Yeah, those videos. The ones that make you laugh and cringe at the same time. That’s how it was for all non-Pakistani fans in yesterday’s T20 Semi-Final.

For Pakistani fans, it must’ve been like the dude that’s having a good time and gets punched in the nuts by his 4 year old. Painful.

Bring back the quicks

Growing up in a city that is a scaled up model of a can of sardines when it comes to open spaces meant that you learnt to improvise when it came to playing outdoor sports. The ‘garden’ patch behind the apartment block served as the football field. The L-shaped concrete parking lot was right for tennis ball cricket where a generation of teenagers got really good at square drives and cuts. The ‘shortness’ of the long arm of ‘L’ wasn’t conducive to 22-yard cricket. For that, there was the narrow strip outside the entrance, barely 12 feet across, but the requisite 35 yards or so long. That’s where I found my true love.

Quick bowling; the one activity that rescues cricket from the ignominy of being grouped alongside other post-retirement interests like curling and golf.

Born too late to behold the awe-inspiring pace battery of the West Indies or the partnership of Lillee and Thommo, my first glimpse of pace was from a recently re-admitted South Africa, namely Allan ‘White lightning’ Donald.

I don’t mean dinky “medium-fast” bowling a la Venkatesh Prasad but the kind that gets batsmen scrambling to look up the warranty of their protective equipment.

It is impossible to forget the thrill of apprehension that used to run up my spine as Donald, tall and wiry, sun block applied like war paint, would start his run-up. No languid jog this, quickly getting up to sprint speed, the compact gather and the whiplash delivery stride that ended with the perfect follow-through, the left arm pointing straight up, the bowling arm finishing next to the left thigh. The result, a 165 gm projectile, propelled at frightening pace, at the Indian (and therefore often hapless) batsman.

I’m sure one of the many emotional scars the Indian cricket fan lives with was inflicted on a sunny December day in Kingsmead, Durban in 1996 (Match report / Score Card). The delivery landed on a length just outside off-stump, nipping back off the seam, even as the batsman’s front foot and bat started to take perfect forward-defensive position to impede its path, only to be beaten for pace, sneaking through and sending the off stump cart wheeling. And this was cart wheeling in the days when stumps were hammered into the ground and not propped up in loose soil to enable glorious TV replays off 120kph bowlers like Praveen Kumar. The batsman was Sachin Tendulkar and his 15 was the 2^nd highest score for India out of 100 in that innings.

Since then the cricket world’s fast bowling stocks have been in decline. First with the retirement of Ambrose and Walsh, then Waqar and Akram. Brett Lee and Shoaib Akhtar kept things interesting for a while.

Akhtar’s spell at the Eden Gardens to bowl Dravid and Tendulkar off successive deliveries must be part of Pakistani cricketing folklore.

Sadly, the list of those who have flattered to deceive is longer than Akhtar’s list of reality TV antics. With the retirement of Shane Bond, cricket loses its last out and out quick bowler good enough to run through the best batting lineups on his day. Given his late entry and the fact that New Zealand haven’t been the most lucrative team to have tours with, the Indian fan has little idea of his lethal late out swingers at 145kph. Also, we have Lalit Modi and Co. to thank for wasting atleast a couple of good test-playing years of his career when he dared to earn a living by turning out for the ICL. Even a glimpse of him in the IPL can give one an idea of how mouthwatering a prospect it must be to watch him in test matches against top batsmen with a well-manned slip cordon and a leg gully.

We still have Praveen Kumar and an arsenal of part-time left-arm orthodox tweakers to enjoy. Sigh.

I hope India choked

I hope India choked against Sri Lanka on May 11th 2010. I hope that seasoned professionals with significant amounts of experience lost the plot in a crunch game. I hope it was technical deficiencies brought about by an all-consuming focus on the money-engorged IPL that was the cause for their 2nd embarrassing exit in as many editions of the T20 World Cup. Because the alternative is way too disturbing.

When a team needs not just a win, but a defined margin of victory, to stay alive in a big tournament, one of two things tends to happen. All out “nothing-to-lose” cricket that shocks the opponent or abject surrender. India did neither yesterday.

Batting
A statistic that reads 37 in the last 5 overs leads you to expect a clump of wickets resulting from desperate heaves by the batsmen. Fact is only 3 wickets fell. At the end of the 10th over, India were at 90/1. 10 overs to go with almost the entire batting lineup to come. The 2nd wicket fell in the 12th over, when Dhoni promoted himself to number 4. The score was 98/2 after 12 overs. From then until the end of the final over, India scored 65 runs for the loss of 3 more wickets. Dhoni faced 19 balls and scored 23 runs. He hit one ball over the rope. Most of the other deliveries were a combination of nudged singles and mistimed drives. At no stage did he look like he was out there to get as many as possible without regard to losing his wicket. A total of 180-plus ended up at 163.

Bowling
In contrast to the Indian innings, Sri Lanka was at 58/3 at their halfway mark. The required run rate for them was 10.60 and for India to defend was 8.60. Sri Lanka needed a win and needed over 11 an over in the last five. Big matches and slowing tracks make anything over 7 a challenge but Sri Lanka not only knocked out India but won the game. Like the batsmen, none of the bowlers lost the plot save for a Nehra over where three boundaries were hit. With a run rate of 7 to defend (to qualify), Dhoni got Vinay Kumar to bowl around the wicket to defend the shorter legside boundary. Instead of providing run savers within the circle on the offside, he kept deep point where the batsmen collected their singles and twos with disdainful ease. Only when Sri Lanka had scored the 143 did he bring in more fielders into the circle. What followed can be attributed to a demoralized side having nothing to play for or something more.

I have observed Dhoni’s batting and his captaincy for too long to be left wondering. About the 19 deliveries he faced where he played not more than 3-4 shots in anger. About the defensive field placings that gave easy singles to a middle-order that had scored precious little in the tournament so far. Dhoni’s tactics have sometimes been unorthodox but never plain defensive and daft. I am left with an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach about whether it was 11 against 11 in India’s final match at the T20 World Cup. I hope India are really that bad.

Why bother with NRR?

The curse of the group format is upon us. Four days into the tournament, theoretically, six super-eight spots are still up for grabs, India and West Indies having claimed the other two. Realistically, they have all been decided. We have four all-but-meaningless games before the business end of the tournament begins.

The reason. Net run rates. It would take huge wins by Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan and Ireland to send one of the test teams home. The idea that one or even two of them might squeak a win isn’t outrageous, but to expect them to do it with margins of 75-100 runs and more is as realistic as a consistent Pakistan team.

On paper, the use of run rates to decide tie-breakers is intuitive. When two teams end up on the same number of points, the team to have run its opposition closer should be given credit. There are multiple reasons why that calculation does not provide a complete picture. Here are three of them:

1. Teams bowling first are more likely to suffer heavy losses after their opposition piles on the runs compared to those batting first and scoring small totals. Chasing teams are more likely to be skittled out chasing 10 an over than when batting first when they can plod along at 6 an over
2. Differing ground conditions mean that some teams have access to high-scoring tracks while others have to slug it out on slow turners where the run-rate difference is unlikely to be significant.
3. Net run rates do not take into wickets lost in scoring the runs. One might argue that the number of wickets lost is immaterial, but then the same argument can be used to say a win is a win, whether by 1 run or 50.

If not net run rate, then what? While there might not be a universal solution, in the case of the T20 World Cup, having one win each should keep all three in the running. The final two from each group should be decided on the basis of a 5-over shootout done immediately after the final group game. This would mean having the third team at the ground not knowing if they will need to play for their survival. Drama!

Overall, they would reduce the number of meaningless games in big tournaments and help hold interest in a tournament named ‘The World Cup’

Time for some cricket!

25th april was the big finish to the most-watched Indian Television event spanning a month. The best team of the tournament played the comeback team, and lost. As a Mumbaite and foremost, an SRT supporter, I’d had a reasonably satisfying IPL until then. As Chennai catches went down and Mumbai wickets fell, the writing was on the scoreboard. Chennai won comfortably. I shrugged and went to bed. The next morning I drove to work with my mind on the meetings ahead and my to-do list. There was some chat and consensus about how the Mumbai think-tank might face problems if asked to design rockets given their structuring of the batting order. There was more chat about Modi Tharoor and ‘IPLgate’.

What was most noticeable through the duration of the IPL was by absence. There weren’t any heated discussions about when matches were lost. No arguments over captain’s choice to bat or bowl at the toss. No expletive-laden rants at borderline umpiring decisions. No excited high-fives about team victories or airs of despondency over losses. In general,

Not anymore. Starting 30th April there won’t be performing celebrities or ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’ players. Catches won’t be named after cheap blackberry knockoffs, sixes won’t be named after overpriced realty. But the matches will matter. We’ll talk about brilliant cameos and inspired bowling changes. We’ll delight in the opposition batsmens’ suicidal running. We will exult when our team scores the winning run and cringe when they fall short. It’s the world cup and cricket will take centerstage. And that’s how we like it.