Evil Cricket Eats up Tweet Space Meant for CWG

Yes, it is cricket once again that has woken me up from my slumber. These days Ramayana is pretty popular, so I will forgive you if you compare my blog to Kumbhakarna – he too used to wake up after sleeping for 6 months. Bad one! I know.

Ok so, yesterday, I read a few comments in the light vein from some of my friends deriding cricket, across various social media forums:

“Die Cricket Die”

“…I have programmed myself to ignore all cricket and focus on watching/reading all things CWG next 2 weeks…”

The triggering event for this was that on 5/10/10 sometime between 14:00 and 15:00 hrs, VVS Laxman shouted a few expletives at Pragyan Ojha, threatened to beat him with his bat (rarest of rare events), and won a cracker of a test match for India. It was as if he was commemorating his awesomer feat from 2001. How awesome these feats and some of the others that Indian cricket team has pulled off in between them needs the space of a book and not a blog. So let me just say that, yesterday at the aforementioned time, I was deliriously happy and so were the 200-400 colleagues jumping in the office cafeteria and shouting “India, India, India”.

Obviously so were a lot of Indian twitterati, because hashtags related to Laxman and VVS were (globally) out-trending all pop singers, Jerome Kerviel, “premium” viral trends, and CWG. Yes, Indian shooters and wrestlers were busy winning 5 gold medals (a very rare feat indeed) and a few silvers and bronzes at that same time.

So cricket out-trended other sports in India again. Anything unexpected? More importantly, anything unfair or wrong about it?

Now why does cricket need to die for this or why do people need to shut themselves away from such great cricket moments? Such comments and ideas always remind me of a story I heard long back – about a teacher drawing a line in sand and asking a student to make it smaller without touching it, and the student drawing a bigger line under it.  Cricket hogs tweet space, TV space, and mind space, because no other sport does that for us Indians. It is not right or wrong, fair or unfair, it just is.

Consider this:

1) BCCI did not spend $3 billion on hosting this series with Australia. The richest board in the world even cited cost problems for not using UDRS.

2) Most of those that thronged to the PCA stadium, to TV sets in cafeteria, brought down the Cricinfo servers, or just kept tweeting, had schools to attend, homework to complete, reports to write, vendors to pay, orders to fulfill, and bosses to appease. Yet they prioritized the culmination of a game rambling on for last five days over all other priorities in life. And they have been doing this for last 30 years at least.

3) And for VVS it was just one more match to turn around, one more challenge to thrive in. At least when the day started, he definitely needed less support than those wrestlers for whom the medals were once in a life time event.

Still more eyeballs and wishes focused on him, because he was playing the sport that Indians love. Why?

Perhaps because as Ram Chandra Guha says in “Wickets in the East”, Indian cricket resembles the ethos that is India; perhaps because India has been more successful at cricket than at other sports; or perhaps it is sinister BCCI’s sinister plan.

I don’t know why it is so, but that it is so, is for everyone to see. Personally, I think it is the hope of success in a high-quality contest that drives the audiences. If interest in a sport can be measured historically, I believe that we would see huge spikes in 1971 (Gavaskar, India’s first away victories over WI and Eng, highest run chase of the time), between 1983 and 1987 world cups (victory to a pathetic semis exit), immediately after Nov. 1989 (God happened), and definitely after March 2001 (Kolkata). At all these times, the quality of cricket went up and hope of success surfaced or strengthened. I believe, we would also see negative spikes between 1987 WC and Nov 1989, in 1999 and early 2000, and during 2007 WC.  In all these times hopes were dashed and quality of cricket played by India spiralled down. Perhaps what sustains Indians’ interest in cricket between these spikes is the factor that Mr. Guha talks about – in some ways – both good and bad, cricket in India does reflect India. I do not have any statistical evidence for this composite theory, but its just a thought.

So for CWG or any other sports event to trend higher than cricket, Indians would have to do well at it, against the best opposition, and it would have to have chaos of Indian life muddled into it. Simple task of drawing a longer line.

I personally don’t have anything against the CWG. I beamed with pride all throughout the opening ceremony and happily tweeted and retweeted whenever an Indian won a medal. But when there is a masterpiece being etched in a cricket match, it is difficult for my mind to focus on anything else, not in the least on CWG. I guess it was true for a lot of people yesterday.

In the end, I would like to thank my friends, whose status messages and comments got me thinking and woke my blog up.

May CWG XIX live long! :)

IPL: Crass Cricket – Yes, Completely Fixed – Too Fantastic

Sometime back a friend’s status message on Facebook read “IPL – Indian Pre-fixed League”. Sounds scandalous, witty, funny, and true. And indeed if there were some who believed it was not fixed, most of them would have changed camps in the last 15 days. Of course, if the administrative and ownership structure of the league was so tangled up and screwed up, totally devoid of the concept of independence of responsibilities and benefits, then how could the sport itself be clean? And of course, it makes for good reading and good discussions. We so thrive in scandal.

Well, I for one, have differing thoughts. There are many reasons:

First, this is not the first time that the sport of cricket has been governed by an opaque administration. Right from the days of Maharaja of Vizianagram (Vizzy), who royally financed and screwed up India’s 1936 tour to England to the days of Jagmohan Dalmiya and most recently Sharad Pawar. We all know that they all had some or other interest in the sport of cricket other than the love for the game and ability to administer it. Does that mean that all of Indian cricket’s (and by implication other teams’) achievements were solely financed by their boards? Yeah let’s believe it. It sounds even more scandalous.

But even if the boards (or commissioners) financed all the events in all the cricket matches till date, has anyone tried to think how fixable is this complex sport? Take the bowler, there are several variables that control his ability to follow his paymaster’s command. There has been one bowler in the last decade who could control his line and length to a very large extent – Glenn Mcgrath. He ended up with 563 test wickets at 21.64 a piece. He also took 20 T20 (IPL format – most probably fixed all the way) wickets at 24 a piece. Some twisted fixing that!

Now the batsman. Yeah this guy must sure be able to follow the paymaster’s order. With that large piece of willow in the hand he should be able to hit it straight into a fielder’s hand, at will. Anyone who picked up even a plastic bat in the childhood would tell you that for a batsman, placement at will, all the time, is almost impossible. And those who can place the ball where they want, almost at will, are generally called great batsmen, because they win matches with those well placed strokes.

Before anyone accuses me of thinking that fixing = losing, let me clarify. Your point is that the broad script is fixed. Yes of course. A broad script is to be followed. But this is what bothers me here. What happens if a bowler, acting according to the script, bowls long hops, waiting to be struck out of the ground, but the stupid batsman does not follow his script and is able to act out only a single? What if this happens again and again in the play? The broad script goes for a toss!

The same can happen if the bowler fluffs his script - while the batsman is waiting for a loose delivery, he may get a toe-crushing yorker. The point is broad scripts work for films, where they have retakes and for theatre, where they have rehearsals. For a team sport, the bosses need a fervent wish and robots as players (or luck, which would make them punters and the game, legitimate).

Naah! Most people would not be convinced by this feeble logic. It has happened in cricket before they say. Yes it has. But let us see the details:

1) First reference of fixing that I know of – some English county bowler fed full tosses to Vizzy for a few deliveries, in return for a gold watch. Why he could not continue doing it? In his own words “I gave him a full toss and a couple of long hops, but you can't go on bowling like that all day, not in England." The actor could not continue acting. My point above.

2) This one I saw live and even as a kid I could figure it out that Mongia and Prabhakar did not want to win against the WI in 1994. Now that’s how a fixed match pans out. Have we seen anything like that in the IPL?

3) This one involved Hansie Cronje, who was a self-confessed fixer. Other than all the money he got from “MK” for trying to fix matches and passing on some information, he and Nasser Hussein (innocent and unpaid – poor fella) decided to forfeit two innings of the fifth test match in 2000 to induce a result. And indeed South Africa lost. Any such event in IPL?

All other events related to fixing in cricket’s history are either exchange of information (Warne and M. Waugh) or acquaintance with book-makers (Azharuddin and A.Jadeja) or unsuccessful attempts at throwing away the wicket (H. Gibbs). The last one is a classic case of the actor getting it wrong and screwing up the “script”.

Information could have been exchanged during IPL and book-makers might have attended IPL Nights, but I fail to understand how does that help the matches follow the scripts? And aren’t we saying that Modi himself was the bookmaker in this case? Even then he can’t ensure that the 109th ball will go for a six.

In the end, all I have to say is it is next to impossible to fix an entire match in almost any team sport. What is possible is something called “spot fixing”. For some part of the match, some of the players try to underperform. That indeed is possible, highly probable in IPL, and is unpardonable.

But because of spot fixing or because of financial and administrative opaqueness at the top, saying that each match is script based is just a little bit too indulgent-in-scandals (or cynical) for my taste.

Critics Beware: Dada-giri Continues

Someone called Allen E George once said,“People of mediocre ability sometimes achieve outstanding success because they don't know when to quit. Most men succeed because they are determined to.”

Other than that bit about mediocre ability, he could have been talking about a certain Sourav Chandidas Ganguly.  The guy simply refuses to give up! God (the one up there, not SRT) help the stomachs of those who wrote him off a bit too early, because I don’t think words, especially one’s own judgments on others, make for easily digestible food. Every time they write him off, he makes them eat their words.

At least twice in last 18 years, he has made his critics eat their words. When the kid who failed to score runs and carry drinks in 1992 turned up at Lord’s in 1996 and scored a 131, the naysayers of 1992 had to consume their judgments and applaud. He made them applaud for a full decade before facing off with Greg Chappell. Yeah the same guy who made his younger brother bowl underarm because as captain he could not think of any other way to save 6 runs off one ball!

He wrote emails. By writing emails, he ensured that Dada was not a part of the team that won the 2006 series in West Indies. Dada’s reply wasn’t that emphatic this time, but it was solid enough to ensure that Greg would have his emails for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for quite a few days between that Wanderers test match in  December 2006 to his final test in Nagpur in November 2008.

BCCI of course did not give him the chance to settle the ODI account that well. IPL so far has been a yo-yo ride as well. For two IPLs he did not perform as well as he and SRK would have liked and in the third too he was going horrendously – till last night.

But I saw him launch into Pragyan Ojha last night and I knew I had seen this earlier, when I saw him cover drive Dominic Cork repeatedly in 1996 and pull Andre Nel in 2006. Here was a man who was determined to win that personal battle, who did not care if he was ill-equipped to win, and who did not know when to quit. The perfect model for Mr. George’s quote above.

It is possible that Dada might go pfffft… after the bang of last night. But I for one, would not want to say that because first, I don’t like a snack of words. And second, I would rather take this opportunity to cheer the captain who taught the Indian cricket team to look the best in the eye and never give up. May he continue never giving up!