The good, bad and thorny of Indian cricket

Going by its past record, the latest Wisden India Almanack (WIA) could be seen either as arriving many months late or far earlier than usual this year. The latest WIA is a two-in-one compendium, not because doomsday is around the corner but because it was believed a little order was required in its publishing calendar. Rather than appear at the end of a calendar year, as in the past, the seventh WIA takes into account what is in the broadest sense the Indian season. Timestamped as the 2019 and 2020 edition, this volume begins at the start of the 2018-19 Indian season with the Duleep Trophy and rounds off nicely with the World Cup.

What remains constant, however, are the two responses to a WIA sighting. One is to ask wide-ranging questions about its meaning and purpose in this day and age, and make an attempt to quantify its readership. The other is to fall back on six seasons of habit and wonder what lies at the top of the doorstop - because that's where WIA's treats have traditionally resided.

There are quite a few of those among the WIA's many essays this time around too. A few appear hardboiled and prescient - like an account by a former director of India's Central Bureau of Investigation, RK Raghavan, who headed the 2000 match-fixing investigation. We live in a time when Shakib Al Hasan has been found guilty of failing to report an approach from a bookie, and there have been several arrests relating to corruption in the Karnataka Premier League. Fans today must brace themselves for the fact that every beloved cricketer's professed ignorance or innocence in the face of bookie-related allegations is, at best, an attempted smokescreen. Raghavan's account will remind us how long cricket has been mud-wrestling with the pigs.

Then there is Bengaluru lawyer Nandan Kamath's essay on the importance of having a law in place to handle sporting corruption, which acquires new relevance with the recent attempt by the BCCI, led by Sourav Ganguly, to completely dismantle the Lodha recommendations, which were meant to improve governance standards and the BCCI's administrative probity. What if, in the wake of the IPL 2013 corruption scandal, the courts had actually sent an errant cricket official or two to prison for a night due to contempt? Would the BCCI have tried a shakedown like they are doing now?

Alongside these accounts of the bad stuff are an eclectic mix of essays divided into carefully calibrated sections. A few talk to cricket tragics in one voice. Or rather, they become as several voices telling a single, sometimes soulful, story.

From Gideon Haigh and Shishir Hattangadi come stories of the changing of players' rites of passage. Former Mumbai captain Hattangadi's evocative account of the Bombay gharana of cricket in the 1980s will leave modern-day cricketers flummoxed: he writes, "I had Gavaskar's shoes, Mankad's trousers and Sandeep Patil's bat." (The Mankad here is Rahul.) Hattangadi's tales of dressing-room wisdom may sound like us old folk moaning about the 21st century. Contrast comes in the form of Haigh's account.

It describes a modern-day cricketer's mobile-phone app and its "real-time monitoring system", which feeds data to Cricket Australia's team performance department. Today's elite cricketers, Haigh says, "have locked themselves into a gilded jail", their lives "altogether pervaded by technology, who show off their digital ankle bracelets as jewellery, to whom the word 'submit' has no unsavoury connotations". No amount of data, though, can be brought to bear on cricketers' personal dilemmas, as described by former India Under-19 captain Unmukt Chand, who finds himself left behind by his peers on the way to the top.

In another piece Mike Brearley quite clinically lists the issues over which Indian cricket administrators had been "prickly to change". The opposition to day-night Tests was the most recent of those, though the BCCI's stance on that particular one was quickly turned around by Ganguly and Co. Brearley looks for an answer in the tussle between Indian cricket's contemporary face as an emerging, young country with "confidence, brashness and energy" and its conservative side that contemplates, he says, an unconscious thought: "What is five minutes against eternity?" The BCCI's new Enemy No. 1 is Olympic participation, and as usual there is, to borrow Brearley's words, "prickliness and stickiness" at work.

A hundred pages later, Manoj Narayan tells a compelling story of why the Olympics are central to cricket's dream of being considered a "global" sport. In Germany, reportedly one of the fastest growing centres for cricket, Narayan writes, it is Afghan immigrants who are spreading the game. The head of the Deutscher Cricket Bund, the German cricket federation, tells him, "It's like a circle… England took it to India, Pakistan. The Pakistanis introduced it to the Afghans and now the Afghans are bringing it back to the Europeans."

It is the kind of tale that would have made one of WIA's own, Sidhanta Patnaik, happy. Patnaik died at the age of 34 from cancer, and is fondly remembered in the edition and among its obituaries. Even in his final days, from his bed in an intensive-care unit, Patnaik would churn out articles and put together the last bits of a book about Indian women's cricket, The Fire Burns Blue, with Karunya Keshav. He was the kind of person who understood what compendiums like WIA are for - so what if we can get every score, stat and record online and believe we don't really need a volume like this year by year on a bookshelf?

But even today, of those numbers this must be said: if ever a high-powered electromagnetic pulse destroyed all data on every hard drive on earth, cricket fans will always have the comfort that these almanacks will be the "hard copies" that record what transpired in our cricket season after season.

Wisden India Almanack 2019 and 2020
Bloomsbury
954 pages, Rs 699