Tendulkar, Wisden and a furore of ignorance

It takes very little to spin a controversy around Sachin Tendulkar © AFP Enlarge

In the beginning it was amusing, but now it has become nauseating. What started with a deliberate manipulation by a national broadsheet is now a full-blown epidemic, with the ignorant and the polemicists enjoying a free ride. At the centre of this utterly senseless controversy is Sachin Tendulkar, the victim, and the Wisden Cricketer's Almanack, allegedly the perpetrator of a malicious campaign against him.

It started like this. On April 7, The Indian Express, a newspaper known for its pursuit of hard news stories, carried a front-page article headlined: "Wisden pops the query: Sachin?" The tagline that preceded the story, helpfully added: "Failure to play a matchwinner in 15 years rankles". The story started with this paragraph from the then yet-to-be released Wisden Cricketers' Almanack:

Apart from a glorious, nothing-to-lose 55 against Australia on a Mumbai terrortrack, watching Tendulkar became a colder experience: after his humbling 2003, he seemed to reject his bewitching fusion of majesty and human frailty in favour of a mechanical, robotic accumulation.

From here, the newspaper story went on the examine Tendulkar's contribution to Indian cricket, his inability to win crucial matches for India and his failure in key matches. It concluded with this question: has the superstar been reduced to a mere passenger in the Indian team?

Wisden was evoked once more in the piece. "The majesty - as Wisden noted - is missing, the touch is barely there and after 123 Tests in over 15 years, he is yet to play that defining innings that has won a game for the country." Clever tactics this, borrowing one word from Wisden then adding ten more, while making it appear that Wisden said all of it. In fact when I first saw the newspaper on Thursday morning, I thought there was a major essay on Tendulkar in the Almanack which I had not known about.

What it turned out was that there was a 125-word review of Tendulkar's performance in 2004. It was part of the Wisden Forty feature, where 40 leading cricketers of he world are listed on the basis of their performance in the previous calendar year, 2004 in this case. There were five other Indian players in the list, Rahul Dravid, Virender Sehwag, VVS Laxman, Anil Kumble and Harbhajan Singh. This is what the whole piece on Tendulkar read:

Having spent his career delighting the purists, Tendulkar spent 2004 whipping the statisticians into a frenzy. In Tests, he played a remarkable three-card trick: 495 runs without being dismissed to start the year; then seven singlefigure scores in eight innings either side of tennis elbow; finally normal service resumed with an average of 284 in the series in Bangladesh. Apart from a glorious, nothing-to-lose 55 against Australia on a Mumbai terrortrack, watching Tendulkar became a colder experience: after his humbling 2003, he seemed to reject his bewitching fusion of majesty and human frailty in favour of a mechanical, robotic accumulation. The end - an average of 91 for the year - justified the means, but the game was the poorer for it.

That's all. Nothing more, nothing less. But amazingly, even before the copies were officially released this became the subject of a front-page headline in one of India's leading newspapers. "Wisden pops the query: Sachin?" What query? The Wisden pen-sketch was merely an observation on the way he batted in 2004. It was not even an original observation; Tendulkar's changed approach to batting is a much-traveled territory now and even Tendulkar himself has talked about it. But where in the Almanack piece was the question about his career and contribution to the Indian cause? There can be no issue with any publication wanting to raise these questions, but why fire from somebody else shoulders?

The Express piece has spawned many follow-ups. Some newspapers merely reported what Wisden had said, some went looking for reactions from former cricketers, and some have taken upon the themselves the task of defending Tendulkar against this "myopic and biased attempt at humiliating a cricketer." How touching indeed. It would have been funny, weren't it so pathetic.

There is another wave of indignation sweeping across India. That's over the choice of the five cricketers of the year. Five Englishmen, huh. Ashley Giles? What a joke. Robert Key? Can he even hold a place in the England side? The idea of debating the Almanack's choice is a fair one. It's fair too to question the criteria used for nomination, and the relevance of the Wisden Five to the rest of the world, but to ignore the criteria altogether is absurd, and if willful, seriously malicious. Two great Test players of the past made quite a scene on a television show last night.

What about Virender Sehwag? asked Wasim Akram indignantly on a television show, smugly waving Sehwag's average last season. What about Irfan Pathan, piped in Geoff Boycott, wasn't he ICC's young player of the year? Who is this editor making all this decisions sitting on his desk, has he played even one Test?

But can 100 Tests be an excuse for ignorance? Perhaps Akram can be excused, for he proudly proclaimed that he had never read an Almanack, but Boycott, surely he should have been wiser. For someone who has lived, played and commentated in England all his life and been a cricketer of the year in the second year of his international career, not to know that the Wisden Five are traditionally chosen on the basis of performances in the English season and that no cricketer can win it twice is a bit odd. And to spread his ignorance to thousands of unsuspecting television watchers is plain irresponsible. The question that could have been asked instead is that if the Wisden Five are to be chosen from the English season, should they not be promoted as such?

But who are we to tell good old Boycs that? Have we played a Test?

Sambit Bal is editor of Wisden Asia Cricket magazine and Cricinfo in India.