Krishna Kumar

The Sahara Cup used to be a sort of homecoming. When I landed in Montreal 20 years ago, I was resigned to not watching or playing cricket for a fair while, but unexpected aid was on its way.

The gopher interface cricinfo.cse.ogi.edu was slow, but thank heavens for it. And for rec.sport.cricket. I would get up early every morning and religiously type up a shortened version of the BBC World Service Sports Roundup for the newsgroup. For many graduate students from cricketing countries, rec.sport.cricket in those days was a second home. Then along came Internet Relay Chat and the #cricket and #crickettalk channels. Efnet, and later undernet servers, crashed under the heavy cricket load, especially when India played. All of us would merrily leave one severely stretched server, try multiple others and rejoin in groups, like schoolkids looking for a better playground.

Meanwhile, I discovered Montreal had cricket leagues, and surprisingly, inter-university cricket tournaments. Once, as a prelude to our summer of cricket, we called for a university cricket club meeting in the campus newsletter and were rendered speechless when a girl showed up for the meeting with her collection of crickets.

I remember when there were rough, unruly chips of laterite that jutted out from the red clay across a portion of our front yard. Mindless of the occasional uncertainties of bounce, we used to play cricket, lovely, carefree cricket, on them.

There used to be a bamboo gate that opened out to furnish us with the most splendid cricket pitch and run-up you could imagine. Half of our pitch was tarred - not very uniformly tarred. This tarred bit blended almost inconspicuously into the faded yellow cement flooring of our front porch, around mid-pitch. The other half was hard red chip and clay, which eventually lost out in the battle of attrition with rain and tennis and rubber balls bowled with rare energy. By the time we all had reached the ripe old age of seven or eight, this half had thus gradually eroded and settled into a nice, fairly even patch of earth. We bowled only from the tarred end as the bounce off the slightly haphazard tar was far too unpredictable, even by our fairly flexible standards, to be used for batting. The bamboo gate served as the straight boundary, and our run-ups started beyond the boundary. Never did any of this strike us as particularly odd.

The mid-pitch porch floor formed a negligibly small incline with the patch of clay, noticeable only to the discerning eyes of the better bowlers amongst us. Sometimes we pitched the ball unerringly on this innocent little incline and smiled in disdain as the ball skidded bouncelessly along the ground beneath the flailing willows of hapless batsmen. With more than a touch of arrogance, we called this deadly ball the yorker. Our sprightly young minds, brought up on a surfeit of Joel Garner yorkers equated anything that snuck beneath a helpless bat and spreadeagled the stumps with those famous balls.

Cricketing criticism can broadly be categorised as that which highlights the technical aspect and that which focuses on the mental side of things. As a result, failures in an international cricketer's career are seen to be a deficiency of technique or a lack of temperament, and sometimes both. With some cricketers, these weaknesses, at times real, at times perceived, tend to stick. In the event of a dismissal or a few loose deliveries, familiar criticisms reappear.

I don't think any other sport has such a variety of questions thrown at its practitioners in the face of failure. Some of it can be put down to cricket being a team sport - the individual failure contributing to a collective failing, and what is seen as the shirking of individual responsibility toward a collective cause assuming a moral flavour. But I believe a lot of the questioning of character is also a result of cricket's nature, the rules of the game, its drama, and its ebbs and flows. The drama and form that leave such lasting impressions on followers also lend themselves to an almost bewildering variety of vitriol, much of it carrying moralistic overtones. Cricket can be an utterly unforgiving game.

In this piece, I'll restrict myself to two aspects of batting: its protracted one-on-one nature, and a more specific point in the context of the famed corridor of uncertainty. Other factors that spring to mind are: batting's almost obligatory mix of attack and defence (you are supposed to give the opening hour to bowlers in Tests, else you might be termed impetuous); and that you are expected to perform in varying conditions, unlike, say, in tennis, where there's more understanding of the fact that a clay-courter might not do well at Wimbledon. Further, not playing well on bouncy pitches is termed as lack of stomach for battle, whereas not playing spin well is referred to as more of a technical shortcoming (though this view is gradually changing). But more of that in another piece.

Short-wave radios are interesting things. Sadly, you get to see very few of them these days. It has almost got to a point where you need to explain what a short-wave radio is. A radio, by default, is now an FM radio. How defaults have changed.

The quality of long-distance audio over the internet is obviously much better. Television brings direct visual effects. However, there is something a bit more active about the short wave. The waxing and waning has an almost human quality to it. It conforms to distances: far-flung places actually seem far-flung. Perhaps, after all, there is something to be said for the analog.

Cricket commentary never felt better than on radio. Lata Mangeshkar sometimes sounds even better on a creaky old short-wave. But maybe I'm getting a bit carried away.

During times like these, you are forced to think why you follow the game so closely, and watch matches so intently. Here is one reason I feel I watched Delhi Daredevils matches. After an almost interminable wait, along has come an Indian fast bowler who makes you sit bolt upright in your chair and watch the game. Forget the match situation. Forget the opposition, the pitch, the format. Forget everything. Just watch.

A run-up is something unique to cricket. There's no real equivalent in another sport. It heightens the drama like little else. In athletics, I can perhaps think of the triple jump run, the long- and high-jump approach runs. But there's nothing similar in racquet or bat-and-ball sport.

For a bowler at the top of his game, everything builds up to the final leap. As the bowler gathers himself into his last stride, the world seems at his feet and the batsman at his mercy. On an off day or, at times, against a batsman on the offensive, the run-up deepens his doubt.