Men in White

Around the time India was routing Bangladesh in an ugly stadium in Dhaka watched by nearly no one, England was rolling up the West Indies even more comprehensively, only they were doing it before a full house in Leeds. When it wasn't raining in Headingley the sky was a vivid blue, denser than the bleached blue of summer skies in the subcontinent.

From newspaper reports the English scene looked better than it felt: temperatures hovered just above zero, fielders kept their hands in their pockets and the West Indians could have been forgiven for thinking that everything, even the weather, was against them. Just as no one should play Test cricket in the dehydrating heat and humidity of Bangladesh in May, the early, frozen part of an English 'summer', as Indian teams have found in the past, is unfit for human consumption.

It's hugely satisfying to see India rout a Test team. Before qualifying that with the almost-mandatory, 'even if it's only Bangladesh', every Indian fan should pause and candidly answer a simple question: were you expecting to destroy Bangladesh so comprehensively before the Test series began, or did you, after the World Cup, feel vaguely anxious about what might happen? My answer is that I expected us to beat Bangladesh but I didn't expect that on the third day of a Test we'd win by an innings and more than two hundred runs. I didn't know that we had the bowling attack for it. We batted really well: I still think Laxman should be playing but the team Dravid selected has done the job it was given. Ganguly got a hundred in the first Test and it's hard to argue with runs on the board.

I just hope we don't build on this for England. Because if Dravid decides to stay with five batsmen in England, he can't, after this performance, pick Laxman for the first Test and Jaffer, Karthik, Dravid, Tendulkar plus Ganguly and Dhoni would be an iffy line-up against the moving ball and short-pitched bowling. Lots of people have written in to point out that Ganguly did well against an all-pace attack in South Africa and so he did. He has earned his place in the team…at No.6. I don't want him walking in against Harmison and Flintoff at the fall of the fourth wicket, specially if Dhoni's in next. Dhoni's a splendid player in sub-continental conditions but he has yet to show us that his home-made brutality travels well. Besides, I'm not sure that India's dominance in this Test match has much to do with a five-man attack. Zaheer and Kumble between them have done the business as so often before. I can't see that the exclusion of Ishant Sharma would have made much difference to our fortunes in the Mirpur Test. Footnote: given that Karthik can't catch anything without gloves on, Laxman in the slips in seaming conditions would be more than useful.

I notice that cricket reporters on web sites and newspapers (and not a few of the comments in response to the last post) are 'perplexed', 'baffled' and 'worried' by Tendulkar's strike-rate. The conclusion is a) that Tendulkar is batting for individual milestones, not for the team and b) that he's past his sell-by date. Sanjay Manjrekar had a piece in the May issue of Cricinfo Magazine where he observed "…Indian players have a tendency to overstay their welcome. Kapil Dev, with due respect, clearly robbed India of two good years of cricket from the young Javagal Srinath…There is a fear that a great cricketer can never be replaced. But didn't Tendulkar replace Sunil Gavaskar adequately in a matter of two years?" You could be forgiven for thinking that Manjrekar's hinting rather broadly that it's time to send Tendulkar on his way, but even if that's not what Manjrekar meant, from the evidence of public comment over the last couple of days, there are lots of fans and journalists who think Tendulkar's a liability.

Now that every Indian batsman lucky enough to be picked looks likely to score a century against Bangladesh, this is a good time to look at the considerations behind Indias five batsmen policy in the long term. The point of only five batsmen is more bowling options. Despite the matchless Adam Gilchrist, Australia traditionally play six batsmen, a keeper and four bowlers. One of the batsmen (Michael Bevan, Andrew Symonds, Mark Waugh) has generally doubled up as an auxiliary bowler. Dravid has been pushing the idea of five bowlers for a while, though it isn't clear that India has five bowlers penetrative enough to back up the policy. Anil Kumble, an in-form Harbhajan Singh, Zaheer Khan, an un-injured Munaf Patel and Sreesanth might (just) justify their places but Harbhajan is in decline and Munaf Patel keeps breaking down. Irfan Pathan swinging the ball and shoring up the lower order would be perfect, but Greg Chappell, with his gift for turning gold into lead, did for him.

In Bangladesh the five-bowler experiment is relatively risk-free. On slow pitches Bangladesh's seamers aren't a threat and Indian Test batsmen aren't likely to be troubled by poor-to-middling left arm spin. I can't see us playing five batsmen against England in England this summer or even at home against the Pakistanis later this year so the best thing you can say about the policy is that it's Bangladesh-specific. But you have to experiment somewhere if five bowlers is what you favour so perhaps Bangladesh is Dravid's laboratory.

	'How can there be a Test series being played that features the Indian team with no television coverage and no radio commentary?' © Getty Images

I was in Bangalore around the the time the first Test between India and Bangladesh was being played and the only channel I could watch the match telecast live had commentary in Tamil. I like to think that I'm an old fashioned fan, committed to Test cricket, but I couldn't watch Test cricket in Tamil for more than fifteen minutes. I tried turning the sound off but that was even worse. Mute meant no crowd noise and no cricket sounds: no appeals, no edges, no satisfying thunk when the ball hit the middle of the bat. Cricket as a dumbshow is infuriating; it feels like pantomime—bloodless and perverse.

At the time I felt sorry for my hosts but not especially worried because I assumed that this was a provincial problem. Once I got home to Delhi, a proper metropolis, the capital of this great republic, normal service would be restored. Except it wasn't, because the dispute between Neo Sports and Doordarshan on the one hand and Neo Sports and cable and satellite operators on the other, made sure that the only Indians watching were the Tamil-speaking audiences of Raj TV.

How has it come to this? How can there be a Test series being played that features the Indian team with no television coverage and no radio commentary? You might say that a contest with Bangladesh is unlikely to make pulses race, but you'd be wrong. Bangladesh helped boot India out of the World Cup, they nearly got the better of a Test match against a full-strength Australian touring side recently, so they're worthy opponents. I think there's a substantial audience for Indo-Bangla Test cricket; not as large as the audience for one-day cricket, of course, but large enough.

What's happening here is that Doordarshan isn't willing to settle for the modest profits that a low-profile Test series with Bangladesh might have brought in. It telecast the one-day matches because the ad revenues are higher for those, but refused to agree terms with Nimbus (which has bought the television rights from the Bangladesh Board) for the Test series. Amazingly Doordarshan was telecasting the one-day series being played between Sri Lanka and Pakistan at the same time as it was conspicuously not doing live coverage of the Indian Test match. This wouldn't be amazing if Doordarshan was a private television station. ESPN/Star as private channels are responsible to their shareholders. If they find that there's more money to be made telecasting ODIs played between Sri Lanka and Pakistan than Test matches featuring India, that's their business.

For adults, watching cricket is a kind of schoolboy dreaming. It offers the possibility of perfect resolutions…not just a happy ending but a perfect happy ending, the sort that real life doesn't deliver. Actually, nor does cricket. But on the 24th, it did.

The Sri Lanka-New Zealand match wasn't a great one-day match, because it wasn't much of a contest, but for the spectator who'd picked the right side (like me) it was the most perfectly satisfying game to watch. Had this been one of Wodehouse's cricket stories, Mahela Jayawardene would have replaced Mike Jackson and the book would have been called Mahela at Wrykyn which doesn't sound as snappy as the original (Mike at Wrykyn) but it'll do.

I can remember the year I discovered that I had the wrong idea about deep fine-leg. I had played cricket right through my childhood and followed it enthusiastically on the radio afterwards (and at Feroz Shah Kotla whenever a Test came round), but I didn't know my fielding positions. I thought deep-fine leg stood near the boundary just a few degrees to the left of the keeper. I thought long-leg was deep fine-leg. Why was I so deluded? Because when batsmen glanced the ball past the lunging left hand of the wicket-keeper, radio commentators often used that ready-made phrase, "and he's tickled it fine, just wide of the keeper." Ergo, deep fine-leg.

Watching Chaminda Vaas open the bowling yesterday (three overs, no runs, two wickets) was scary, it was like being allowed to watch a master hit man at work. First his bunny, Stephen Fleming, trapped in front, business as usual. Then the right-handed Taylor done by the ball that didn't come back at him, caught Kumar Sangakkara, diving to his right. Not a run conceded in eighteen balls. Match over in three overs. And all this at under 120 kmph. No sound, no fury: just lethal seam bowling with the silencer on.

Why does watching Sri Lanka win give non-Sri Lankans so much pleasure? It's not because they're the little guys. They're not. The Sri Lankans won the World Cup eleven years ago: they've been big boys in the one-day game for over a decade now. No, we love watching the Sri Lankans win not out of chivalry, but because they're the new West Indians. Their crowds make more musical noise than Caribbean spectators ever did and their players do the gay cavalier business to the manner born.

Three of these guys are so old they should be playing veterans' charity matches. Vaas, Murali Muralitharan and Sanath Jayasuriya helped Sri Lanka win the Big One in the last millennium for god's sake! Sanath's even retired once. But instead of sitting on their rocking chairs waiting for their pension cheques, they're in the West Indies, terrorizing a new generation of cricketing infants.

Whether Subhash Chandra of Zee follows through with his Packerite circus or not, it's on the cards that sooner or later someone will. Someone certainly should.

The present structure of Indian cricket is a parody of India's political system. The provincial associations represent India's states. Each has its own constitution and a system of elections based on affiliated cricket clubs. Representatives of the provincial associations (some states like Mumbai, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh have more than one for historical reasons, and there are first-class associations like the Railways and the Services that aren't geographically defined) in turn elect the BCCI's chief officials. So, on the face of it, India has a pyramidal system of cricket administration based on indirect election. The democratic virtue of this federal system is rendered even more saintly by the fact that the world's richest cricket market is administered by honorary officials, men who work for the love of the game.

The Nawab of Pataudi thinks cricket is a man's game.

The occasion for this insight was the launch of a book that chronicled India's career in one-day cricket, timed to coincide with the build-up to the 2007 World Cup. The panel assembled to discuss the book had the Nawab as the moderator. Ten minutes into the discussion (which he had thus far switched about in his deft, relaxed, posh way) came the evening's Male Moment; Pataudi turned towards the cricket editor of the Hindustan Times, Kadambari Murali, and asked:

"So, as a woman, how do you see cricket? D'you see it as a manly game…?"