Men in White
In praise of Kumble
If winning Test matches is the yardstick we use to measure the value of a player, Kumble is the most valuable player India has had since Kapil Dev
Mukul Kesavan
25-Feb-2013
I'm glad Anil Kumble has retired from one-day cricket. For two reasons. The lesser reason is that India's ODI team management appreciated neither his gifts nor the implacable will he brought to his work and didn't deserve him. Dravid preferred Harbhajan bowling mechanical off-spin like a wind-up toy to Kumble's commitment and intelligence and craft—as did Ganguly before him. But the more important reason to celebrate Kumble's one-day retirement is that it will help extend his Test career.
And how important is that? Very important indeed. If winning Test matches is the yardstick we use to measure the value of a player, Kumble is the most valuable player India has had since Kapil Dev: more important than the fine crop of batsmen of the last twenty years (Azharuddin, Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly, Laxman) and orders of magnitude more important than endorsement giants like Pathan, Dhoni and Yuvraj. You can reasonably argue that most Kumble-inspired victories have come at home but only if you're willing to apply that stricture to his batting contemporaries. Since 1971, the year we beat the West Indies in their backyard, Indian cricket has been sustained by three great players: Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev and Anil Kumble. That the rehearsal of this simple fact should seem startling or revisionist gives you some idea of how batsman-centric cricket is and how much we love worshipping little mountains of runs.
Luckily Javagal Srinath who, along with Kumble, pretty much made up India's bowling attack for years, has written a lovely tribute in the Hindustan Times which gives Kumble his due. Here's a quote from it, but do read the whole thing:
Full postGreg Chappell and the Long Run
We all want to know why we lost to Bangladesh and then Sri Lanka
Mukul Kesavan
25-Feb-2013
For historians, the controversy around India's exit from the world cup has a familiar rhythm and pattern. On the face of it all the stakeholders in Indian cricket—the fans, the BCCI, the coach, the captain—want to get to the bottom of this unexpected failure. We all want to know why we lost to Bangladesh and then Sri Lanka. We want the causes for our defeat laid out: we want, in short, a historical explanation for this catastrophe. Post-mortems shall be performed on the Great Slip of 2007, months, years after the World Cup is done. In just this way do historians of the rebellion of 1857 still debate the reasons for that bloody episode.
No one will ever agree on why we got eliminated because every interested party will set his causal explanation in a different time frame. Greg Chappell has already indicated that he favours a long term explanation for India's poor performance. In a press conference after India's loss to Sri Lanka, Chappell was understandably defensive. Quizzed about the reasons for India's losses, he repeatedly said that "we didn't play well enough." When asked why India didn't play well enough he had this to say:
Full postIndia's slip is good for cricket
For Indian fans, India's virtual elimination from the cricket World Cup so early in the competition is a crushing disappointment
Mukul Kesavan
25-Feb-2013
For Indian fans, India's virtual elimination from the cricket World Cup so early in the competition is a crushing disappointment. For the television channels that bought rights to beam the tournament to these fans, Friday's defeat is a financial disaster. But for the tournament itself, nothing could have been more tonic than the purging of Pakistan and India, the dysfunctional giants of South Asian cricket. Instead of these glowering bruisers, it looks as though the extravagantly gifted Sri Lankans and the plucky Bangladeshis shall represent South Asia in the next round, the Super 8.
The rest of the piece can be read at the BBC website here
Full postThe Desi Fan
The subcontinental cricket fan is a lazy, pampered know-nothing who thinks he owns the cricket teams that he supports
Mukul Kesavan
25-Feb-2013
The subcontinental cricket fan is a lazy, pampered know-nothing who thinks he owns the cricket teams that he supports. His sense of proprietorship is so developed that when his team loses, he speaks (or writes) of being betrayed without a tremor of self-consciousness. He is never disappointed, he's always 'let down' by the inadequate, time-serving, over-paid villains who represent him and his Nation.
The vandals who attacked Mahendra Singh Dhoni's house in Ranchi are stock characters in Indian cricket's absurd dramas, clones of the men who did the same to Mohammad Kaif's house the last time round in South Africa. Kaif's fault was the same as Dhoni's: being part of a losing Indian team.
Full postMurder, They Said
In their coverage of Bob Woolmer's death, news channels went one better by trying to second-guess popular prejudice before it had the chance to form
Mukul Kesavan
25-Feb-2013
The idea that the news that's fit to broadcast is an editorially responsible view of signficant recent events is quite dead. Consider the treatment (on Indian television's news channels) of the two big news stories to emerge from the World Cup: the violence that followed India's loss to Bangladesh and the death of Bob Woolmer the day after Pakistan lost to Ireland.
I was a talking head on a news show that was trying to examine the attack on Dhoni's house as a symptom of the unhealthy obssession of Indians with cricket. The anchor prefaced his question to me by observing that given the fact that cricketers enjoyed being in the news through the good times, that they liked being pictured on Page 3, given their willingness to milk cricket for celebrity, wasn't extreme public hostility after defeat part of the game?
Full postA Martian picks...Sri Lanka!
When I'm being extra-terrestrial, I want Sri Lanka to win
Mukul Kesavan
25-Feb-2013
Full disclosure: I want India to win. There must be evolved cricket fans out there who don't let vulgar ideas like nationalism affect their pleasure in the game, but I don't know of any. Actually that's not true: I know of one: Mike Marqusee. He wrote one of the three best books ever written on the history of cricket: Anyone But England (the other two are CLR James's Beyond the Boundary and Ramachandra Guha's A Corner of a Foreign Field). Mike doesn't count: he's an American and he doesn't have a home team to back. We do.
But when our better selves take over, when we remember first things, like the joy of accidentally middling the ball and hearing it 'thunk' off the sweet spot of the bat, it's sometimes fun to imagine who you'd want to win the Cup if you were a neutral, like Marqusee, or a Martian.
Full postSubedar Major Haq and a Company of Sepoys
If I was a betting man looking for big returns on a small investment, I'd put some money on Inzamam's men
Mukul Kesavan
25-Feb-2013
In this the150th anniversary year of the rebellion of 1857, a good way of understanding the Pakistani squad is to see it as a company of turbulent sepoys. The Pakistan Cricket Board is the palace, racked by coups and intrigue. There's no real constituted authority, no legitimizing election (this being a pre-modern state) and every now and then the portly JCO in nominal charge of Pak Company, is challenged by an ambitious deputy.
Their dashing colonel who, some years ago, had whipped them into a fighting unit with a strange mix of paternalism, coercion, egotism and personal example, and successfully led them into battle, is now retired but watches from the sidelines. He doesn't approve of the foreign mercenary who has taken the sepoys in hand and sometimes allows his patrician exasperation with his talented but plebeian proteges, to show.
Full postLara and the Eleven Dwarfs
Lara embodies West Indian batsmanship in all its flourishing glory but the void in the fast-bowling department will worry West Indies
Mukul Kesavan
25-Feb-2013
This current West Indian squad has to be understood as a cast of characters in a sad fairy tale called Lara and the Eleven Dwarfs (if you count the twelfth man); sad, because there doesn’t seem to be a happy end in sight. Regardless of home advantage, if this team wins the World Cup, international cricket will have to take its temperature to check if it’s sick. I’ll be thrilled if the Windies win, because cricket needs a successful West Indies side to feel normal, but Lara’s team (no pun intended) is so second rate that if it gets to the final, world cricket ought to worry about how competitive it is. (Though, come to think of it, India won the 1983 Cup with a team that bore a passing resemblance to the present West Indian outfit. It was a team with one alpha male champion and a bunch of bit players who just happened to play out of their skins.)
I grew up in a world where West Indian supremacy was an unchanging fact of life. When Australia defeated the West Indies in 1995, it was the first test series the team had lost in fifteen years. Now that’s dominance; even more remarkably, despite this near-endless reign, they weren’t loathed. The rest of the cricket world actually liked them.
Full postDramatis Personae: Australia
A year or so ago, Ponting began to make pious noises about Australians setting standards of good behaviour on the field
Mukul Kesavan
25-Feb-2013
Cricket sides are creatures with personalities. If the World Cup is cricket’s greatest stage, the teams are its characters. And if we’re going to work our way through the cast, it’s appropriate to begin with the hero of the last Cup and the one before that: Australia.
Australia is a protection racket gone legit. You can see glimpses of the lawlessness in Ricky Ponting’s early delinquency, in Shane Warne and Mark Waugh’s brush with bookies, in Glenn McGrath’s snarling unloveliness, in the constant sledging, the occasional racial slur (Darren Lehmann’s ‘black c__ts’ for example), in the pleasure the Australians take in their rep as bully boys. When I watch Ponting spit into the palms of his hands and rub them together, some shabby-genteel part of me cringes, and a stereotype is reinforced. With the exception of Adam Gilchrist (whose popularity shows you that with a sprinkling of good humour, the Aussies could have been liked, not just admired) they feel like political operators with knuckle-dusters, conducting a dirty but legal election campaign.
Full postCricket as news and cricket as commerce
It's getting harder, while covering entertainment and sport, to draw a line between news manufactured by sponsors and ‘real’ news
Mukul Kesavan
25-Feb-2013
Midweek this week, NDTV 24/7 carried an item about the Indian team on the eve of its departure to the West Indies. Viewers were shown Shahrukh Khan spraying fizzy drink about with a selection of Indian players in blue uniforms watching. To start with I thought that this was some manner of farewell bash that Shahrukh had hosted for the team which NDTV was running as a celebrity news segment. (Aside: Shahrukh looked little in a shot with Yuvraj Singh looming behind him. Small and sort of unsparky.)
Then Priyanka Chopra turned up on screen and declared that she wanted the team to win the World Cup. After voicing this unexceptionable sentiment, she pumped her fist and went: “Rah, Rah, India etc.” in a canned way and I thought, hey, that sounds familiar. My children clarified: the cheer-leading lines were from Pepsi’s cricket commercials. The fizz being hosed about wasn’t sparkling wine but a new drink called Pepsi Gold. Pepsi, the sponsor of the Indian team, was cannily launching a product and milking its cricket cow at the same time. I understand why Pepsi would want to do this, but what was NDTV thinking? Why would a news channel, specially one that sees sobriety and a sense of proportion as its USP, be running a promotional event as news?
Full post