Men in White
Silva and Sinhala
Every time I watch a South Asian player unfamiliar with English struggling with the language during match ceremonies, I want to shake the team manager and the event organisers
Mukul Kesavan
25-Feb-2013
The most significant thing about the ODI in Visakhapatnam went unnoticed. When the brilliant Chamara Silva walked up to collect his Man of the Match trophy, he answered Arun Lal’s questions in Sinhala. One of his team mates (I think it was his captain) translated for him and us. I wanted to cheer. Every time I watch a South Asian player unfamiliar with English struggling with the language during match ceremonies, I want to shake the team manager and the event organisers. To be forced to express yourself in a language you don’t know at all is agonizing: you feel cretinized. We’ve all experienced this as tourists in strange lands. There’s no reason for an outstanding Sri Lankan or Indian or Pakistani player to make himself look like a stammering moron because some would-be smoothie in a tie and blazer asks a question in English.
I hope the Pakistani team management was watching the match and taking notes. To watch a modern great like Inzamam-ul-Haq reduced to pidgin responses because Rameez Raja or some other south Asian suit didn’t have the sense to commission translation is intolerable. To accept, as we do, English as the lingua franca of cricket, shouldn’t mean that we wilfully ignore the fact that the majority of international cricket’s fans (and increasingly its players) are not English speaking. This trend is a good thing because it tells us that cricket’s following in South Asia has real social depth and that it has expanded hugely beyond the subcontinent’s anglosphere. Acknowledging this fact in practice is not a big deal organizationally: you just need a team mate to translate. But it makes a huge difference to the ease and comfort and, yes, dignity of the player. The next time Inzamam walks up to collect a trophy I hope he answers questions in Urdu or Punjabi. Silva and the Sri Lankans may not know it, but they’re pioneers in the business of getting cricket to acknowledge its great cultural diversity.
Full postVictory in Vizag
What had happened was this: chasing a more than decent total, against respectably fast bowling, without the aid of Tendulkar, Dravid and Dhoni, India creamed Sri Lanka
Mukul Kesavan
25-Feb-2013
Everything about this match seemed too good be true: the bowling was startlingly quick, the grass ridiculously green, the stadium rimmed by hills was too picturesque to be Indian (used as we are to half-built, barbed-wired, bamboo-strutted hell holes) and we won with overs and wickets to spare. This was our last international game before the World Cup. It doesn’t come much better than this. Someone pinch me.
Even the speedgun seemed to be on steroids on Saturday. Agarkar, Sreesanth and Zaheer all averaged around 140kmph, with Agarkar occasionally nudging 145 and the Sri Lankan bowlers, specially Malinga were even faster. ‘Slinger’ Malinga clocked 148 every other ball. And here I was thinking that the only quick bowlers in the sub-continent came from Pakistan.
If this game hadn’t happened, Dravid couldn’t have dreamt it up. All the players critical to our batting came off: Yuvraj coming off injury, slaughtered the bowling, Ganguly kept up his amazing run of form and Sehwag nearly made a fifty before he tried to do a Ranatunga by walking a single only to discover that Sangakkara wasn’t auditioning, as Sehwag was, for the title of most laid-back cricketer in the world. Older fans will remember the News Read at Slow Speed on All-India Radio. Well, this was Sehwag’s cricketing tribute to that programme: the Single Run at Slow Speed. Moved by a vulgar competitive spirit foreign to the Nawab of Najafgarh, the Sri Lankan keeper ran him out. Fancy that.
Full postWorld Cup 2: the bowling
I think Dravid will be desperate to play Pathan if five of his six main batsmen fire because Pathan playing to seventy five percent of his potential as a bowler would appear to balance the side out
Mukul Kesavan
25-Feb-2013
Apart from Ramesh Powar, it’s difficult to think of anyone else who might have had a claim to the bowling places in India’s World Cup squad. S. Rajesh’s excellent statistical analysis
of Shaun Pollock’s recent ODI record on cricinfo.com, has a table listing the best one-day bowling averages since 2006. Powar is number 8 on that list and the highest ranked Indian. He has taken 24 wickets in in sixteen ODIs in this period which compares well with the the bowler on top of the list, Shaun Pollock, who has taken 37 wickets in 24 matches.
To be fair to the selectors, figures don’t always tell you much. The man whose spot Powar might have taken, Irfan Pathan, is tenth on that list with 36 wickets in 25 matches, one less than Pollock with one more match played. And we know that Pollock has hit a rich vein of form in the past year while Pathan’s bowling has fallen away so much that he’s in the World Cup squad as a pinch-hitter who, with luck, might get through half a dozen overs. When he gets to play a World Cup match, Pathan’s more likely to replace an out of form batsman, than a specialist bowler.
Full postDesi Radio Commentary
I was driving to work in the morning with the radio commentary on, listening to cricket in Hindi and English alternately
Mukul Kesavan
25-Feb-2013
I was driving to work in the morning with the radio commentary on, listening to cricket in Hindi and English alternately. Jayawardene went from being a batsman to being a ballebaaz while Zaheer bowled in English and threw in Hindi—though I noticed that Hindi commentators now spoke of ball ‘dalna’ rather than ball ‘phainkna’. I was thinking nostalgically as middle-aged fans will, of commentators past who had moved on to the great blue yonder and were now voices in the sky, literally Akashvani. The dreadful Vizzy, wonderful Pearson Surita, who spoke so posh that you wanted to cry, Chakrapani, all cut-glass lucidity, Devraj Puri who could instigate a riot with a single sentence (he set Brabourne Stadium aflame by observing on the air that the umpire had given an Indian batsman out unjustly). I had risen to the crest of a fly-over when the English commentator, one Dr Milind, made my morning. The Sri Lankans were three down for not very much, thanks to a great opening spell by Zaheer Khan. “The Sri Lankans,” observed Dr. Milind, “are on the slippery slope. With their backs to the wall."
Full postHow good is Mahendra Singh Dhoni?
Speaking for myself, I’ve swung between admiration and scepticism
Mukul Kesavan
25-Feb-2013
Speaking for myself, I’ve swung between admiration and scepticism. In the beginning, when Dhoni scored those two mammoth centuries, the 148 in Vishakapatnam and the 181 in Jaipur, I was taken by the confident brutality of his style but to score a lot of runs in one-day cricket on dead wickets against moderate opposition isn’t always a sign of exceptional talent.
What stood out from the beginning was Dhoni’s poise. He never looked the young debutant. He seemed to know what his business was and went about it with a self-possession that contrasted nicely with the violence of his methods. As a fan I know that spectators are drawn to Dhoni by the sense that this spectacular, risk-taking hero isn’t a death-and-glory kamikaze pilot like Kris Srikkanth used to be nor flamboyantly careless with a great batting gift as Kapil Dev was. Dhoni comes across as someone wholly in charge of his talent.
What order of talent is it? When he reprised his one-day 148 in the first Test against Pakistan in 2005-06 I began to wonder if he was a Gilchrist-sized gift to Indian cricket. All right, so it was a featherbed of a pitch and to put Dhoni’s century in perspective, Shahid Afridi got a bigger century in fewer balls, but a big hundred against the old enemy early in a Test career always seems a portent of good things. But after that high voltage start, Dhoni’s performances tailed off. There have been a couple of fifties along the way and a few starts but nothing out of the ordinary and his Test match average has stabilized at around thirty.
Full postDean Jones redux
Mukul Kesavan
25-Feb-2013
When I switched on the television in the morning yesterday to catch up with the third ODI between India and Sri Lanka, who should I see in the Neo Sports studio but Dean Jones. What’s he doing, I wondered, on a South Asian channel after the things he had said last year?
And what had he said? I wrote a piece on the controversy at the time which can be found on the Hindustan Times website here. But since Jones has turned up on our TV screens again and since I don’t think that bygones should be allowed to be bygones in this instance, here’s an extract from that article that summarizes its main argument.
Full postThree straws in the wind
Australia remain favourites for the Cup but the odds on them winning have lengthened and it’s no longer a one horse race
Mukul Kesavan
25-Feb-2013
Yesterday’s match in Sydney was a small step for England but a great (rain-assisted) leap for cricketing mankind. If this England team after the Ashes whitewash can beat Australia three times in a row, there’s hope for the rest of us. The World Cup suddenly looks like a contest instead of a prolonged green-and-gold victory lap.
From an Indian point of view, the difference between this Australian team and earlier ones is not so much Shane Warne’s absence as Glenn McGrath’s decline. Indian batsmen never bought into Warne’s mystique but McGrath was a different matter. No Indian ever sorted out McGrath. A decline, of course, is a relative thing: McGrath has lived alone on Everest so long that even a slide off the summit still leaves him at an altitude most bowlers never reach. Yesterday he took 2 for 41 off ten overs, which Zaheer Khan and Munaf Patel would gladly settle for, but he went for fifty runs in the first final against England without a wicket and he’d gone for fifty in the last league match against England. Five runs an over isn’t expensive in the context of contemporary one-day cricket, but it isn’t McGrathian. Australia remain favourites for the Cup but the odds on them winning have lengthened and it’s no longer a one horse race.
Full postWorld Cup wish list - 1
Here’s my batting card for the World Cup: Tendulkar and Ganguly to open, Yuvraj, Dravid, Sehwag, Karthik and Dhoni to follow
Mukul Kesavan
25-Feb-2013
Looking at the Indian batting line-up for the rained-out ODI against Sri Lanka, I see that it features two wicketkeepers and four opening batsmen. Robin Uthappa, Sourav Ganguly, Sachin Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag. Six opening batsmen if you count Dinesh Karthik’s and Rahul Dravid’s occasional stints at the top. A middle-order made up mainly of openers is certainly innovative.
Someone will have to make room for Yuvraj Singh when he’s fit and the likely candidate from this line-up will have to be picked from Uthappa, Sehwag and Karthik because I can’t see Mahendra Singh Dhoni being replaced as first-choice keeper. If Sehwag gets a decent score in the matches against Sri Lanka, he’s safe because he holds out the promise of explosive acceleration and an Indian middle order that has a faintly out of form Dravid and a determinedly responsible Tendulkar needs someone who can push things along. I’d pick Karthik over Uthappa, who seems a splendid prospect but Karthik’s shown temperament and aggression when it’s needed and we can do with that in a World Cup. Also, should Sehwag or Tendulkar be promoted to the opening spot in the course of the tournament, Karthik would be useful down the order.
Full postIs the Indian finger spinner obsolete?
In the first seven years of this new century India has produced a queue of fast-medium workhorses…but not one distinguished spinner.
Mukul Kesavan
25-Feb-2013
The first comment on the post, The Strange Death of Indian Cricket, Mr Moiz’s now notorious equation of vegetarianism with India’s inability to nurture real fast bowlers, produced, er, deeply felt responses, and whatever we might think of his theory, it’s true that between Ramakant Desai, and Kapil Dev, Chandrasekhar was very nearly our fastest bowler. But more puzzling for the Indian fan is the decline in what used to be Indian cricket’s traditional strength: spin bowling. In the first seven years of this new century we’ve produced a queue of fast-medium workhorses…but not one distinguished spinner.
Once Anil Kumble collects his gratuity and provident fund, Tendulkar and Sehwag will be the only spinners left in the sub-continent, if, as patriotic but honest fans, we admit that Harbhajan should represent India at darts.
What happened to the Indian spinner, especially to left and right arm finger spinners? In the late Sixties, we had not one but two fine off-spinners pushing each other for a place in the Test team, Erapalli Prasanna and Srinivas Venkatraghavan. Bishen Singh Bedi was probably the greatest left arm orthodox slow bowler in modern cricket, but just a notch below below him were Padmakar Shivalkar and Rajinder Goel who would’ve played dozens of Test matches if they hadn’t had the misfortune of sharing an era with Bedi. Dilip Doshi, who succeeded Bedi, had a distinguished career despite making his debut after thirty. Even Ravi Shastri, who morphed into a fine opening batsman, had a respectable record as a left arm slow bowler.
Full postLet's keep Test cricket white
Test cricket is lovely because it happens in whites
Mukul Kesavan
25-Feb-2013
Test cricket is lovely because it happens in whites. A game that doesn’t allow competing teams to differentiate themselves with contrasting uniforms is a game with a developed aesthetic, one that values its ‘look’ enough to refuse the short-term temptations of colour. Think of Wimbledon. But designers frustrated by the timeless chic of cricket whites are beginning to nibble away at their margins. Literally.
The South Africans wear whites with green piping, and green collar details. Others teams have begun to follow suit. Already the inside linings of trouser pockets flash deep green or dark blue. I can see this trend evolve into piped whites with discreet, barely visible stripes which would look very nice – on a baseball diamond. But on a cricket pitch, for a Test match, can we have whites please?
The worst offender against white is the Indian team and here the problem isn’t design details but the awfulness of its sponsor’s logo. Sahara might be a sterling company but its logo was made by a graphic designer from hell. It consists of the company’s name spelt out in letters so large they were clearly designed to do duty on a billboard, with a tri-colour wing attached to the last ‘A’ just so we know that the company’s heart beats for India. It makes sense for the Sahara Group to want its name to be visible from a mile away, but shouldn’t the BCCI be trying to protect the ‘look and feel’ of the game that it’s meant to promote? Shouldn’t there be a maxiumum size specified for corporate logos? Doesn’t the BCCI care that with SAHARA meandering across their chests and sleeves, India’s Test cricketers look like bandwallahs on holiday? And things promise to get worse. In the Super League match being played currently between Bengal and Mumbai, the players wear logos not just on both breasts but on both thighs too. And on their sleeves!
I recognize the importance of corporate sponsorship in contemporary sport, but every game has to make a choice about advertising: It can take the Formula 1 route where the contestant is a walking billboard or it can choose Wimbledon’s way, where players’ bodies are meant to represent tennis and where logos are subordinated to a particular, pastoral vision of the game. Given the nature of Test cricket, the choice isn’t a hard one. Someone tell the BCCI.
Full post