Samir Chopra
Memories, faithful and unfaithful
Sigmund Freud famously wrote of the impossibility of autobiography and biography
Samir Chopra
25-Feb-2013
Sigmund Freud famously wrote of the impossibility of autobiography and biography. Part of the reason the good doctor thought thus was because that wonderful human facility, memory, which is often thought to be constitutive of our personalities, is also an amazingly flaky thing. To put it mildly, if you know what I mean.
As cricket fans, we are all subject to the vagaries of the art of recall. Players grow in stature; we are mysteriously present at games we never attended; statistics grow and multiply.
And in the modern internet era, we no longer need to rely on the photographic memories once needed to commit all those Wisdens and Frindalls to the insides of our craniums. And the internet can also serve to remind us of the things we get wrong.
For years, one of my favorite cricketing stories was told to me by my father. It concerned two greats of years gone by: CK Nayudu (the Colonel) and Keith Miller. Their encounter, during the Australian Services team tour of India in 1945-46, had for my father, the status of legend. In 1998, I posted an account of this story on the cricket newsgroup rec.sport.cricket. Some folks enjoyed it, and I certainly enjoyed telling the tale. Recently, I posted the story again on my blog, Eye-on-Cricket. There is a twist to the story that needs some tackling.
Full postGetting caught out as captain
A couple of weeks ago, on my return to play a game with my old Sydney team, I was generously invited to captain the team in the absence of our regular captain, who had been called away on family duty
Samir Chopra
25-Feb-2013
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| Captaincy, while being an honour and a privilege, is also a rum business © Getty Images |
A couple of weeks ago, on my return to play a game with my old Sydney team, I was generously invited to captain the team in the absence of our regular captain, who had been called away on family duty. And I learnt once again, that captaincy, while being an honour and a privilege, is also a rum business.
Many years ago, in my final undergraduate year, I had captained the Mathematics Department in the Interdepartmental competition. We lost narrowly to Chemistry by three runs as I failed in both tactical and performance dimensions as captain: I glibly assumed the one attacking plan I had would work, and later, I failed to stick around long enough to let our star batsman finish the job he had started. In the former, I assumed our star opening bowlers, both left-handed quicks, would simply run through the opposing line-up. The bowlers instead, lost their line and length and I was left floundering. When we chased, I came together with our best batsman and simply had to hold up one end while he blasted away. But I got too cute, and in trying to play a clever tickle, got myself bowled. The collapse of the tail was inevitable, and we were out of the competition.
My recent experience in the Northern Sydney Suburbs competition was similarly educative on another aspect of captaincy: how is the captain to assert authority? I was captaining a team many of whose players I barely knew: the personnel turnover had been high in my absence. I had gone in at No. 10, and scored one not out; they had no idea whether I was a decent bat or not. And I couldn't bowl, because I had a bad back. All I could do, really, was ring in the changes, set the fields and say the right things out on the ground.
Full postGods no more
I had grown, and the players hadn't
Samir Chopra
25-Feb-2013
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| As a sub-teenager, cricket players were, quite literally, giants © Cricinfo Ltd. |
Cricket fans, like pitches, change with time. Where a devotee of the game might once have spent his youth waking up early for radio commentary from distant lands, he could move on to spending those morning hours playing with his little children; where an ardent lover of the numerical aspects of the game might have spent hours calculating the fluctuations in his hero's batting averages, the only number with decimal points he might care about in his thirties is likely to be the mortgage rate on his city apartment.
In my case, the most significant change was the realisation a few years ago that I was older than anyone who currently played Test cricket. That slowly developing shift in my perspectives on the game's players has been enlightening in more ways than one. This change has occurred at the same time that I have had increasing access to the players via the media: their spoken words, their writings, their antics in the many-splendoured television coverage that is now ubiquitous.
As a sub-teenager, cricket players were, quite literally, giants. They looked bigger, they did adult things. They looked like my uncles (and these were just the Indian players). When it came to cricket players from other countries, the distance was even greater. They looked different; they were names in books, faces in photographs, flickers on television screens. They weren't real, really.
Full postOf fielding and statistics
Fielders do not figure on cricket scoresheets except for when they take catches
Samir Chopra
25-Feb-2013
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A few weeks ago, I wrote a little piece suggesting cricket take a leaf out of baseball's book and maintain statistics for fielders. The practical difficulty with this suggestion is that cricket scoresheets do not contain this kind of information: fielders do not figure on scoresheets except for when they take catches. The runouts and boundary saves they make, the catches they drop, the misfields the inflict on their team are all missed.
But for a few years now, a scoresheet has been present which could potentially address this difficulty. I am referring to the Cricinfo ball-by-ball commentary, which currently records brilliant fielding, catches, drops, some misfields (if they are particularly egregious), and sometimes information on the fielder.
Consider the following excerpts from the Ashes:
Full postCricketing friendships and nationalist rivalries
The stories that surrounded the Botham-Richards friendship were numerous and of varying quality and veracity
Samir Chopra
25-Feb-2013
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I read the late and great David Halberstam's little gem, The Teammates, this past weekend and like many of its other readers, was struck by the simple story of the multi-decade friendship of four sportsmen (in this case, Boston Red Sox luminaries Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, Dominic Di Maggio and John Pesky).
Halberstam's tale concerns friendships amongst members of the same team, and of those, I've heard, a few when it comes to cricket. But one cricketing friendship featured two giants of the game who played for opposing teams in international cricket (albeit the same team in a domestic cricket competition): Ian Botham and Viv Richards.
The reasons the Botham-Richards friendship struck me as so distinctive (in clearly idealized ways) were numerous: they were both cricketers I admired for the way they played their cricket; there was something undeniably romantic in the notion that men used to fierce competition against each other in one context, could then put shoulder-to-shoulder in another; a camaraderie amongst sportsmen in a sport centered largely on international bilateral contests was uncommon; the political overtones of a proud black cricketer finding comradeship with a Somerset lad; and so on.
Full postAn early vote for India-Pakistan Tests in England
My weekend got off to a rough start, but the news I read this morning, that India and Pakistan might play Test matches at a neutral venue (sometime after 2012) has put a huge smile on my face.
Samir Chopra
25-Feb-2013
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My weekend got off to a rough start, but the news I read this morning, that India and Pakistan might play Test matches at a neutral venue (sometime after 2012) has put a huge smile on my face.
Hopefully, the sensible thing will be done by staging these in England. India and Pakistan need to stage their Test cricket somewhere else; in stadiums that might actually fill up with loud, enthusiastic fans, of which there will be plenty in England for both teams. Pakistan can regard North England as "home" and India can do the same with the South. Many expats will fly in to watch the games (I would seriously consider flying over for one Test at least), and hopefully, English pitches will co-operate with the weather to produce some result-oriented cricket. The India-Pakistan cricket relationship needs a shot in the arm, and this might do it.
The fact of the matter is that even without the politics that has been getting in the way, India-Pakistan Test cricket in recent years has been a bit of a crashing bore (and not just because both boards have staged too much cricket between the two). The series in 2004 was played in empty stadiums, an especial irony given all the pre-tour hoopla about how desperate the Pakistan cricket fan was to see the Indian team in action. The two series played in India since then have been impressive showcases for India's inability to close the deal in Tests. In both series, India held the upper edge, and managed to royally stuff things up. In the 2004-05 series, they won one Test when Pakistan obligingly rolled over, but failed to drive home the advantage in another, and then completely lost the plot by putting together a nice last-day collapse in the third Test.
Full postMy uncle, my mentor
Cricketers have mentors
Samir Chopra
25-Feb-2013
Cricketers have mentors. Those that inspire them to reach heights they might not have dreamed of. I think cricket fans have mentors too. Those that inspire our fandom, pointing us to corners of the game we might not have thought of exploring, whose influence makes us the fans we are today.
My mentor in cricketing-fandom was (and is) my uncle (my mother's younger brother). He taught me how to read cricket scorecards, to calculate batting and bowling averages, to find cricket commentary from England and Australia (and to tune shortwave radios), and introduced me to many of the game's greats. Indeed, he made me aware of so many different facets of the game, that it would take a column considerably longer than this one to do justice to him. Before I came to the US, it was no exaggeration to say that if I had experienced a pleasurable moment in watching cricket, the odds were high it was in his company.
I still remember the day I was first struck by what seemed like his uncanny ability to read a game. We were watching highlights of a Test between Tony Lewis' English side and the Indians in 1972-73. BS Chandrasekhar strode out to bat. My uncle calmly said, "Watch, he'll be bowled first ball." And so it came to be. I gazed at him in admiration; this man was prescient!
Full postRanjitsinhji's many lives
The particular plight of the immigrant, his involuntary schizophrenia caused by his locational and cultural displacements, is a familiar trope today
Samir Chopra
25-Feb-2013
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I've just finished reading Satadru Sen's remarkable book, Migrant Races: Empire, Identity and K.S. Ranjitsinhji. As might be evident from the title, the book is not primarily about cricket, and neither is it a straight-up biography of Ranji. But to read this academic, yet accessible, study is to understand a little better what a remarkable life Ranji lived, to add another piece to the jigsaw puzzle relationship of colonialism to cricket, and finally, to view today's world of cricket in just a slightly different light (compare the language used by colonial authorities to describe lazy natives in the 19th century with that used by cricket commentators to describe South Asian cricketers and you might just squirm a bit in your seat).
Sen's primary objective is to illustrate the multiple identities Ranji claimed and had foisted upon him: an exotic Indian in England, evidence of both the Empire's civilizing influence in making him an honorary Englishman, while simultaneously being a subject resistant to Englishness because of his inherent Otherness, and an England-returned Indian appearing both as a potential agent of modernizing change and a visible symbol of the decadence of Indian princely life. More than any other sportsman of the era, he was Englishman and Indian both.
Ranji's movement between these identities was fluid, and he was not always possessing of full agency when it came to transitions between them. In many ways, he was a tabula rasa for fertile imaginations: those that saw in him the magic and the darkness of the East and the power and brutality of the West.
Full postThe Duleep and Roy Show
A staggering display of flair and style from two batsmen in a Sri Lankan team that was still struggling to find a foothold in world cricket
Samir Chopra
25-Feb-2013
One of the things I promised myself I would do when I started writing on Cricinfo was to point out cricketing achievements that didn't seem to have been noticed enough by the cricketing world. I'm not sure I've done that adequately yet, but thought I'd make a start by talking about two Sri Lankan batsmen who played two of the most amazing innings I've ever seen: Roy Dias and Duleep Mendis. And they did it in the same Test.
I saw Dias and Mendis bat - on television at least - for the first time during Sri Lanka's first official Test against India at the MA Chidambaram Stadium, Madras, in September 1982. The monsoons had just ended in New Delhi but their traces remained: I was down with a viral fever. This meant I couldn't attend school, and would have to stay in bed. And be forced to watch Test cricket. Truly, it was a tragic time.
Full postPlay a game away from home
In the US (in a way well described in Joseph O'Neill's Netherland), cricket, despite being proudly played by large, important, immigrant communities, sticks out, and is played on sufferance
Samir Chopra
25-Feb-2013
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Here is a question I'm often asked by people who know of my obsession with cricket: why don't you play cricket in the US? The answer to that is a little tricky and I struggle to express it clearly. It goes something like this: I prefer playing cricket in a context where the game fits in organically with the rest of its surroundings. I know this is not entirely rational, and I welcome feedback from folks who do play cricket in the US on how they experience the game here.
I've played cricket in India and Australia, and indeed, after arriving in the US some 22 years ago, played a few games at my university (with the usual grab-bag of Indian, Pakistani and West Indian students). Since then, I've never picked up a bat or ball in the US. And given my present location in Brooklyn, which is one of the hotbeds of cricketing activity in the US, this is a surprising business.
For, somehow, I do not feel a strong desire to play the game here. I often see students at Brooklyn College playing a quick game on the grounds; I often see Bangladeshi boys practicing close to Prospect Park, and more than once I've seen young men walking around with cricket kit bags on their way to a game. But I never feel the compulsion to walk up and ask for a bowl or a bat.
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