Samir Chopra

There is plenty to talk about when it comes to cricket these days: the Stanford bonanza, the Bangla exodus to the ICL, Andrew Symond's journey back from the precipice, the Australian decision to tour India despite the bomb blasts, and so on. But there isn't enough top-level international cricket being played. And quite frankly, all this talk of money, hypocrisy, authoritarian and incompetent boards, politics, and plenty of other matters not involving the direct contact of bat on ball, is enough to make me start hankering, seriously and desperately, for some good to honest international cricket. Real Soon Now. (As an Indian fan waiting for the Australians to show up, my anticipation is particularly intense).

Back in the days of Limited Media Coverage of Cricket [tm], the world seemed quite simple: there was the time that cricket was played, and there was the time it wasn't. One somehow found the means to get through those gaps as best as one could, and one dealt with the deprivation with a stiff upper lip (or a downcast one, depending on your personal style). Gaps between games were painful, and I dreaded the closing credits of television broadcasts. Cricket analysis only appeared when games were on, and the surrounding discussions were sketchy at best (or so it felt). One's anticipation was sharpened, and the limited diet of games only added to the sense of a scarce and valuable resource.

But now cricket coverage is 24/7; the administrative, political, and financial trappings of the game are quite extensive and obscure (and hence invite commentary); and thus, we are exposed to a lot of material on all that surrounds the game. While some of this is genuinely illuminative, there comes a time when I find myself thirsting for the very business that prompts all this verbiage in the first place. For this conversation, rather than magnifying the game, sometimes starts to make the game feel a bit small, a bit incidental to the business of television rights, travel permissions, player contracts, personalities, labor relations and all of the rest. And sometimes this conversation doesn't act as a filler or illuminator; sometimes it just makes me miss the simplicity of the game more.

Most cricket fans have, at some point, while listening to the ponderous pronouncements of an 'expert' television commentator, said words that approximate the following: "No sh*t, Sherlock!" In short, we are used to being deluged with Missives from the Department of the Bleeding Obvious.

We are told early wickets are important, that while chasing a victory target, the openers should provide a good start, and that line and length is key (feel to supply your own personal favourite). My intention in reminding us of these tautological dictums is not to make merry at the expense of an oft-vilified demographic, The Expert Commentator, but to try and segue into a brief questioning of the latest addition to international cricket's evolving cast of characters: the national coach. For, like some cricketers, I often wonder at what precisely the role of the coach is. To slip into corporate mumbo-jumbo for a second, what is the 'value-addedness' of this entity, what is its core competency?

The list of virtues cited for Kevin Pietersen as England captain is well-known: he will be aggressive, he can hold his own in terms of playing ability in all three forms, he is confident, will be unafraid to take the attack to the enemy and so on. Running through all these expressions of support is also a hope, implicitly or explicitly expressed, that he "will shake things up"; that, fundamentally, he will work in a not-English way.

It is the expression of this particular sentiment, sometimes expressed by pointing out how the very fact of his being South African is an advantage, because he will not be caught up with being English in all those ways that contribute to losing cricket games, that I find by far the most interesting.

For this sort of suggestion, that somehow national character, a particular nation-wide psyche or characteristic, is to blame (or praise) for lack of success (or failure) at cricket, is exceedingly common in cricket journalism and in conversations amongst cricket fans. Indian fans are quick to indulge in long bouts of psychoanalytic speculation about the lack of national "killer instinct" when it comes to finishing close games, with their diagnoses ranging from weather conditions to colonial histories to religious inclinations; Pakistani fans have had a long tradition of pointing to the success of their cricket team and their endless production of fast bowlers as vindication of national aggressiveness (and sometimes a rejection of vegetarianism); Australians would have us believe that it is a particularly Aussie brand of 'mateship' that contributes to 5-0 Ashes victories (nowhere has this been better exemplified than in the visits to Gallipolli and the Buchanan Boot Camps[tm]); the self-flagellation of the English fan is well-known; the list goes on. I could supply more examples (and I invite readers to send me their favourite examples) but my slightly facetious list above should be sufficient reminder of how much speculation, conjecture and theorizing about nations and their alleged characteristics infects discussions about failures and success in cricket.

And all of this is inevitable. For what cricket provides in heaps, quite unlike any other sport, is something quite unique in international sport: direct country versus country competition, understood as the highest form game. Till the advent of the IPL, there was no international league in cricket. The closest we ever came to it was World Series Cricket a long while ago, and part of the reason it suffered initially was that people associate top-class cricket games with "official" national teams playing against each other. More than any other, the cricket fan aches for the stamp of "Certified International Contest" upon the game that he is watching. And as such, cricket is bound to provoke not just some of the nasty nationalist spats that are now a depressingly common feature of fan interactions (what the Internet giveth, it also taketh away), it also invites the sort of analysis pointed to above.

	Frozen in time: Alvin Kallicharan effortlessly hooks John Snow during the 1973 Test series © The Cricketer International

Is it just me or does it seem like cricket fans are just a little bit more obsessed than the usual sports fan with photographs of the game? Exposure to cricket photographs starts early; there is a steady diet of newspaper and online galleries, full-page blowups in magazines, coffee-table books by folks with last names like Eagar, all reinforced by slow-motion replays on television. Slowly, a certain set of iconic images starts to jell, and by the late teens and into early adulthood, the average cricket fan can start pointing to favourite photographs, his listing of his reasons for this choice offering a revelatory glimpse of his cricketing aesthetic.

A good photo more than just freeze the actions, catching cricketers at moments of poised athletic grace and power. It offers us a hint of what came before and after; it invites us to think about the effect of the action on display on the game being played; it instantly captures a mood, and urges a description, a captioning, on our part. Sometimes the action captured can make us think about the physics of the action at hand, reminding us that one reason we pay good money to watch these men play is that they are capable of doing things we can only dream out. This is certainly the case with two of the most dramatic photographs I've ever laid eyes on.

The first is that of Alvin Kallicharran hooking John Snow during the 1973 Test series. Anyone that has seen this photo knows which one I'm talking about (raise your hand if you do). Kallicharan is poised on his right foot, his left leg raised and bent at the knee, performing a seemingly impossible balancing act as he hooks, crisply and powerfully, over his shoulder. In the background, Snow can be seen, perhaps despairing that his intended thunderbolt has been dispatched.

The second photo is that of Don Bradman stepping out to drive "Farmer" White during the 1928-29 series. (I have to admit, I'm a little obsessed about this photograph, having mentioned it before on rec.sport.cricket and on my blog, and no, I don't have a link to it). In this photo: Bradman is at least six feet out of his crease, and the back face of Bradman's bat is parallel to his upright back. Bradman seems to have sailed down the pitch and whiplashed this furious off-drive, with the bat swinging over his shoulder and then down. The crispness of the action on display is palpable, almost making the photograph itself sharper. (Actually, I do have favourite photographs of bowlers in action as well, but I think I will save discussion of those for another day.)

Will it ever be possible to get a fair depiction of cricket in the US media? On current evidence, the prospects are bleak. Every television advertisement that features a cricket game, whether it be a tourism clip for the Caribbean or something else, invariably features a rather staid setting, perhaps with cucumber sandwiches and parasol-holding landed ladies in the background, in which portly men in creams amble up desultorily and deliver donkey drops which are clumsily hoicked past geriatric fielders. In these settings cricket does not so much resemble a game as much it does a government-mandated exercise program meant to replace drug prescription benefits for the rich and elderly.

Every print article in the US press meanwhile incessantly harps on the utter incomprehensibility of the game (which is guffaw inspiring given the Byzantine complexity of NFL penalty rules), the jaw-dropping durations of Test cricket (with no attempt to explain what relationship the length of the game bears to the endless variations it allows on a single theme, and how this cultivates a dedicated legion of fans), the inevitable mention of the quaint customs of 'tea' (its almost enough to make one wish this interval had been named differently) and 'drinks' (American readers might be forgiven for thinking gin and tonics are consumed by players to help with the tedium of the game). Much is made of the gigantic amounts of protection worn by cricket players with snickering about baseball players facing faster pitching with only a visor-less helmet for protection. No mention is made of the fact that cricket allows for the ball to bounce before it gets to the batsman, which allows for varying angles of attack by fast bowlers at a batsman's body (I simplify, of course, comparisons between cricket and baseball need more time and space than I can devote here). And it would be too much of course, to ask that any attention be paid to the rich body of cricketing literature, possibly more varied and complex than that associated with any other sport. There are also some half-hearted, superficial attempts at examinations of post-colonial tensions in cricket, most of which involve the phrase "the new economically empowered Indian middle-class." All in all, it's a depressing state of affairs to be surrounded by a culture which specializes in systematic, cliched misrepresentations of one's most abiding passion.

Despite the growing presence of cricket leagues in the US, despite the introduction of cricket as a recognized game in New York schools, despite the presence of large expatriate populations from cricket playing countries and even an American cricket team, cricket remains a profoundly misunderstood game in the US. Still, one should not complain too much. Soccer has a huge following in the US and still remains misunderstood; plenty of soccer artistry is unappreciated by a large segment of the population.

But, how one wishes the television advertisements mentioned above would instead feature Malcolm Marshall sending stumps cartwheeling, Viv Richards smashing one through midwicket or Jonty Rhodes catching swallows at gully. Pigs would be aviators before then, but one is allowed to dream.

I have attended just one day of Test cricket in India: the third day's play in the second Test of the 1983/84 West Indies tour. I left India some 21 years ago, and since then all the Test cricket I've seen has been in Australia, the West Indies and South Africa (well, not really, because the 2001 Pretoria India-RSA 'Test' was demoted thanks to the Mike Denness controversy). I bring this up because my experiences of watching cricket in India have become distinctly second-hand. Thus, I do not have a first-hand take on how well spectators are treated in India at cricket stadiums. But if the reports I've read in a variety of fora over the years are any indication of the state of affairs at the grounds, things are not good for the entity singularly responsible for the untold wealth that has become associated with Indian cricket: the Indian cricket-watching fan.

Lines are long outside stadiums as entry points are scarce (when things get crowded, hectic and tense, there is invariably pushing and shoving and then, voila, police heavy-handedness); plenty of stands are still uncovered (the mind boggles at the thought of folks sitting there in the sun in the later parts of the ever-lengthening season); food and drink are either of poor quality or expensive or hard to get; public restrooms are not numerous or clean enough; the list goes on. Some grounds are better than others, of course. Mohali has worked hard to make sure its attendees are well taken care of (beer is sold at the ground; not surprising for a Punjabi locale), and the Sawai Mansingh Stadium at Jaipur is quite comfortable. (As always, I welcome empirical data from readers to confirm or disconfirm my impressions.)