Samir Chopra
Cricket players or comrades in arms?
Can we imagine players to be just wage workers who, like the rest of us, have day-to-day issues with their colleagues and employers?
Samir Chopra
26-Oct-2013
Jonathan Wilson's analysis, here on the Cordon, of cricket's workplace and the "unrealistic" expectations of player relationships it seems to generate among fans made for some very interesting reading.
Fans, of course, expect player relationships to be far more cordial and chummy than they actually are, or even could be, because - among other things - they view cricket through an imaginative and hopeful lens, one that refracts and distorts and magnifies and colours in all sorts of ways. We view cricket not as a series of prosaic encounters of bat and ball wielded by salaried men, but rather as the stage and setting for a variety of noble encounters that resolve archetypal conflicts. We populate this stage with a variety of stock characters: heroes (our side), villains (their side), damsels in distress (the nations the players represent, which need rescuing from all manner of insults), scapegoats (those on our side who fail us and must be blamed for the defeats that could not possibly be our just fate), traitors (see: scapegoat), village idiots (sometimes umpires, sometimes opponents, sometimes selectors, sometimes our own team), magicians, gnomes and wise men (the captains, and now increasingly the coaches, all capable of changing the fortunes of nations and groups of men with mysterious incantations and potions). And so on.
The vision of cricket afforded by these lenses is one that cricket writers, going back to the game's earliest days, and television producers and commentators in more recent times, have drawn on and embellished. It is one whose moral universe is relatively unambiguous, whose human relationships follow smooth, predictable trajectories; its decision-makers experience little cognitive dissonance, whether ethical, strategic or tactical; where rough edges are miraculously smoothed out by good intentions and ceaseless striving. The only reward our heroes expect is adulation and fame and the gratitude of adoring nations.
Full postTendulkar: not a players' player
Perhaps fighting the BCCI is a losing battle but if there was one player who could have thrown sand in the wheels of their juggernaut, it was Tendulkar
Samir Chopra
16-Oct-2013
Our evaluations of our favourite cricket players do not stop with a cold statistical assessment of their playing records, or a passionate recounting of the aesthetic pleasures afforded us by their efforts on the playing field. We often hope, sometimes unreasonably, that they will not disappoint us in other dimensions. Perhaps they will also be great captains; perhaps they will not embarrass themselves during their retirement phase; perhaps they will not turn into one-dimensional blowhards on television.
For a very long time now, I have entertained an abiding hope that an Indian cricket player of sufficient sporting stature would become, by dint of action and deed during his career, an advocate for Indian players. Someone who would - to borrow the language of labour relations and industrial action - organise the workers in his workplace and campaign for better treatment by their management.
Perhaps he would lead the initiative to form a players' union - an effort that has been tried in the past and has failed, or rather, has not been allowed to succeed; perhaps he would take up cudgels on behalf of other players treated unfairly by the national board; perhaps he would, by singular acts of defiance, engender relationship-transforming showdowns with "The Man". He would speak up boldly and act accordingly. He would thus bell the BCCI cat and introduce some much-needed professionalism into a relationship - the BCCI-player one - that still bears depressing traces of the feudal.
Full postA day at Adelaide Oval
Australia v South Africa was so enticing that one spectator played hooky to be at the first day of the 2001 Test
Samir Chopra
09-Oct-2013
I've seen just one day of Test cricket in Adelaide. It was memorable in many respects: first, the cricket, where a tough, well-contested day saw Australia finish at 272 for 6 against South Africa in the first Test of the 2001-2002 series, and second, because it took some elaborate hooky-playing to get me to the ground.
A few months previously, sitting in my university office in Sydney, I noticed that the dates for the opening Test overlapped with those for the Australian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, which was being held in Adelaide that year. How convenient. I quickly ran over to my colleague's office and asked him if he would want to submit our joint paper - "Postdiction Problems in Dynamic Logic" no less! - to the conference.
He, a post-doctoral fellow like me, agreed; our paper had been in progress for a while, we had already presented it at a workshop, it had received critical feedback from a number of interested readers, and now looked ready for prime time. We went over its technical details again, cleaned it up, formatted it in the conference's required style, and sent it off to the conference referees, fingers firmly crossed. My colleague was not a cricket fan; he harboured no suspicions whatsoever about the actual motives for my desire to submit a paper to the national AI conference.
Full postTwo friends, lost in a maze
Thousands of Indian cricketers aspire to play for their college. Many promising ones slip through the cracks
Samir Chopra
01-Oct-2013
In 1984, like thousands of other high-school students in New Delhi, I began the process of applying for university admission. I was joined in this endeavour by two friends of mine, far more proficient at cricket than me, who intended to try out for a college cricket team and gain entrance to the hallowed halls of academia not via marksheets but the cricket field.
They knew their chances were slim. The competition would be fierce; Delhi's college teams were among the champion teams nationwide, and moreover, these lads were from out of town - from my old boarding school in Darjeeling - and would have to be slotted into the tiny out-of-state quota allotted to each college.
My friends had written to me several weeks before the admissions rush began, asking me for any assistance possible in navigating the university's admission process. I was happy to meet them again after a two-year gap, and responded enthusiastically to their plans. I even offered them a place to stay at my home; one had alternative accommodation arranged, the other took me up on my offer.
Full postThe hook: cricket's bravest shot
Other strokes may be more elegant, but there's nothing to quite match the elemental thrill of the hook
Samir Chopra
26-Sep-2013
A dozen or so years ago, when with great enthusiasm I built the first incarnation of my academic homepage, I put up a "Leisure" section as well and inserted the following lines to indicate my cricket fandom:
Cricket: quite simply, the world's greatest game, bar none. I'm a fanatical fan that worships batsmen that play the hook well.
I still stand by those lines.
Full postWorld Cup qualification could give ODIs context
Bilaterals tacked on to the end of a Test series, or hastily arranged triangulars, could gather meaning if teams had something bigger to fight for. But will cricket's major teams ever agree to such a proposition?
Samir Chopra
20-Sep-2013
A couple of my recent sports viewing experiences offer an interesting contrast.
On September 10, USA played Mexico in a football World Cup qualifier at Crew Stadium in Columbus, Ohio. The game was telecast live, the stadium was packed with noisy, exultant spectators. I watched with great interest for a great deal rode on the result of this game. A win for USA along with a loss or draw for Panama would send USA to the 2014 World Cup. USA won 2-0 on the back of goals by Eddie Johnson and Landon Donovan.
Between September 6 and September 16, England and Australia played five one-day internationals. I watched approximately five overs of the fifth; my baby daughter was in a slightly cranky mood, and she needed the distraction. Two of the scheduled games had already been washed out. The spectators didn't seem too excited. They were bundled up in autumn and winter gear. It all felt a little unseasonal. The Ashes and the summer had ended a while ago.
Full postWhither the great cricket novel?
Cricket fiction has not really floated my boat. Who needs made-up heroes when the real-life ones are so wonderful?
Samir Chopra
10-Sep-2013
I read Jonathan Wilson's post on why cricket seemingly does not lend itself to the novel with great interest. As someone who likes to read about cricket, and as someone who has, in these very pages, complained about the lack of a definitive, high-class documentary on cricket, I'd like to offer a few purely speculative thoughts of my own. (Some of them resonate with Jonathan's remarks, but for all that, I hope they will not be found redundant.)
First: a confession. I've only read one "cricket novel": Joseph O'Neill's Netherland. I could not finish the critically acclaimed Chinaman, despite starting it twice. Over the years, I've been recommended many cricket novels, have had some offered to me for review, and have seen many blurbs or advertisements for them. But I feel strangely uncompelled to read them, and do not make the slightest effort to explore this particular literary avenue. (Obviously, I have never bought one, and not a single one features on my Amazon wishlist.) But the reasons for my failure with - or perhaps antipathy towards - the cricket novel tell me something about why others might have had similar experiences, and thus, perhaps, have not prompted great efforts at writing them either.
First, Netherland does not really make cricket its centrepiece; that part is played by New York city, and its place in the displaced central protagonist's life. Cricket is a part of New York city, in interesting and diverse ways, and so it shows up in Hans van den Broek's life in a similarly intriguing way. When I first wrote a brief review of Netherland I considered it a sports novel, a cricket novel. But now I don't. I think if cricket had intruded any more into it, I would have found it a considerably less interesting book. And thus Chinaman. There was too much cricket in it. (Before I get too many flames for my failure to complete it, let me assure you that I have it on my shelves and intend to try again.)
Full postTracking Sobie and the gang from afar
To a boy growing up in India, West Indies' 1973 tour of England came alive years later through a cricket annual
Samir Chopra
04-Sep-2013
Martin Williamson's story of going to a one-day international during the 1973 West Indies tour of England reminded me that that series was for me too, a formative one, but in a radically dissimilar way. I have written in this space about a Test tour that I did not watch on television but only tracked - live, in a manner of speaking, by faithfully following its progress - from afar: Pakistan's tour of the West Indies in 1976-77. Well, I tracked the 1973 West Indies tour of England too but well after the fact, years later, by repeatedly perusing, for a period of a few weeks, every Sunday, its match reports and photographs in the John Player Cricket Annual.
Wikipedia notes that, back in the day when cigarette and tobacco companies still sponsored sports, "the 'John Player Special League' was launched in 1969, as the second one-day competition in England and Wales alongside the Gillette Cup". The John Player cricket annual was brought out - like Wisden - as an annual report on the entire summer's cricket. The 1973 report included photographs, match reports and statistics for not just the county season but the summer's Tests as well: the tours by New Zealand and West Indies. The former lost 0-2 to England; the latter won 2-0. (New Zealand were certainly no pushovers; they lost the first Test by 38 runs chasing a target of 479, even as their captain, Bev Congdon, made a brave 176; they drew the second after amassing 551, before finally succumbing by an innings and one run at Headingley in the third Test.)
But it was West Indies who commanded my attention and exerted the strongest hold on my imagination. The 1973 outfit featured several batting greats: Garry Sobers, Rohan Kanhai, Clive Lloyd, Roy Fredericks and Alvin Kallicharran; amazingly Sobers batted at seven. They scored heavily throughout - 652 in the third Test, at Lord's - and won comfortably despite a bowling attack that, to eyes accustomed to seeing four genuine quicks in a West Indian line-up, might seem a little underpowered - Keith Boyce, Bernard Julien, Inshan Ali, Lance Gibbs, Sobers - but which boasted plenty of variety and not a little pace. To round things off nicely, Boyce and Julien were sparkling all-round talents capable of lighting up a ground with their displays of hitting. For Sobers and Kanhai, 1973 was their last hurrah in England, their 150-plus scores at Lord's their final flourish.
Full postA tale of two Ashes books
Two college professors, of politics and philosophy, in two continents, connect through their common love of cricket
Samir Chopra
28-Aug-2013
Norman Geras, professor emeritus of politics at the University of Manchester, is known to most students of political science as a political theorist, a prolific author with books on, among other things, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and Richard Rorty; and as a former member of the editorial boards of the New Left Review and the Socialist Register. He is also a blogger and a cricket fan. In this last capacity, he is the author of two books on the Ashes - The Ashes '97: The View from the Boundary (with Ian Holliday) and Men of Waugh: Ashes 2001. I have copies of both and have read them with pleasure. The story of how I came by them tells us, I think, something about how cricket, especially in this modern age, lets us make connections with our fellow travellers in fandom.
I chanced upon Geras' blog after he and I had a short online exchange in response to a minor quasi-theological debate triggered by the Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony. I wrote a post responding to a piece by Hazony in the New York Times; so did Norm. A colleague at Brooklyn College sent me Norman's post, and I emailed or tweeted him, pointing him to mine. I also checked out the rest of Norman's blog. There I found some cricket.
On his blog, Geras maintains a section titled "Memories of Cricket". It contains a series of recollections of incidents, notable and not so notable, in the history of cricket, with a twist: each personal recounting is supplemented by descriptions of the same event from books in Geras' voluminous collection. The motivation for the series came partly from John Arlott; it has now grown into a rich collection, one well worth perusing and savouring at leisure.
Full postThe pleasures of Urdu commentary
Memories of following an India-Pakistan match described in high-flown Urdu
Samir Chopra
20-Aug-2013
On February 20, 1985, I was feeling a little cross during my usual long bus ride home after classes at the university. India were playing Pakistan in a one-day international game in Australia, and not only was there no live telecast, there was also no radio commentary.
However, by the time I returned home my mood had changed. Commentary was on from an unexpected source: Radio Pakistan. All India Radio, unable to send a team of their own to cover the games, had decided to start relaying commentary available from across the border.
Pakistan's innings was over, for a less-than-stellar 183, but in response, three Indian wickets had already fallen, all of them to Imran Khan. As Sunil Gavaskar and Mohammad Azharuddin put together what would prove to be a match-winning partnership of 132, their feats were described to us in a familiar lingua franca: the seemingly highfalutin Urdu of Radio Pakistan's commentators. And there was no English commentary; it was Urdu all the way.
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