Samir Chopra
The body language of fast bowlers: Diversity in unity
I am truly grateful that there exists such marvelous diversity in the same act, providing the cricket fan with many hours of viewing pleasure
Samir Chopra
25-Feb-2013
Some 15 or so years ago, as I watched Pakistan's then latest fast-bowling find, Mohammad Akram, bowl against India in the 1997 Toronto one-day internationals, I remarked to a friend - then chatting online with me - that Akram's smooth action was quite distinctive. Indeed, I suggested, it was even 'non-subcontinental'.
"A non-subcontinental action? What's that?" my friend, quite naturally perplexed, asked. In turn, I struggled to make clear what I meant, finally settling on something like the following: fast bowlers from the subcontinent have a certain 'body language' to their actions, a particular stride, jump, and style of bowling delivery that distinguishes the practitioners of this group from others.
Urged on by my interlocutor to make my taxonomy explicit ('well, what about the rest of the world's fast bowlers then?'), I elaborated a bit more. It seemed to me fast-bowling actions the world over settled roughly into three - perhaps predictable - categories: the Anglo-Saxon, the West Indian, and the subcontinental. I included Australians, Englishmen, South Africans and New Zealanders in the first group; the West Indies in the second; and Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka in the third. (Yes, I didn't think of Zimbabwe then.) This classification is a rough one, and exceptions will abound, I'm sure, but still, it seems to me that there is a family resemblance of sorts between the members of each group.
Full postA look at the Kallis-Sobers debate
The Jacques Kallis versus Garfield Sobers comparison and evaluation is guaranteed to draw sharply contrasting reactions from most cricket fans
Samir Chopra
25-Feb-2013
In today's post, I want to continue on a thread commenced in my last post by considering, in light of the visual appearance of cricket, a contemporary debate about the game's greatest allrounder.
The Jacques Kallis versus Garfield Sobers comparison and evaluation is guaranteed to draw sharply contrasting reactions from most cricket fans. For some, Sir Garry remains peerless; for yet others, Kallis' staggering statistical feats, his batting at No.3, his catching, his value to South African cricket, his contributions to their rise to the top demand recognition and proper assessment.
Kallis will always come off second best in this argument. This is not because I think he is any less of a cricketer than Sir Garry. It's not because I think he is a 'boring bat' who does not perform well in clutch situations, who does not have the strokes Sir Garry had, who took too long to score his first double-hundred, or whatever your favourite canard about Kallis is. Rather, it is because I suspect the dominant imagery of Sir Garry will always swamp that of Kallis.
Full postCricket's look and feel: A mixed bag
One of the curious ironies of modern cricket is that just as our means of the visual inspection of the game, its players and their skills have grown ever more sophisticated
Samir Chopra
25-Feb-2013
One of the curious ironies of modern cricket is that just as our means of the visual inspection of the game, its players and their skills have grown ever more sophisticated and refined, the actual on-the-field happenings have seemingly grown less visually attractive. That is, thanks to modern television with its high-definition and thousands of frames per second coverage, and modern photography with its awesome array of filters and lenses, we can inspect the game with far greater detail and acuity than ever before; but what we look at is perhaps not as attractive as what was available in previous, less technologically blessed times.
Consider for instance, player appearance. The modern player, in sharp contrast to players from thirty or so years ago, wears an arsenal of protective gear starting with the helmet, and proceeding downwards, elbow guards, chest guards, bulky gloves, thigh guards and bulbous pads. (The contrast with pre-1970s players is even greater.) His uniforms, too, look very different.
Of these, nothing has quite done as much damage to the batsman's appearance as the helmet. The batsman's face is obscured by a visor or grille; his hair by the hard-top of the helmet. The helmet renders the batsman anonymous, pushing him ever more distant from those who observe and inspect his actions from afar. Gone are the distinctive hairstyles or facial expressions visible in the days when batsmen wore team caps, or a variety of other headwear ranging from floppy sunhats to wide-brimmed Panama hats. Thankfully, some of the damage of the helmet has been mitigated by the presence of the team logo on it, counteracting the efforts of batsmen, as in the 1990s, to wear utterly bland white helmets.
Full postTony Greig: Turning cricketers from Patriots into Professionals
Seemingly a giant of a man, literally and figuratively, he was the captain of a team central to the Indian team's understanding of itself in the cricket world
Samir Chopra
25-Feb-2013
On December 17, 1976 as the bell rang for the lunch recess at my Delhi school, a gaggle of fifth graders, including myself, came together, lunch-boxes and transistor radios in tow, to check on the cricket scores. The first Test between the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and India was underway at the Ferozeshah Kotla, and thus far, on that bright Delhi winter morning, we had been denied updates. I did not own a radio myself so I was dependent on my classmates for a ticket to the ground. I walked over to a young lad, the ubiquitous square-shaped little box glued to his ear, and asked for the score. The MCC were batting, and stunningly, five wickets had already fallen for a little over a hundred on the board.
I wasn't done yet though. "Is Greig out?" I asked. "Yes." "How much?" "Twenty-five." Twenty-five! Stunned, I wandered away, my fingers nervously strumming the edges of my lunchbox; how was it possible for such a giant of a man to be out for such a low score? I've responded with shock on hearing the news of a favourite player's dismissal many times, but this was something else altogether: giants were not so easily felled by midgets, after all.
Last year, when I penned a short tribute to Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi on the occasion of his passing away, I wrote up a cricketing XI consisting of players particularly important to me:
Full postTwo nations better than one?
One recurring fantasy of the Indian cricket fan is to speculate about a combined India-Pakistan team
Samir Chopra
25-Feb-2013
One recurring fantasy of the Indian cricket fan is to speculate about a combined India-Pakistan team: If Partition had never happened, India and Pakistan may have fielded the greatest team of all times. Gavaskar and Majid would open the batting, Imran and er, Akram the bowling, Bedi and Qadir would spin anyone out, and so on. Many Indian fans indulge in this sort of rumination; they imagine that they are making some sort of statement of brotherhood and commingling, a giant Kumbaya moment of coming together on the 22 yards of the cricket pitch, a massive festival of candle-lighting at the Wagah Border, its glare bright enough to illuminate a Twenty20 game being played at the Gaddafi Stadium some thirty kilometers away. Thus the Partition, besides being responsible for the untold human misery caused by large population transfers, is also indicted on the charges of having weakened the cricket teams of the subcontinent.
I'm an Indian fan, and I've indulged in this little fantasy myself in the past. I've noticed that more often than not, Pakistani fans do not join in this little exercise in building castles in the air. The reasons are varied: sometimes it's because Pakistani fans who remember Pakistani batting greats of the past, are quite content to build up a fantasy XI that includes Majid, Hanif, Zaheer, Miandad et al with their fast bowling greats and reckon this would be good enough to take on the world. Sometimes it's because in this suggestion of unity, they perceive the elision of Pakistani identity.
Well, today, I'd like to join their camp and suggest that in purely cricketing terms, the Partition was a positive thing. If the Partition had not taken place, India and Pakistan (and Bangladesh) would have fielded one national team, and the thirty-three slots available for an international player - that are currently available for cricket players in the subcontinent - would be replaced by merely eleven. Eleven slots to fulfill the aspirations to play international cricket, earn a living from top-class cricket, and make a career out of the game, for a population of almost 1.5 billion (or is it more now?). Sounds like bad news for cricketers to me.
Full postMore curiously significant numbers: Birthdays and aids to concentration
I'd like to recount two ways in which I've turned to cricket to see if there was a resonance of interest to me with significant numbers in my life
Samir Chopra
25-Feb-2013
Cricket is a game of numbers and so it is no surprise that I have blogged several times here, at the Pitch, on 'curiously significant numbers'. The first entry was on statistical landmarks, the second, on significant dates in cricket history, and yet another on libraries and cricket. Those are numbers that are significant within the domain of cricket: averages, career records, memorable team or individual scores, and the like. But sometimes we can indulge in the converse. We can pick a number of significance to ourselves and see if cricket can somehow render it more significant.
This is self-indulgent in the extreme, but today I'd like to recount two ways in which I've turned to cricket to see if there was a resonance of interest to me with significant numbers in my life.
Perhaps unsurprisingly my first inquiries in this dimension were to find out what significant events in cricketing history had transpired on my birth date. For those interested, I have some distinguished company. I share a birthday with Bill Edrich. I didn't share any of his talent of course, but I'll take the common anniversary for now. Unfortunately, I also share a birthday with Vikram Rathour, who was rather unkindly described as a 'walking wicket' after India's tour of South Africa in 1996-97. After these flirtations with quality and mediocrity there are some encounters with obscurity too: I share birthdays with Prosper Utseya and Edwin Evans. As far as cricketing events on the field go, my birthday has not seen too many dramatic occurrences in Test cricket or even one-day internationals for that matter, but it still remains the 78th anniversary of the day South Africa lost 19 wickets in a day in a Test and the eighth anniversary of Mushtaq Mohammad's Test debut.. (I'm sure there are fans out there who were born on far more memorable dates; what great party lines you have in your possession!)
Full postEmergence of new markets with T20 leagues
Tristan Lavalette's piece on cricket in Serbia reminded me once again, that cricket is not yet a truly global sport, but it has great potential to become one
Samir Chopra
25-Feb-2013
Tristan Lavalette's piece last week on cricket in Serbia reminded me once again, that cricket is not yet a truly global sport, but it has great potential to become one. And a very important feature of the Twenty20 world has a great deal to do with that promise: the fact that clubs, not nations, can form the basis of an international league, and as such a new labour market can emerge, one made up of players not resigned to waiting for their country to make it big before they can.
In modern international cricket, nations rule the roost. If your country is an Associate, not Full, Member of the ICC, your chances of playing top-class competitive cricket and earning a living wage are considerably diminished. But things aren't so good even for the Full Members. If your country has already picked its national eleven, you are out on the sidelines. And the salary schedules in international cricket taper off very sharply: plenty at the top, little below. The international cricket league--indeed, whether T20 or 50-50, or well, in my wildest dreams, Tests--could offer these players a chance to compete against the best and make a career out of cricket. They will not be up against the glass ceiling. The Twenty20 league has caused much disruption in world cricket to established cricketing nations; it is worth remembering it can do much good to cricket's current poor cousins, the Associate nations and the journeymen cricketers from the Full Members.
In my new book Brave New Pitch: The Evolution of Modern Cricket, in a section titled 'The World Labour Market' I wrote:
Full postBrave New Pitch: The Evolution of Modern Cricket
The bio on the right hand side of this page has indicated for some time that I have been writing a book on 'the changing face of modern cricket'
Samir Chopra
25-Feb-2013
The bio on the right hand side of this page has indicated for some time that I have been writing a book on 'the changing face of modern cricket'. That bio will be revised soon (if it's not already) for my first book on cricket, Brave New Pitch: The Evolution of Modern Cricket has just been released by HarperCollins.
The blurb for the book says:
Cricket as we know it may soon be no more. Thanks to Twenty20, technology, media, and the sheer financial power of Indian cricket, the gentleman's game is on the brink of radical changes. Nation-based cups might give way to T20 professional leagues; umpires might be replaced by technology; and professional franchises, not national boards, might call the shots. Could cricket go the way of professional football? Will Test cricket survive in an entertainment-driven field? Will television rights deals determine the nature of the game? This upheaval has been accompanied by conflict between the old guard England and Australia and the new boss, India. If the spirit of cricket is to survive these changes, it requires the balancing of economic, political and sporting imperatives. The game must find a way to remain a financially solvent global sport that caters to the changing tastes of its fans and players by creatively using new media and limited-overs cricket. In 'Brave New Pitch', Samir Chopra takes a look at cricket's tumultuous present, and considers what could and should lie ahead.
That's quite a mouthful, or two. What's the book about, really? To begin answering that, let me point to a tiny section with which I begin the book:
Full postCricket Sightings: A Sonic Cricket Encounter
The US-based cricket fan reacts with an emotion that is a mix of pleasure, relief, and sometimes, a giddy determination to make the most of it
Samir Chopra
25-Feb-2013
A cricket fan that lives in the US is used to a very particular estrangement from the game: the inaccessibility of the game on television and broadcast media; an absence of cricket scores and reports in newspapers; the inability to play a game of cricket on a proper cricket pitch; the lack of a community of fellow fans. Cricket is often the invisible sport, the game that dare not speak its name.
So when cricket makes an appearance, the US-based cricket fan reacts with an emotion that is a curious mix of pleasure, relief, and sometimes, a giddy determination to make the most of it. These reactions can be occasioned by many prompts: rare access to a live televised game, a snippet of a cricket score that miraculously found its way into the back pages of a local newspaper (perhaps thanks to a diligent, cosmopolitan, sports reporter), an impromptu game thrown together by a few enthusiasts, and of course, most pleasurably, the chance to watch a game in the company of other aficionados. In the twenty-five years I have lived in the US, I have sampled some of these pleasures; they have served to provide me some of the most pleasant memories of my time here.
Sometimes a 'cricket sighting' needn't be so direct. It may be a mere reference to the game in a non-cricketing context. On my old cricket blog, Eye on Cricket, I had started to put together a collection of references to cricket in philosophy texts; these were invariably, made by English or Australian philosophers, and used to illustrate a broader philosophical point. The first one I encountered was in JL Austin's work on speech acts: how a spoken sentence or word can be an action. The example: a cricket umpire saying 'Out.' And so on.
Full postTwenty20 in the US: We've seen it before
The US launch of a professional T20 league reminds me of another, more humble US-based T20 competition I took part in some 25 years ago
Samir Chopra
25-Feb-2013
Reading about the US launch of a professional T20 league reminds me of another, considerably more humble US-based T20 competition I took part in some 25 years ago. As you might have guessed, these games involved students. In this case, a motley crew of Indian, Pakistani and West Indian undergraduate and graduate students enrolled at a New Jersey technical school. (Thanks to the large number of South Asian students enrollees, local wags suggested the NJ stood for 'Nehru-Jinnah'.)
Back in 1987, shortly after arriving in the US, I had already participated in one attempt to bring cricket to campus: arranging a telecast of the World Cup final. This done, our local band of cricket enthusiasts felt sufficiently emboldened to get off our collective backsides and actually play some real cricket. Miraculously, not only was cricket equipment like bats, balls, wickets, gloves and stumps procured, but lo and behold, so was a matting pitch. We would need it to solve the problems inherent in playing our games on the university's soccer ground.
As organisation proceeded and word was spread among the student populace about the upcoming games, a few of us met to plan the logistics. Twenty overs per side was settled on as the right number of overs; many of us had played games in that format at the school level, and the time we had for the game (on the weekends, after the soccer team had finished practice, and we were done installing the matting pitch) would only allow a 40-over game. We wanted to draw up teams as well from the list of those who had thrown their hat into the ring; we clearly had enough to make up two XIs, with some extra folks who could be counted on to not show up on the actual day out of laziness or forgetfulness. If we ran over the limit, we'd just have to find a creative way to substitute players.
Full postMost Read
Writers