Wicket to Wicket

When Devangshu says that the one-day international has become “a game of rich strategic content” does he mean that it requires more strategic thinking than Test cricket does, or merely that it has more moves now than it earlier did? Because if he means the former, I’d suggest that it’s truer to say that the tactical choices in an ODI have public cues -- they are more heralded and therefore more obvious. But in terms of actual strategic potential, Test cricket is the more fertile and complex form.

From how long you keep a bowler on, to when to take the new ball, or how far ahead you should be to declare, or whether you should enforce the follow-on, or whether Ashley Giles should convert the paying public to rugby by bowling over the wicket forever, or how to deal with a threatening bowler who can bowl at your batsmen without an over-limit, these are decisions that captains and players make routinely in Test matches. I agree about the wider range of skills. You have to be a better fielder for one. The downside is that a utility player who can bowl a bit is more likely to make the team in ODIs than in a Test match. Though with Sourav Ganguly being touted as a batting allrounder for the Test squad, maybe I should take that back.

I think there are two main reasons why, speaking for myself, ODIs are generally forgettable:

I was quite glad when Mukul Kesavan shifted the focus of the discussion, with the last post, from the Indian cricket team to Indian cricket. In the long run, Indian cricket has greater problems than whether the Dravid-Chappell duo is better than the Ganguly-Wright duo. So here's a larger question I'd like to raise: Will cricket survive in India, and if so, in what form?

Why do I raise the issue of cricket's survival before you? After all, isn't the game thriving in the subcontinent? Well, yes, at the moment. But my hypothesis is that the same process - one that I support wholeheartedly, by the way - that has made the subcontinent the commercial centre of cricket is the biggest threat to the game here: globalisation. Let me explain.

A couple of decades ago, Indians had just two options of entertainment: cricket and Bollywood. India's middle class was relatively small and subdued, and its purchasing power wasn't too great. So it wasn't a commercial force in the world of cricket. This changed when India began to liberalise, however half-heartedly, in 1991, and one of the world's largest latent markets opened up to the world. The middle class burgeoned, as did the purchasing power of cricket fans across the country, and satellite television made cricket easy to commercialise. Everything came together well, and cricket in India became big money. All of that is oft-repeated and well documented.

Sourav Ganguly and John Wright set the bar pretty high for their successors. They won Tests at home and abroad and they took India to the finals of a World Cup.

The only way Rahul Dravid and Greg Chappell can improve on that record is by winning Test series abroad and winning the 2007 World Cup. In the final analysis, anything else is a letdown.

How do you win a World Cup? On the basis of historical evidence, the following ways can work.

I want to leave Oliver Chappell and his New Model Army out of this for a second. This isn’t easy to do. Like Devangshu Datta who wrote the last post on this subject, I spend more time than an adult should trying to work out how many Test matches and series this Indian team will have to win to qualify as different or better or unprecedentedly better than Indian teams gone by. I re-read, with a strong feeling of déjà vu, an article I had written in the run up to the last World Cup, that tried to assess the Indian team’s chances in the context of the excitement and anticipation generated by that justly celebrated management firm, Ganguly & Wright. Messrs G & W very nearly pulled it off — and look where it got them: in two years every stakeholder in Indian cricket from the BCCI to Cricinfo had joined forces to nudge Wright into retirement and Ganguly, poor wretch, finds himself cast as Charles I, dethroned, though not yet beheaded.

Are Rahul Dravid and Greg Chappell going to make India a consistently successful team? I’ve no idea. Will they win the World Cup for us in the Caribbean? Who knows. What I do know is that even if they do, the victory will do nothing to change the condition of Indian cricket for the better. If you are worried, as I am, about the health of Test cricket, winning the World Cup might make things worse.

The state of Indian cricket is shaped by the circumstances of international cricket, and, over the last two decades, the financial health of world cricket has become increasingly dependent on the Indian hunger for the game. The critical challenge before both is the secular decline of Test cricket and the likelihood that it will become ever more marginal. As David Runciman wrote in the London Review of Books, the extraordinary Ashes series this summer wasn’t a new dawn, more like a last hurrah. The reason, he explained, was the fact that cricket’s centre of gravity had shifted to the subcontinent where the one-day game was hugely more popular.

You know it's a rare era in Indian cricket when an inspirational captain, the most non-parochial in decades and a customer who plays hard, gives as good as he gets, is dropped – and not even missed. The period after the dark winter of match-fixing has been a dazzling, extended summer of brilliance and sunshine. The Indian team has won everywhere – well, almost everywhere – and made it to the World Cup final.

Some of this happened because the BCCI got out of the way. Jagmohan Dalmiya did start with writing letters to John Wright demanding explanations for "bad performance". Of course, that Wright had been appointed by AC Muthiah – Dalmiya's predecessor and, in the best traditions of the Board's byzantine politics, former friend and current foe – may have had something to do with it.

Yet, once Dalmiya developed a comfort level with Wright – more important, once India started winning – he left him alone, or as alone as a coach can be left by the BCCI. Next, despite the Board's inner wranglings and bizarre elections, the men in suits had enough sense to appoint Greg Chappell as coach.

I agree with Harsha that the current state of well-being in the Indian team is born out of chaos, both within the Indian team and in Indian cricket in general. I doubt if Greg Chappell would have got the space and the freedom to start acting on his vision or Rahul Dravid would have got the chance to lead India had Sourav Ganguly not looked so shaky, and, more crucially, the political situation with the BCCI not been so volatile.

Chappell’s high-risk approach to the problem he found himself facing in Sri Lanka and in Zimbabwe could turn out to be one of the most crucial, even seminal, points in Indian cricket. The six-page email he wrote to BCCI was brutal on Ganguly; more critically, it left Chappell with no escape route. He would have perhaps known that the mail would find its way to the public domain and it would force the board to act. It could have cost him his job. That he put his job on the line in order not to compromise his beliefs was a strong statement about his character.

Chappell could have, like many of us who are frustrated by the system, reconciled himself to working within its limitations. But he decided to shake it up. That Ganguly’s time was up as captain was plain to see, but without Chappell acting as precipitator, the status quo would have been maintained: Ganguly’s Test hundred against Zimbabwe would have been enough to keep him in the seat. Chappell had a bit of luck because the circumstances – the uncertainty and the power struggle within the BCCI – worked to his advantage. But courage, you could say, begets luck.

Over the last fifteen years India’s extraordinary economic progress has been accompanied by some pretty staggering political upheaval. From single-party-majority rule India hurtled into one coalition after another, the love affair with the Soviet Union gave way to a grudging but increasingly strong infatuation with the US and the number of legislators with criminal records grew alarmingly. But it only required a couple of visionary budget proposals and the corresponding unshackling of the economy to unleash Indian entrepreneurship. Soon governments became irrelevant.

So what is this political treatise doing on Cricinfo? Interestingly there is a parallel. The two most significant forward movements in Indian cricket were accompanied by bitter power struggles within the BCCI. When John Wright was appointed AC Muthiah was locked in battle with Jagmohan Dalmiya, and the first few months of Greg Chappell’s stay in India have been accompanied by some pretty forgettable administrative manoeuvres. And yet, in either case, a couple of key decisions, either through a sudden, unexpected burst of foresight or sheer accident, let loose critical positive energy for Indian cricket.

The Chappell-Dravid combination is a coming together of two erudite, studious and tough cricketers. It has coincided with delayed player contracts, a chaotic television-rights situation and farcical board elections. Maybe democracy as we know it is not so good after all!

We had conceived of this topic before India began the series against Sri Lanka, and Indian cricket seemed a matter of somewhat greater concern then that it does now. The team was in disarray, unsure of its leader. The Board of Control for Cricket in India was in disarray, unsure of its leader. Fans were disillusioned and fed up.

The Indian team turned a corner against Sri Lanka. Remarkably, Greg Chappell was given the freedom to shape the team as he wanted. For perhaps the first time in Indian cricket's brief experience with coaches, the powers and responsibilities of the coach were aligned. The team played with an intensity that had been missing for months, and there was a greater competition for places in the side than ever before.

But Indian cricket has seen many temporary highs before, and its problems go beyond its team. That is precisely what we will try to explore in this discussion. What are the things that ail Indian cricket, what are the dangers that it faces, and what can be done about all these things? Harsha starts the discussion off tomorrow by sharing his views with us, and I hope you'll be listening.

Well, it was great fun while it was happening, but it's time to bring this particular discussion on technology in umpiring to a close. You can view all the posts on this subject, with the earliest posts at the bottom, by clicking here. I'd like to thank Sambit Bal, Martin Williamson, S Rajesh and Andrew Miller for taking time off to take part in this, and we're all delighted that Bob Woolmer also shared his views with us.

I'm strongly pro-technology, and especially support Hawk-Eye, which I feel will be an invaluable tool for umpires in getting lbw decisions right. But one of the things I've learnt during this discussion is that accuracy is not the main point of contention here -- comfort is. For various reasons, well-stated here by Sambit and Martin and Andrew, opponents of technology are not comfortable with the technology, regardless of how well it may work. Whether they feel it diminishes the human touch, or changes the nature of the game, it is a view that must be taken seriously. After all, we are all stakeholders in the game. And we must keep talking.

The next discussion should be coming up in a week's time or so. Watch this space.

My only answer to those who talk about the charm and say ‘Let cricket remain quirky, annoying and enthralling’ is, try telling that to the coaches and players whose jobs are on the line.

Hawk-Eye is far and away the fairest means of giving lbws. I can do without the snickometer as I believe it is fallible to any noise, although scientists in the know will tell you that technology can be advanced to cater to all situations. I still advocate a technology super series where we give everything a bash and see what can and cannot be achieved.