Notes on greatness

During a recent Test between India and England at Ageas Bowl, there was an extended discussion among the Star Sports commentators on the distinction between a fine and a great batsman. The discussion piqued my interest for two reasons. For one, it was an interesting premise worthy of a dialectical discussion, something rarely encountered on Indian television commentary for some time. The current crop of Nasser Hussain, Ed Smith, Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid are a welcome change from the cliché-ridden drone of a Ravi Shastri or the polemic of a Sunil Gavaskar or an Ian Chappell. That apart, this was a subject that had intrigued me quite often.

What makes a sportsman great and another merely very good is often a matter of narratives built around them. There are those who are marked for greatness from the very beginning like Sachin Tendulkar and Ricky Ponting, and the moment this potential converts into performance, they naturally enter the pantheon of greats. Others like Rahul Dravid and Jacques Kallis have to wait for longer before the world wakes up to their greatness. The promise of greatness seems to be an advantage, but it can also be a serious nuisance. The world reserves a special brand of ridicule for those who do not live up to their hyped potential, as Rohit Sharma surely experiences from time to time. Aside from the easy process of the early promise flourishing into inevitable performance, greatness is acquired often through a mixture of context and personality. Steve Waugh, for instance, was a grafter, never easy on the eye like his twin brother, and given to periods of ugly scrapping around. But in that 1995 Frank Worrell trophy, Steve stood up to Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh and showed that he was not going to be cowed down by finest fast bowlers on the greenest pitch.

Statistically, Kallis is the greatest cricketer of his generation. Dravid put it in context better than anyone else, at least to the Indian imagination, when he highlighted that Kallis had scored as many runs as Dravid, undoubtedly the second best Indian batsman of his generation, and taken as many wickets as Zaheer Khan, the spearhead of the Indian attack for the better part of a decade, not to mention the small matter of being the third-highest catcher in Test cricket. Kallis' statistical brilliance, I would think, puts even Tendulkar's 100 100s in the shade. Yet Kallis is relegated to the status of being one of the most valuable players, but rarely counted among the greatest cricketers. There is something to be said for stats. The legend of Don Bradman has grown from the magic figure of 99.94, as will Tendulkar's from the 100 100s. But stats are merely the stamp of certainty on what we already know, numbers to be used to buttress our arguments, something to add to our already fuelled imagination.

As someone who enjoys cricket as much for sheer beauty of the game as the stories and narratives in it, I have often been tempted to give a higher billing the men who ooze a nonchalant effortlessness. In the last two decades, we have seen Mark Waugh, VVS Laxman, Ian Bell, Mahela Jayawardene and Hashim Amla. Such prettiness can often be a disadvantage. Because one can make batting look so easy, when a stroke goes wrong and you get out, it can almost look cavalier. This is a serious drawback for someone making a case for greatness, as you are seen only as a fine batsman who can delight sporadically, but without the determination to make the cut as a truly great batsman. Often I have felt this a little unfair. Lazy elegance at the crease could have little to do with a batsman's character or attitude. Laxman, for instance, worked extremely hard on his game and played numerous innings where he pulled the team out of adversity. Yet against the prettiness of his late cuts and cover drives, and the clichés of sports journalism that pigeon-holed him, the more gritty aspects of his character were not always so obvious.

Another criteria we judge great batsmen by is the impact they have on the game. A constant criticism Tendulkar dealt with through most of his career was that he did not win enough games. While the criticism may be a tad unfair, it shows how we judge someone obviously great like Tendulkar also on the basis of how his batting affects the larger course of things. Virender Sehwag and Adam Gilchrist score very highly in this regard for they could turn a game around in a session of play. However, even by that standard I would argue that relatively dour batsmen like Dravid or Kallis scored equally high on impact as they could stand in the face of hostile spells of bowling for hours, and often had the ability to be the difference between defeat and a draw.

Dom Moraes in his biography of Sunil Gavaskar looks at what eventually makes a great batsman. He speaks of Barrington and Boycott, and laments that whole both were very good batsmen, they were characterized by 'an absence of grace, the grace that elevates and speaks like the gonged tongues of seraphin'. According to Moraes, this grace came from mixtures of character, style and individuality. What I find most interesting about what Moraes has to say is his emphasis on 'cricket character', an ability to imprint yourself indelibly upon the course of the game. It is important to note that by imposing oneself on the game, Moraes does not necessarily mean the ability to dominate or dictate terms to the opposition. While Matthew Hayden might have been more obviously dominating than Dravid or Kallis, he does not qualify as easily as great. Moraes was a poet and he equated greatness with presence and the effect it has not just on the game but the spectators who expect to feel the cricketer's character, 'reflected from the glazed mirror of the turf'. It is this presence, this undefinable quality that sets apart the great from the very good, not the flawlessness of technique, or aesthetic brilliance or the weight of statistics.