The art of flinching, and the morality of deception
Amit Varma's weblog on cricket and more
Amit Varma
23-Jan-2004
Saturday, January 24, 2004
9.10am
The latest on Steve Bucknor: according to a news report, the Indian team has lodged a complaint that Bucknor mocked Rahul Dravid in the last game at Sydney. As Dravid came in to bat, he allegedly looked at Dravid tauntingly and rolled his fingers over the ball, in what was purportedly an obvious reference to the ball-tampering incident involving Dravid a day earlier. I am no fan of Bucknor, but if true, this is superb news. Umpires sledging players? I'm all for it. Let's also get the match referees to chuck empty bottles from the crowds and the curators to plant mines in the outfield, and one fine jolly spectacle we'll have.
Friday, January 23
11.57pm
Anand Vasu wrote an entertaining piece on our site today on cricketers and music. All the players of the VB Series have been asked to pick a song that will play as they walk in to bat - or walk back to the pavilion - and the choices of the players make for interesting reading. Virender Sehwag, the entertainer, chose "Let's Get Loud", while Michael Bevan, that grand finisher, chose "The Final Countdown". All nice and funny, but it could have been even better. The players were given a limited playlist to choose from, and two of them, the heroes of the Sydney Test, Sachin Tendulkar and Anil Kumble, did not find anything suitable.
If you assume that every song ever written is available to choose from, what do you think the players would choose? More specifically, what do you think would be apt for them? Even better, what songs would be suitable in specific contexts between players? (For example, should Steve Bucknor sing "Please Forgive Me" to Sourav Ganguly, after all his lapses through the Test series?) Write in and tell me, I shall put up the ones I enjoy here - with attribution, of course. (I wanted to offer prizes, but my boss snarled at me, "Sure, we'll just give them your salary.")
11.32pm
My friend and colleague, Rahul Bhattacharya, cornered me after reading the two questions about the trains. "I can't picture the second scenario," he told me. "Can you explain it to me?"
I said, "That not an issue. Did you get the premise, that's what is important."
"Yes, I got that," he said. "That's not a problem. But I can't picture the scenario. Where's the train, where's the footbridge, where are the five people? Please explain, with the help of pictoral aids."
He pulled me down to the floor (basically, we both sat). "This" - a long black row of tiles - "is the train. And this" - a white column of tiles running perpendicular to it - "is the footbridge. And this is me and the rotund gentleman." - Two of the plastic balls we play cricket with. "Now, quite what happens?"
We got five other balls, mucked around for a while - the train turned in my visualisation, and the black row didn't - discussed the matter, as Sambit Bal, our editor, who hadn't till then read the piece, got to it. Then he joined us on the floor.
He said the answer to why our instincts lead us to different conclusions when rationality brings them to the same end is obvious. "We don't want to kill the man ourselves."
"But we're effectively killing the guy by flicking the switch as well," I said. "The result is the same."
"No, but we're not so involved," he said. "It's more, um, passive." Which is just about what Brearley said as well. "He didn't want to get his hands dirty," I said, which summed up what all of us felt. The passivity does matter.
I have another parallel for this. There is a story about how Leo Tolstoy, who had turned vegetarian, was once visited by his aunt for lunch. The lady, a non-vegetatian - as most Russians of those times were - was astonished to find a live chicken on her chair. As she turned, flabbergasted, to Tolstoy, he calmly informed her:
"We knew you wanted chicken, but none of us would kill it."
Many people I know eat chicken with relish, but would not kill one themselves, though the consequences of the two acts are effectively the same. Our race, somehow, is given to passive sinning. I have an evolutionary explanation for this. In primitive times, man was sustained by the spoils of violence, but the violence itself was a danger to him. He would gladly eat a dead wild boar but would be averse to killing it himself - because it could endanger his life. That passivity - the feeling that the less the direct involvement, the less the transgression - is hardwired into us. As the outrages of the 20th century - the century of the greatest genocides in humankind's history - confirm, we are a race perfectly suited for standing by and watching.
3.35pm
How does one flinch? We were discussing this in office today as we spoke about Aakash Chopra, who has done such a fantastic job as a close-in fielder this season for India. Sambit Bal, my editor in India, had covered India's tour of Australia, and he described the stark contrast between the sizes of Matthew Hayden and Chopra, and how Chopra time and time again flinched and turned away as Hayden swept, and swept, and swept.
"It is an amazing sight," said Sambit. "One just doesn't get the same impression on TV."
Sambit spoke to Chopra after the tour, and asked him whether he would prefer fielding at short leg to Hayden, or batting against Brett Lee. (This over breakfast, it seems - what does that do for the appetite?) Chopra did not have to think. He'd prefer to face Lee, he said. A batsman at least knows where the ball is coming from and has an approximate idea of the trajectory. Besides, there is a fair amount of distance between him and the bowler. But fielding to Hayden, he's virtually blind, as he's not following the ball from the bowler's hand but has to pick it from Hayden's bat, from maybe three or four feet away. So when Hayden gets into position to sweep, Chopra instinctively recoils away.
To get back to my original question, how should a fielder react in such a situation (both from a point of view of safety, and maximising the chance of a dismissal.) Well, Yajurvindra Singh, one of India's great close-in fielders, spoke in Wisden Asia Cricket a few months ago about the art of close-in fielding. In the piece, he says:
Always keep your eyes on the ball; never, ever turn away. Having said that, you should make as small a target of yourself as possible whenever the batsman moves into position for an aggressive stroke. Crouch down with your palms in front of your face, fingers upwards, forearms erect, looking at the ball through the fingers. That way you have a very good chance of taking a rebound if it hits you. I've been hit on the forearms very often, and if the ball comes to hand, well, there's a good chance it'll stick.
From the point of view of increasing the chances of taking a catch - if Hayden doesn't hit it on the full, or off a rebound, whatever - this is sound advice. What about safety? Isn't he safer turning away (which is how that instinct would have evolved in the first place)? There are arguments that go both ways. You could say that it is safer to stay facing the ball, because a blow on the front of the head - which is covered by his hands anyway - would do less damage than to one on the side or the back of the head. On the other hand, it could be argued that a ball smashing into his side would do less harm than one bouncing on the upper half of his torso. But wouldn't his arms be protecting that, anyway?
Either ways, Chopra is an astounding fielder, and the debate might be moot because the instinct to flinch would be too strong for the rational mind to overcome. In most people. Yajurvindra tells of how his hero, Brian Close, never flinched, and once caught a ball after it rebounded off his head. Close had, says Yajurvindra, "courage to the point of madness".
Mike Brearley, in The Art of Captaincy, speaks about how, during a match, the ball once rebounded off Close's forehead to second slip. Brearley recounts:
`Catch it!' Close shouted. After the catch the Yorkshire players hurried up to him. He assured them that he was all right. `But what if it had hit you an inch lower?' one asked. `He'd have been caught in t' gully,' Close replied.
Morality is an issue that is complicated beyond reasoning. There is a classic experiment that philosophers love to carry out, which consists of asking two questions to subjects. Imagine I'm a philosopher and you're the subject. Now answer these two questions:
1. You are standing at a railway switch as an oncoming train approaches from the right. Just beyond you is a fork on the track. Five innocent people, unaware of the train, are standing on the left fork. One innocent man is standing on the right. If you do nothing, the five people will die; if you flip the switch, the train will veer to the right and one person will die. Do you flip the switch?
2. You are standing on an open footbridge that crosses a railway track. A rotund gentleman stands by your side. A train is approaching at high speed. Just beyond the bridge, behind you, five people are standing on the track. You can save them - but only by pushing the rotund gentleman besides you, immediately, off the bridge, onto the train's path. Do you push him?
The decision, as posed, has to be taken immediately. Most people, through the ages, have instinctively answered `yes' to the first question and `no' to the second, even though the end result of both decisions - sacrificing one person's life to save the life of five others - is exactly the same. These are instinctive responses. Why is our brain wired to react thus?
I thought of this example while re-reading an essay by Mukul Kesavan that had appeared in the January 2002 issue of Wisden Asia Cricket. Kesavan was writing about match referees, and reserved particular criticism for a decision made by Denis Lindsay, while officiating in a West Indies-India ODI. Lindsay gave a three match suspension to Ridley Jacobs for claiming a stumping after removing the bails with his right hand, "whilst the ball was clearly in Jacobs left hand which was nowhere near the broken wicket" (from a ZCU statement; the match was played in Harare).
So why was Kesavan outraged at this? In his own words:
To answer that, you have to look at the way cricket deals with players who mislead umpires. Every batsman who nicks the ball stands his ground and waits for the umpire to give him out, caught. The batsman knows he is out, yet, I've never heard of a match referee suspending a batsman for not walking.
Morally, there's no difference between a batsman who chooses to stay, knowing that he is out, and a wicketkeeper who appeals against a batsman knowing he isn't. Even those who admire the hard men for standing their ground - arguing that things even out, that every time you're given not out when you are, there's a matching occasion on which you are given out when you aren't - recognise that this is an argument from experience, not principle, and, less charitably, a shabby piece of rationalisation.
Now, Kesavan's reasoning is spot on here. (He is one my favourite writers on cricket, though he concentrates on presumably less trivial subjects nowadays, for his lucid and enlightening prose. His other non-fiction is masterly as well: pick up Secular Common Sense if you find it, a wonderful read.) But the question must be asked: when the effective outcome (deception) of both ways of behaving (claiming the stumping; not walking) is the same, then why do we instinctively pardon the batsman who deceives but feel aggrieved at the wicketkeeper who deceives? When the workings of the mind are hard to fathom, turn to a psychologist, so I duly turned to Mike Brearley. This is what he says in The Art of Captaincy:
Claiming a catch when you know that the ball has bounced strikes me as plain cheating, as there are solid grounds for distinguishing between this practice and staying in, as a batsman, when you know that you were out. The main difference lies in the passivity of the latter. You are, by virtue of the appeal, placed in the dock; you stand accused; it seems reasonable to wait for judgement, and not to give yourself up. It is not the case that the only alternative to a plea of guilty is one of not guilty. By contrast, the quasi-catcher has to initiate the process of indictment by an appeal.
The italics were Brearley's, though the red bits were coloured by me. So is passivity the key? (Interestingly, in the Jacobs incident, he did not actually appeal himself, but he did not recall the batsman either. He was passive.) Personally, I believe that in all these instances, passivity is actually not as passive as it sounds. The decision to be passive is an active decision. I am with Kesavan on this: both kinds of behaviour are immoral. But that is in a vacuum, of course - in the context of sport, where your opponent will most likely do whatever he can to win, it would be impractical to be rigidly moral. Perhaps we should just go with our instincts?
So what would you do? Flip the switch? Push the man? And most importantly: why?
Amit Varma is managing editor of Wisden Cricinfo in India.