Chamara Silva: a pioneer in the business of getting cricket to acknowledge its great cultural diversity © Getty Images

The most significant thing about the ODI in Visakhapatnam went unnoticed. When the brilliant Chamara Silva walked up to collect his Man of the Match trophy, he answered Arun Lal’s questions in Sinhala. One of his team mates (I think it was his captain) translated for him and us. I wanted to cheer. Every time I watch a South Asian player unfamiliar with English struggling with the language during match ceremonies, I want to shake the team manager and the event organisers. To be forced to express yourself in a language you don’t know at all is agonizing: you feel cretinized. We’ve all experienced this as tourists in strange lands. There’s no reason for an outstanding Sri Lankan or Indian or Pakistani player to make himself look like a stammering moron because some would-be smoothie in a tie and blazer asks a question in English.

I hope the Pakistani team management was watching the match and taking notes. To watch a modern great like Inzamam-ul-Haq reduced to pidgin responses because Rameez Raja or some other south Asian suit didn’t have the sense to commission translation is intolerable. To accept, as we do, English as the lingua franca of cricket, shouldn’t mean that we wilfully ignore the fact that the majority of international cricket’s fans (and increasingly its players) are not English speaking. This trend is a good thing because it tells us that cricket’s following in South Asia has real social depth and that it has expanded hugely beyond the subcontinent’s anglosphere. Acknowledging this fact in practice is not a big deal organizationally: you just need a team mate to translate. But it makes a huge difference to the ease and comfort and, yes, dignity of the player. The next time Inzamam walks up to collect a trophy I hope he answers questions in Urdu or Punjabi. Silva and the Sri Lankans may not know it, but they’re pioneers in the business of getting cricket to acknowledge its great cultural diversity.

	Lasith Malinga, clocking 148kmph every other ball, couldn't stop India winning by seven wickets at Visakhapatnam © Getty Images

Even the speedgun seemed to be on steroids on Saturday. Agarkar, Sreesanth and Zaheer all averaged around 140kmph, with Agarkar occasionally nudging 145 and the Sri Lankan bowlers, specially Malinga were even faster. ‘Slinger’ Malinga clocked 148 every other ball. And here I was thinking that the only quick bowlers in the sub-continent came from Pakistan.

If this game hadn’t happened, Dravid couldn’t have dreamt it up. All the players critical to our batting came off: Yuvraj coming off injury, slaughtered the bowling, Ganguly kept up his amazing run of form and Sehwag nearly made a fifty before he tried to do a Ranatunga by walking a single only to discover that Sangakkara wasn’t auditioning, as Sehwag was, for the title of most laid-back cricketer in the world. Older fans will remember the News Read at Slow Speed on All-India Radio. Well, this was Sehwag’s cricketing tribute to that programme: the Single Run at Slow Speed. Moved by a vulgar competitive spirit foreign to the Nawab of Najafgarh, the Sri Lankan keeper ran him out. Fancy that.

Best of all, the new boy came off: Uthappa juggled and dived his way to three catches, then made Sehwag look like Mr Sedate while clubbing the Lankan seamers for fifty two scored at a strike rate of 140. A hook that helped the ball over long-leg for six was particularly satisfying: a nice swivelling old-fashioned hook shot hit off the back-foot unlike the modern preference for the firm-footed whack that clears square-leg or even mid-wicket.

The bleak, joy-denying ghoul that lives in every Indian fan, whispered in my ear that what the match really showed for the third game running was that the Indian bowling was incapable of running through a side after its opening bowlers had blown the top order away, that Sehwag had a moment of discomfort against the short ball on a benign batting wicket, that the stand-and-deliver technique that finally got Uthappa dismissed was likely to be found out by Asif, Bond, Lee and Co. and finally that Harbhajan was a spent force going through the motions of off spin bowling, but I shook the doomsayer off and concentrated on what had happened.

And what had happened was this: chasing a more than decent total, against respectably fast (if not terribly disciplined) bowling, without the aid of Tendulkar, Dravid and Dhoni, we creamed ‘em.

	Irfan Pathan’s more likely to replace an out of form batsman, than a specialist bowler © AFP

Apart from Ramesh Powar, it’s difficult to think of anyone else who might have had a claim to the bowling places in India’s World Cup squad. S. Rajesh’s excellent statistical analysis
of Shaun Pollock’s recent ODI record on cricinfo.com, has a table listing the best one-day bowling averages since 2006. Powar is number 8 on that list and the highest ranked Indian. He has taken 24 wickets in in sixteen ODIs in this period which compares well with the the bowler on top of the list, Shaun Pollock, who has taken 37 wickets in 24 matches.

To be fair to the selectors, figures don’t always tell you much. The man whose spot Powar might have taken, Irfan Pathan, is tenth on that list with 36 wickets in 25 matches, one less than Pollock with one more match played. And we know that Pollock has hit a rich vein of form in the past year while Pathan’s bowling has fallen away so much that he’s in the World Cup squad as a pinch-hitter who, with luck, might get through half a dozen overs. When he gets to play a World Cup match, Pathan’s more likely to replace an out of form batsman, than a specialist bowler.

Scenario 1: Robin Uthappa doesn’t come off. Tendulkar moves up to open with Ganguly and instead of bringing Karthik in as a specialist batsman, the team management opts for Pathan as a decent outfielder, a more than useful batsman who can play up or down the order, and someone who can smuggle in a few overs through the middle passages of a game.

Scenario 2: Virender Sehwag’s dreadful form continues. Given that India routinely plays six batsmen and four bowlers, Dravid and Chappell decide that Pathan is a better all-round replacement for Sehwag (who usually shares the fifth bowler’s quota with Tendulkar) than Dinesh Karthik.

I think Dravid will be desperate to play Pathan if five of his six main batsmen fire because Pathan playing to seventy five percent of his potential as a bowler would appear to balance the side out. Dravid’s stated preference is to play five bowlers and playing Pathan gives him at least four-and-three-quarters.

If I’m right in this, I can’t see Karthik getting an opportunity except as a replacement for an injured Dhoni or, as a longer shot, if Yuvraj is unfit. Yuvraj doesn’t bowl any more, so Karthik for Yuvraj would be a straightforward batsman for batsman swap with no bowling considerations coming into play.

All of this presumes that the main batsmen do well. If the first couple of games find the battting wobbling, Karthik automatically becomes the favoured replacement.

You don’t have to be an a genius to know that the Indian team will start its campaign with Zaheer Khan Munaf Patel, Ajit Agarkar and Harbhajan Singh. I’m not sure I understand why Harbhajan is an automatic choice for the spinning spot in ODIs but the good thing about having bowlers as good as Sreesanth and Kumble on the bench is that the players they replace in the event of injury or poor form, won’t be hugely missed.

But I’ll miss Powar’s waddle, his fearlessly flighted teasers, those glaring red shades.

	'Dhoni comes across as someone wholly in charge of his talent' © Getty Images

What stood out from the beginning was Dhoni’s poise. He never looked the young debutant. He seemed to know what his business was and went about it with a self-possession that contrasted nicely with the violence of his methods. As a fan I know that spectators are drawn to Dhoni by the sense that this spectacular, risk-taking hero isn’t a death-and-glory kamikaze pilot like Kris Srikkanth used to be nor flamboyantly careless with a great batting gift as Kapil Dev was. Dhoni comes across as someone wholly in charge of his talent.

What order of talent is it? When he reprised his one-day 148 in the first Test against Pakistan in 2005-06 I began to wonder if he was a Gilchrist-sized gift to Indian cricket. All right, so it was a featherbed of a pitch and to put Dhoni’s century in perspective, Shahid Afridi got a bigger century in fewer balls, but a big hundred against the old enemy early in a Test career always seems a portent of good things. But after that high voltage start, Dhoni’s performances tailed off. There have been a couple of fifties along the way and a few starts but nothing out of the ordinary and his Test match average has stabilized at around thirty.

So were our expectations inflated? Dhoni’s record in Test is respectable. His average after fifteen Tests is just a fraction lower than Kunderan’s and Engineer’s, both of who finished their careers with averages in the low thirties. His main rival for the wicket-keeper batsman slot in the present team, Dinesh Karthik, has an average under twenty-five.

In an international context, Dhoni is clearly inferior as a Test batsman when you compare him to Kumar Sangakkara (who averages more than fifty runs per innings) or Gilchrist (who averages just under fifty). Set against his Pakistani counterpart, the talented Kamran Akmal, Dhoni does surprisingly well: he has a better Test average and is by some distance the better one day performer.

Adequate though Dhoni’s Test record is, his main claim on our attention as a batsman has been his one-day record. He scores at nearly a hundred runs per hundred balls and still has the staggering, Tendulkaresque average of forty-five. And while his two centuries against Pakistan and Sri Lanka came early in his career, there has been no falling off in his one day career, where he has regular racked up important fifties.

Does his record explain why Dhoni has captured the Indian imagination in the way he has?

Dhoni makes our collective pulse race not only because he’s aggressive, but because his aggression exhibits itself in shots I’ve never seen anyone else play. I can think of three right away. The first and least of them is the peculiar flip shot that he plays where he lays the bat face up on the pitch and tips the ball over his shoulder in the direction of long-leg. The second one is the forcing shot he plays square on the off side, with both feet off the ground, his legs scissoring to make momentum in mid-air. It’s a viscerally savage shot that besides violating every reasonable rule of batsmanship tries, in passing, to break the law of gravity. The third Dhoni special, is the strangest shot of all: when he’s served up a yorker or a near-yorker length delivery, he essays a two-handed top-spin forehand which is intended not just to dig out the ball but to whip it to the mid-wicket boundary. More often than not the shot doesn’t come off: its significance lies in his determination to invent a shot with which to attack the unplayable ball.

Dhoni’s an interesting batsman because his aggression is wholly based on improvisation. He plays like a pioneering backwoodsman who has had to invent batsmanship without instruction. In the best sense of that phrase, Dhoni’s technique is home-made. Sometimes this is frustrating: he often gets out playing eccentric shots when an ordinary drive or flick would do; nothing that Dhoni plays, in attack or defence, belongs to the orthodox repertoire. Allied to this improvisatory technique is a degree of premeditation unusual in cricket at the highest level. One of the reasons he does better in the shorter form of the game is that ODI bowling is more predictable and less various than bowling in Test cricket. Also, there’s more short-pitched bowling in Tests and some of his dismissals have raised a question mark about his technique against the short ball.

The reason I think Dhoni is potentially cut out for great things as a batsman, unlike, say, Afridi (who, by the way, has the better Test match record), is his willingness to subordinate aggression to a larger plan. Dhoni has shown an ability to choose his moment, to commit himself to percentage cricket, to coast on furious singles in a crisis, instead of careening, brake-less, on adrenalin. In India’s victory over Sri Lanka yesterday, he hit just four boundaries in his unbeaten sixty-six and still managed a strike rate of eighty-eight. An enthusiastic Hindi radio commentator compared his posture before assuming his stance to Bheem, shouldering his gada, or mace. Given the way he’s built, his rumoured appetite for gallons of milk and the size of that bat, I can see the resemblance. Part Bheem, part Eklavya—it isn’t hard to see why he’s got our attention.

A longer version of this post published in The Telegraph, Kolkata, is available here

	Forgiven but not quite forgotten - Deano returns to the commentary box © Getty Images

When I switched on the television in the morning yesterday to catch up with the third ODI between India and Sri Lanka, who should I see in the Neo Sports studio but Dean Jones. What’s he doing, I wondered, on a South Asian channel after the things he had said last year?

And what had he said? I wrote a piece on the controversy at the time which can be found on the Hindustan Times website here. But since Jones has turned up on our TV screens again and since I don’t think that bygones should be allowed to be bygones in this instance, here’s an extract from that article that summarizes its main argument.

“He said, “the terrorist has got another wicket,” when Amla, a bearded South African Muslim of Indian descent, took a catch. Jones thought he was making a private comment to his fellow commentators but the microphone was live and it carried his words to a television public.”

Peter Roebuck and Alan Border leapt to Jones’s defence. Their line was that Jones didn’t mean it, couldn’t have meant it because everyone knew that Jones wasn’t a bigot or a racist.

“”This was the same defence that Darren Lehmann mounted when he called the Sri Lankans “black c___s”. It was also the defence used by Jewish friends of Mel Gibson (another man who has spent some growing-up time in Australia) after his anti-Semitic outburst. Mel, they said, ‘wasn’t like that’.

Wasn’t like what? What does a man’s track record have to be before a bigoted comment made by him qualifies as bigotry? It’s unlikely that a television commentator will have prior form or known links with the National Front or the Vishwa Hindu Parishad or a pro-apartheid party. But why should we need more than the evidence of our ears?

Let’s try to set this in a ‘Western’ perspective because Jones’s defenders seem to be having trouble appreciating the vileness of what Jones said in the context of cricket in Sri Lanka. Here’s a hypothetical circumstance. Tiger Woods is playing golf at the US Open. He sinks a putt, there’s a pause and the commentator, thinking he’s in a commercial break, says to his colleague, with the microphones on, “The nigger’s holed another one.” How long do you think that commentator would last on prime time? How many golf correspondents and commentators would characterise his comment as a ‘bit stupid’? And how many people would buy the line that “some of my best friends are…”?

	Jones tried to suggest later that he wasn't referring to Hashim Amla at all © Cricinfo Ltd

The truth is that no American commentator working for a major TV channel would use ‘kike’ or ‘nigger’ or ‘faggot’ with their colleagues around even if they thought the mikes were switched off. Because political correctness, in the best sense of that term, has made these words unsayable. To use these words in polite society is to court ostracism.

Dean Jones said what he did because he thought his colleagues in the box would be amused, because he didn’t think the words he used were taboo. Jones assumed that a remark tossed off like that would pass without challenge or reproach. That’s the real significance of this incident, not the fact that he got caught with the microphones on.

“The terrorist has got another wicket”: this is the casual bigotry of the locker room which assumes that the guys will go along. It’s bigotry founded on an assumption of shared prejudice because you can bet Dean Jones’s last Australian dollar that he wouldn’t have said what he did with Rameez Raja and Imran Khan in the room.

That’s why the eagerly forgiving attitude of his peers is disappointing. They’ve responded like members of a guild, not as professional men looking out for cricket or broadcasting.
…
The reason ‘kike’, ‘faggot’ and ‘nigger’ are taboo today is because public opinion backed up by social sanction made them unsayable. If an Indian commentator was caught calling … a Dalit player a ‘chamar’ he would never work again. Roebuck and Border and cricket’s commentariat seem to think calling a bearded Muslim a ‘terrorist’ doesn’t belong in the same category of proscribed words. Well, it’s up to us to persuade them that it does, through a policy of zero tolerance.

It has been unsubtly suggested in the press that Jones was sacked from Ten Sports because his employers were Muslim. I hope that isn’t true. I’d like to think that ESPN, Star Sports and Zee Sports, regardless of the religious beliefs of their owners would have done the same thing. India is a secular, pluralist nation and sports channels that work out of this country need to make sure that the people they employ respect those ideals.”

Neo Sports must believe that Jones has seen the error of his ways and is therefore fit for public consumption again. Except that he hasn’t and therefore isn’t. After self-serving apologies of the some-of-my-best-friends-are-Muslims sort, Jones tried to suggest that he wasn’t referring to Amla at all.

As Andrew Miller pointed out in Cricinfo earlier this year, ‘Jones was sacked by Ten Sports almost before the utterance had passed his lips, but within the month he was back, denying he'd ever erred. “Amla got the catch, Nicky Boje was the bowler," he wibbled. "I'll leave it up to you to work out who I was referring to." Nice one. Except it had been Pollock bowling at the time.’

A man in denial can’t be contrite. Ergo, Dean Jones shouldn’t be commentating on Indian television.

	'Australia remain favourites for the Cup but the odds on them winning have lengthened and it’s no longer a one horse race' © Getty Images

Yesterday’s match in Sydney was a small step for England but a great (rain-assisted) leap for cricketing mankind. If this England team after the Ashes whitewash can beat Australia three times in a row, there’s hope for the rest of us. The World Cup suddenly looks like a contest instead of a prolonged green-and-gold victory lap.

From an Indian point of view, the difference between this Australian team and earlier ones is not so much Shane Warne’s absence as Glenn McGrath’s decline. Indian batsmen never bought into Warne’s mystique but McGrath was a different matter. No Indian ever sorted out McGrath. A decline, of course, is a relative thing: McGrath has lived alone on Everest so long that even a slide off the summit still leaves him at an altitude most bowlers never reach. Yesterday he took 2 for 41 off ten overs, which Zaheer Khan and Munaf Patel would gladly settle for, but he went for fifty runs in the first final against England without a wicket and he’d gone for fifty in the last league match against England. Five runs an over isn’t expensive in the context of contemporary one-day cricket, but it isn’t McGrathian. Australia remain favourites for the Cup but the odds on them winning have lengthened and it’s no longer a one horse race.

If this was the lesson of the England-Australia encounter, the other two matches provided a pointer or two about who might challenge Australia down the home straight. The South Africans are clearly the main contenders; the ICC rankings have that right. They killed India four times in a row and what they did to Pakistan yesterday was cruel. They’re a great fielding unit and they bat deep which helps but I can’t help thinking that their bowling is so bustlingly similar that anytime Shaun Pollock has an off day, they’re likely to get slaughtered. On the other hand, if there’s one team that’s on its knees giving thanks for Warne’s retirement, it’s this lot, so that’s another thing they have going for them.

But if I was a betting man I’d put my money on Sri Lanka. To beat India at home without Chaminda Vaas and Muttiah Muralitharan (ie nine-tenths of their bowling attack) after the game seemed lost, needed extraordinary poise and nerve and this Sri Lankan team has both. They fielded like demons and in Kumar Sangakkara they have one of the cleverest men in cricket, a modern-day Mike Brearley with a difference: this man can bat. So can Mahela Jayawardene and Marvan Atapattu and I have a happy feeling that Sanath Jayasuriya, that Martin Luther of modern cricket who offends against orthodoxy every time he swings his angled scythe, is saving himself up for one last spasm of berserker violence on the world stage. And Lasith Malinga is so weird he’s wonderful: Sri Lanka is a kind of cricketing Galapagos, breeding exotic bowling actions in its island isolation.

	'Kumar Sangakkara is one of the cleverest men in cricket, a modern-day Mike Brearley with a difference: this man can bat' © Getty Images

Pakistan are number three in the ICC’s rankings and anyone with eyes knows that as individuals they’re so prodigiously gifted that eleven of them on a good day could win anything. But, as with India (only more so) the Pakistani whole is often considerably less than the sum of its constituent parts. Yesterday they played like they were collectively in the depressive phase of a bi-polar disorder. They have the remarkable Mohammad Asif, all round depth, and a great middle order, so they’re contenders but after yesterday’s performance you’d have to be a patriot or a clairvoyant to bet on them.

From the Indian point of view, yesterday’s game followed a recent pattern. Sourav Ganguly and Sachin Tendulkar did moderately well, Rahul Dravid failed, Mahendra Singh Dhoni contributed but not decisively and the tail collapsed. The worrying thing about the game was that everyone apart from Anil Kumble and Dravid played reasonably well and we still lost.

The seamers did as well as anyone could expect and the four selected for the West Indies are no surprise: they pick themselves. Irfan Pathan’s passage was booked on a wish and a prayer. Dinesh Karthik’s selection in the World Cup 15 is understandable because he is insurance in case Dhoni is injured. That Robin Uthappa, on the strength of seven ODIs and two fifties, made the cut ahead of, say, VVS Laxman (who will now never play a World Cup match) is hard to credit. He has been chosen, I suspect, to carry the standard of youth, a responsibility once borne by RP Singh and VRV Singh and Suresh Raina. Greg Chappell, Dravid and the selectors have so fetishized youthfulness that they couldn’t, without embarrassing themselves, have picked a batting line-up that, with the exception of Virender Sehwag, was Made in the Nineties. For India’s sake and his, I hope Uthappa does well, otherwise he’ll be the latest sacrifice at the gory altar of New Blood. I can’t see a neutral punter backing us to win. On the other hand the odds on an Indian win in ’83 were 60 to one and I’m not a neutral punter. We can win this one…

	'I’d pick Karthik over Uthappa. Karthik’s shown temperament and aggression when it’s needed and we can do with that in a World Cup' © AFP

Looking at the Indian batting line-up for the rained-out ODI against Sri Lanka, I see that it features two wicketkeepers and four opening batsmen. Robin Uthappa, Sourav Ganguly, Sachin Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag. Six opening batsmen if you count Dinesh Karthik’s and Rahul Dravid’s occasional stints at the top. A middle-order made up mainly of openers is certainly innovative.

Someone will have to make room for Yuvraj Singh when he’s fit and the likely candidate from this line-up will have to be picked from Uthappa, Sehwag and Karthik because I can’t see Mahendra Singh Dhoni being replaced as first-choice keeper. If Sehwag gets a decent score in the matches against Sri Lanka, he’s safe because he holds out the promise of explosive acceleration and an Indian middle order that has a faintly out of form Dravid and a determinedly responsible Tendulkar needs someone who can push things along. I’d pick Karthik over Uthappa, who seems a splendid prospect but Karthik’s shown temperament and aggression when it’s needed and we can do with that in a World Cup. Also, should Sehwag or Tendulkar be promoted to the opening spot in the course of the tournament, Karthik would be useful down the order.

But I’d like to see Tendulkar opening the batting. The only reason we made it to the finals of the last World Cup was because we had the great man making it look easy for the rest. I know he’s four years older (he tells us that often enough) but the old firm, Ganguly & Tendulkar, making our case to the rest of the world, is, for me, an irresistible prospect. If he were to open (or even if he stays at No. 4) I don’t think Dravid should come in at the fall of the first wicket. Dravid’s instinct is to stabilize, to consolidate. The reason the Aussies do so well is that a decent start or an early wicket is followed up by Ponting’s relentless aggression. I know the short answer to that is that Ponting plays for Australia we don’t have any clones handy, but it wouldn’t hurt to send Yuvraj or Karthik in at that number and see if it works.

The other argument for having Dravid come in at No. 4 with Tendulkar opening the batting, is that they’d be separated. To have them adjacent to each other at 3 and 4 invites a situation where, with the openers gone, India’s two best batsmen set about retrieving the situation knowing that the dismissal of either might prompt the deluge. Given Dravid’s responsibilities as skipper and anchor and Tendulkar in his present Atlas mode, the likelihood is that we’d be becalmed.

So here’s my batting card: Tendulkar and Ganguly to open, Yuvraj, Dravid, Sehwag, Karthik and Dhoni to follow, in that order. Of course, should Chappell and Dravid be willing to think out of the box (with an eye to genius, experience and slip catching), there’s a Hyderabadi batsman I’d like them to meet…

	'Powar flights his off-spinners and brings to his art Prasanna’s tubby poise and robustness' © AFP

Once Anil Kumble collects his gratuity and provident fund, Tendulkar and Sehwag will be the only spinners left in the sub-continent, if, as patriotic but honest fans, we admit that Harbhajan should represent India at darts.

What happened to the Indian spinner, especially to left and right arm finger spinners? In the late Sixties, we had not one but two fine off-spinners pushing each other for a place in the Test team, Erapalli Prasanna and Srinivas Venkatraghavan. Bishen Singh Bedi was probably the greatest left arm orthodox slow bowler in modern cricket, but just a notch below below him were Padmakar Shivalkar and Rajinder Goel who would’ve played dozens of Test matches if they hadn’t had the misfortune of sharing an era with Bedi. Dilip Doshi, who succeeded Bedi, had a distinguished career despite making his debut after thirty. Even Ravi Shastri, who morphed into a fine opening batsman, had a respectable record as a left arm slow bowler.

But if you look at their successors from the Nineties, the decline is swift. Venkatapathy Raju and Rajesh Chauhan were fine first-class cricketers but they wouldn’t have managed a Test between them in the glory days of Indian spin bowling. And if M Kartik is anything to go by, those days are done. Kartik's slow bowling weapons were those strings of beads and bands wound round his neck and wrists. His plan, I think, was to persuade batsmen that he was a wily oriental. Perhaps he should have bowled in a patka.

This is blasphemous but I'm not sure that Bedi would have survived this epoch of short boundaries, enormous bats and batting instincts honed to ferocity on the whetstone of one-day cricket. I sometimes wonder if flight and moderate turn can work in contemporary cricket. Perhaps the finger spinner isn't so much extinct as obsolete. I can't think of a single one in contemporary cricket of any class apart from Daniel Vettori. Look at Saqlain Mushtaq’s extraordinary decline after the novelty of his take on the doosra wore off. The successful off spinners in contemporary cricket, Muttiah Muralitharan and Harbhajan Singh, are essentially wrist spinners.

The one ray of light for the orthodox left armer is the ugly but effective tactic pioneered by Nasser Hussain when he got Ashley Giles to bowl over the wicket into the rough wide of leg-stump to contain Tendulkar. It worked then and it worked again against the Indians in South Africa. But it’s a containing stratagem, light years from the lovely round-the-wicket aggression of Bedi’s classical style.

I hope I’m wrong about this. Perhaps the dearth of fingers spinners today is a passing phase soon to be remedied by some charismatic practitioner. After all, Abdul Qadir resurrected leg-spin bowling even as nostalgists had begun to lament its extinction. Monty Panesar seems a throwback to the old days in his attitude and the fact that he can’t field or bat seems to augur well: neither could Bedi, Prasanna or Chandrasekhar. And I really like Ramesh Powar: he flights his off-spinners and brings to his art Prasanna’s tubby poise and robustness. The buzz about India’s World Cup team seems to be that he’ll be left out in favour of a seamer. I hope he isn’t: the future a great Indian tradition might be riding on his success.

Test cricket is lovely because it happens in whites. A game that doesn’t allow competing teams to differentiate themselves with contrasting uniforms is a game with a developed aesthetic, one that values its ‘look’ enough to refuse the short-term temptations of colour. Think of Wimbledon. But designers frustrated by the timeless chic of cricket whites are beginning to nibble away at their margins. Literally.

The South Africans wear whites with green piping, and green collar details. Others teams have begun to follow suit. Already the inside linings of trouser pockets flash deep green or dark blue. I can see this trend evolve into piped whites with discreet, barely visible stripes which would look very nice – on a baseball diamond. But on a cricket pitch, for a Test match, can we have whites please?

The worst offender against white is the Indian team and here the problem isn’t design details but the awfulness of its sponsor’s logo. Sahara might be a sterling company but its logo was made by a graphic designer from hell. It consists of the company’s name spelt out in letters so large they were clearly designed to do duty on a billboard, with a tri-colour wing attached to the last ‘A’ just so we know that the company’s heart beats for India. It makes sense for the Sahara Group to want its name to be visible from a mile away, but shouldn’t the BCCI be trying to protect the ‘look and feel’ of the game that it’s meant to promote? Shouldn’t there be a maxiumum size specified for corporate logos? Doesn’t the BCCI care that with SAHARA meandering across their chests and sleeves, India’s Test cricketers look like bandwallahs on holiday? And things promise to get worse. In the Super League match being played currently between Bengal and Mumbai, the players wear logos not just on both breasts but on both thighs too. And on their sleeves!

I recognize the importance of corporate sponsorship in contemporary sport, but every game has to make a choice about advertising: It can take the Formula 1 route where the contestant is a walking billboard or it can choose Wimbledon’s way, where players’ bodies are meant to represent tennis and where logos are subordinated to a particular, pastoral vision of the game. Given the nature of Test cricket, the choice isn’t a hard one. Someone tell the BCCI.

	'Once upon a time Test cricket was one of the white goods that this class consumed reflexively: but for how much longer?' © Getty Images

Most of my son’s classmates find greater pleasure in watching Thierry Henry, a Frenchman who captains a London club, Arsenal, than in watching Rahul Dravid turn out for India. The boys in his class who aren’t fixated on Arsenal are obsessed with Manchester United and someone called Rooney who looks worryingly like an Eighties model skinhead. I could be wrong, my sample could be too small, but I think we’re seeing a shift in the sporting culture of metropolitan Indian schoolboys of a particular class. They’re seceding from international cricket and offering their enthusiasm and loyalty to English league football.

Before you go off thinking that my son’s school is some deracinated, air-conditioned NRI heaven, let me assure you that it’s not. Sardar Patel Vidyalaya is an austere, emphatically desi school, with a great cricket tradition. It has produced Indian internationals (Ajay Jadeja, Murali Karthik) and it has one of the most powerful cricket teams amongst Delhi’s schools. Lots of sensible kids in the school aspire to play competitive cricket. So far, so good. But ask any parent with a boy in middle-school and he’ll tell you the same thing: cricket’s reasonably popular, but it isn’t cool.

No, watching Arsenal play Chelsea with your friends is cool. Watching Arsenal play Chelsea wearing the red, obscenely priced Arsenal jersey, is cooler. To fold yourself into Arsenal’s global fan base with a casual ‘we’ is coolest of all, because that’s the very acme of cosmopolitan belonging.

That ‘we’ wouldn’t have been possible till a few years ago, before Star/ESPN began telecasting fixtures live. Recorded matches can seem second-hand because others have watched/used them already. With live telecasts beamed in by satellite, a schoolboy in Delhi can own the action of the match, its suspense, its exhilaration, its heartbreak, in the same way as someone in South Harrow can, because both of them see it happen in real time. Paradoxically, supporting league football is easy because it doesn’t involve treason. It’s not England you’re supporting at football where once you supported India at cricket. No, in cheering for Arsenal you’re supporting a club side whose captain is French, and whose players are as likely to come from Cote d’Ivoire as Camden Town.

And why is Arsenal more compelling than India? Two reasons. One, the Indian team isn’t successful enough at cricket to be glamorous. The last ten years of Australian dominance have left the other cricketing nations looking like pygmies squabbling for second place. Two, with the decline of the West Indies and the less than competitive presence of Zimbabwe and Bangladesh, international cricket sometimes seems like a tawdry, post-colonial leftover, too small and tarnished a mirror to reflect the growing self-consequence of contemporary India’s globalizing elite. The extraordinary celebration of Bhaichung Bhutia, an Indian footballer who was recruited to play for a third division English club, is a forewarning of the enormous enthusiasm that’s likely to be stirred up if one or two Indian players manage to make their way into the upper reaches of a truly global league like the English Premiership.

I tell myself that even if my son’s class is representative of its kind in India’s great cities, we’re still talking about a small minority of Indian cricket’s viewership. As television-aided cricket reaches more deeply and widely into Indian society, as talent begins to be produced in provincial places (think of Virendra Sehwag, Irfan Pathan, Munaf Patel, and Mohammad Kaif), metropolitan towns like Bombay, Delhi, Bangalore and Madras become less important as nurseries of talent, and urban, middle-class, English-speaking children become a diminishing sliver of Indian cricket’s huge installed fan base.

But I’m not consoled. Our cricketing genes need to reproduce themselves. When our children defect, an unbroken sequence of cricketing generations is severed, a familial cricketing tradition, a silsila, becomes defunct. Less sentimentally, no Indian game can afford to lose the children of the haute salariat, the class of people who buy fridges and washing machines. Once upon a time Test cricket was one of the white goods that this class consumed reflexively: but for how much longer?

A longer version of this post published in The Telegraph, Kolkata, is available here