One good thing about Anil Kumble's decision to retire from one-day cricket is that he can now concentrate completely on Tests © AFP

And how important is that? Very important indeed. If winning Test matches is the yardstick we use to measure the value of a player, Kumble is the most valuable player India has had since Kapil Dev: more important than the fine crop of batsmen of the last twenty years (Azharuddin, Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly, Laxman) and orders of magnitude more important than endorsement giants like Pathan, Dhoni and Yuvraj. You can reasonably argue that most Kumble-inspired victories have come at home but only if you're willing to apply that stricture to his batting contemporaries. Since 1971, the year we beat the West Indies in their backyard, Indian cricket has been sustained by three great players: Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev and Anil Kumble. That the rehearsal of this simple fact should seem startling or revisionist gives you some idea of how batsman-centric cricket is and how much we love worshipping little mountains of runs.

Luckily Javagal Srinath who, along with Kumble, pretty much made up India's bowling attack for years, has written a lovely tribute in the Hindustan Times which gives Kumble his due. Here's a quote from it, but do read the whole thing:

"What made him a great bowler was there was no parallel (in the way he bowls) in Indian cricket, perhaps Chandra being the closest. The rest are more traditional bowlers. But his uniqueness was as much an insecurity (to him) as a strength. What worried him early on was that people would think him predictable, say that he would be read very well by the opposition. Whenever he was compared to Warne and found wanting, it really worked him up. It was only around the late 90s that he came to terms with it, realised that his uniqueness was his strength, figured what he could work on and what he could not."

At least Bangalore appreciates him. Which other player can claim to have a roundabout in the middle of a great metropolis named after him at age thirty! Anil Kumble Circle (formerly Oriental Circle) sits at the junction of St. Mark's Road and MG Road in the heart of Bangalore and bears mute witness to the glory of a native son.

	'We want the causes for our defeat laid out: we want, in short, a historical explanation for this catastrophe' © AFP

For historians, the controversy around India's exit from the world cup has a familiar rhythm and pattern. On the face of it all the stakeholders in Indian cricket—the fans, the BCCI, the coach, the captain—want to get to the bottom of this unexpected failure. We all want to know why we lost to Bangladesh and then Sri Lanka. We want the causes for our defeat laid out: we want, in short, a historical explanation for this catastrophe. Post-mortems shall be performed on the Great Slip of 2007, months, years after the World Cup is done. In just this way do historians of the rebellion of 1857 still debate the reasons for that bloody episode.

No one will ever agree on why we got eliminated because every interested party will set his causal explanation in a different time frame. Greg Chappell has already indicated that he favours a long term explanation for India's poor performance. In a press conference after India's loss to Sri Lanka, Chappell was understandably defensive. Quizzed about the reasons for India's losses, he repeatedly said that "we didn't play well enough." When asked why India didn't play well enough he had this to say:

"Well I don't think India has won a tournament overseas since 1985. There is a bit of history to it. There are obviously some reasons."

It seems churlish to point out that the questioner hadn't asked why India hadn't won the World Cup, though this is the question Chappell chose to answer. He was merely asking why we had been slung out in such short order and given the fact that we had reached the finals just four years ago, it was a reasonable question. Be that as it may, Chappell and his admirers were setting out a preliminary sketch of their history of our decline.

It goes like this. The base of Indian cricket is the first-class game. The Australian school (to which Chappell and Dravid belong) argues that there are too many first class teams. These make the Ranji Trophy unwieldy and the huge difference in the level of cricket played by, say, Mumbai and Jharkhand, makes the first class game uncompetitive. Indian cricket at the very top can only improve when this system is reformed and a premier league created that will feature a maximum of six or seven teams following the Australian model. In addition Indian cricket needs paid selectors unconnected with the politics of zonal cricket, professional managers, and curators who can produce the pitches that India encounters overseas.

Once this reformed structure is in place, the skills of top-tier players have to be professionally honed by putting a process in place. Process became something of a totemic word for Chappell and Dravid. It was generally invoked to defend changes in the batting order and team selection and its purpose was to indicate that the choices made were not random but determined by a process that would, in the fullness of time produce a strong and versatile team. Which brings us to another part of Chappell's press conference.

Q. Another word that has been mentioned a lot is 'process'. What went wrong with the process?
A. That's an inflammatory question and I'm not prepared to answer it.

Even allowing for a natural defensiveness, 'inflammatory' is a curious description of the question. It's a pointed question, even a sarcastic one, given the mantra-like significance of 'process' in the team management's jargon, but inflammatory? Chappell's thin-skinned reaction to the question is probably explained by his feeling that the assembled journalists were trying to get him to take responsibility for the debacle when he clearly thought the responsibility ought to be shared around. Feeling as he did, that the Indian press was trying to assign blame (rather than analyse the causes of failure) Chappell took refuge in the longue durée.

The problem is that structural explanations don't really explain success or failure at the highest level in team sport. Brazil has won the soccer world cup four times. England, with one of the richest and best organized football leagues in the world has won it once. The Dutch, who systematically implemented a 'process' called 'total' football for years never won it at all.

The real difference between the Australian team and the Indian team in structural terms is that the former is thrown up by a population which routinely plays outdoor sport into adult life while the latter is chosen from a population where a statistically insignificant number of people do. The despairing references to a nation of a billion people failing at every sport are beside the point.

So are ambitious plans to restructure first class cricket. I don't think anyone has plausibly demonstrated that the infirmities of the present system have led to the wrong players being systematically chosen for India's Test or ODI teams. There has always been debate about the selection of Indian teams and dark aspersions cast on the corruption of the selection process, but I don't see any Tendulkars or Kapil Devs blushing unseen in some cricketing desert. If anything the number of players to make the Indian team from obscure provincial sides has risen steeply in recent times. Think of Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Irfan Pathan, Munaf Patel, Mohammad Kaif and Suresh Raina and it becomes apparent that as far as throwing up talent is concerned, the system's working.

In any case, it's the same system that got us to the final in 2003, so perhaps we should look for explanations in the shorter term and focus on policies and personalities, rather than structure. It's a form of history writing that used to be unfashionable but is making something of a comeback.

I think we lost because Chappell, with the best possible intentions, tried to shake the team out of its settled routines by recruiting new players and rotating their roles. He bet on youth and fitness, on developing the all round skills of players like Dhoni and Pathan, and on undermining notions of seniority and hierarchy. He made an example of Ganguly to this end, made his indifference to slow-moving specialists like Laxman obvious and built up players like Raina on the strength of their fielding skills.

All of these policies are theoretically defensible: the problem is, they didn't work. Raina wasn't ready for prime time as a batsman, Pathan's bowling fell away, the experiments at the top of the order failed and by the time the World Cup came round, the Indian team looked remarkably like the one John Wright had handed over. Ganguly was back and he rejoined a team that had been stirred and shaken so hard that it was an anxious bunch of individuals with no esprit de corps. It didn't help that its captain was so tense and care-worn that his batting form declined.

If the atomization of the team was the medium term cause, the short term trigger was daft team selection. It still isn't clear what Uthappa was doing in the team or what Laxman was doing out of it. Or why the job of bailing India out in the crunch game against Sri Lanka was handed to a rookie instead of being given to Tendulkar who has scored nearly all his one-day centuries opening the batting.

It's in choices like these that the causes of India's embarrassing exit from the World Cup should be sought. A seven team Ranji tournament, the art of total cricket and paid selectors may well be useful in the long run, but it's unwise to base a coaching process on that projection. In the long run we're all dead.

This piece first appeared in the Telegraph.

	An elimination after the opening round will have serious repercussions, financially © Getty Images

For Indian fans, India's virtual elimination from the cricket World Cup so early in the competition is a crushing disappointment. For the television channels that bought rights to beam the tournament to these fans, Friday's defeat is a financial disaster. But for the tournament itself, nothing could have been more tonic than the purging of Pakistan and India, the dysfunctional giants of South Asian cricket. Instead of these glowering bruisers, it looks as though the extravagantly gifted Sri Lankans and the plucky Bangladeshis shall represent South Asia in the next round, the Super 8.

The rest of the piece can be read at the BBC website here

	A news channel was guilty of jumping to conclusions on the cause of Bob Woolmer's death © Getty Images

The idea that the news that's fit to broadcast is an editorially responsible view of signficant recent events is quite dead. Consider the treatment (on Indian television's news channels) of the two big news stories to emerge from the World Cup: the violence that followed India's loss to Bangladesh and the death of Bob Woolmer the day after Pakistan lost to Ireland.

I was a talking head on a news show that was trying to examine the attack on Dhoni's house as a symptom of the unhealthy obssession of Indians with cricket. The anchor prefaced his question to me by observing that given the fact that cricketers enjoyed being in the news through the good times, that they liked being pictured on Page 3, given their willingness to milk cricket for celebrity, wasn't extreme public hostility after defeat part of the game?

I'm certain that the anchor didn't for a moment believe what he was suggesting. He was rhetorically framing a popular view of the Indian cricket team as a bunch of pampered, indulged, overpaid underperformers. He was being the modern news professional: if there was popular resentment raging without, it was his job to air it. I notice that when anchors channel the 'public mood', when they ventriloquize, they leer in a knowing way, as if to suggest to their sophisticated peers that the vulgarity of the popular view they are voicing has nothing to do with their own opinions.

In their coverage of Bob Woolmer's death, news channels went one better by trying to second-guess popular prejudice before it had the chance to form. By Wednesday morning the Jamaican police had indicated that since the autopsy hadn't confirmed death by natural causes, Woolmer's death would be, by default, treated as death in suspicious circumstances. Samples had been sent to pathology labs to test for toxins and other things and the reports hadn't yet come in. By noon I saw that Times Now was leading with the headline: Bob Woolmer Murdered. I watched horrified, waiting for new revelations. There were no revelations. The rest of the bulletin was a grudging retreat from that headline. The first qualification came when the anchor announced that there was a 'strong murder angle' to the story, whatever that meant. The channel's claim that Jamaican police sources had indicated murder was flatly contradicted by the statement of the Jamaican police commissioner who merely repeated that Woolmer had died in suspicious circumstances and that it would be inappropriate to speculate till the pathology reports came in. Despite the headline, I realized that the story was exactly where it had been earlier in the morning.

Undaunted, the news channels turned their cameras on Sarfraz Nawaz who said that Woolmer had probably been killed by bookies who were scared he would blow the whistle on them in his forthcoming book. Now it's reasonable for a news channel to speculate on the reasons for a murder, but equally a responsible news editor should have found a discreet way of indicating that Sarfraz Nawaz has been making headline-seeking accusations for decades. Finger as always on the public pulse, our modern newsmongers had decided that the People wanted murder (without pausing to consider that even if the reports confirmed the presence of poison, suicide was at least a possible alternative explanation) and it was murder they served up.

This post is extracted from a longer article in The Telegraph, Kolkata, that can be read here

	As cricket fans it's reasonable for us to feel frustrated and annoyed by incompetence but even chronic incompetence doesn't warrant a reaction as disproportionate as betrayal © AFP

The subcontinental cricket fan is a lazy, pampered know-nothing who thinks he owns the cricket teams that he supports. His sense of proprietorship is so developed that when his team loses, he speaks (or writes) of being betrayed without a tremor of self-consciousness. He is never disappointed, he's always 'let down' by the inadequate, time-serving, over-paid villains who represent him and his Nation.

The vandals who attacked Mahendra Singh Dhoni's house in Ranchi are stock characters in Indian cricket's absurd dramas, clones of the men who did the same to Mohammad Kaif's house the last time round in South Africa. Kaif's fault was the same as Dhoni's: being part of a losing Indian team.

How do these lunatics justify their actions to themselves? Most people recognize that a sense of entitlement has to be based upon some sort of contract, written or otherwise.
If a statutory body like the election commission is shown be partisan or a committee entrusted with the purchase of munitions turns out to be corrupt, or a cricketer takes a bribe from a bookie and underperforms, in all these cases there is a genuine breach of trust because these are public figures who have been dishonest.

As cricket fans it's reasonable for us to feel frustrated and annoyed by incompetence but even chronic incompetence doesn't warrant a reaction as disproportionate as betrayal. Think of the Barmy Army. Here's a contingent of fat English fans who spend weeks, even months of their lives following the English team around, just to cheer their players on. In between watching cricket they get some sun, sand and sea in, but they're there for their team at considerable cost to themselves. England loses more often than it wins, but I don't notice this caravan of supporters killing themselves or threatening to kill their champions.

Why are they different from desi couch potatoes who never leave their rooms, never exert themselves except to find their remote controls and yet treat every Indian defeat as a conspiracy against the Nation Recumbent?

You can read the rest of the piece in The Times of India here

	'Nationalism aside, Kumar Sangakkara is my favourite cricketer' © Getty Images

Full disclosure: I want India to win. There must be evolved cricket fans out there who don't let vulgar ideas like nationalism affect their pleasure in the game, but I don't know of any. Actually that's not true: I know of one: Mike Marqusee. He wrote one of the three best books ever written on the history of cricket: Anyone But England (the other two are CLR James's Beyond the Boundary and Ramachandra Guha's A Corner of a Foreign Field). Mike doesn't count: he's an American and he doesn't have a home team to back. We do.

But when our better selves take over, when we remember first things, like the joy of accidentally middling the ball and hearing it 'thunk' off the sweet spot of the bat, it's sometimes fun to imagine who you'd want to win the Cup if you were a neutral, like Marqusee, or a Martian.

When I'm being extra-terrestrial, I want Sri Lanka to win.

The Sri Lankan team makes me smile. Do I think it's going to win the World Cup? I've no idea. The function of pre-World Cup journalism isn't astrology: it's job is to find believable reasons for enthusiasm and prejudice.

Sri Lanka has the most interesting team in the Cup. They open with Sanath Jayasuriya, the arch-heretic of modern cricket: he breaks every rule in the book and yet he is one of the most effective ODI allrounders in contemporary cricket. He plays nearly every single shot with the bat angled and the bat face open, and he lifts the ball more often than he plays it along the ground and despite this he's probably won more matches for Sri Lanka off his own bat than any one else on that team. Upul Tharanga is a good partner for him: he had a wonderful tour of England and hit two centuries in the Champions Trophy, so if Jayasuriya gives us a half-decent swansong, Sri Lanka's likely to be off to some great starts.

The captain, Mahela Jayawardene and his predecessor, Marvan Atapattu are better at the longer game but they've adapted orthodoxy to the needs of one-day cricket and when they're in form, they make reliability seem a graceful and attractive quality.

Nationalism aside, Kumar Sangakkara is my favourite cricketer. His record in Tests is better than his ODI record, but an average of 36 and a strike rate of 75 is very respectable for a top-order player who also keeps wicket. But that isn't why I like him. Like a good desi I'm a sucker for anyone who talks a good game and I've never heard a cricketer speak as lucidly and impressively as he does. There's a two part interview on Cricinfo with Sanjay Manjrekar where he's so sharp and so fluent that he makes Mike Brearley seem inarticulate. And unlike Brearley, this guy can bat—he averages over fifty as a Test batsman—and keep wickets.

The one thing this Sri Lankan team seems to lack is an intimidating batsman who comes in after the openers and can, if required, take the game away from the opposition with pure aggression. Aravinda de Silva came to the wicket at Eden Gardens during the semi-finals of the 1996 World Cup, after Sri Lanka had lost a couple of early wickets, and destroyed us. He just decided that the bowlers had to go…and they went. Sangakkara might become that sort of batsman in time, but he isn't there yet. Australia is a great team because Ricky Ponting can walk in after an early wicket, watch a couple more fall and still go for the bowling as if it were business as usual. (The Indian team is particularly bad at dealing with the loss of early wickets: despite the enormous experience and talent in the batting line-up, its instinct is to hunker down like a besieged garrison.)

The Sri Lankan bowling is a constant delight. Chaminda Vaas, little more than medium now, is a canny old fox and his batting gets better all the time. Dilhara Fernando reminds me of the tall West Indian quicks of yore, right down to the bounce he gets off the wicket and the stress fractures. Facing Fernando and Lasith Malinga operating in tandem must be weirdly disorienting: one minute the ball's steepling down at you from eight feet; the next second your radar's trying to home in on a low flying missile slung at you from under five.

After his destruction of the West Indies in the Champions Trophy, Farveez Maharoof seems a real prospect though he'll have to compete with Dilhara for a place in the eleven. And then, of course, we have the great man himself, Muttiah Muralitharan. Sri Lanka missed him in their tour of India before the World Cup, though to be fair to the Indians, they're such good players of spin that Murali's never really been a mortal threat. But the man has more than four hundred wickets at twenty-three runs apiece at an economy-rate under four runs an over. If you were picking the bowling attack for a World IX you'd pencil him in right after Glenn McGrath.

So speaking strictly as an alien, I want to see an Australia-Sri Lanka final. And should the Sri Lankans win, it'll be nice if they don't take the trophy off to be blessed by the Buddhist clergy like they did the last time they were champions. Murali, Farveez, Atapattu, Malinga and the rest of the team do their best for Sri Lanka, not for some majoritarian Sinhala Buddhist state. Nationalisms that exalt a dominant faith dishonour the collective effort that makes team games special. They should have no place in cricket.

	Shoaib and Asif were the Pakistan squad's death-or-glory artillery boys. Then their habits got to them © AFP

In this the150th anniversary year of the rebellion of 1857, a good way of understanding the Pakistani squad is to see it as a company of turbulent sepoys. The Pakistan Cricket Board is the palace, racked by coups and intrigue. There's no real constituted authority, no legitimizing election (this being a pre-modern state) and every now and then the portly JCO in nominal charge of Pak Company, is challenged by an ambitious deputy.

Their dashing colonel who, some years ago, had whipped them into a fighting unit with a strange mix of paternalism, coercion, egotism and personal example, and successfully led them into battle, is now retired but watches from the sidelines. He doesn't approve of the foreign mercenary who has taken the sepoys in hand and sometimes allows his patrician exasperation with his talented but plebeian proteges, to show.

Looking at this endearing mob of M.A.S.H. style misfits, you wouldn't know that it is, in fact, a company of elite soldiers, first-rate fighting men. Those two big fellows over there in glitzy mufti, shamming injury, and suspected of emptying some dull opiate to the drains till a few weeks ago, were the squad's death-or-glory artillery boys, its big guns. Then their habits got to them. Now they're convalescing, poor chaps, certain to miss the big battles coming up.

But the company is so crammed with talented, testosterone-driven heroes that their absence shouldn't necessarily hamstring its forthcoming campaign. Subedar Major I.U. Haq has great phlegm and can hold a position forever. Lance Naik Afridi, urf Shaheed, (sometimes reduced to the ranks for recklessness beyond the call of duty), can turn a skirmish into a rout single-handed, but it is never clear whether his actions will cause Pak Company to be the router or the routee. Naib Subedar Yousuf, always a fine marksman, has in the past year become infallible, his conversion ratio of shots to hits nearly perfect. Subedar Y. Khan, a fine strategic thinker and no mean shot himself, was long ago singled out by Colonel I. Khan (no relation) as officer material.

One of the recurrent frustrations of Pak Company has been its inexplicable failure to defeat the Light Blues in world tourneys despite defeating them in other, bilateral battles. Subedar Major Haq has been working on this with Pak Company's new secret weapon: the prayer huddle. This formation's solitary drawback is the possibility of being ambushed from behind while bonding in faith. Naib Subedar Yousuf, however, has solved that problem by suggesting that Sepoy Kaneria, surplus to requirement in the prayer huddle as Yousuf himself once was, ought to act as a look-out.

On the face of it, Pak Company shouldn't have a prayer this time round: it comes to the tournament without its fastest and best bowlers, uncertainty about its opening pair, and a recurrent tendency to come unglued in moments of stress. Colonel Khan, who is an expert witness as far as Pakistan is concerned, thinks that the team's preparation for the World Cup has been the worst ever that he can recall and I'm not going to argue with him.

But if I was a betting man looking for big returns on a small investment, I'd put some money on Inzamam's men. The Pakistan team has two things going for it:

a) The absence of Shoaib Akhtar is a huge bonus whether the team knows it or not. The operatic absurdness of his behavour subverted the authority of the coach and deranged the whole team.

b) Pak Company is never short of talent. It's selectors behave like fickle recruiting sergeants, drafting in gifted eagle-eyed rookies and then dumping them after a skirmish or two. A case in point is Sepoy A. Mehmood, a fine all-terrain fighter, forced to seek foreign employment because he inexplicably fell out of favour. Most teams would find their cupboards bare after such prodigal behaviour, but Pakistan still has all the fast bowling talent it needs and in Afridi, Razzaq, Mehmood and Shoaib Malik, it has a string of ODI all-rounders who can, when the stars align and when they remember to put their brains in gear, turn matches on their own. It goes without saying that in Younis Khan, Inzamam-ul-Haq and Mohammad Yousuf, the team has batsmen of real class.

Pakistan's largest liability is its captain, who seems to have outsourced inspiration and leadership to that offshore Entity, the great Call Centre in the Sky. Contrast the way Inzamam blundered about, clueless, in the team's confrontation with Darrell Hair, with Ranatunga's clinical, ruthless defence of Muralitharan when he was called for chucking in Australia. Whatever the rights and wrongs of those confrontations, Ranatunga was in charge of events while Inzamam was hostage to them. If World Cup rules (like those of the Davis Cup) allowed non-playing captains and if Colonel I. Khan was willing to fill that bill, Pakistan would a real contender for the Cup. Even without a first-rate captain, Pak Company remains a serious threat to every other team in the competition.

	'If this West Indies team wins the World Cup, international cricket will have to take its temperature to check if it’s sick' © Getty Images

This current West Indian squad has to be understood as a cast of characters in a sad fairy tale called Lara and the Eleven Dwarfs (if you count the twelfth man); sad, because there doesn’t seem to be a happy end in sight. Regardless of home advantage, if this team wins the World Cup, international cricket will have to take its temperature to check if it’s sick. I’ll be thrilled if the Windies win, because cricket needs a successful West Indies side to feel normal, but Lara’s team (no pun intended) is so second rate that if it gets to the final, world cricket ought to worry about how competitive it is. (Though, come to think of it, India won the 1983 Cup with a team that bore a passing resemblance to the present West Indian outfit. It was a team with one alpha male champion and a bunch of bit players who just happened to play out of their skins.)

I grew up in a world where West Indian supremacy was an unchanging fact of life. When Australia defeated the West Indies in 1995, it was the first test series the team had lost in fifteen years. Now that’s dominance; even more remarkably, despite this near-endless reign, they weren’t loathed. The rest of the cricket world actually liked them.

The three Ws were a bit before my time, but their legend endured and their successors, the ones I actually saw play, were epic enough to satisfy the most stringent fan. Sobers, Kanhai, Lloyd, Hall, Griffith, Gibbs made up my first instalment of heroes and then, in 1974 on their tour of India, I saw a new trinity of gods make its entrance: Gordon Greenidge, Viv Richards and Andy Roberts. Lloyd was captain by now and we haven’t even mentioned Roy Fredericks, Alvin Kallicharran, Lawrence Rowe and, not least, Michael Holding (who debuted the next year). The Caribbean assembly line just kept turning out titans: Malcolm Marshall, Desmond Haynes, Joel Garner, Curtley Ambrose, Richie Richardson, Courtney Walsh and so on.

What went wrong? I think I know what happened to the West Indies, though the more important question, why it happened, is a mystery. For some reason, the islands stopped producing fast bowlers. If you look at the West Indian squad, its batting is okay. Not stellar, but serviceable. There’s Lara, of course, (who ought to be pickled because he embodies West Indian batsmanship in all its flourishing glory and he doesn’t seem to have any successors), but there’s also Ramnaresh Sarwan and Chris Gayle and Shivnarine Chanderpaul, who, once you get past the hideous stance, is a resilient bat.

	Oh ... for a Viv Richards © Getty Images

The trouble is that great West Indian sides were defined not by their batsmen but by their fast bowlers. Important as Viv Richards, Gordon Greenidge, Clive Lloyd, Alvin Kallicharran etc. were to their sides, the fast men — Michael Holding, Andy Roberts and Malcolm Marshall — were more crucial still. And I mean ‘fast’ bowlers, not fast-medium or medium-fast or medium. The reason Courtney Walsh kept going as long as he did was because as a loyal servant of West Indian cricket, he tried to buy time for the islands to produce someone to whom he could pass the fast bowling flame. But no one turned up.

The present squad has one bowler, Jerome Taylor, who is genuinely quick. There’s Corey Collymore, a decent fast-medium bowler with some experience; Dwayne Bravo, a promising all-rounder but no more than medium-fast, and then there’s Daren Powell, a twenty-eight year old rookie of no great promise, who is billed as fast-medium. A team that used to have a battery of four quicks, with a couple of others, equally fast, on the bench, doesn’t have a single exceptional bowler. Sri Lanka has a scarier pace attack. Mashrafe Murtaza and Sreesanth would fancy their chances (given the right passport) of forcing their way into this West Indian team.

The squad has three players of Indian origin: Chanderpaul, Sarwan and Denesh Ramdin, the wicket-keeper. That’s unusual. ‘East Indian’ players always figured in West Indian teams — Sonny Ramadhin, Rohan Kanhai, Alvin Kallicharran, Raphick Jumadeen to name a few — but in ones or (rarely) twos. One speculative explanation for this larger presence is that the poor rural Indian communities of Guyana and Trinidad supply an increasing proportion of West Indian cricketers because they haven’t yet been seduced by American television and the NBA. If that’s true, it might explain the decline of West Indian fast bowling because India and its diaspora aren’t exactly famous for producing tearaway quicks.

On the other hand, I’ve also heard West Indian commentators rubbish the idea that Afro-Caribbean youngsters, having found new role models in black American basketball players, are abandoning cricket en masse. A lack of infrastructure, arguments about central contracts, the difficulties inherent in managing a team made up of citizens from several nations are some of the many causes cited for the absence of good fast bowlers.

So there isn’t one persuasive theory for the extinction of West Indian quicks any more than there is a reasonable explanation for the recent awfulness of West Indian fielding. Right through the Sixties and Seventies, the West Indies were the best fielding side in the world. Sobers, Lloyd, Richards, Greenidge set very high standards when it came to litheness and sure-handedness and speed. Recent West Indian squads have been almost comically inept in the field. How has this come to pass is even more baffling than the decline in the quality of their fast-bowling, because most people assume (perhaps wrongly) that fielding skills, based as they are upon a culture of outdoor sport and athleticism, ought to be more resistant to the fluctuations in form that plague batsmen and bowlers.

I hope the West Indian team has a great World Cup: which is to say, I hope it gets to the semi-finals. Getting that far would be a coup. Getting further would be a schoolboy romance: wonderful for nostalgists like me, but a poor advertisement for contemporary cricket.

Postscript:

In response to the post on Australia, I read more than one comment making the point that the West Indies, who dominated cricket before the Australians took over, were as arrogant, thuggish and verbal as the Australians. A reader reminded all of us of the way the fast bowling quartet used to demoralize opposing batsmen by injuring and intimidating them. As an Indian fan I need no reminders: I remember vividly Bedi throwing in the towel with half the Indian team left to bat.

But, with respect, there is a difference. And Sunil Gavaskar, who, helmet-less, scored more runs against more West Indian fast bowlers than anyone else in the world has testified to this difference over and over again. Malcolm Marshall, Michael Holding, Joel Garner, Curtley Ambrose, Andy Roberts and Courtney Walsh let the ball do the talking. A look, as Gavaskar is fond of saying, a narrowed stare and they were back to their marks, leaving the batsman wondering anxiously if there wasn't a safer way of making a living than taking guard against this lot. Perhaps it's a cultural thing, but like Gavaskar, I find the sight of Lee or McGrath (or Sreesanth) following through all the way up to the batsman, snarling obscenities, unpleasant, unnecessary and a form of sharp practice. I like Sreesanth but I find his elaborate aggro as a bowler ridiculous: he doesn't even look the part. If he wants a role model in the business of menace, he'd be better off studying archival footage of Malcolm Marshall. (I have to confess, though, that I find Sreesanth's bat-twirling, hip pumping routine as a batsman wholly wonderful, specially as a response to abusive bowlers like Andre Nel.)

An earlier version of this post published in The Telegraph, Kolkata, is available here

	Like any good political machine that operates on the margins of the straight-and-narrow, the Australians have the rhetoric of respectability pat (Click to enlarge) © Getty Images

Cricket sides are creatures with personalities. If the World Cup is cricket’s greatest stage, the teams are its characters. And if we’re going to work our way through the cast, it’s appropriate to begin with the hero of the last Cup and the one before that: Australia.

Australia is a protection racket gone legit. You can see glimpses of the lawlessness in Ricky Ponting’s early delinquency, in Shane Warne and Mark Waugh’s brush with bookies, in Glenn McGrath’s snarling unloveliness, in the constant sledging, the occasional racial slur (Darren Lehmann’s ‘black c__ts’ for example), in the pleasure the Australians take in their rep as bully boys. When I watch Ponting spit into the palms of his hands and rub them together, some shabby-genteel part of me cringes, and a stereotype is reinforced. With the exception of Adam Gilchrist (whose popularity shows you that with a sprinkling of good humour, the Aussies could have been liked, not just admired) they feel like political operators with knuckle-dusters, conducting a dirty but legal election campaign.

But like any good political machine that operates on the margins of the straight-and-narrow, the Australians have the rhetoric of respectability pat. A year or so ago, Ponting began to make pious noises about Australians setting standards of good behaviour on the field. A kinder, gentler Australian team is about as likely as the Godfather giving himself up to the olive oil trade, but Ponting knows that in these politically correct times it’s important to talk the talk. At its best the Australian team is a mafia with flair: watching Warne, McGrath and Gilchrist hoodwink, harry and hammer the opposition over the last decade has been the great spectacle of contemporary cricket.

But with McGrath in decline, and without Warne and Brett Lee, the Australians seem duller, their bowling seems efficient rather than devastating, almost South African in its sameness. Mike Hussey is a batting phenomenon: his runs, his average put him in the highest company, but there is an ordinariness, an anonymity to his presence at the crease which makes his record even more remarkable than it is. Matthew Hayden, Hussey and Ponting are fine batsmen by any measure but where Gilchrist’s genial aggression makes me grin even when it’s India that’s suffering, these three come across as bouncers working you over, not debonair bandits pulling off a heist. If the Australians were to be cast in a movie, they’d be Al Capone’s gang in The Untouchables, and I’d be rooting for Costner to bust them.

	Shah Rukh Khan and Priyanka Chopra: cricket fans or simply Pepsi models? © AFP

Midweek this week, NDTV 24/7 carried an item about the Indian team on the eve of its departure to the West Indies. Viewers were shown Shahrukh Khan spraying fizzy drink about with a selection of Indian players in blue uniforms watching. To start with I thought that this was some manner of farewell bash that Shahrukh had hosted for the team which NDTV was running as a celebrity news segment. (Aside: Shahrukh looked little in a shot with Yuvraj Singh looming behind him. Small and sort of unsparky.)

Then Priyanka Chopra turned up on screen and declared that she wanted the team to win the World Cup. After voicing this unexceptionable sentiment, she pumped her fist and went: “Rah, Rah, India etc.” in a canned way and I thought, hey, that sounds familiar. My children clarified: the cheer-leading lines were from Pepsi’s cricket commercials. The fizz being hosed about wasn’t sparkling wine but a new drink called Pepsi Gold. Pepsi, the sponsor of the Indian team, was cannily launching a product and milking its cricket cow at the same time. I understand why Pepsi would want to do this, but what was NDTV thinking? Why would a news channel, specially one that sees sobriety and a sense of proportion as its USP, be running a promotional event as news?

There’s a general problem here. I called a friend in NDTV who explained that it was getting harder, while covering entertainment and sport, to draw a line between news manufactured by sponsors and ‘real’ news because nearly every event in these areas was stage-managed or underwritten by some company or the other. It’s certainly getting harder for the viewer (or reader) of news. The Times of India acknowledges that it sells editorial space, only it doesn’t tell the reader which parts of the ‘news’ that he’s reading have been paid for. I’m not suggesting that NDTV or any other channel gets paid for coverage: what I am saying is that in a cutthroat environment, the fear of being left out has television news rooms aiming cameras at trashy non-events.

Much better to watch cricket footage that you know has been paid for. There’s a glorious Nike commercial playing on Indian television channels, set in a crowded Indian street. The traffic’s stilled by a snarl-up; boys swarm up buses and trucks to play on their roofs. Sreesanth gets out of a car to watch, an elephant fields, a truck-top batsmen is hit by a rising ball where his box would have been, the traffic starts to move but an intrepid, fired-up lad runs in and, heedless of the pitch that moves beneath his feet, launches himself into his pre-delivery leap. The frame freezes mid-leap, leaving the boy suspended in air: Just Do It.

It's a terrific little film. Currently, the cricket in the commercials feels more real than the cricket in the news.