Men in Black: Eyes on the Prize. © Getty Images

For adults, watching cricket is a kind of schoolboy dreaming. It offers the possibility of perfect resolutions…not just a happy ending but a perfect happy ending, the sort that real life doesn't deliver. Actually, nor does cricket. But on the 24th, it did.

The Sri Lanka-New Zealand match wasn't a great one-day match, because it wasn't much of a contest, but for the spectator who'd picked the right side (like me) it was the most perfectly satisfying game to watch. Had this been one of Wodehouse's cricket stories, Mahela Jayawardene would have replaced Mike Jackson and the book would have been called Mahela at Wrykyn which doesn't sound as snappy as the original (Mike at Wrykyn) but it'll do.

Our hero, Mahela, is sitting in his study pencilling in the team for the match against Wrykyn's rival school, Sedleigh. Jayasuriya to open: that's a no-brainer, but Tharanga? Not only is he in a junior form but lots of the prefects are backing Atapattu who's a fine bat, a senior man in the Sixth, who had skippered the team before Mahela replaced him, so the team sheet is a tricky business. But Mahela holds his nerve and pencils in Tharanga's name.

The next day the cricket match goes like a Boy's Own Paper fantasy. Mahela wins the toss and makes the right call, to bat. Tharanga repays Mahela's confidence by scoring an aggressive fifty that gives the innings momentum despite early wickets. When he falls, MJ's in first gear, but by the time Wrykyn's innings ends, he's smacking Sedleigh's fast men to all parts. Just think of it: Mahela calls right, backs the right man and scores an unbeaten century at faster than a run a ball to set up a massive win.

The reason Wodehouse didn't write this novel is because he specialized in plausible school stories centred on cricket and this one's plot line was too good to be true. There's no conflict, no tension, and Mahela walks on water. But you know what? Fans are coarse spectators: they'll take all the good news they can get.

And listen, I've been thinking about the final. Ponting wins the toss and puts Sri Lanka in on a fast Barbadian track. Big mistake. Jayasuriya and Sanagakkara failed at the right time, the match before. So they're due big scores and they get them. Then Tharanga and Mahela fool everyone by beating the odds and doing it all over again. Lightning strikes twice, Atlantis surfaces and McGrath goes for 60 in eight overs. 289 for 2 this time. By the time the innings ends, it's past my bedtime and I sleep through Murali and Malinga's Punch and Judy show. When I wake up in the morning, they've won.

	Hawk-Eye extrapolates the trajectory and bounce of the ball to see if it was going to hit the stumps or not © Cricinfo Ltd

(The two-and-a-half months I've spent writing this blog and reading the comments responding to the posts helped me construct a stereotype of the contemporary fan. Here it is.)

One fan and a fielding position

I can remember the year I discovered that I had the wrong idea about deep fine-leg. I had played cricket right through my childhood and followed it enthusiastically on the radio afterwards (and at Feroz Shah Kotla whenever a Test came round), but I didn't know my fielding positions. I thought deep-fine leg stood near the boundary just a few degrees to the left of the keeper. I thought long-leg was deep fine-leg. Why was I so deluded? Because when batsmen glanced the ball past the lunging left hand of the wicket-keeper, radio commentators often used that ready-made phrase, "and he's tickled it fine, just wide of the keeper." Ergo, deep fine-leg.

The point of the story is not my ignorance (naturally) but the holes in the cricketing knowledge of my generation of fans. I can hear readers say, "speak for yourself, loser, I knew the difference between long-leg and deep fine-leg before I was five". I freely admit my special and particular stupidity, but I still think that the generation of fans who grew up after the mid-80s are better informed about cricket that those of us who were socialised into cricket in earlier decades.

The rest of the article can be read on The Week's website, here

	Chaminda Vaas had the game wrapped up in three overs of nagging swing © AFP

Why does watching Sri Lanka win give non-Sri Lankans so much pleasure? It's not because they're the little guys. They're not. The Sri Lankans won the World Cup eleven years ago: they've been big boys in the one-day game for over a decade now. No, we love watching the Sri Lankans win not out of chivalry, but because they're the new West Indians. Their crowds make more musical noise than Caribbean spectators ever did and their players do the gay cavalier business to the manner born.

Three of these guys are so old they should be playing veterans' charity matches. Vaas, Murali Muralitharan and Sanath Jayasuriya helped Sri Lanka win the Big One in the last millennium for god's sake! Sanath's even retired once. But instead of sitting on their rocking chairs waiting for their pension cheques, they're in the West Indies, terrorizing a new generation of cricketing infants.

Who can forget Vaas's return catch to dismiss Robin Uthappa? Young Uthappa decided to go after the slow-bowling ancient, whacked him for a couple of fours and then swatted another ball (that flat-batted straight hit that modern batting brutes so favour) only to have Vaas catch it with both hands on his follow through. Exit, bewildered youth, sent on his way with a few instructions.

If Vaas favours the cold steely look, Muralitharan is the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of modern cricket: like the giggling guru, he just never stops grinning. Watching him frolic with delight after taking catches in the outfield as the Sri Lankans picked off long-faced Indian batsmen, I wondered why Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar and the rest didn't smile more. Why did they always look like oppressed Atlases holding up a billion people?

And then there's Jayasuriya: he has held Sri Lanka's batting together for a decade now and he has bowled more balls in one-day cricket than most specialist bowlers. But does he go around looking as if he's in the trough end of a manic-depressive cycle? No. He gets hit by Shane Bond (consensually the most fearsome fast bowler on view in this tournament) and then takes the Kiwi attack apart in trademark fashion. I look at him and think, if he can carry on batting exactly the way he has always done at the top of the order, why is Tendulkar batting like a barnacle at number four?

Nor do the young ones show any sign of being mass-produced mediocrities: as an Indian fan I've seen a lot of those in the last two years. Lasith Malinga's so wonderfully strange they should freeze him in his delivery stride and suspend him in formaldehyde for posterity. Chamara Silva is the kind of young batsman Team India would die for. Even the middling Sri Lankans, neither young nor old, are remarkable. Sangakkara is on the brink of batting greatness, he's a fine wicket keeper and he talks such a good game that most countries would have fast-tracked him into captaincy by now. Dilhara Fernando, after years of waywardness is bowling fast and straight again.

They won this one without Malinga, but they'll need him against the Australians. I'll be rooting for the Sri Lankans to win for many reasons and one of them is that Sri Lanka is the only team on show that brings the variety of Test match bowling to limited overs cricket: medium, fast-medium, fast, plus left-arm orthodox and right arm off spin, absurdly unorthodox! Blond highlights, round-arm thunderbolts, leg-spinning off-spinners, deadly old men: weird and wonderful is what they are—it's why we love them.

	In the 1980s, Kerry Packer signed up young players such as Steve Waugh on lucrative contracts with his company PBL. India, circa 2008? © The Cricketer International

Whether Subhash Chandra of Zee follows through with his Packerite circus or not, it's on the cards that sooner or later someone will. Someone certainly should.

The present structure of Indian cricket is a parody of India's political system. The provincial associations represent India's states. Each has its own constitution and a system of elections based on affiliated cricket clubs. Representatives of the provincial associations (some states like Mumbai, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh have more than one for historical reasons, and there are first-class associations like the Railways and the Services that aren't geographically defined) in turn elect the BCCI's chief officials. So, on the face of it, India has a pyramidal system of cricket administration based on indirect election. The democratic virtue of this federal system is rendered even more saintly by the fact that the world's richest cricket market is administered by honorary officials, men who work for the love of the game.

Naturally it doesn't work that way in practice. Indian cricket's electoral structure consists of rotten boroughs owned by local grandees. Often a local business family will dominate the state association for decades. The affairs of the Delhi and District Cricket Association have been shadowed by charges of intimidation and mismanagement for years now. Elections to the BCCI, the apex body of Indian cricket, have been accompanied by a chorus of allegations about rigging, gerrymandering and accreditation.

The net result of this way of doing things is that Indian cricket, at every level, is run by people who use a narrowly based, easily manipulated system of elections to win positions of power in a very rich sport. They often have day jobs, and since the positions they vie for are honorary, they have to find their rewards in opaque, unaccountable ways. So the first thing to remember when contemplating change is that the elections which legitimize the present system have more in common with the rigged aristocratic faction fights of 18th century England than the mass politics that universal adult franchise brought in its wake in republican India. This isn't a struggle between democracy and commerce; it's a choice between patronage and Old Corruption on the one hand, and sponsorship and media conglomeration on the other.

If cricket-board elections have traditionally been one of the justifications of the system, the other great source of legitimation has been the powerful idea that the structure of the domestic game represents territorial affiliation and loyalty. First-class teams are generally organized on a territorial principle on the theory that they harness sub-national loyalty. This is a perfectly good idea in theory, but it hasn't worked for the last quarter of a century. Nobody watches Ranji Trophy matches anymore. The rule that players must have residence qualifications for the team they represent is based on the assumption that Mumbaikars want to cheer their own, not some alien mercenary. Again, this would be an intellectually defensible rule if Mumbaikars turned out to support their own, but they don't and so it isn't.

A league based on team franchises and open to foreign players is a good idea in principle. I can see no disadvantage to a league where Ricky Ponting and Mashrafe Mortaza and Muttiah Muralitharan turn out for a Twenty-20 tournament called the Wipro Cup or a 50-over league sponsored by Tata. It would give Indian spectators a club league to follow in the same way as English spectators follow the careers of sides like Arsenal and Chelsea, packed with brilliant foreign recruits. Athletes like Ponting would force Indian players to lift their game. It's also a 'just' idea: it's unfair that fine players like Shane Bond and Mohammad Ashraful make a fraction of the money that Sehwag or Yuvraj have come to take for granted simply because they have fewer consuming countrymen watching them on television.

(The one danger that a league like this poses is this: if a pirate league manages to run away with Twenty20 cricket and the one day game, the revenues from limited overs cricket will no longer be available to subsidize the longer game. Zee's proposal shows no interest in either first class cricket or Test matches.)

Zee's plan to create a parallel tournament with teams made up of foreign players, young talent and Indian stars is part serious, part window-dressing. The serious part of the plan is the proposal to create team franchises after the pattern of baseball and football, owned (presumably) by business people. This is the first-class cricket team as a squad of 'mercenaries' hired for their skills, in place of the first-class side as regional champions chosen from the available sons of the soil. The big move here is the plan to have players from outside India which symbolically makes a break with the idea of a league organized on territorial principles.

The idea that more than half the players in each team will be young talent or that these franchises will be nurseries of Indian talent is a PR move. Clubs trying to build themselves into brands, to attract a fan following, to merchandize their stars will hire the best players they can, though they'll probably sign enough players from the region in which they're based to encourage a sense of solidarity and assuage local feeling.

Can a bid like Zee's work if the BCCI sets its face against it? It's unlikely that the BCCI will tolerate a challenge to its monopoly, so we should assume that Zee's version of Packer's circus will begin life as an insurgent, unofficial league. Local players who sign up will face the threat of excommunication by the BCCI, which would mean forfeiting any chance of representing India in tests or ODIs. Players from other Test-playing countries who sign up with Zee will find the BCCI using its very considerable leverage in the ICC to get their parent boards to whip them into line. At this point, the first line of defence for contracted players would be an appeal to the courts in India and elsewhere in defence of their right to livelihood.

If these players failed to satisfy the courts that the action of the official boards was an unreasonable restraint on trade, the circus's ability to attract talent would depend on two things. First, the amount of money players are offered and the number of years they're offered contracts for. Any player signing up will be looking for years of financial security. Zee's talk about prize money worth a million dollars will be attractive, but the cricketers who sign up for the six teams that will be the kernel of this parallel league will be looking less at prize money than guaranteed salaries.

	'More important than the money will be Zee's ability to deliver two or three major contemporary Indian players, not has-beens like Vinod Kambli or Ajay Jadeja or players at the margins of the international team like Murali Karthik or Ramesh Powar' © AFP

But even more important than the money will be Zee's ability to deliver two or three major contemporary Indian players, not has-beens like Vinod Kambli or Ajay Jadeja or players at the margins of the international team like Murali Karthik or Ramesh Powar. Zee needs a couple of Indian giants whose presence will make the gamble feel like a bona fide business venture. We can rule out Dravid: as India's captain, he has nothing to gain from being part of an insurrection. And all other things being equal, I can't see Tendulkar, Kumble, Ganguly and Sehwag abandoning (even temporarily, assuming that Zee and the BCCI settle the dispute as Packer eventually did) the glory of the international game for Subhash Chandra's gold.

But should other things not remain equal, then the Zee venture has an outside chance of getting off the ground. This is where the current politics of Indian cricket opens a window of opportunity for Chandra: were the selectors to take their cue from the BCCI and 'rest' senior players (Tendulkar, Ganguly, Sehwag, Kumble and Laxman or any combination of these) from the tour of Bangladesh, these veterans would read their exclusion as a public humiliation by a vindictive, buck-passing board. In that event, it's just possible that a risk-taker like Ganguly might unfurl the standard of revolt and others like Sehwag and (who knows) even the great Tendulkar might rally to the cause.

Tendulkar doesn't need Zee's money, but exclusion from the Bangladesh tour as punishment for not giving his all in the World Cup will be a slight that touches his honour. If the former coach and the present captain, if the journalists, administrators, selectors, and fans who form Indian cricket's new and vocal lobby for youth have their way, this coming season could go down in Indian cricket history as an epochal year: the Summer of Seven.

This post is adapted from an article that appeared in the Telegraph, Kolkata, which can be read here.

	'The problem with Chappell wasn't his candour, it was his propensity to intrigue' © Getty Images

One of the recurrent themes in the gabfest about Chappell's departure is the inability of Indians to deal with straight talk. In this view the robust candour that comes naturally to Australians is something that thin-skinned, hero-worshipping, neurotically sensitive desis find hard to deal with. Sanjay Manjrekar had a version of this view in an audio interview on cricinfo.com . Having hired a foreign coach, he said, the Indians should have braced themselves for the frankness that was likely to come their way, even if it was alien to their nature, but they didn't. Chappell held up the mirror to Indian cricket and Indian cricket wasn't brave enough to look at the ugly truth. Also, says Manjrekar, the storm over Chappell is beside the point because cricket coaches don't make much difference to the team's fortunes. It's the players who are responsible for victory and defeat.

That's good to know.

Actually India did have a foreign coach who dealt quite well with his team for nearly five years. John Wright's tenure didn't make the Indian team a squad of world-beaters but it did rather better than this team has done under Chappell. But Wright was a creature of the team's senior players, argue some, while Chappell refused to accept that individual cricketers could be bigger than the team. Chalk up another one for the straight-talking Aussie, the coach as lion-tamer.

This is orientalist nonsense.

It can be plausibly argued that the problem with Chappell wasn't his candour, it was his propensity to intrigue. Several cricket journalists I've read or spoken to (and this includes Chappell's protagonists) testify to his habit of sending sms messages to journalists leaking his views on players, selection and policy. The players who disliked him complain about how manipulative he was. They might be wrong and self-interested but it's odd that Indian journalists and commentators should find the stereotype of the straight-talking Australian and the truth-denying Indian easier to credit than the chorus of allegations that Chappell's preferred mode for communicating with the media was the modern equivalent of harem whispers.

Just as odd is the 'balanced' view that equates criticism of Chappell and his methods with a willful blindness to the structural problems of Indian cricket. I find no difficulty in holding in my head (at the same time) two related but distinct ideas: 1) that the BCCI presides over a mess and 2) that Chappell is a terrible coach. The need for structural reform and the necessity of making the best of what you currently have aren't contradictory goals. A good coach will have a vision of the future, but his primary job is in the here and now. Chappell had poor results in the here and now when he coached the national side in arguably the worst organized cricket system in the world (India) and he had indifferent results when he coached a provincial side in the best organized cricket system in the world (Australia). It seems to me that Chappell is the constant here.

Clint Eastwood was a great star who returned to the movies to direct others in hugely successful films. Greg Chappell as coach is Clint Eastwood in age…only without the hits. Speaking for myself, I'm delighted he's gone.

	'Women's games that can't be sexualised, can't be sold to the networks and the paying public' © AFP

The Nawab of Pataudi thinks cricket is a man's game.

The occasion for this insight was the launch of a book that chronicled India's career in one-day cricket, timed to coincide with the build-up to the 2007 World Cup. The panel assembled to discuss the book had the Nawab as the moderator. Ten minutes into the discussion (which he had thus far switched about in his deft, relaxed, posh way) came the evening's Male Moment; Pataudi turned towards the cricket editor of the Hindustan Times, Kadambari Murali, and asked:

"So, as a woman, how do you see cricket? D'you see it as a manly game…?"

Kadambari Murali, who was different from the other five panelists in being neither male nor middle-aged, made the only possible response.

"I don't approach cricket as a woman. I report on it as a professional journalist," she said. Or words to that effect.

Sitting in the audience I thought that Kadambari, who is a first rate cricket journalist, handled Pataudi's incredulity at the thought of a woman covering cricket with poise and grace. I mean, "manly game"? I haven't come across that phrase since the time I stopped reading GA Henty's Victorian stories about plucky young men in high school. I thought it was a daft thing to say. Daft, anachronistic, patronising…

And true.

Is cricket co-ed?

A month or so ago, I read on Cricinfo that India had beaten Australia in a quadrangular one-day tournament in Chennai. India won with an over to spare. J Sharma opened India's innings and scored an unbeaten century that saw India home. The reason you haven't heard of a J Sharma at the top of India's batting order is because this was a women's tournament. The last time we won a series against Australia in India, the country went mad -- Harbhajan Singh mutated into a national hero and VVS Laxman temporarily became god. Somehow I don't think Jaya Sharma is going to become a household name. She wouldn't have become one even if India had gone on to win the tournament. Because cricket, as the Nawab suggested, is a man's game.

This isn't literally true. Women play cricket; women like Sharda Ugra and Kadambari Murali and Nishi Narayanan report on it with insight and distinction for well-known magazines, newspapers and websites; I've heard two women, one West Indian and the other Indian do running commentary on international matches; and women routinely turn out to watch one-day cricket in stadiums. But none of this disproves the NOP (Nawab of Pataudi) Assumption: Women collectively, women as a sex don't play cricket or understand it or like it. And when they do, people (women included) don't take them seriously.

Why is cricket gendered?

This is the wrong question. It should be, why is nearly all sport gendered? The only game I can think of where the spectator, regardless of sex, is as likely to watch women play as men, is tennis. Alone amongst international sports, team or individual, the women's version of the game is as lucrative and popular as the men's. Maria Sharapova makes more money than nearly all the men in the game. The great symbolic acknowledgement of this parity arrived this year when Wimbledon announced that it was going to pay women the same prize money as men.

	'Anjum Chopra, a former India captain and an active international, did wonders for the profile of women's cricket in India by appearing on a cricket talk show. She was articulate, knowledgeable and, most importantly, attractive. ' © AFP

Boys and men routinely play team sports more often than girls and women do, and even where women play organised, competitive team sport it's always the male version that is the greater public spectacle. Cricket's no different. Volleyball, hockey and basketball are team sports that lots of women play but with the partial exception of basketball in US television markets, no one wants to pay to watch, and commercial sponsorship is hard to find.

Why does this happen? A large part of the explanation has to be historical. The world's team sports (with the exception of America's) were all given their modern form in 19th century England. That nursery of empire, the English public school, appropriated rugby, football and cricket and made them exercises in 'character' building, little theatres in which the future soldiers, civil servants and clergymen of the Raj were taught deference, leadership, hierarchy, and teamwork: In short, the skills and virtues that helped male Britons run the world.

So it isn't surprising that a game shaped by Victorian definitions of maleness (the 'manliness' that Pataudi spoke of) is a poor fit for contemporary Indian women. As far as the costume of cricket is concerned this is literally true. The batsman's rig, for example, is like a modern take on knightly masculinity. In place of armour you have pads, gloves, arm guards, the 'box' and the helmet, that modern accessory that ironically makes the contemporary batsman look more than ever like a medieval jouster.

Sex and the Sporting Girl

Appearances matter. Women's teams from Australia, England and New Zealand used to play in skirts (the Indian women have always, for reasons of modesty, worn trousers), but given pads and shin guards this was clearly inconvenient, so they switched to trousers. Putting a woman into standard cricket kit is a bit like cross-dressing: She becomes a cricketing man. And if cricketing gear is going to make women look like men, why would you watch less powerful nearly-men play, when you could watch the genuine article, the real thing?

I don't think it's a coincidence that women's tennis has always flirted with knickers and nipples and necklines, that Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova wear tiny frocks that make it quite clear to their audiences that they're women, not feebler versions of Rafael Nadal, that Sania Mirza and Venus Williams wear elaborate earrings on court: Women's tennis, unlike women's cricket, has no interest in unisex clothing. The sex appeal of women's tennis is an important way in which it has differentiated itself from the male game and is a crucial element in its success. From 'Gorgeous Gussie' Moran to Evonne Goolagong Cawley to Maria Sharapova, women's tennis has drawn attention to its womanliness and its audiences have responded with enthusiasm.

There's a flip side to this which isn't pretty: Women players who don't fit the templates of sexiness that marketing executives work with make much less money than women who do. So Venus Williams who is black (and not Madison Avenue's definition of a sex goddess) will never see a tenth of the money that Anna Kournikova, who never won a tournament of any consequence but who was blonde and leggy, did. And Martina Navratilova, arguably the greatest player in the history of the women's game, never made any real money out of endorsements because she came out as a lesbian and looked butch.

There are team sports which have gone down the same route. In 1998 the secretary of the Federation of International Volleyball concluded that a snugger costume would help the game find a larger audience. This meant that women volleyballers began wearing tight little shorts that showed a lot more bottom. A few years later in 2004, Sepp Blatter, President of FIFA, used the volleyball precedent to suggest a way forward for women's football. In a newspaper interview he said that women's football needed to attract sponsors from the cosmetics and fashion industry and the way to do this was to imitate women's volleyball by changing to more 'feminine' uniforms. Blatter's definition of 'feminine' wasn't complicated: "Tighter shorts, for example. In volleyball the women also wear other uniforms than the men. Pretty women are playing football today. Excuse me for saying that."

In the early Seventies when women's cricket in took off in India, international matches drew large crowds. A game between India and the West Indies in Patna attracted 25,000 spectators. In a short essay on the history of the women's game, Shubhangi Kulkarni suggests that the large crowds that greeted white touring teams had something to do with the interest Indian spectators had in the novelty of cricket played in skirts.

The pioneers of the women's game, players like Shanta Rangaswamy, Diana Edulji and Sandhya Agarwal did become famous but this wasn't enough to keep their sport in the public eye. India in the Seventies and Eighties wasn't the sort of place where promoters and marketing mavens packaged sport the way ESPN/STAR is trying to package the Premier Hockey League, with large doses of regional machismo. And the nature of cricket makes it hard to make women on the field look sexy. But whether we approve or not, that's the road women's cricket will have to take to find an audience for itself.

Anjum Chopra, a former India captain and an active international, did wonders for the profile of women's cricket in India by appearing on a cricket talk show. She was articulate, knowledgeable and, most importantly, attractive. Some face recognition through television shows and costumes that make it clear that Anjum Chopra isn't Rahul Dravid by another name might help women's cricket top that zenith of 1997 when eighty thousand people in Eden Gardens watched Australia play New Zealand in the final of the World Cup. Or maybe not. Perhaps the nature of cricket makes it hard to 'feminise'. But the moral of the story is depressingly clear: Women's games that can't be sexualised, can't be sold to the networks and the paying public.

In the meanwhile women correspondents and commentators will continue to be patronised by politically incorrect men. When Kadambari Murali spoke about cricket in that panel discussion, there were moments when I could almost see thought balloons growing out of the male panelists' heads, and the thoughts they contained were all variants of this one: I'd like to see her face Brett Lee with a bat in her hand.

Interestingly, I didn't see that thought balloon rise when the non-playing male panelist who represented a television channel gave us his expert views on the game, though confronted with Lee running up to bowl, he would have very likely become incontinent.

But there it is: life isn't fair, guys are like that and cricket remains, in Pataudi's quaint phrase, a 'manly game'.

A shorter version of this post was first published in 'M' magazine, Mar-Apr 2007. More details here.