This was meant to be a year-long blog and it's a couple of months over that limit now. Blogging about cricket without any right to has been entertaining. I wasn't edited, which was strange but nice, and readers wrote in, which was gratifying. The last year has been good to people like me who track the Indian team to wallow in Test match success. There was success to wallow in, for instance (not always the case in the forty-something years of my fan-dom); even the rubber we lost in Australia was so stirring it felt like we had won. It was such a good year that the limited overs game was nearly memorable: the Twenty20 triumph in South Africa was a landmark; so was the CB Series win.

I can't see that there's going to be a tour to top the one in Australia any time soon, so this looks like a good place to stop. If, like an Australian, I was used to winning, I might see the past year as the start of a hot new streak, but I'm not. I'm a desi fan who has learnt over time to keep his fingers crossed, not to push his luck and to quit when he's ahead. If a brave new world of cricket beckons, with new forms of the game, new leagues and young players, it ought to be more robustly blogged.

Bye.

	© Getty Images

Listening to Tendulkar declare that the CB series win counted as the greatest moment of his cricketing career, I felt dismayed, then scornful, and then just old.

The dismay was defensible: here was the best Test batsman India had ever produced, back to sublime Test form (he had just struck two centuries and a fifty in the four Test series against Australia), the spearhead of the Indian charge to a gloriously implausible victory in the third Test in Perth, telling the world that India's triumph in a trivial three-nation tournament in its last season (the tri-series tv ratings are so poor that it's being put to sleep) ranked higher than any Test match triumph of which he had been a part.

So, I thought, building up a rhetorical head of steam, this was bigger than the 2001 Test in Kolkata where Laxman's double and Dravid's century and, yes, Tendulkar's three wickets, helped us clinch our greatest Test victory ever? Bigger than the win at Chennai in the final Test of that series, where Tendulkar's hundred won us a series victory against Waugh's Invincibles at full strength?

Bigger than the last Test series in Australia when we got the better of a 1-1 draw. Bigger than winning our first Test rubber in England in twenty years last summer? Edging a struggling Sri Lanka in the league stage and blanking an ageing Australian side in the finals of a small limited overs tournament was a bigger deal than all of the above?

Dismay drove me to derision. I told myself that till recently, till Tendulkar's resumption of the mantle of genius in the Test series in Australia, I had always classed him as the second-best batsman in the history of Indian cricket. I should have stuck with SMG. Gavaskar is unbearable in his present avatar as television pundit, but at least there is the reassurance of knowing he is too bright to embarrass himself (and us) with a comment as crass as Tendulkar's. Would Kumble ever say such a thing? Would Dravid? No and no. This is what comes of not going to college.

Derision didn't work. It's impossible to condescend to Tendulkar. Cricket-wise, he's so colossal that even the all-knowing Indian fan finds patronizing him a stretch. So I did the next best thing. I tried to explain his statement away. He probably meant the whole tour, I thought hopefully. The total Oz experience: Perth, Harbhajan, match referees, Andrew Symonds, Malcolm Conn, the one-day victories, all taken together. That didn't work either. This is how the Telegraph reported Tendulkar's statement:

'If captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni was a picture of calm even after a terrific tri-series win, senior-most pro (and his idol) Sachin Tendulkar was overjoyed. "I'm feeling so proud… It's probably the biggest moment in my career," Sachin told The Telegraph at the team hotel, the Sofitel.' There was some wiggle-room in that 'probably' but the only honest reading of that statement was that Tendulkar thought that the CB series win was the high-point of his cricketing life. And with 39 centuries in Tests and 42 in ODIs, I had to accept that he had tasted triumph often enough to know which victory was sweetest.

This is when I defaulted to feeling not just old, but superannuated as a fan. More than any cricketer in the world, Tendulkar embodies the modern batsman because of his absolute mastery of the two main forms of the game. He has scored more runs in ODIs than any other batsman and it won't be long before he's on top of the Test match heap too. He's played international cricket since 1989 and he has felt the game seesaw between its long and short forms. So when he says that this small tournament victory was the highlight of those twenty years at the top, we should pay serious attention because it marks, I think, a tipping point in the precarious balance between the five-day and the limited overs game, a decisive turn in the history of cricket.

Tendulkar's comment sprang partly from the thrill of defeating a bunch of Ugly Australians in their backyard after a long summer of squabbles. But it sprang also, I think, from a sense of achievement in being the only veteran to have transitioned to the Twenty20 epoch not by the skin of his teeth, but triumphantly.

	Prodigy in 1989, game's grey eminence now © Getty Images

I don't think Tendulkar enjoyed forsaking a place in the Twenty20 team that won the World Cup. I have no way of reading the great man's mind, but given his record in the limited overs game and his competitiveness, I find it hard to believe that it didn't gall him to have to make room 'voluntarily' for the young brigade. The team that won the tri-series in Australia was in large part the same as the team that won the Twenty20 World Cup. Dhoni had asked for his merry men and got them; Tendulkar was the odd man (old man?) out. At the age of 34 he was eight years older than the captain, who, at 26 was the next oldest player in the team.

In this company, with the player auction for the BCCI's new Twenty20 league as context, to have steered this young team home with a fifty, a hundred and a near-hundred in the three matches that counted, was a triumph, a triumph of Tendulkar over Time and particularly sweet for that reason.

Tendulkar was a prodigy when he started out in 1989 and he's now the game's grey eminence. But he isn't just cricket's durable genius; he has also been for fifteen years, it's hottest commercial property. Both the brand and the batsman unconsciously grasped that cricket had mutated decisively, in one of evolution's leaps, away from the longeurs of Test cricket towards the compact formats of the limited overs game. Dhoni's charisma, the hysteria after the Twenty20 World Cup win, the meteoric valuation of young potential at the expense of proven achievement and experience in the IPL's auction, signalled the end of an era when Test cricket had sort of held its own. The surest sign of an epochal change was the fact that the largest sums of money in cricket were now being invested in the newest and most trivial form of the game.

Tendulkar, like Dravid and Ganguly, wasn't bid for in the IPL auction because they were designated champions of their state sides. Of the three, Tendulkar is the one who is there on merit; the other two seem to have been included out of a strategic deference to seniority. I wouldn't be surprised if Tendulkar finds a place in the Indian squad that plays the next Twenty20 World Cup; he may well use the arena of the IPL to try to force his way in. I'm certain, though, that he plans to be around for the next ODI World Cup, to see if he can't add the World Cup to his trophy cupboard.

If Tendulkar's valuation of the tri-series is the first sign of the slow death of five-day cricket, some of us, specially middle-aged nostalgists who live for Test matches, might find it hard to follow the game down this new road. Still, my initial outrage, my sense that Tendulkar in saying what he did, had betrayed the long game, was daft. Old men rail at History; great men master it.

A version of this post was published earlier in the Telegraph

	Gavaskar and Tendulkar are Indian cricket's greatest batsmen and one of Gavaskar's claims to greatness was that he retired from cricket on a high © AFP

The story of the Australian tour from an Indian point of view isn't Australia's run at seventeen wins in a row or the mock-epic stand-off after the Sydney Test. No, the real story of the last year, of which this tour Down Under is a part, is Sachin Tendulkar's bid for immortality.

Till 2007 and this unfinished Australian series, a summary description of Tendulkar's career might have read like this: he was one of the great batsmen of the twentieth century, who declined into a merely good batsman in the twenty-first.

It is hard to believe that next year in November, Tendulkar will have been a Test batsman for twenty years. Sunil Gavaskar had sixteen years at the top; so did Dilip Vengsarkar. Mohinder Amarnath had eighteen, but his was an interrupted career. In terms of longevity no one else comes close. Of the three only Gavaskar can sustain the comparison. Gavaskar and Tendulkar are Indian cricket's greatest batsmen and one of Gavaskar's claims to greatness was that he retired from cricket on a high: his last innings was that great 96 against Pakistan in Bangalore, on a track that was turning square. He followed that up with a big hundred at Lord’s playing for the Rest of the World in 1987 and called it a day. So our sense of Gavaskar's career is one of great consistency at a very high level.

This isn't how the trajectory of Tendulkar's career was viewed till recently. The first decade of his career was his time of greatness. It encompassed both his time as a prodigy dazzling the world in Perth and elsewhere and his pomp in the late Nineties when he dismantled bowling attacks with such ruthless intent that Bradman was moved to anoint him as his heir. But as his second decade unfolded, it was hard not to feel that while greatness had been achieved, the promise of immortality had been belied.

This is not to argue that Tendulkar in the twenty-first century was an inconsiderable batsman. He scored lots of runs, hit substantial hundreds, and played match-saving, sometimes match-winning innings. But something had changed, the spark that had once made him not just a very good high-scoring batsman (a Jacques Kallis, say), but a magical stroke-player, impregnable and overwhelming at once, seemed to have been extinguished.

The moment that marked that transformation from genius to journeyman wasn't a failed innings but a successful one: the match-winning hundred Tendulkar made in the Madras Test of 2001. It was the deciding Test of that extraordinary series against Steve Waugh's men. India and Australia had shared the first two Tests, thanks to Harbhajan Singh's heroics and VVS Laxman's sublime double hundred. Laxman scored a pair of lovely sixties at Chepauk but the decisive innings was Tendulkar's. It was a dour, unlovely hundred made to look even more earthbound by Laxman's unearthly cameos and it signaled the arrival of a utilitarian Tendulkar.

Utilitarian because where once Tendulkar's innings had seemed a form of self-expression, he now began to play to purpose. The way he spoke about his batting changed: his refrain became the need to play to the needs of the team, almost as if he was a craftsman working on commission. Part of this was defensive: as it became evident that he wasn't imposing himself on the bowling any more, people began to ask where the Shane Warne-annihilating persona was hiding. Tendulkar answered this chorus by saying two related things: a) no batsman could play the same way through a long career and b) as he had grown into the senior pro of the team, his role had changed in a way that required a more responsible style.

	But the real significance of this brief Australian purple patch has been the manner in which Tendulkar has scored his runs. For the first time in years he has played with intent and without inhibition © Getty Images

This explanation of late-period Tendulkar suggested a batsman using his formidable skills to adapt to circumstances instead of bending circumstances to his will as he had done in his first half of his career. Even his big innings this century seemed to bear witness to a once-great batsman adapting magnificently to the physical toll of a long career.

Take his double century at the SCG in the last Test of India's previous tour of Australia. It was a crucial innings, one that allowed the Indians to press for a victory that eventually eluded them, but that's not why we remember it. We remember it for its freakish aspect: Tendulkar scored 241 runs without once driving through the off-side. He had suffered a string of dismissals trying to drive through cover, so he just put away the shot and worked everything through the onside. His signature shot throughout his career had been that cover drive hit off the back foot standing on tip-toe and he was showing the world that he could limit his repertoire and thrive.

But the change in style was also accompanied by a secular decline in both his batting average and the frequency of his centuries. These things are relative: Tendulkar's 'decline' would constitute success for the merely very good. From the very high fifties, the average dipped to under fifty-five. At the same time the achievements of other batsmen eclipsed Tendulkar's efforts.

Brian Lara reversed a slump that saw his average plunge to into the forties and salvaged his reputation by dragging that figure up into the fifties as he ended his career in a blaze of brilliance and Ponting's career graph read like the opposite of Tendulkar's: he raised his game to such heights in the second half of his career that there were seasons when his results were Bradmanesque. A new generation of batsmen led by Michael Hussey and Kumar Sangakkara produced passages of such consistency and flair that they made Tendulkar look grizzled and tentative.

Then, in 2007, Tendulkar began his bid to rehabilitate himself. In South Africa, in Bangladesh, in England, in India and finally in this series in Australia, he emerged from the cocoon of conservative caution that had marked his batsmanship for more than five years and gave himself permission to play his whole repertoire of shots. The results were mixed: 2007 was a decent year, not an annus mirabilis: some seven hundred runs with a clutch of fifties and a couple of centuries against Bangladesh. Its real importance is only now becoming apparent: it was the necessary run up to his return to vintage form in Australia.

He has hit two fifties and a big, unbeaten 150 in five innings against the best team in the world, one that was aggressively seeking a record sequence of Test wins. This would be reassuring in itself for Tendulkar, when you consider that his last century against respectable opposition came in 2005. But the real significance of this brief Australian purple patch has been the manner in which he has scored his runs. For the first time in years he has played with intent and without inhibition. Every shot from the paddle sweep to the off-side force, to the pull and the improvised upper-cut has been taken out of storage and played. He has taken the fight to the opposition, on and off the field. I don't think it's a coincidence that after the ugly Sydney Test, it was Tendulkar who forced the Harbhajan issue and compelled Sharad Pawar to stand up for his team-mate.

Having put the mirage of captaincy firmly behind him, Tendulkar has stepped into the role he should have claimed years ago: not the senior pro of the Indian team (an NCO's role, meant for lesser men) but its grey eminence, its elder statesman. The way he is batting in Australia, that part will be his to play for years yet, at the end of which he might well stand on the pedestal that Bradman chose for him and which Cricket reserves for her most durable geniuses.

	Steve Bucknor is under the spotlight for the wrong reasons © Getty Images

Peter Roebuck has said all that needs to be said about the umpiring on the first day of the Sydney Test. The Indian bowlers, given how thin the attack looked on paper, were first-rate. Disregard the static about how a truly resilient bowling attack would have picked itself off the floor: this one just did. RP Singh and his fellows took Mark Benson's gift to Ricky Ponting in their stride and reduced Australia to 134 for 6. (Ponting, by the way, did a Yuvraj and moaned about getting a bad decision having benefited from his let off!). The spinners then gamely tried to put Steve Bucknor's hearing-aid moment behind them by having Andrew Symonds stumped twice but the third umpire was astigmatic and didn't give the first one, so Bucknor sensibly didn't refer the second stumping to him to stop him from giving technology a bad name.

For the Indians, RP Singh and Sachin Tendulkar were exceptional. The four wickets that RP Singh took were actually out, which, with umpires like these, must count for something. The outstanding Australian player was Brad Hogg. He started the counter-attack and caned the bowling with such smiling good cheer that Anil Kumble and the rest must have wondered if he was Adam Gilchrist's cousin. Then Brett Lee did his part by putting the boot in on the second morning. It's the depth of this Australian lower order that kills visiting sides off; if the batsmen don't get you the allrounders will. This Test may well turn on Symonds' big hundred but that had so many fathers that it must count as a collaboration, not an individual achievement.

I haven't watched a lovelier innings than the one VVS Laxman played today in years. The cover drives were reliably sublime but it was the onside shots, the whips and pulls and flicks that made me grin and nod like a hypnotized child. When threading a packed off-side field wasn't challenging enough, he seemed to experiment, for the sake of his art, with more improbable angles. Long legged and stooped, Laxman occupies the crease like a slightly worried, but marvellously graceful stork. His stroke-play is non-violent; when he's in his zone the strokes seem to be played in some abstract cause - beauty? geometry? - rather than the needs of the contest itself. It isn't true, of course. His epic innings have always been played in ferociously competitive contexts; it's just that he never looks dogged or fierce or elaborately determined.

That said, this innings mightn't rank amongst his best because it doesn't seem big enough. Size matters; India needed a repeat of his two previous centuries at Sydney, a hundred and fifty at least. If stumps had been taken on the second day with Laxman and Rahul Dravid at the crease, Indian fans could have gone to bed dreaming of six hundred runs, Kolkata redux. As things stand, a sensibly optimistic scenario would have India matching the Australian score over two sessions and a bit on the third day and then look to RP Singh, Kumble and the enigmatic Harbhajan Singh to keep the Aussies down to a plausible fourth-innings target. One of Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly and Yuvraj Singh has to get a century for any of this to happen. If it is Yuvraj, he will have earned his Test spurs and this blog will happily abase itself and acknowledge its absolute ignorance. But someone had better do it, because if they don't, Laxman's magical innings will be diminished; it'll become one more pretty thing to be salvaged by desis from the familiar wreckage of defeat.

	Shoehorning Yuvraj Singh into the side didn't work and his body language wasn't encouraging either © Getty Images

In a perverse way, it was a pleasure to be beaten by the Australians. It was a reality check conducted by a first-rate professional team. Amongst the many good things about the Australian demolition job, one stood out: Ponting’s handling of Hogg. Despite the rough treatment he suffered at the hands of Tendulkar and Ganguly, Ponting kept him on and by the end of the Test, instead of being a marginal man, he was looking like an asset to the Australian team, going into Sydney. It was a fine piece of man-management, an investment of faith that will likely pay off later in the series. Which brings us to the way the Indian tour selectors managed their players, particularly Dravid.

Rahul Dravid in the kind of form he’s in, isn’t just a bad opener, he’s a blight. In both innings in this MCG Test, but most particularly in the first innings when there was everything to play for after a decent bowling performance by Kumble and Co., Dravid’s example killed such momentum as the Indian bowlers had generated and demoralised his fellows. He’s a great batsman, completely out of sorts, who should be playing at No. 6 so that he doesn’t have the responsibility of giving the Indian innings a start. He was forced to open because the people who picked the team for the Melbourne Test wanted to have their cake and eat it: shoehorn Yuvraj Singh into the side without making difficult choices. Well, it didn’t work.

Dravid was clearly unhappy doing an opener’s job despite his press statements. And he has a right to be: to mess about with India’s best and most consistent middle-order batsman since Tendulkar’s glory days, especially when he’s going through a lean period, is stupid and inconsiderate. To watch the hero of India’s last Australian tour batting like an oppressed bank clerk was awful. In the seventies and eighties when public sector unions in India were stronger than they are now, they would ‘work to rule’, i.e. they would sleepwalk through their jobs in slow motion, doing the barest minimum required by the law. Unlike those time-servers Dravid, as always, gave his all, but the end result was the same: an agonized crawl.

What makes the decision to coerce Dravid into opening even more infuriating is that it was done to make room for a pretender. Yuvraj doesn’t belong in Test cricket. He’s a wonderful limited-overs player who, unfortunately for India’s Test fans, scores the occasional century on the sub-continent’s dead wickets to stay in contention. If you’re playing a side with one dysfunctional fast bowler, a defensive spinner and a bunch of middling medium pacers on a flat track, then Yuvraj is the bully you need. In any other circumstance, he ought to be India’s first pick for 12th man. In the first innings of this Test Yuvraj mimed elaborate dissatisfaction when he was given a bad decision. Given that he had just been let off when he nicked one off Hogg that wasn’t given, you have to marvel that he had the gall to moan. To top that, in the second innings when Hogg had him lbw with a flipper that was going to hit middle, he still managed to look injured in that hard-done-by way that he’s patented.

If the squad’s selectors want to gamble on a batsman, much better that they gamble on Sehwag who is, as Ian Chappell persistently points out, the kind of aggressive opening batsman who might seize the initiative from Australia. At least Sehwag can point to previous successes Down Under. Since we haven’t got another spinner in the touring party, Harbhajan Singh will play in Sydney despite his performance here, so it’s even more urgent that the Indian team gets its batting sorted out. Given Harbhajan’s recent record, Sehwag’s inclusion would at least give Kumble the option of an offspinner who occasionally flights the ball.

None of this is likely to happen. I have the sinking feeling that in the name of consistency and giving Yuvraj a proper run, we’ll go into the Sydney Test with the same team. It’s meant to be a spinner’s wicket and I can already see Yuvraj in the nets, bowling his left-arm slows.

	If we want to see the top order trying to take the initiative, the captain would do well to promote VVS Laxman © Getty Images

In a perfect world he'd bat at number three with Rahul Dravid at five and Sourav Ganguly at six. In my dreams. We're going to be treated to the sight of Dravid with a point or two to prove, hunkering down in the number three trench, prepared to wait out the enemy for the duration of the battle of the Somme.

If we want to see the top order trying to take the initiative, the captain would do well to promote Laxman, who is more likely to play his shots than Dravid. In the semi-old days, Virender Sehwag used to supply the momentum at the top. In his absence the team needs someone else. Dravid is the Indian team's best batsman but his recent Test form has been iffy. Wasim Jaffer and Dravid in partnership after the loss of Dinesh Karthik's wicket is a batting vanguard designed to fight rearguard actions; not the best strategy to take to Australia.

Laxman at three would carry the fringe benefit of pushing Ganguly down to six. Ganguly has earned a place in Test team against Pakistan and if he performs, he will have earned his berth to Australia, but he should bat no higher than six. Given his fragility against the short ball it would be silly to have him bat above someone like Laxman against an Australian pace battery on bouncy pitches.

Which is why Captain Kumble might turn out to be an inspired choice. He's the one player who can disregard the hierarchies of Indian cricket and force a rational batting order on the team. Dravid was too compromised by his closeness to Greg Chappell to impose his authority on the line-up after the Australian's departure and though Mahendra Singh Dhoni doesn't seem to have a deferential bone in his body, he is possibly too 'junior' and too unproven at the Test level to tell his 'seniors' where they should bat. Kumble has been given the captaincy at the end of a magnificent career, he has nothing left to prove, he's not a batsman (and has no personal stake in the matter): consequently he's the closest India gets to the beau ideal of the selfless, disinterested leader.

With him in charge, I live in hope that the eccentric moves to replace Laxman as a Test batsman with Yuvraj will come to nothing. One reason for not making Dhoni Test captain is that it would have been harder for him to keep players who had done well for him in the shorter versions of the game, out of the Test team. The clamour to include Yuvraj in the Test team is fuelled by his limited-overs performances. A captain like Kumble who doesn't play that form of cricket any more, is insulated from those pressures.

Harbhajan Singh has his critics who argue that he isn't the wicket-taking force he once was. He had a wretched time in Pakistan in 2005-6 and an indifferent series against England soon after, but in fairness, he did pretty well against the West Indies in the last Test series he played. He took eleven wickets in two Test matches. I think he's owed an opportunity to prove himself and the Pakistan series is the right proving ground. If he doesn't take enough wickets, he ought to be dropped from the Australian tour.

It is unusual to have two keepers in the playing eleven. There's an Indian precedent in Farokh Engineer and Budhi Kunderan, but it's an unstable condition. While a specialist opening batsman is cut some slack in the matter of big runs so long as he delivers partnerships (Chetan Chauhan comes to mind), a ‘keeper-batsman playing as a specialist opener is, paradoxically, under huge pressure to score a hundred to justify the exclusion of the specialist batsmen clamouring to play in his place. It's unfair, but that's how it works and the Test series against Pakistan should be time enough to judge if Karthik is good enough to become a fixture at the top of the order.

I'd have had S Badrinath in Yuvraj's place because after nineteen tests and a batting average of thirty-three, the Punjab batsman has done enough to demonstrate that he'll never be a significant Test batsman. He's that rare creature: a great specialist limited-overs player. But it's politically impossible to drop him from consideration given his great deeds in one-day and Twenty20 cricket, so the selectors can't be faulted on that score. All things considered, they've done a decent job.

	Dilip Vengsarkar must stop playing to the gallery © Getty Images

Dilip Vengsarkar, the current chairman of selectors, has been in the news, most recently on account of his public warning to India's 'seniors' (read Tendulkar, Ganguly and Dravid) that they couldn't take their places in the team for granted, that they needed to earn their keep.

Vengsarkar has a habit of shooting his mouth off, but this statement was so unnecessary that it drew a double reproach: one from India's cricket board, asking him to stop making public statements about the team and another from the new captain of India's ODI team, MS Dhoni, who went out of the way to praise the performance of India's veterans, saying categorically that the team had no replacements for them.

And well he might, given that Ganguly's recent form and Tendulkar's, has been outstanding in the one-day game. Dravid's form in the four matches against Australia has been disappointing but he played a couple of outstanding innings against England in the limited overs series that followed the Tests, and given that he voluntarily gave up the captaincy in both forms of the game in the very recent past, he's scarcely the sort of player who needs to be told not to be complacent.

This is unlikely to stop the chairman from offering his opinions to the press because indiscretion has been his watchword since he was appointed to his present office. After his retirement from the game Vengsarkar wrote columns for a while, the copyright for which vested with a company of his devising called Dilip Data Syndicate. He could revive that company to sell his opinions to the newspapers, a sort of rent-a-quote service, so that the remainder of his tenure could be profitably used.

It's not unusual for national selectors to behave oddly. For many it is their return to the limelight from the shadows of retirement, their last reprieve from the obscurity into which all ex-cricketers disappear. Actually, that should read 'used to disappear'. Now, thanks to sports channels and news channels on television, all sorts of cricketers remain in the public eye long after retiring from the game. Nikhil Chopra and Syed Saba Karim, two cricketers with very modest international careers figure in a comic cricket show, Laxman Sivaramakrishnan and Arun Lal have successful broadcasting careers, Ajay Jadeja overcame scandal and retirement to become a fixture on cricket shows and to figure in celebrity dance competitions and Navjot Singh Siddhu is more than a mere Member of Parliament, he's a cult figure.

But perhaps it's unfair to compare Vengsarkar to these men, who are, after all, much younger than him, players who were still playing at the highest level when the great tide of globalisation came to lift cricketers to levels of fame and wealth unimaginable through the years in which Vengsarkar played his cricket. On the other hand, I can think of players of roughly his generation who remain more vivid in public memory than Vengsarkar. I'm not talking about Gavaskar, who as India's greatest batsman, is an immortal, with whom comparisons are odious. Nor of Kapil Dev, for the same reason. A good player to compare him to is Ravi Shastri.

Like Vengsarkar, Shastri played for Bombay. He was six years younger but he retired from international cricket around the same time as Vengsarkar did, in 1992. Like him, Shastri captained India occasionally without ever becoming captain of India in his own right. Vengsarkar led India for as many as ten Tests, played international cricket for India for sixteen years (as many years as Gavaskar did and five more years than Shastri) and was a part of the side through the glory years in the mid-eighties when it won the world cup in 1983, the so-called world championship of cricket in 1985 and the series against England in 1986, in which triumph Vengsarkar played a leading role.

And yet, the contrast between the current standing of the two couldn't be more marked. Shastri is arguably the most successful cricket commentator India has produced, earlier this year the BCCI was literally begging him to take over the team after the debacle of the World Cup and he has just accepted, on his own terms, the headship of the Board's cricket academy. Vengsarkar, on the other hand, vanished from the minds of the cricketing public for a dozen years and when he returned as chairman of selectors, he courted the attention of the media, something that Shastri accepted as his due. And the cricket academy Vengsarkar runs is is called, forlornly enough, the Elf Academy.

	An elegant, pivotal presence at No. 3 in the '80s © Getty Images

It isn't just Shastri. Take Mohinder Amarnath. If Shastri is six years younger than Vengsarkar, Amarnath is six years older. Like Vengsarkar, he had a long career (nearly twenty years of Test cricket with gaps in between) and a Test average just above 42 which is better than good. But Amarnath pops up on television as an expert, as a commentator, as an actor in commercials: he is a figure in the world of cricket, whereas Vengsarkar, before his elevation to the chairmanship was not.

Perhaps the reason for this is that Vengsarkar is a self-effacing sort of fellow, not the pushy sort who courts the media. This is hard to believe given how keen he is to supply soundbytes to the press, but let's give him the benefit of the doubt. Even so, his post-retirement obscurity is puzzling. Gundappa Viswanath, the most modest, retiring cricketer this country has ever had the good fortune to produce, remains a presence in the cricketing public's mind despite his shyness, in a way that Vengsarkar doesn't. This might have something to do with the fact that Vishy was a genius, but if you look at his figures, he has a lower batting average in Tests than Vengsarkar does, fewer centuries, he played his last ODI a year before India won the World Cup in 1983 and he never experienced the adulation and publicity that Vengsarkar and his team mates did after the coming of network television in 1982. And yet Viswanath has a hold on the affections of Indian cricket fans that Vengsarkar can only dream of.

Vengsarkar's invisibility is puzzling because he was a first-rate cricketer. He scored seventeen Test centuries, many of them to win or save matches for India. He was, after Gavaskar, our finest player of fast-bowling in the '70s and '80s, he helped us win a Test series in the mid-eighties which was our last win there for twenty years, and through his career he was an elegant, pivotal presence at No. 3 in the batting order. He was affectionately called the 'Colonel' because of his organized, near-military bearing and he did score those three splendid centuries at Lord's. He was an unlikely contender for obscurity when he retired, and yet that was his fate.

It may be that India's cricket establishment took too long to call upon his services: the politics of the Indian cricket board are indecipherable to anyone outside its grubby structures. Or it might just be a function of personality: there are people who are instinctively liked and there are others who seem to have had a charm bypass. Whatever the cause of of Dilip Vengsarkar's long years in the wilderness, he would do well to remember that he was a fine player in his time. His reputation will be better served if he uses his past experience and his present eminence to pick the best teams he can instead of picking on great players and playing to the gallery. The regard of posterity should be a greater prize for a cricketer of his standing than fifteen minutes of 'fame'.

This post first appeared as an article in the Kolkata based Telegraph.

"Ricky Ponting has accused India's early-series attitude of being "fake"
after their behaviour turnaround during the third ODI on Friday.
Mahendra Singh Dhoni, India's captain, publicly complained about
"harsh words" from some of the Australians during the 47-run loss,
but Ponting claimed Chris Broad, the match referee, congratulated
him for the way his side approached the game." (report in Cricinfo).

	Ponting and Dhoni - Not quite a sign of things to come © AFP

To raise useful levels of friction
You need to sledge with conviction
A quality that's wanting,
In Indians, said Ponting.

To snarl one match and snitch the next
Is to stray from sledging's sacred text:
Which bids you: Go mano a mano
(If you can-o).

To drag the ump into private chat…
What kind of manliness is that?
Turning it on and off like a gizmo?
That's not machismo!

Real men don't need to start jumping
To get their testosterone pumping.
These Sreesanths and Dhonis:
They're just phonies.

A history of transportation
Explains our gift for confrontation,
And our knack for raising hell,
Also why we travel well.

That doesn't mean we're less than good
We bear ourselves as sportsmen should
Unlike the excited oriental
Who tends to look mental.

While Dhoni sneaked and Bhajji raved,
The referee said we were well-behaved
Only losers think I'm a baddy:
I have a reference from Daddy.

I was thinking about who the next captain of the Indian Test team might be (or should be) when I read this first-rate post by Kaushik Sunder Rajan on his blog DailyCric.You can read it here

	Zaheer Khan’s performance was a once-in-a-generation spectacle for the Indian fan © Getty Images

One of the hardest things for a fan to do these days is to retain in his mind an uncluttered sense of how the Test team is doing. Test match tours are tacked on to one-day contests, one-day tournaments (the World Cup, the Champions Trophy,) keep elbowing and shoving their way into your consciousness, players are picked and dropped from Test match teams on account of their limited-overs performances, and all these things together create a hybrid sense of well-being or despair.

So before the one-day series against England begins, and before its results colour our feelings about the Test matches that have preceded it, it might be useful to take stock of our standing in the only arena that counts, Test cricket.

Out of 10, I think we’re at 5; if we were using letters instead of numbers, we’d be graded B. We lost to South Africa away and Australia at home when we really shouldn’t have done. We drew against England the last time they toured, when they were an underdone team, and that did us no credit. Losing to Pakistan 1-0 on their grounds wasn’t great but it was sort of acceptable. Beating the West Indies in the Caribbean was a milestone but given how bad Windies are now, beating them 1-0 wasn’t a rousing statement about a resurgent India. Beating Bangladesh was a relief for the reasons referred to in the first paragraph: the modern tendency to let one-day emotions tint our Test match feelings. But this one was different.

One, we beat a decent team that fancied itself after destroying the West Indies. The argument that England was playing its second string pace attack is unpersuasive: if Chris Tremlett, James Anderson and Ryan Sidebottom had won England the first Test (as they nearly did) we wouldn’t have heard any excuses about them being ‘B Team’ back-ups. It’s like an Indian fan sighing for Munaf Patel, L Balaji, Irfan Pathan and Ashish Nehra. In the contemporary game people are always injured and someone generally does the job.

I thought the English bowlers did well: it was their batting that did them in, in the Trent Bridge Test. Sidebottom was my favourite: he bowled well and his look of windblown frustration and wordless rage was a constant delight. I think he was auditioning to play the Saxon serf in a film about the Norman yoke.

Two, the pleasure of watching Sachin Tendulkar grinding out the runs, Sourav Ganguly playing fluently, yet solidly, like a left-handed Gundappa Viswanath and VVS Laxman mothering the lower order like an anxious but elegant stork, was a balm after the perverse disruptions of the Chappell years. For them the series was a vindication. After the ugly, hysterical talk of their selfishness, their lack of team spirit, their nearness to the knacker’s yard, it was good to see them show us what we’ll miss when they do retire. (The shot of the tournament was Anil Kumble's falling inside-edge for a hundred. He was always a bowling Titan; now he's Kanhai.

Three, it was great to watch the young(ish) ones help us win. Dinesh Karthik and Wasim Jaffer might, with a bit of luck, be the opening pair India’s been looking for and with Virender Sehwag likely to press for a place, it’s nice to have competition for the opening spots. Mahendra Singh Dhoni showed us why he’s an exceptional player: his ability to adapt his homemade style to every circumstance is endlessly impressive. He’s looked like captaincy material right through this series. (I’ve often wondered what that means: I think it means someone who seems articulate, responsible and composed on and off the field. Dhoni manages that, comfortably) Given that one of my cleverer suggestions before the series began was to play Karthik as 'keeper so India could drop Dhoni for Yuvraj, I'm feeling contentedly foolish. RP Singh was a decent foil to India’s star turn, Zaheer Khan. Zaheer’s performance was a once-in-a-generation spectacle for the Indian fan: I can’t remember the last time an Indian quick was our dominant bowler in all three tests of a series played outside the sub-continent. Even Chetan Sharma, twenty one years ago, starred in only two of the three Tests we played.

Finally, this series was different because it was played on wonderful grounds (lovely to look upon, great drainage, a soothing sense of first-world order) in front of happy full houses. The one thing that qualified my pleasure in that great series we won in Pakistan the time before last, were the empty stands. Things aren’t much better on Indian grounds when Test matches come round. This, when most of the tickets in our stadiums are given away to freeloaders. In England, concessional tickets for the last day were ten pounds for kids and twenty for grown-ups! I can’t bring myself to imagine what full-price tickets cost—and still they pack them in. Watching a match being played in a deserted concrete doughnut is like being shown a preview of Test cricket’s death. In England, on the evidence of this series, the game is triumphantly, joyfully alive.

Still, if Australia is A+, a B is fair. We’ve beaten England, but Sri Lanka looks like the second best team in the world in both forms of the game. Definitely B+. They’ll kill England at home (in the interests of even-handedness let me say that if it was India visiting, they’d kill us too). But I could be persuaded to abandon this measured view quite easily. If we beat Pakistan in India and Australia away… hell, if we lose to Pakistan at home and beat Australia in Australia, we’ll be Masters of the World. We’ll switch grading notations to serve notice that the cricketing balance of power had shifted eastwards: instead of the boring Alpha plus, we’ll be alif awwal.

	Mahendra Singh Dhoni batted for over three hours for his 76 as India managed to draw the Test against England at Lord's © Getty Images

Moved by his heroics, the gods commanded the clouds to foregather and weep. In case you’re the nervous sort of desi fan and haven’t asked what happened after they went in for bad light for fear of finding out, I can confirm that we saved the match, Dhoni and me. Yes, I had to take a hand. There was a bad moment when Monty Panesar appealed for a leg before decision against Sreesanth and Steve Bucknor, who has form when it comes to pushing us off the edge, got all twitchy. He would have grimaced and nodded and raised his finger but taking advantage of how slowly he gets to the point I whipped out my wand and yelled “Stupefy!” That stopped him. Nobody noticed that he was unconscious for a bit because a) he was standing up and b) he isn’t too animated to start with.

Like I said, a happy end makes a difference to the whole story and all the characters in it. At the end of the first day’s play when England were two hundred and plenty for four, I wanted to sack the pace ‘attack’. When you need Sourav Ganguly to take the first wicket and Anil Kumble to take the second (after giving away more than two hundred runs), three specialist seamers begin to seem extravagant. RP Singh was high on my list of least favoured bowlers. I found his run-up and follow-through deliberate to the point of absurdity: why, I wondered, did he bowl fast if he was worried that some body part was about to fall off? And when Dinesh Karthik put down Andrew Strauss, he was lucky I had forgotten the Cruciatus curse or he’d still be writhing at point.

By the end of the second day it was clear to me that I had been right about our seamers all along: they were the fulcrum of our side, the pivot on which the team’s fortune’s turned. To get England out for under 300 with a fielding side like ours amounted to genius; which is more than you could say for our batsmen. Karthik batted as well as he had caught and Rahul Dravid died defending so you could say he didn’t throw his wicket away but since he hadn’t scored very many it wasn’t much of a consolation.

By the time we crawled to 200 all out, I had demoted MS Dhoni to Jharkhand’s second XI. To be out, nudging a short ball to slip, like someone providing catching practice, made me wonder what Dravid thought he was doing with two wicketkeepers in the same side. Three if you counted the captain himself. They should have left Dhoni at home given that he was a specialist batsman, a subcontinental specialist. His batting technique was so homespun, it looked home-made.

By the time the fourth day was done, I was vindicated in my early faith in RP Singh, especially in the tiger-like litheness of his bowling action. After he had torn the heart out of the English middle order I could see the Wasim Akram in him - the same effortless rhythm and the same capacity to slip in the lethal bouncer. Dravid’s terminal decline continued apace and while Sachin Tendulkar and Ganguly got a few, it was clear to my unsentimental eye that the sun had set on our galacticos. In terms of bad selection, the 2007 tour of England was proving to be the batting equivalent of the bowling disaster of Pakistan tour in 1978 when we dispatched our great, storied spinners for one tour too many, only to have them slaughtered by the Pakistan batsmen, led by Zaheer Abbas and Javed Miandad.

	When RP Singh tore out the heart of the English middle order, his bowling, with its effortless rhythm and capacity to slip in the lethal bouncer, resembled that of Wasim Akram's © Getty Images

Yes, it had been a wonderful Test match. Given the advantage of surprise that England had, in fielding a brand-new pace attack about which the Indian batsmen knew little if anything, it was creditable that India survived the ambush. On a normal ground, the teams would have lost much more time and it wouldn’t have come down to this last wicket drama that English sports writers (and, I regret to report, some Indian writers too) have made so much of. The match would have been drawn as a matter of course. I think the Indian management, perhaps Chandu Borde himself, ought to register a discreet complaint that the Indian team hadn’t been briefed by the ECB on their new, fast-draining grounds. Shouldn’t the speed of drainage have been specified under the playing conditions? Still, a draw was a fair result. Going into the second Test, given the Indian team’s experience and its champion middle order, I would have to say as a neutral critic, that India start favourites.

This post is adapted from an article published in the Telegraph, Kolkata.

	Is Yuvraj Singh a top six Test batsman? © AFP

The big selection question on this tour of England will be whether to play five batsmen or six. Despite Rahul Dravid's frequently expressed desire to play five bowlers, given his bowling resources on this tour and the need to have runs on the board, he'll go with six batsmen. Karthik, Dravid and Tendulkar are certainties. On the evidence of the Bangladesh tour, Ganguly has his place in the team nailed down and the chances are that Wasim Jaffer will keep his place as a specialist opener.

The sixth spot, in recent times, has been a toss-up between VVS Laxman and Yuvraj Singh. I hope Laxman's 95 against Sussex wins him the nod, though given his luck with selectors there's no telling. Dravid played Yuvraj ahead of Laxman in the second and third Tests the last time we played England, at home. This time round, given Dravid's early endorsement, Laxman's prospects look better.

But it doesn't have to be an either/or choice between the two. If Dhoni's poor form with the bat persists into the first Test at Lord's, Dravid might want to review the luxury of carrying two wicketkeepers in his batting card. In which case, for the second Test, Dhoni could make way for Yuvraj batting at seven.

I don't think Yuvraj has the technique to claim a place in the top six of our Test team, leave alone the top five (against England in the drawn series he batted, astonishingly enough, at five) but coming in five wickets down, with (hopefully) a substantial total to build on, he could do real damage in quick time with the tail.

Dravid, always keen to play five bowlers, would have the minor bonus of half an extra bowler: Yuvraj's left arm slows would add some variety to the Indian 'attack'. This way Dravid could have Yuvraj's electric heels at point and the reassurance of Laxman's safe hands in the slips.

Gambhir's quick eighty puts him in contention should Jaffer fail in the first Test. I hope it doesn't come to that because despite his inconsistency and his maddening habit of scoring a hundred and doing nothing for the next half-a-dozen innings, Jaffer looks a Test batsman and Gambhir doesn't. Gambhir looks like a cut-rate Kambli: all flash and firm-footed flourish.

So, for the first Test: Karthik, Jaffer, Dravid, Tendulkar, Ganguly, Laxman, Dhoni, Zaheer, Sreesanth, Kumble and RP Singh. This is the team that I think will be picked: but if Dravid wants extra batting oomph, a bowling option and the team's best outfielder, he'll pick Yuvraj over Dhoni and make Karthik open and keep wickets.

Historically, Indian keepers have managed both jobs well: think of Faroukh Engineer, Budhi Kunderan, and, more recently, Nayan Mongia. It would be wonderful if Dravid went further and chose another spinner over RP Singh, and he has indicated that one spinner or two will depend on the pitch, but my guess is that for the first Test of an English tour, his instinct will be to go with three seamers.

In the end, though, we need to play to our strengths, and realistically, we have just one: batting. If the skipper plays as well as he did the last time India toured England, and the rest of them just reproduce their career averages, we should win. That isn't wishfulness, you know, just sensible, temperate hope.

	'But the more crucial reason for picking Borde was that Borde wouldn't play favourites' © Getty Images

If this thing becomes epidemic, Steve McClaren could feel pressured to declare his disinterest. I've heard reports that the search committee considered Tony Roche because he was available (Federer had fired him); there were even whispers that Gavaskar wanted Prakash Padukone all along.

There's another, less feverish way of looking at what has happened. There is an Indian method underlying the BCCI's choices which has escaped the deracinated sensibilities of the English language press. The search for the truth as everyone with an Indian passport ought to know, happens by elimination. It doesn't matter who says neti, neti ('not this', 'not this') —it could be the Board (this is what happened with Whatmore, his very name was an invitation to look further) or the candidate (Ford, Emburey)--so long as it is said a respectable number of times. With every rejection the possibility of stumbling upon the true coach increases. Far from Gavaskar or the members of the search committee being hostile to a foreign coach, they deliberately didn't offer it to an Indian for fear of aborting this process of negation. An Indian would have said yes.

This is what happened. Cornered by the unthinking scorn of ignorant journalists, the Board was forced to offer the job to Chandu Borde who said yes without knowing what he was saying yes to. When the news broke and journalists quizzed him about the details of the offer, he said he'd know when the official letter arrived.

Even here, though, the sensitive critic will notice the lengths to which the BCCI went to indulge its cricketers. Knowing that Rahul, Sachin and Saurav didn't want an Indian coach, the Board didn't appoint one: Borde was made Cricket Manager instead. Of course, this might have had something to do with Borde's age. 'Coach' has a hands-on ring to it: early morning fielding sessions, shorts, laptops, none of which is suitable for a distinguished gent about to turn seventy-three. 'Manager' seems the right title for Borde's likely duties: reminiscing with old men in MCC ties, visiting the Indian High Commission, telling his lads that they were lucky they weren't up against Truman, Tyson, Statham and Loader, being benevolent all round.

Mr Pawar, for all his modesty about being a hands-off President who leaves the running of the Board to his trusted lieutenants, knew exactly what he was doing when he pulled Chandu Borde's name out of a hat. One, he knew Borde would say yes which was important because vulgar public opinion, uninitiated in the neti thing, wouldn't brook another 'no'. But the more crucial reason for picking Borde was that Borde wouldn't play favourites. That had been the trouble with Greg Chappell. He'd had his pets and peeves and by the end of his tenure the team had been riven, with lurid stories of the skipper being on one side and the senior players ranged on the other. The Board couldn't let that happen again, so Pawar and Dungarpur chose someone who who was mature enough to know that the historical individual was unimportant: it was the eternal type that counted.

Borde has been ridiculed in the Hindustan Times by an anonymous Board 'insider' who claims that during his tenure as chief selector, Borde called the former Indian skipper, Gaurav Ganguly. These critics don't see that this is exactly what recommends him. Borde mightn't be able to tell Gambhir from Ganguly but he can see, in his mind's eye, the perfect opening batsman, the compleat number four. He might call that platonic ideal at number four Gundappa Tendulkar, but so what? Having seen Merchant and Mankad and Gavaskar and Srikkanth and Sehwag play over the decades, Borde can conjure up a composite, eternal opening batsman and by speaking of him as one person, inspire the incumbent opener, the current instance of that ideal type, to greater things.

We should also recognize that the Board's willingness to accommodate the senior players' aversion to an Indian coach extended to the support staff. Robin Singh, looked at closely, is sort of foreign: he grew up in the West Indies and his fielding ethic is completely alien. Venkatesh Prasad's foreignness is harder to discern but I suspect it was his un-Indian enthusiasm for swearing at opposing batsmen during his time in Indian colours that got him the job.

Without wanting to seem like an apologist for the BCCI, I think it's clear that the board made the best decisions it could in difficult circumstances. There are two suggestions the Board could consider.

One, it could do the daring thing and consult the Junior players about their preferences for coach. This would appeal to the Senior players because in the context of Indian cricket, it would be such a Foreign thing to do. Also, it would be logical: the likes of Ranadeb Bose and R.P. Singh need the coaching more than Sachin or Saurav do.

Two, the Board could do away with the idea of the constant coach and consider a relay of mentors. It has made some headway in this direction already: Shastri for Bangladesh, Borde for England. A roster of coaches, one for every month? It's worth looking at: in one stroke it would sweep away resentment, favouritism, entrenched prejudice, all the cankers continuity brings. The boys would be given BCCI diaries to orient themselves through the year. April would bring Amarnath and May, Madan Lal. The winter months could be reserved for non-tropicalized foreigners. And so on.

Talking about the awfulness of cricket arenas in India, Bishen Bedi has a lovely story about lavatory facilities at Feroz Shah Kotla, Delhi's only Test stadium.

'I was captain and I was sick of outsiders using the players' loo. So I sat a couple of policemen in front of the lavatory door with instructions that only players were to be allowed in. We were batting, so I settled down to nap. Suddenly I woke to stomping sounds: the dressing room was crowded with soldiers in uniform. "What?" I asked. "Sir," said one of them, "permission to use the bathroom…the President..." It wasn't the President of the BCCI he was talking about, it was Mr Fakhruddin Ali Ahmad, the President of the Republic. He needed to go, but this was Feroz Shah Kotla: there was nowhere to go to!'

This is a democratic story: whether you're slumming it on the concrete terraces or sitting in the pavilion, the Feroz Shah Kotla treats you with equal contempt.

The national audience for cricket was created by Doordarshan. I was part of that pan-Indian audience when it first gathered as one to watch the World Cup in 1983. Which partly explains why I was so annoyed in an earlier post that Doordarshan had passed on the Bangladesh Test matches.

	The Indian players rush to the pavillion after defeating the West Indies in the final © AllSport UK Ltd

But when we collapsed for under two hundred, the fairy tale seemed over. You have to understand that none of us really thought we could win. This was the West Indies, twice champions of the world already. Just to list their bowlers was to finger a rosary of scary modern greats: Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Malcolm Marshall and Joel Garner. And we were one-day minnows; that we were in the final was a miracle. In the first two World Cup competitions we had won once, against a minor team.

In the break between innings, I did what what Indian fans have always done: I consoled myself with individual performances amid the collective wreckage. Individual performance, actually, in the singular: Srikkanth top-scored with 38. Reading the scorecard now, it's odd to notice that it took him 57 balls to make, because I remember it as a berserker innings.

Anyway, after the team folded, we drove to a friend's house because it seemed too depressing to sit indoors waiting for the West Indies to begin killing us. Venkat, who lived a few miles away, had a new colour television. I saw Desmond Haynes and Gordon Greenidge take guard in colour. The West Indies didn't just have the four greatest fast bowlers in cricket, they also had an invicible top order. Haynes and Greenidge had been the best opening partnership in the game for years. Number 3 was Viv Richards, whose on-field aura was more menacing than that of most fast bowlers. Number 4 was the skipper, Clive Lloyd who had been giving Indians a hard time from the time I was twelve. And they batted all the way to eight.

But colour worked for us. Balwinder Singh Sandhu, the gentlest swing bowler in the history of cricket, got Greenidge to shoulder arms to a slow-motion in-dipper and that was the end of Greenidge. There was a nasty passage when Richards was cruel to Madan Lal, hitting him for lots of unnecessarily emphatic boundaries but that ended in colour too, with Kapil in whites bounding across green turf to catch a red ball dropping over his shoulder in his brown hands. We tore ourselves away from that magic box because we had to get home for dinner. By the time we got back, Lloyd and Larry Gomes and Faoud Bacchus were gone too, consumed, presumably, by the corrosive colour of Venkat's television. Mohinder Amarnath didn't let the handicap of my mother's old black-and-white set get to him: bowling even slower than Sandhu, he winkled out Jeff Dujon and Marshall who were threatening a lower order resurgence, and then, suddenly, the thing was done.

There were people screaming and little explosions in my corner of Delhi. All the accounts I've read of that famous victory have fire-crackers going off. And they're all true, because for once the phrase 'India rejoiced' wasn't a metaphorical flourish—it was literally true. The World Cup of 1983 was the first cricket event that had a national television audience in India. Indians had watched live cricket on television for years before 1983, but never as a networked national audience. Calcutta, Delhi, Bombay, Madras didn't watch the same programmes. Only with the Asian Games of 1982 did the National Programme come into being, which linked all of Doordarshan's broadcasting nodes for the same telecast. The result was that India's incredible win in 1983 was watched by a single pan-Indian audience, tens of millions of eyeballs transfixed by a single event.

This coincidence of national telecasting and World Cup victory transformed cricket in three ways.

It cemented cricket's primacy in India because this newly consolidated television nation wanted winners and Indian cricket team had delivered glory on cue. Two years later, our one-day heroes delivered again when, captained by Gavaskar, we won the World Championship, a one-off one-day tournament in Australia, this time in blue costumes (in 1983 the teams wore white). These two victories won cricket a new mass audience which was as interested in savouring the unfamiliar taste of international glory as it was in watching cricket.

This perfectly timed, nationally televised victory, created a massive captive audience for any company that had the sense to advertise its wares in the course of a cricket match. India hadn't yet emerged from the austerity of autarky and high tariff barriers (the Maruti 800 was launched the year we won), so this was an untapped ocean of consumers. Unsurprisingly Dhirubhai Ambani saw the opportunity first and staged the Reliance Cup in 1987. Pepsi moved in to India at the end of the decade and began recruiting actors and cricketers for its campaigns because they were the keys to India’s consuming classes. First Kapil Dev, then Mohammad Azharuddin, then Sachin Tendulkar and his generation became rich and the BCCI became powerful. By the time India began to open up its economy at the start of the Nineties, cricket owned the national audience and was perfectly positioned to milk a sub-continental market.

And once it became clear that India owned the world’s largest and most lucrative audience for cricket, the balance of power within world cricket changed decisively. For good and ill, India became the pivot of the ICC, of world cricket. The consequences of this shift in power are still working themselves out.

And all of this began that long ago summer evening in 1983, when spectators like me, individually clapping for India, found ourselves part of a national communion.

This post first appeared as an article in the April 2007 issue of Cricinfo Magazine

	Did you expect India to register a comprehensive series-win before the Bangladesh tour started? © AFP

I just hope we don't build on this for England. Because if Dravid decides to stay with five batsmen in England, he can't, after this performance, pick Laxman for the first Test and Jaffer, Karthik, Dravid, Tendulkar plus Ganguly and Dhoni would be an iffy line-up against the moving ball and short-pitched bowling. Lots of people have written in to point out that Ganguly did well against an all-pace attack in South Africa and so he did. He has earned his place in the team…at No.6. I don't want him walking in against Harmison and Flintoff at the fall of the fourth wicket, specially if Dhoni's in next. Dhoni's a splendid player in sub-continental conditions but he has yet to show us that his home-made brutality travels well. Besides, I'm not sure that India's dominance in this Test match has much to do with a five-man attack. Zaheer and Kumble between them have done the business as so often before. I can't see that the exclusion of Ishant Sharma would have made much difference to our fortunes in the Mirpur Test. Footnote: given that Karthik can't catch anything without gloves on, Laxman in the slips in seaming conditions would be more than useful.

I notice that cricket reporters on web sites and newspapers (and not a few of the comments in response to the last post) are 'perplexed', 'baffled' and 'worried' by Tendulkar's strike-rate. The conclusion is a) that Tendulkar is batting for individual milestones, not for the team and b) that he's past his sell-by date. Sanjay Manjrekar had a piece in the May issue of Cricinfo Magazine where he observed "…Indian players have a tendency to overstay their welcome. Kapil Dev, with due respect, clearly robbed India of two good years of cricket from the young Javagal Srinath…There is a fear that a great cricketer can never be replaced. But didn't Tendulkar replace Sunil Gavaskar adequately in a matter of two years?" You could be forgiven for thinking that Manjrekar's hinting rather broadly that it's time to send Tendulkar on his way, but even if that's not what Manjrekar meant, from the evidence of public comment over the last couple of days, there are lots of fans and journalists who think Tendulkar's a liability.

I think they're daft. On the matter of Tendulkar thwarting the team interest by scoring too slowly, it's worth remembering that India scored over six hundred runs at four runs an over in less than two days and there was enough time after the declaration for Zaheer to wreck the Bangladeshi top order. There's a difference between a proper nostalgia for a younger Tendulkar who took attacks apart and the unlovely, irrational instinct to savage a great player because he has been diminished by time. Yes, Tendulkar isn't the batsman he was and his decline is the more poignant for having been accompanied by a change of style: a great attacking batsman has become a nudging accumulator. But I suggest that till we find a young batsman who can nudgingly accumulate at the same rate as Tendulkar does now, we leave him be. I don't think Suresh Raina or Yuvraj Singh are credible rivals for his batting spot. In the South African series Tendulkar was well below his best but it's worth remembering that he played rather better than his captain did.

I'm not surprised by Tendulkar's attritional methods and his determination to get his hundreds. Having been slandered by gossip (the rumours about his subversion of Dravid's authority), dissed by Chappell, reprimanded by the board for speaking out of turn and excluded from the Bangladeshi ODIs as punishment for unspecified 'sins', he could be forgiven for thinking that he had been put on notice, that given the opportunity the time wasn't far off when the selectors and the team management might 'rest' him for Test matches. Having struck two centuries in successive Tests he's achieved two things: One, a stay on the popular Manjrekar Prescription (viz. old guys should be recycled) and two, he's boosted his own morale as a batsman. For those of us who wish the team well this is good news at the start of a busy Test season.

	"Why the batsman the team turns to in difficult conditions, is denied the opportunity to consolidate his place in the Indian side and fill his boots in easier ones?" © Getty Images

Now that every Indian batsman lucky enough to be picked looks likely to score a century against Bangladesh, this is a good time to look at the considerations behind Indias five batsmen policy in the long term. The point of only five batsmen is more bowling options. Despite the matchless Adam Gilchrist, Australia traditionally play six batsmen, a keeper and four bowlers. One of the batsmen (Michael Bevan, Andrew Symonds, Mark Waugh) has generally doubled up as an auxiliary bowler. Dravid has been pushing the idea of five bowlers for a while, though it isn't clear that India has five bowlers penetrative enough to back up the policy. Anil Kumble, an in-form Harbhajan Singh, Zaheer Khan, an un-injured Munaf Patel and Sreesanth might (just) justify their places but Harbhajan is in decline and Munaf Patel keeps breaking down. Irfan Pathan swinging the ball and shoring up the lower order would be perfect, but Greg Chappell, with his gift for turning gold into lead, did for him.

In Bangladesh the five-bowler experiment is relatively risk-free. On slow pitches Bangladesh's seamers aren't a threat and Indian Test batsmen aren't likely to be troubled by poor-to-middling left arm spin. I can't see us playing five batsmen against England in England this summer or even at home against the Pakistanis later this year so the best thing you can say about the policy is that it's Bangladesh-specific. But you have to experiment somewhere if five bowlers is what you favour so perhaps Bangladesh is Dravid's laboratory.

The trouble is that Dravid's experiment, even if it succeeds (i.e. we beat Bangladesh), is so poorly set up that it has no lessons for the future. And the problem isn't the five bowlers, it's the five batsmen he's decided to go with.

Mohinder Amarnath wrote a piece recently where he argued that it was a mistake to pick two wicket-keepers (Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Dinesh Karthik) in the playing eleven. I don't think that's where the problem lies. I'm old enough to remember the time India played both Farokh Engineer and Budhi Kunderan. Kunderan played as a batsman and he was picked for the same reason that Karthik is: he showed promise as an opener, a position India has always had trouble filling. Karthik has scored runs every time he's been given an opportunity and I don't think it's a good idea to unsettle the team's best batsman, Dravid, by making him open.

No, the reason this experiment is meaningless is that Dravid and Ravi Shastri have picked Sourav Ganguly over VVS Laxman. If India were to play six batsmen, Ganguly walks into the team. He has made a brave return to the Indian team in both forms of the game and he deserves his place at number six. As a Test batsman Ganguly is still twice the player Yuvraj will ever be. But in a line up of five, after Karthik, Wasim Jaffer, Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar, surely the fifth has to be Laxman. His recent form in Test matches, his overall record, his average, his ability against fast bowling are all superior to Ganguly's. Were we to play Australia or England or South Africa on quick pitches I can't see anyone rooting for Ganguly over Laxman and if it's Bangladesh and slow bowlers we're talking about, nobody sane is going to argue that Laxman is less than masterful against spin. Or that Ganguly is immeasurably the better fielder. I could argue the reverse: Laxman is a fine slip catcher.

So why did Ganguly get the nod over Laxman? It doesn't seem to be on account of the 'process' that Dravid was once so keen on. If 'process' is shorthand for a rational long haul strategy systematically implemented regardless of short term setbacks, the dropping of Laxman seems the very opposite of process: it seems an example of how expediency trumps merit and reason in Indian cricket, it seems, in short, a political decision.

It seems a political decision forced upon the team management by its complicity in the selectors' decision to 'rest' Ganguly (along with Tendulkar) from the one-day games against Bangladesh. My guess about the reasoning behind Laxman's exclusion goes like this: World Cup gossip, a television sting operation and the rumours about Dravid's difficulties with senior players made it clear to everyone that they were being punished for having been recalcitrant, awkward and subversive of the captain's authority. In this context dropping Ganguly from the Bangladesh Tests would have seemed like vendetta so the tour management dropped Laxman instead.

Ganguly, with composure and courage, compiled a century in the Chittagong Test which meant that Laxman was benched for the Bangladesh Test series. So if Dravid is serious about a five batsman team in the long run, the current series has entrenched a batsman who is dodgy against the short ball at the expense of perhaps the best player of fast bowling in the Indian team. If he isn't, if the five-batsman strategy is designed for the sub-continent's slow pitches, then he needs to explain to us (and perhaps to his erstwhile team mate, Laxman) why the batsman the team turns to in difficult conditions, is denied the opportunity to consolidate his place in the Indian side and fill his boots in easier ones?

Dravid has form in the business of dropping Laxman from the side. He has chosen Yuvraj over Laxman in a home series during Chappell's regime as coach which, in Test match terms, is close to sacrilege. But to drop Laxman (and remember that Laxman was vice-captain in the last Test series we played in South Africa) because it was inexpedient to drop Ganguly is worse because it seems to indicate a willingness to politically finesse a cricketing choice. To exile Laxman to the margins of the team, to make an extra of a batsman who by right should be seen as one of the anchors of India's Test match batting over the next few years, is inexplicable especially when the captain who has made that call had the privilege of playing glorious second-fiddle to Laxman through his great, match-winning innings in Kolkata in 2001.

	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.

	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.

	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

	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.

	'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

	'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.