Men in White

Men in White http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/ en-us Copyright 2008 Sat, 22 Mar 2008 10:18:14 +0000 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Last post 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. http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2008/03/last_post.php http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2008/03/last_post.php Indian Cricket Sat, 22 Mar 2008 10:18:14 +0000 The Beginning of the End

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?]]> http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2008/03/the_beginning_of_the_end.php http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2008/03/the_beginning_of_the_end.php Indian Cricket Thu, 13 Mar 2008 09:29:55 +0000 Why should the IPL be globally managed?

Kerry Packer didn't ask the world's cricket boards if he could subsidise them for the trouble they had taken to raise the players he was buying for his pirate league © The Cricketer International

Some six years ago I wrote an article speculating about a world in which domestic cricket in India would be organised around commercial franchises and clubs on the football model, not the territorial principle on which the Ranji Trophy is based. With the IPL, this has (sort of) come to pass. I can't lay claim to prescience because I was dreaming of franchised first-class cricket, not a Twenty20 league. I've no idea whether the IPL will work in the long term or not and I'm as surprised as anyone at the money that's been bid for the players. But it seems like an interesting experiment that might create a following for the game at a sub-national level. I'd like Twenty20 cricket to mutate into a four-innings format, like Test cricket in miniature. It's an idea that Chris Cairns once mentioned in a discussion in a television studio. It's a feasible format because even with each side batting twice, the 80 overs would take less time to bowl than the 100 overs of one-day cricket. The sports channels would love it (more time to flash commercials in) and the limited-overs game would be invested with some of the magic of Test cricket: the thrill of another chance, the prospect of the stirring fight back, the shot at a second-innings redemption. ]]> http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2008/03/why_should_the_ipl_be_globally.php http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2008/03/why_should_the_ipl_be_globally.php Indian Premier League Wed, 05 Mar 2008 12:33:31 +0000 Ponting and the 1950s

Andrew Symonds stands his ground after nicking an Ishant Sharma delivery in the infamous Sydney Test © AFP

I met Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi recently at an NDTV India talk show called Muqabla (contest). Before the studio discussion, talk veered to Ricky Ponting's reply to Neil Harvey's withering condemnation of Australian sledging. Ponting had argued that the team's critics and, by implication, their notions of good cricketing behaviour, were stuck in the 1950s, i.e a time when cricket wasn't the professional sport it is today. Pataudi didn't see how that explained anything. "I learnt my cricket in the hardest school there was—at least at the time—the county game. Most of the people I played with were professionals, people who played for a pretty meagre living. Nearly everyone walked, and hardly anyone sledged. There were always one or two people who didn't walk, but they were marked out as cheats." "There was the one time that I didn't walk," he said, grinning. "We were playing West Zone in the Duleep Trophy and the captain told us not to because the chaps on the other side didn't. So I stood my ground, but that was the only time." Who was the captain? I forgot to ask him. It must have been his Hyderabad skipper, ML Jaisimha. ]]> http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2008/02/ponting_and_the_1950s.php http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2008/02/ponting_and_the_1950s.php Controversy Sat, 02 Feb 2008 10:08:59 +0000 Shock and Awe

Anil Kumble and Sachin Tendulkar put the BCCI on notice after Mike Procter's decision to hand Harbhajan Singh a three-Test ban © GNNphoto

The two greatest Test series India has played in recent times have been against Australia: 2001 at home and 2008, Down Under. There's a curious symmetry to these two contests: India won the first one, 2-1 and lost the second one 1-2. Harbhajan was the pivot on which both turned: as a hero in the first (he took an astonishing 32 wickets in three Tests) and as a villain in the second, after his run-in with Symonds. If the 2001 series saw the beginning of Tendulkar's transformation into an attritional player, the one just ended saw that master-craftsman persona discarded as Tendulkar went back to being the Master. And in both series India stopped a great Australian team's astonishing winning run: Waugh's team and Ponting's, were looking for a seventeenth consecutive victory and both were thwarted by unlikely defeats. In the seven years between these two 21st century contests, international cricket was dominated by two developing narratives. One was driven by the strength of the Indian economy, the purchasing power of its consuming middle class and the consequent and massive increase in the television revenues controlled by the BCCI. The Indian board became the paymaster of world cricket and cricket's calendar became India-centric. This made other countries understandably uneasy and when incidents like the Sehwag controversy in South Africa provoked the BCCI to flex its muscles, Anglo-Australian commentators saw not an evolutionary shift in cricket's centre of gravity, but a thuggish take over, while south Asian fans and journalists saw a western unwillingness to acknowledge the end of empire. ]]> http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2008/01/shock_and_awe_1.php http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2008/01/shock_and_awe_1.php Thu, 31 Jan 2008 03:59:09 +0000 Tendulkar's bid for immortality

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.]]> http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2008/01/tendulkars_bid_for_immortality.php http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2008/01/tendulkars_bid_for_immortality.php Indian Cricket Thu, 17 Jan 2008 04:02:18 +0000 Harbhajan, cont'd here]]> http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2008/01/harbhajan_contd_1.php http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2008/01/harbhajan_contd_1.php Thu, 10 Jan 2008 03:38:39 +0000 We was robbed

Tennis allows three challenges; given umpires of the quality of Benson and Bucknor, half a dozen might be too few © AFP

India lost the Sydney Test because the umpiring was one-sidedly awful. It was good to see Kumble and his team-mates shake hands with the Australians but formal salutation is where congratulations should stop. This was a Test match where the excitement was manufactured by incompetent umpires making weird decisions: the Indians players must have felt like lab rats being chivvied by mad scientists. While previewing the present series in this blog, I wrote that for the Indians to have a chance the umpires would have to hold their nerve. Well, they didn’t. Test series in Australia have in recent years have followed a pattern: the touring team struggles to to hold its own against the superior home team; then, at vital moments when the beleaguered tourists have a chance of saving the game or winning it, they get a shocker. Or two. Or three. In the Sydney Test the Indians lost count. ]]> http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2008/01/we_was_robbed.php http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2008/01/we_was_robbed.php Controversy Sun, 06 Jan 2008 09:52:29 +0000 Ponting and the case against Harbhajan

Ponting, Harbhajan, Tendulkar and Gilchrist in conversation after Harbhajan's confrontation with Symonds © Getty Images

The Symonds affair and the charge of racial abuse laid against Harbhajan Singh by Ricky Ponting could change the way in which international cricket is monitored and regulated. I say ‘could’ because the affair could also pan out straightforwardly with punishment for Harbhajan and no general consequences for the game. If there is any corroborative evidence (besides the testimony of Symonds, Matthew Hayden and Ponting) that Harbhajan used racist taunts when he responded to Symonds’ comments by confronting him on the field, Harbhajan should not only be banned for the period laid down by the ICC’s rules, the BCCI should put the spinner on notice: it should warn Harbhajan that any subsequent offence will result in his banishment from international cricket. The board equivocated in the matter of racist abuse from spectators in Vadodara and Mumbai; it mustn’t make that mistake again. Mike Proctor hasn’t revealed the specific comment(s) for which Harbhajan is charged, but the rumour in Australian newspapers is that Harbhjan called Symonds a monkey. Chetan Chauhan, the Indian team manager, has been reported saying that Harbhajan denies having said this; he is also reported as saying in the same breath that ‘monkey’ in Indian usage isn’t a derogatory word. If the report is accurate, this is exactly the kind of shiftiness that the touring team’s management should avoid. If Harbhajan called Symonds a monkey he should go down; preferably forever. ]]> http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2008/01/symonds_ponting_and_the_case_a.php http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2008/01/symonds_ponting_and_the_case_a.php Controversy Sat, 05 Jan 2008 23:02:04 +0000 Laxman was sublime but India need more

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. ]]> http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2008/01/laxman_was_sublime_but_india_n.php http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2008/01/laxman_was_sublime_but_india_n.php Indian Cricket Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:05:25 +0000 Dravid: The meddle and the muddle

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. ]]> http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2007/12/dravid_the_meddle_and_the_mudd.php http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2007/12/dravid_the_meddle_and_the_mudd.php Indian Cricket Sat, 29 Dec 2007 06:12:34 +0000 The Hussey Measure (and the measure of Hussey)

Michael Hussey averages 86 in his last eighteen Tests, a bit less than Sangakkara's 90 over a similar number of Tests © Getty Images

Omer Admani made a reasonable point in response to the previous post about Hussey. He said:

“His average seems to be stunning, but there seems to be a trend on offer in the past few years: Mohd Yousuf, Younis Khan, Ponting, Sangakkara, and others have probably have had similar averages in the past few years (around the period Hussey made his debut).”

Omer’s point is that a decline in bowling standards coupled with featherbed pitches have led to a general inflation of batting averages. The implication of this is that Hussey seems exceptional only because his career began after this trend had been established. Other major batsmen have lower averages because they began playing earlier, at a time when conditions were harder for batsmen. ]]> http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2007/12/the_hussey_measure_and_the_mea.php http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2007/12/the_hussey_measure_and_the_mea.php Sun, 23 Dec 2007 09:14:01 +0000 The most under-rated player in the world

Michael Hussey's already done enough for us to acknowledge that he is as good as the best in the contemporary game © Getty Images

One of the really interesting things about the Australian team right now is the standing of Michael Hussey. The man has played eighteen Tests: he is about to cross the threshold that's normally used to benchmark player performances, which is twenty Tests. And as we know, he has a batting average in the mid-80s. Allowing for Australian dominance, average inflation, wretched bowling attacks, making, in short, every deduction that a petty Indian fan might make to cut an Australian champion down to size, you're still left with figures that lift him so far above Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, Ricky Ponting, Jacques Kallis and Kumar Sangakkara that you'd think cricket writers would be falling over themselves to crown him the Badshah of Batsmanship. Not a bit of it. A few weeks ago, during Sri Lanka’s tour of Australia, Ian Chappell went on at great and carping length on how shocked he was that Hussey hadn't put his hand up to open for Australia when Justin Langer retired and how Hussey had missed a huge opportunity because Phil Jaques had made that position his own. I don't know about Chappell but if India had a player averaging 60 in the middle order, I'd have picketed the BCCI offices to uphold his right not to open. Even allowing for the fact that Hussey has opened the innings at the first-class level, I still can't follow why you'd want to mess with someone who has been delivering numbers like 86.18 per innings. It's not just Chappell: listening to Channel 9's commentators, it's hard not to get the feeling that they're puzzled, even vaguely embarrassed by his statistics. Hussey himself is endearingly modest about his achievement. Talking to an Australian newspaper he said: "I must admit I'm surprised and shocked by my numbers but it's early in my Test career. I'd love to retire with an average of 60 but it's in the nature of the game that it all levels out. I know deep down it's going to come down to a more realistic region as my Test career continues." ]]> http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2007/12/the_most_underrated_player_in.php http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2007/12/the_most_underrated_player_in.php Fri, 21 Dec 2007 14:57:57 +0000 More than a Test series

If Anil Kumble's side performs well on the Australian tour, it will be good for Test cricket as a competitive sport © Getty Images

The Indian tour of Australia that's just gotten under way, is historically significant for all sorts of reasons. It's important for India for the same reason as every other tour of Australian has been: it offers us the opportunity to do what we have never done before — beat Australia at home. It has been nearly sixty years since we started playing Test matches against the Australians and to not have won an Australian rubber even once, is, well, feeble. And it's no use saying we nearly beat them the last time round: 'nearly won' doesn't show up in Wisden. It's significant for Australia because Ricky Ponting's men have a real chance of breaking the record for most consecutive Test wins set by Steve Waugh's Australians. Waugh won sixteen Test matches in a row and the current team took their tally to fourteen by destroying the Sri Lankans over two Test matches. We're going to play four Test matches against them, so theoretically the Australians could have notched up seventeen in a row by the time we get to the final Test at the Adelaide Oval. ]]> http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2007/12/more_than_a_test_series.php http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2007/12/more_than_a_test_series.php Thu, 20 Dec 2007 04:52:31 +0000 Journeyman and genius

When Sanath Jayasuriya announced his retirement from Test cricket in the course of the first Test against England, the way he signed off was nicely representative of his extraordinary career. He failed in the first innings with the bat, then hit a quick 78 in the second innings. As a bonus in the second innings, Jayasuriya took a wicket with his slow left-arm spin. A fifty and a wicket: useful but not remarkable figures…unless you know that 24 of those 78 runs had been scored in a single over off that blameless swing bowler, James Anderson. Jayasuriya's career statistics—his aggregates, his averages, his centuries, the number of wickets he took—give the same impression: they suggest a more than useful player, not a remarkable one. They lie. In a career that spanned eighteen years, Jayasuriya played, in the idiom of Hindi films, an extraordinary double role: journeyman and genius. He was a useful bits-and-pieces player, fielding alertly, chipping in with the odd wicket (he took 98 wickets in 109 Test matches) scoring the necessary fifty (he had 31 half-centuries to his name); he was also, in his fearsome prime, the most destructive opening batsman in the world.]]> http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2007/12/journeyman_and_genius.php http://blogs.cricinfo.com/meninwhite/archives/2007/12/journeyman_and_genius.php Thu, 06 Dec 2007 03:57:56 +0000