Racket before wicket

The Indian cricket team's failure in two successive T20 World Cups has nothing to do with short-ball pitching but rather the timing of the IPL.

Indian cricket team during a cricket match (Representative image) | Commons

You can’t keep cricket out of any discussion on India, even a heavy-duty academic conference that Brown University organised last week on 60 years of Indian democracy. Lant Pritchett of Harvard University (and formerly with the World Bank in India) stirred up a post-lunch session in a hall full of the finest India scholars with his provocative question: Is India a Flailing State? His premise was unexceptionable: that despite six decades of democracy India has faltered on most social indicators because its governance sucks. But, possibly to turn the knife, among evidence he presented to show how India had lagged behind, he also included a chart to show India’s miserable Olympic medals performance compared to its developing world peers. I objected at once: but how can you forget our improving record in cricket? World number one in Tests, and number two in ODIs.

I did have some sympathy in the hall and even while Pritchett tried to marshal a counter, the chair cautioned him with a sense of alarm: Don’t go there! I suggest you don’t go there! And the chairperson was so right. Cricket is so important to us, and among the many things that may have gone wrong with our sport, our improving performance in cricket stands out as a wonderful exception.

But that was last week. Maybe, if I had been confronted by that Pritchett slide this Friday instead of the last one, I would have kept my mouth shut. Because suddenly now the talk is not about success and glory. It is about lack of fitness, commitment, indiscipline, poor selection, inability to play the short ball and, as is inevitable after a debacle overseas, a brawl in a pub. Suddenly, the very people who gave us so much pride are looking like a national embarrassment. Surely a week is a long time in cricket.

Inevitably, again, while the media is full of expert analysis on what went wrong, the BCCI and its free-loaders are out playing the one game all mafiosi are good at: running a protection racket. Within hours of the appearance of stories that coach Gary Kirsten was livid about his players’ fitness and commitment, fresh leaks have now surfaced saying there was no problem with any player. And that all that was lacking with this team was the ability to play the short rising ball. But you will have to be a novice at cricket, or an American, to be fooled by that. Because if Indian cricketers are still so scared of the short ball, how come they have been the best performing team against Australia for almost a decade now? And how come they just walloped South Africa in ODIs, after handing out an innings defeat to draw a Test series and retain its number one spot?

South Africa, by the way, boasts the fastest bowlers in today’s cricket, led by one Dale Steyn. Inability to play pace is an old excuse which no longer works. How come the short ball only affects Indian cricketers in T20s while they can handle it quite nicely in the longer formats where the most dreaded fast bowlers have longer spells and more attacking fields? And again, look at the numbers. You are being told we lost because of short-pitched bowling. Maybe against Australia, but chasing 185 in a world cup is a challenge anyway, so could it be that we lost the match with lousy bowling and lousier fielding, where fitness and commitment are key, rather than because our top order could not handle Dirk Nannes who, by the way, held no such terrors bowling for the Delhi Daredevils in IPL?

In the match against the West Indies, chasing 170, we scored 155 which (at nearly 8 per over) is not such a bad score for a team that supposedly can’t play the short ball, and that too for the loss of just five wickets. And the loss to Sri Lanka? Who do they have to dig it into your ribcage? Go back a year to figure out where the same BCCI apologists and rented commentators first started building short-pitched bowling as an excuse for our own lack of fitness, discipline and application: the match we lost to England at Lords in the super-8 stage. Remember the scores then? We were chasing 154, and we got to 150 and yet were not bowled out (150-5, with Dhoni and Yusuf Pathan batting). We may have won if there was just one more ball remaining.

What is the point, therefore? It is, that the failure of this Indian team in two successive T20 world cups, or its inability to get those four runs against England last year and 15 against the West Indies this time, or to build a bigger challenge than 164 after averaging more than 8 per over at the half-way mark with just one wicket lost against Sri Lanka is not because of any sudden weakness against the short ball. It is because of the awful, awful timing of the IPL, which concludes less than a week before the T20 world cup. And that is a fact the Board and its protection-racketeers are so desperate to hide. Because that is the gravy train that they can’t get off. Doesn’t matter if it is meanwhile running over Indian cricket.

It isn’t just that the IPL is leaving players injured or fatigued. Players, as Sangakkara had the good sense to state, have the right to decide whether or not to play IPL. But is that a decision you can leave to individual players? Maybe a Tendulkar or a Dhoni can afford to sit out of a future IPL to preserve himself. But a Rohit Sharma, a Piyush Chawla, a Zaheer Khan? I mention those three names in particular because, if you go back to your T20 world cup footage, theirs are the chubbiest cheeks and they are some of the people Kirsten is complaining about.

Fatigue and injuries are a part of sport. It is more about the lowering of the professional bar, whether it comes to fitness, lifestyle, alcohol, smoking and, as Dhoni finally said with emperor-has-no-clothes candour, the parties on match nights that players are contract-bound to attend. No professional sport in the world runs like that. Or the other fixing, networking and non-cricketing money-making that has gone on with IPL where cricket has been given absolutely the last priority. The overall decadence and lack of scruples and such un-cricket-like sleaze that characterise the phenomenon that IPL has now been allowed to rot into cannot have left the players unaffected. That is why the chubby cheeks, missed catches and the lack of that bit of extra commitment that takes a team from 150 to 154 or 155 to 170 and victory. It is nothing to do with short-pitched bowling. Do not listen to Board officials, or to former cricketers or commentators who happen to be either hired by it, or are on the various IPL councils. It is that web of vested interests that is conflicting with your cricket and ruining it, not Dirk Nannes.