Of all sports, cricket has the most special quality to inspire superior prose. At Portsmouth yesterday, it was Rahul Dravid (Kent) versus Shane Warne (Hampshire). “Warne failed to master the method of Dravid,” said The Times headline, hailing Dravid’s 137 in Kent’s total of a mere 252. The Englishmen hold Warne in awe and terror, presumably because they play spin from memory and not through old-fashioned methods like reading the flight and the tweak of the ball. So Richard Hobson was ecstatic at Dravid’s “perfectly balanced stance” that “revealed soft hands in defence and familiar wristiness in attack”. As Dravid pulled and drove mercilessly, “Warne’s body language suggested that Dravid was swimming nearer to his hook with every stroke”. Call the contest pure theatre, with two grandmasters of their art trading moves “at a far exalted level to what is going on in county cricket”.
Purple prose, yes. But in cricket’s season of shame, very little has happened so far to inspire the fast depleting ranks of English cricket writers. It is now a marginal sport here. Cricketers get very little money, no endorsements and several top players take up odd jobs like plumbing when it is off-season. This season, in particular, was first overwhelmed by Euro 2000, then the annual Wimbledon tamasha and, now, the focus is on Tigermania at the British Open as the media go ga-ga over Tiger Woods. England hasn’t had a real cricket star since Ian Botham and now makes do with subcontinental stars, even audiences. This week’s charity match being organised by John Major, not surprisingly, displays nearly a dozen stars from one part of the world. We are now the heart and soul of international cricket. We give it stars and bucks. Unfortunately, we have also given it match-fixing.
That is why how we handle our match-fixing investigation today is so vital. It was the surprising efficiency and persistence of Delhi Police that exposed Hansie Cronje and brought the first real evidence of the bookie-player nexus. But somehow we still shied from accepting that far too many of our own icons, our Michael Jordans and Maradonas, could also have feet of clay and lockers full of unaccounted cash. What was worse, we seemed unwilling to accept that the rot in our cricket, in fact, world cricket, started at the top.
Circumstantial evidence was all there. The way masala tournaments were being taken around the world, from Los Angeles to Singapore to Toronto and so on. The way so many of these went along predicted lines. Remember how the Board first split the team for the Commonwealth Games and then, as it lost quickly in that tournament, flew the stars out overnight to up the stakes in Toronto? While our cricket was being literally raped and pillaged, when players were being traded like MLAs in Laloo’s Bihar or Bhajan Lal’s Haryana. And when sponsors and fixers selected the teams rather than the five alleged wise men, the national selectors (remember how Rahul Dravid was dropped for half a season for no more exact reason than endorsing the “wrong” brand of cola?), we did not wake up.
Now that we have, and have targeted the high and the mighty, the former chief of the ICC, the head of WorldTel, the czars of TV rights and endorsements, the people who “own” the finest Indian batsmen, the world is watching us. Are we now, finally, getting it right? True, the South Africans and the Pakistanis have had judges look into match-fixing charges. But nowhere in the history of all international sport — not just cricket — has an investigation of this magnitude ever been launched.
We can, of course, still make a mess of it. We have a special talent for that. What, after all, did happen to the Jain hawala case and the Jain Commission, the two inquiries that yielded nothing in terms of finding the guilty but destroyed two prime ministers in the process?
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That must not be allowed to happen to the current cricket probe for two reasons. One, that while players from other countries have been involved in match-fixing, nowhere has this affected the performance of the national team as in India. We won our last Test match outside the subcontinent in 1985. We haven’t won a major one-day tournament since that year (Benson and Hedges Cup, Australia) either. Our cricket has been blighted by thuggery, deceit and distrust. Now is the time to clear it up. Second, we owe it to the cricketing world to clean up our act with a sense of finality now. Without Indian stars, fans and TV audiences, cricket cannot survive as an international competitive sport. If this probe also fell by the wayside, as they usually do in India, we would be accused of destroying cricket in headlines bigger than the one that hailed Dravid’s victory over Warne on Thursday. Except this would inspire no purple prose.
Meanwhile: Besides the mess in our cricket, one more thing that continues to give India a bad name is Air-India. The aircraft look run-down, the toilets are dirty and the food is now the worst advertisement for Indian cuisine. If the Prime Minister complained about stale appams on one of his recent flights, he should exchange notes with the great Ustaad of Sarod, Amjad Ali Khan, who, sitting next to me, pulled out a white hair from his sambhar. The upma was inedible, the prawns floated in a so-called curry that was pure oil and the salad was drier than your skin at the end of a nine-hour flight.
It is not just the food, but the attitude that makes the only internationally known Indian brand such a shame. For first class gifts, Air India has teamed up with the Spice Board to give your exotic Indian spices like pepper and cardamom packed in cheap Pearlpet plastic bottles. Even the inflight video screens are no longer there in your seats. They were difficult to maintain, so they have all been yanked out in the manner of a crude countryside dentist, and similarly the hollows have been covered with temporary rexine caps that keep falling off all the time to expose the cavities. You only wish someone would take better care of the engines, the avionics and the controls. Yet, it would perhaps be easier to clean up Air-India. You can just sell it out. Who will ever buy Indian cricket?
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