It is a sad confession to make, but it is God’s own truth that the only reason I delayed writing this Wednesday’s column by a day was that India looked so well-placed to beat New Zealand at Wellington. At 72/4 overnight, with Nathan Astle retired hurt, a last day’s pitch — we seemed all set to end a 12-year drought of Test match victories overseas. Since 1986, we have gone around the world, in search of an overseas Test Match victory, only to be beaten in the West Indies, Australia, South Africa and England. Desperate, we sneaked in two short tours to Zimbabwe as well, only to survive by the skin of our teeth against a 46-year-old off-spinner called John Traicos the first time and to be beaten the next. We didn’t quite get beaten in Sri Lanka but ended up being on the wrong side of the highest aggregate in the history of Test cricket.
This long-winded preamble is necessitated by the compulsion of having to justify two things. First, how does something like cricket qualify to be written about in this column? And second, why would I set the alarm clock at 3 am to watch such poor-quality cricket — even delay my column by a day? This was the year-end column. Everything that needed to be said about whatever was wrong with the country had already been said. So now that the cricket team, following Dingko, Jyotirmoyee and the hockey team, was promising to end on a high note a year so hopeless in terms of politics and economy, I could be pardoned for nursing notions of talking about how sport can revive the spirit of a nation even in such troubled times and other such blah. Except that this cricket team had other ideas.
If you wake up for the fifth successive night at 3 am, hoping to cheer an Indian victory, and then see attitude and body language from at least six of your 11 stars as if winning or losing does not matter, as if no larger issues — national prestige, spirit, the flag — are at stake, you wonder what the hell is going on. Then you think of the smiling, jovial faces of many of the same stars at the Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur (Sachin Tendulkar obviously excepted) as they got out for not-so-sweet nothings, unwilling to strain themselves for the flag when the rest of your “A” teammates were flaunting the logo in Toronto, then you figure out what is wrong with our cricket.
Of course, it’s been fashionable lately to blame commercialism, sponsors and logos, big money and ultimately the free market for all that is wrong with our cricket. In the field of sports, how can there be any contradiction between the market and national interest? The problem is, we now have a cricket team and a cricketing set-up in the country that give the free market a bad name and we, the fans, are as much to blame as the players and the organisers, if not more. Live television may have made us a nation of a hundred crore cricket coaches, but it has not somehow persuaded us to seek that one thing that underlines the essence of a free market economy — value for money. Our cricketers are not rewarded for winning, nor punished for losing. So why blame them if they don’t try too hard to win? We look at them as entertainers, heroes, stars, good-lookers and very little else. We judge even our film stars by more exacting standards — Govinda, Shah Rukh Khan, and Madhuri Dixit, all have to keep producing the odd hit to stay in the news. But cricketers we judge by the same yardsticks as our supermodels. They must look good, and glamorous, entertain us a bit sashaying here and veejaying there, and that is about all. When was the last time a bunch of Indian cricket stars paid for consistently poor performances by the team? What happens when the team gets thrashed on foreign tours? How does the Board react? Does it fire somebody? Do the sponsors drop their stars? Do new faces move in their stead?
So heady is the lure of big money, so strong the vested interests all around that each overseas disaster is immediately followed by the board organising a string of home-and-around series and one-day tournaments. The pitches are doctored — why be shy of giving yourselves the home advantage? Look at how consistent this record has been over the past decade. Doesn’t matter if you get your backsides whipped abroad — you come home and there will be friendly pitches and umpires and, at the end of the day, your career average would look pretty good. The whistle on this scandal was blown, perhaps inadvertently, by none else than Azharuddin at the beginning of the current tour. When asked why India doesn’t win very much abroad, how much did we get to travel in the first place, he asked in reply. Since India’s last visit to Australia, he noted, the Australians had already visited the subcontinent a dozen times. We were taking no reciprocal risks.
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The first major sport in India to be struck by this non-competitive virus was football, beginning with the league in Calcutta. It did not matter what the standard was of football played, and it mattered even less where you belonged internationally, but I got my money’s worth as long as my club beat yours. Meanwhile, if India struggled to even qualify for most Asian championships and if its rank in international football at 120 was just a notch better than the country’s standing in terms of the Human Development Index (132), it was of no consequence to me. In some ways, this applies to cricket as well. Sachin and Azhar got centuries this time, so great. Ganguly too spent some time on the crease. So your stars did fine. And the sponsors got their money’s worth. Who would you punish now if India lost? And why?
You cannot run competitive sport today without big money and if you have any doubts ask your hockey players how badly cash is needed to take a nation to international levels in any game. But, as in any free market, the inflow of cash should be directly determined by the quality of goods and services provided. This isn’t quite so in Indian cricket because the board, the sponsors, the sports management fixers and other lowlier forms of life such as bookies have now completely overwhelmed this market. Ever wonder how the most unlikely names keep on making it to the final elevens and how when they do make it there, advertisements featuring them begin to appear on your TV screens.
That a flat-batted batsman cannot open for India is a facile argument considering that another one who batted quite the same unusual — crude if you may so put it — way formed with Sunil Gavaskar our most successful opening pair ever. But when Chetan Chauhan stepped out to open for India, flat-bat and all, he wrapped himself in the tricolour, not Siyaram Suiting. It was a different time, a different age, when you faced Dennis Lillee without a helmet, and answered him glare for glare, a bouncer for a slog — flat-batted — over the infield. It was a different age when a Kapil Dev hit Eddie Hemmings for four successive sixes to save India the follow-on, or defied an injured hand, a rampant Allan Donald and a petrified Indian batting line-up at 31 for 6 at Port Elizabeth to score 129 that put Stan McCabe’s historic defiance, decades ago, in the shade. Or when Rahul Dravid celebrated his first Test hundred at the Wanderers by kissing the Indian crest on his helmet.
The fundamental question is, why expect a cricketer to exert too much trying to make India win when his larger purpose is served with a reasonably good personal performance — even a 30 or 40 in these times? So why should he throw himself at the ball or go sliding to reduce fours into threes at the boundary and risk injury and thus loss to himself and the sponsors? Who plays for the country anymore? Of course, there will always be an exception like Sachin Tendulkar but he is by no means typical of your present-day cricket stars. Whether turning out for Shardashram, Bombay or India, he will give his hundred per cent. But if he wasn’t so exceptional, why would he be called God?
This brings me to a cold and windy morning at Port Elizabeth in December of 1992. India, on the so-called Friendship Series in South Africa, was already in the dumps and now it was the turn of us hacks to turn out for a one-day match against South African cricket journalists. We stretched the rules a bit and included, in our team, Sunil Gavaskar who happened to be on the bandwagon as a TV commentator. Soon enough our captain, R. Mohan of The Hindu was back in the pavilion, run out by his understudy Vijay Lokapally on the very first ball of the innings. Lokapally was out the next ball, attempting to pull but actually slashing to third man. In came a familiar figure at the familiar scoreline — 0/2 at an unfamiliar number four position. Sunil Gavaskar walked up the pitch to Calcutta cricket writer, Gautam Bhattacharya, and said, “Look, this may be a press team, but it is an Indian team. So let’s put our heads down or we will be 40 for 7”. The attack boasted a couple of Currie Cup medium-pacers and Gavaskar’s first 50 were scored in the ‘V’ as if the World Cup was at stake. Then started a flurry of strokes and soon enough he ended the innings at 130 not out. There was no money at stake, no records. Gavaskar had no point to prove to us hacks years after his retirement. But once you turn out for India, it was serious business for him. Yet no one could say he didn’t understand the market.
Later in the afternoon, as the South Africans batted, and the match drifted, Sunil excused himself from mid-on and we sat chatting inside a car parked by the boundary. He complained about the intelligence of Indian cricketers, about the lack of thinking in our cricket but, most of all, about the lack of pride.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “How will you restore it?”
“You know how I will begin?” He grinned mischievously. “I will ban these white floppy hats and make it mandatory for them to turn out in blue India caps.”
Years earlier, Imran Khan had actually done something of the sort. He describes in his biography how he found his Pakistani cricketers so short on pride, so short on national spirit and confidence on foreign tours that he made it compulsory for them to go out on formal social occasions in their national dress, the salwar kameez. That started a process of team-building and culminated in the World Cup victory. It is with basics such as this that the process of restoring national pride in our cricket has to begin now. This is why even something like cricket needs to be written about in this column.
This article was first published on December 31, 1998
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