Sport

Discipline? Who needs discipline?

If Shoaib Akhtar did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. No, silly, not for his fast bowling, but for his magnificent quotes, which can liven many a dull day. Here, check this out:

I have been made scapegoat by calling me an ‘indisciplined’ player. Infact, there is no discipline in the whole nation. Look at our traffic that defies all rules and regulations, look at the way we rush for food in wedding ceremonies. When there was no discipline in the whole nation, how could Pakistan cricket team be a disciplined bunch as it has never been a disciplined team.

I can just imagine Shoaib starting his run-up to the food counter. Anyway, right after that, this gem of a man, this gift to humanity says:

Pakistan team does not need a coach at all, it needs a strong nerved and good captain.

Can we import Shoaib, please? Free trade? Since young Javagal retired, we’ve had fast bowlers who say immensely non-entertaining things in public, which defeats the purpose of their existence. We want Shoaib! We want Shoaib!

My 2007 World Cup XI

I have a piece up on Rediff with my 2007 World Cup XI, with reasons and suchlike. To give you just a listing, here’s my XI:

1 Matthew Hayden, 2 Adam Gilchrist (wk), 3 Ricky Ponting (capt), 4 Scott Styris, 5 Mahela Jayawardene, 6 Kevin Pietersen, 7 Brad Hogg, 8 Lasith Malinga, 9 Nathan Bracken, 10 Muttiah Muralitharan, 11 Glenn McGrath.

Cricinfo also has a WC XI here, and the only difference, besides the batting order, is that they’ve picked Shane Bond instead of Bracken. Well, I picked Bracken over Bond because big-match temperament matters to me: in New Zealand’s most important game of all, Bond failed to deliver.

Comments are open. What’s your 2007 World Cup XI?

Death, taxes and Australia winning the World Cup

The list of the inevitable grows.

There is much comment all around about how Australia’s domination is bad for the game, and how cricket needs a contest, and so on. I disagree. All of us want to watch cricket that is sublime, beautiful, invigorating. Australia have made that routine. There are few more joyful sights in the game than Ricky Ponting rocking back to pull or Glenn McGrath peppering the corridor, and Adam Gilchrist’s innings in the final will remain a cherished memory for me, on par with his two legendary innings in South Africa—even though it killed the contest.

Imagine, if you can, what would happen if this Aussie side was anything like the England side. You’d have your contest all right, but it would be so boring, so mediocre. Thank FSM for Australia, Steve Waugh onwards. Without them, cricket would be dead.

(Comments are open. Whaddya think?)

The two kinds of cricket experts

Robin Hanson writes:

A prosperous and successful plumber is an expert at plumbing. Someone who is a good source for accurate information on plumbing is an expert on plumbing.  More generally, an expert at a topic is someone who has gained the most attention, praise, income, and so on via their association with the topic. But this may not be the best expert on that topic. He may have succeeded by not giving the most accurate information, but by telling people what they want or expect to hear, or by entertaining them.

We often rely on the heuristic of looking to an expert at a topic, when what we want is an expert on a topic.

Is this not a mistake our sports channels routinely make, hiring experts at cricket instead of experts on cricket? For example, I’d count the likes of Atul Wassan, Navjot Singh Sidhu and Chetan Sharma as experts at cricket, and Harsha Bhogle as an expert on cricket—and I think we all agree on who is a better commentator. Of course, there are some who are both experts at and on cricket, such as Richie Benaud and Sunil Gavaskar (when he’s switched on and is not on auto-pilot). But our broadcasters don’t care too much: they just want the experts at cricket because those people come into the television studio with the benefit of already being celebrities, and viewers crave familiarity. If they happen to also speak insightfully about the game, well, that’s a bonus.

Also read: “Television and cricket.” “Do we really love cricket?”

(Thanks to Rajeev Ramachandran for bringing my attention to Overcoming Bias.)

Don’t regulate either ghee or endorsements

This piece first appeared on Rediff.

Indian cricket has many problems, but imagine the following scenario: An investigative committee formed by the BCCI finds out that the reason many Indian players are unfit is pure ghee. On their time off, it seems, many of them eat food cooked in pure ghee, and as a result put on weight and become lethargic. It starts with Virender Sehwag, spreads to Sachin Tendulkar, and soon they all became pure ghee addicts and lost their vigour on the field.

The mandarins at the BCCI come up with an obvious solution: ban pure ghee! Or rather, ban the cricketers from having any food cooked in it, even in the off season. “Our cricketers are losing their focus on cricket because of pure ghee,” they argue. “We can only counter this with strong action.”

It’s obvious what is wrong with the above scenario, isn’t it? If the players are unfit, they should be punished for that alone. If they don’t perform, drop them. They will soon enough do whatever they need to in order to get their place back, including renouncing pure ghee, if that’s what the problem really is. Focus on their fitness and performance alone, and try to regulate no more than that. Pure ghee is just a red herring, a convenient excuse for a system that does not focus enough on pure merit.

So are endorsements. The BCCI has announced that it will henceforth regulate the endorsements of its cricketers. “A player will endorse not more than 3 sponsors or products,” their statement reads. “No Sponsor can contract more than 2 players.” And so on.

The primary logic behind this is that endorsements distract players from their performance on the field. This is a popular view – thus this populist action by the BCCI – but even if it was true, is it any of the board’s business what players do in their free time? The BCCI’s only concern should be how their players perform on the field, which should be the basis of how they treat those players.

It is a common view that cricketers owe their massive endorsement deals to the fact that they play for the BCCI, and thus the BCCI should have the right to control their endorsements. But by that logic, your employer would want control over all your purchases, and your boss could show up at your house at midnight and demand that you change the furniture. If that were to happen to you, would you not ask him to get off your private property?

A player’s image rights belong to him alone, and this is respected in other sports across the world. You will not find Wayne Rooney asking either Manchester United or the English soccer authorities for permission to endorse a product. Sure, Man U and England have a right to demand that Rooney not do so in Man U or England colours, because those are trademarked material. But Rooney belongs to no one but himself.

You could argue that the BCCI, as a private body, has the right to put whatever clauses it wants in its contracts, and the players have a right to walk away if they object. Indeed. But consider that Indian cricketers have nowhere else to sell their wares: as Niranjan Rajadhyaksha pointed out recently (free registration required), the BCCI has a monopsony on the game. It can use this to strong-arm players to agree to just about any terms. That does not mean that those terms are correct.

Apart from systemic reform, Indian cricket also needs attitudinal change at the top. The board must introduce a meritocracy, and evaluate the players on nothing other than performance and attitude. If they simply do this dispassionately, there will be no need to blame either pure ghee or endorsements for what their players do wrong. They should, simply put, treat their players according to how they perform at the office, and not try to influence their behaviour at home.

Comments are open.

“We’re suckers”

“We’re suckers and we should break our addiction,” writes Martin Kettle in the Guardian about football. Could be said about cricket also, no?

Matches like this one make it hard to break the habit, though. Just one more drag, you think, and then no more.

And then you’re floating!

The dance of a headless chicken

Don’t be taken in by all the activity that’s going on around Indian cricket. You’ll see movement all right, but it’s all headed nowhere.

PS: Of the glut of pieces out there on the subject, I recommend you read “The Real Culprits” by S Rajesh. It lays bare India’s shortcomings on the field of play. As for the dramas of the dressing room, we’ll never have the full story, though different versions of events will no doubt emerge. (You get a sense of Greg Chappell’s version of events here and here. Ian Chappell’s broadside against Sachin Tendulkar the other day now becomes explicable. Heh.)

Anyway, watch the dance if it entertains you. I’m not throwing any more grains.

Cricket and The Mad Dog Show

This piece has been published in the April 2007 issue of Cricinfo Magazine. It was written the day before India’s loss to Sri Lanka.

Imagine a man, dressed respectfully, and a scruffy dog he owns. The man catches the dog and sets its tail on fire. And then, as the dog runs around frenetically, the man says smugly: “Look – mad dog.” He even sells tickets. He calls it: “The Mad Dog Show.”

Indian cricket is The Mad Dog Show. Indian fans are like that burning doggie. The media is the respectable gentleman. Every time I see footage of mobs burning the effigy of a cricketer, and the voice-over of an anchor droning sanctimoniously in the background, I am appalled by the hypocrisy. “That is a beast you feed,” I feel like screaming. For all their talk about crazed subcontinental fans, the crazed subcontinental media is no different.

It is a cliche that cricket and Bollywood are India’s two great passions, but perhaps there really is just one. The media presents cricket like Bollywood drama, not sport. There aren’t winners and losers, there are heroes and villains. If India wins a game, they have lifted the nation. If they lose, they are traitors. Every act is wilful. 

In the quintessential Bollywood blockbuster, there are many twists and few shades of gray. Similarly, in their coverage of cricket, our media does not bother with nuance. Everything is larger than life. A mighty heave that just sails over the midwicket fence conjures up epic adjectives. An identical shot that is caught at the boundary is unequivocally condemned. One is “flamboyant”, “brilliant”, “stunning”; the other is “careless” and “irresponsible”. Note, for the latter set of adjectives, the implication of volition. 

The media is merely catering to the market, of course. The Indian Cricket Fan™ is a mighty beast which brings in much advertising money, but a dumb one. The nuances of the game do not matter to it. It wants spectacle. Passages of obdurate defence against wily spin do not excite it: wickets and sixes do. It wants batsmen to whack the ball, not nudge it around, and bowlers to grab wickets, not buy them. It cannot accept defeat – as in a Bollywood film, the hero must win – and does not enjoy the intricate dramas constructed from ball to ball. Indeed, what it really wants, and will slobber over, is a highlights package that shows it winning. It probably wishes the channels could just broadcast the highlights live. The rest is boring filler material. 

All subcontinental fans aren’t like this, of course. But there aren’t enough exceptions to constitute a significant market segment. Cricket coverage is such that niches cannot be satisfied: one official channel, the one that paid exorbitant amounts of money that it must earn back, broadcasts any particular game. All the news channels – and there is a glut of them – have to cater to the lowest common denominator to survive. The connoisseur has few options, such as, ahem, the magazine you hold, that look at cricket as more than gladiatorial combat for jaded voyeurs.

Indeed, the fear of the voyeurs getting jaded makes the media try harder to produce sensation. The most tried and tested way of doing this in the subcontinent is through shrill nationalism. So you have “Pakraman”. Also “War in the Windies”. And, of course, LOC. (“Love of cricket,” it seems!) This ensures that emotions are most pitched, and this also plays up on the theme of defeat as national betrayal. No true fan would stone the house of a player. But no true patriot would let a traitor go unpunished. 

As this self-fulfilling feedback loop between the media and The Indian Cricket Fan™ plays itself out, think of the players. International cricket is a demanding sport, and the physical and mental stresses it puts a player through are formidable. When one adds to that the stress of our media, searching for sensationalistic headlines, behaving like paparazzi, it must be almost unbearable. It is common to say that our cricketers bear the burden of a nation, but they also bear the burden of madness. How can that beast be satiated? What are the consequences if the other team plays better on the day, as is often inevitable? Cricket is a hard sport, but the cricket that our players play is much, much harder.