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A shot across the bows

In a development that slipped unnoticed past the radar of the
mainstream cricket media in India, the international players’
association has trashed
the latest edition of the ICC’s Future Tours Program [and given me
another excuse to keep banging on about my latest hobby horse: the need
for the ICC to urgently rationalize not merely its calendar, but its
overall approach to how it manages the game]:

FICA CEO Tim May said the ICC’s proposed international schedule is merely an extension of the existing format that does not address changes in the game and diminishes its value.
“The ICC’s draft is just a continuation of the ad-hoc bilateral series
that we have seen going on for 100 years,” May told Cricinfo. “The ICC
draft does not address an increasingly changing cricket landscape,
which demands considerations of changing priorities of players and
broadcasters and the increasing need for context, not volume.”

May is aware that FICA could well be whistling into the wind. When
it comes to taking on board the opinions of the game’s stakeholders –
the players’ associations, the captains, broadcasters, the media — the
ICC has routinely paid lip service to the concept, and as routinely
ignored the suggestions that have been put forward. But, as the FICA
chief points out, the ostrich policy may have outlived its time:
earlier, the ICC could go its own way regardless, because what
alternative was there? With the IPL establishing itself, and the
Champions League emerging onto the stage, that is no longer true.

While the ICC admits that FICA is a key stakeholder in
the game and has given the federation a seat on its cricket committee,
it is not bound by law to accept any of its proposals. In fact, May
admits that he would not be surprised if the ICC board rejects these
proposals, but he also warns that in such a scenario “the natural
forces will take effect.”

“More and more players will follow Andrew Flintoff
by retiring prematurely from one or all forms of international
cricket,” May said. “The grind of the present international calendar
just can’t exist with the attraction of shorter-duration, less
physical, better-remunerated T20 leagues. International cricket will no
longer be the best versus the best. Crowds will diminish, commercial
rights will reduce, and international cricket will be very much an
inferior product.”

If this happens, May said, the ICC will have to accept the blame.
“They will have no one to blame but themselves. It won’t be the first
business to be destroyed by failing to recognise a changing landscape.”

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By Prem Panicker – October 8, 2009


The Cobras versus The Eagles

So starting today, bar-room cricket conversation will revolve around
a clutch of unfamiliar names: Cobras, Eagles, Otago, Wayamba…

Cricket, say the pundits, is struggling to reinvent itself in the
age of T20 — and yet, ironically, all the innovation is coming in the
shortest format while the Tests and ODIs, which arguably need all the
reinventing they can get in the face of dwindling spectator interest,
watch passively.

This latest competition is a strange, unfamiliar brew — a mix of
state teams, county teams and IPL franchises that seek to shuffle the
existing order of domestic competition and conjure from it an
international attention-grabber.

It is uncharted territory for a game largely built on the
flag-and-country premise. A sense of history, of back-story, has
powered our interest in the international calender: the tradition of
the Ashes, the needle of Indo-Pak encounters, the trans-Tasman rivalry
that spices what would be otherwise one-sided contests between New
Zealand and Australia, the sense of schadenfreude as we watch the precipitous decline of the once all-conquering West Indies…

Absent this sense of history, the latest tournament in the calendar
provides little for us to hang our emotional hats on. The question the
next few days will answer is whether the League can rapidly build fresh
points of interest, and create newer loyalties and fan following.

If it succeeds, the League will join the IPL as the cutting edge of
an insurgency that puts club/franchise cricket in the driving seat, and
in doing so overturns the global cricketing structure as we know it,
topples the ICC from the driving seat, and reinvents the game’s
architecture for the commercial age.

It is tempting to see this first season as the ‘acid test’, as the
cliche-meisters have it — but my own sense is that this is merely a
tentative dipping of the toes in untested waters.While there is blanket
coverage in India, the television footprint is limited elsewhere [NB:
This is the sense I got from talking to friends in the business. I
understand Eurosport will beam the tournament in England -- appreciate
input from readers on which broadcaster is showing what, where]. If,
however, this season proves a success, the television footprint will
widen in the coming years, and that in turn will propel the tournament
– and the concept of a club-driven format — towards critical mass.

Absent wall-to-wall global coverage, it will be difficult to judge
the full potential of the CL at the end of the 16 days, and 23 games,
to follow. But already, it has many of the ingredients necessary for
success: a tight format, a clutch of international stars in the most
attention-getting version of the game, a second opportunity within the
year for the growing fan base of leading IPL teams to claim mind-share,
and most importantly, money — not merely in terms of the sponsor
interest which, friends tell me, is growing rapidly, but in terms of
how the prize money on offer could end up changing priorities across
the cricket-playing world.

Andy Bull, in a piece in The Guardian, looks at this aspect as it plays out on the England county scene:

For the first time, club cricket is going to emerge as a
serious rival to international cricket. A rival for the attention of
the fans, the time of the players, and the money of the sponsors. The
jackpot for winning the 2007 world cup was $2.24m. The winner of the
Champions League will walk away with $2.5m. By football’s standards
that is small change. But in club cricket it’s a fortune. It is over
three times what Durham received for taking the county championship
title this year (and over 15 times what they won the year before that).
More tellingly still, it is three times more than Surrey’s entire
pre-tax profit in 2008, and six times that of Yorkshire.

If Sussex can play well over the next three weeks, this may turn out
to be the most profitable year in their history, despite the fact that
they have just been relegated from the first division of the county
championship for the first time. All they need to do is win five games
of Twenty20 - fewer than 200 overs of cricket. With that kind of
financial incentive qualifying for the Champions League is going to
become the top priority for every eligible team.

The injection of such a significant lump of cash into a single club
would have interesting ramifications for the entire county championship
- as it would for domestic leagues in each of the seven competing
nations, with the exception of India. The disparity in operating
budgets between the top Twenty20 teams and the others will become vast.

Another fascinating aspect, for me, is that besides putting
club/franchise cricket on prime time and thus directly attacking the
hegemony of the ICC’s international calendar, the League undermines
traditional player loyalty and threatens a shake up that could
accelerate the process of creating a breed of cricketing mercenaries.
Andy Bull anticipated the point I intended to make, and so a clip from
his piece suffices:

Wrapped up inside all this is another conundrum, neatly
exemplified by Dirk Nannes. He took 12 wickets at an average of just 13
apiece in the KFC Big Bash for Victoria this year. This Friday however,
he will be opening the bowling against Victoria, his own State side,
for the Delhi Daredevils. Both teams have contracts with Nannes, but
Delhi made sure to stipulate that, in the event of a clash, he would
have to play for them. Understandably, Nannes team-mates are just a
little unhappy about the prospect of lining up against their own star
bowler as they compete for a $2.5m jackpot.

….

This situation is being replicated across the cricketing world.
Farveez Maharoof had to choose between Wayamaba and Delhi, Brendon
McCullum could have played for either Otago or New South Wales,
Herschelle Gibbs for the Deccan Chargers or the Cape Cobras.

Starting 8 pm this evening, we will be treated to the latest cricket
’spectacle’. For me, it is not the cricket on offer that is most
fascinating, but the sense that we could be getting ringside seats as
traditional structures are overturned and a new order takes over the
cricket world.

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By Prem Panicker – October 8, 2009


Champions Atrophy

Apologies to a whole heap of friends for stealing the subject line
of a common email thread on the subject of India and its premature exit
from the Champions’ Trophy — what to do, it is so peculiarly apt.

On that thread, some of the friends brought up the question of the
fairness, or lack thereof, of a tournament where a top team exits at
the preliminary level because of one match gone west. Sambit Bal also suggests in his column that questions could be asked about such a format.

I’m sorry, but why? The Champions Trophy format is neither new, nor
a secret — in fact, one of the best things about it is its crisp,
short nature and limited field as opposed to the World Cup which, in
the immortal words of one commentator, is “still probably going on in
the Caribbean some place.”

Try these names on for size: Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Ireland, Kenya.
Those four teams are ranked full members at ICC’s ODI top table; in
other words, in the eyes of the ICC they are the equal — in terms of
rights, if not quality — to the eight teams that played the CT in
South Africa, and they have good reason to be aggrieved that they have
been kept from the tournament.

One of the few good things the ICC has done in recent times is to
limit the field, and thus ensure a minimum of dud matches in a crisper,
more viewer-friendly format. All participating teams knew, going in,
that it was about winning two out of three in the first phase; if they
had done their due diligence, they would have known, too, that there
was always the possibility of rain spoiling someone’s party.

So, hey, we lost one game, and it turned out the loss was fatal — yeah, well, tough. Suck it up.

Harsha in course of a recent chat made this argument: Within India,
there is an economic ecosystem vested in India’s continued success — a
group that comprises the BCCI, the players and support staff, the
associations, the advertisers, the broadcasters, and even news channels
whose talking-head shows rely heavily on cricket and controversy, often
twinned naturally or through artful surgery.

Therefore, Harsha said, there is an inordinate focus on the next
game, the next tournament, as opposed to taking the long range view. It
doesn’t, he pointed out, matter what happens a year from now — what
matters is that we do well in the next outing, to keep the hype machine
running. And so when we pick teams, we pay lip service to long term
vision, to rotation and the need to rest key players, and pick the team
that will, in our opinion, give us best returns in the game tomorrow.

He was referring among other things to the reversal of the youth
policy and the return of Rahul Dravid to the mix [and no, this piece is
not intended to lay the blame for India's premature exit on Rahul]. And
he is bang on the money — the BCCI and those equally invested in the
cricket economy operate purely on short term logic unmindful, likely
even unaware, that they are defeating themselves in the process.

Never mind India — despite MS Dhoni’s words,
anyone who was watching the India-Australia game would have said that
when the rains came down, the Aussies were odds on to win.  Sure, we
might have pulled off a brilliant chase — but ‘might’ and Rs 3 will
get you a cutting chai.

Consider instead the game against Pakistan, and India’s bowling
effort against Australia. Pundits, the press, and even the captain have
pointed, very rightly, at the lines and lengths our bowlers used as the
root cause of the malaise. By the time the bowlers got their radar
working, it was way too late.

So, why? Why didn’t international players get it? IMHO, a large part
of the reason lies in our preparation — a point I bored everyone with
while the whateveritis cup was being played for in Sri Lanka. Why did
we play that triangular in conditions that were the exact antithesis of
the one we would confront in the world tournament? Because the BCCI had
a deal. Its hype machine cleverly sold the cup as India’s push for
world domination — but the fact is, we played the triangular because
the BCCI saw money to be made, not directly in that tournament but in
the reciprocal Lankan tour that was part of the deal.

On Lankan pitches, you pitch up if you want to get driven to the dry
cleaners — the optimal length is a shade short. We got it right, so
did Lanka. The Kiwis, who by nature and inclination bowl fuller and
quicker, got it wrong, and exited early — but look where they are now,
and look where Sri Lanka and India is. [Consider, also, that England
and Australia recently went through seven pointless one day games --
but at least they were played in conditions where the fuller length was
mandatory, and thus had little or no adjustment to make in SA. On the
other hand the South Africans, who know these conditions best, were
rusty, coming off a long lay off -- and rust manifests first in the
shorter length, as Wayne Parnell can tell you; to bowl fuller you need
to be in a really good rhythm].

The damage is done, and India now has the dubious record of
prematurely exiting three of the last four world level tournaments, to
the considerable consternation of the BCCI, the advertisers,
broadcasters, media, et cetera.

Lesson learnt? Likely not — but it should be. The next world level
competition is a year and a half down the line — the time between now
and then is packed with a heap of pointless bilateral ODIs [Oh I know
-- India and Australia are playing for revenge, for the world number
one title, or whatever else the hypemeisters dream up].

There’s two ways we can go from here: Treat each game and each
meaningless cup as an end in itself, as Harsha pointed out is the
nature of the beast, or treat the interregnum as the ideal preparation
for the World Cup, which will be played on home soil.

If you take the latter view, then the result of the Australia-India
series and all the other cups and saucers to follow shouldn’t matter –
those games are ideally used, initially, to experiment with fresh
talent and to rehabilitate those who have recently lost their way, and
closer to the WC, to home in on the best squad, and to work on fine
tuning their skill sets and moving them towards peak form.

The right way to go is obvious. Unfortunately, it is equally obvious
that our administration will go in the exact opposite direction — so
I’ll save this particular post someplace; that will save me the effort
of writing it out all over again at the end of the WC.

PS: We’re looking to close the week’s edition of India Abroad today,
a day ahead of deadline, to sneak a rare three-day weekend; blogging,
hence, likely to be erratic at best, more likely non-existent, for the
rest of the day.

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By Prem Panicker – October 1, 2009


The Calculus of Hype

“Millions of Indians will lustily cheer every wicket
taken by the Men in Green and go into raptures of delight whenever a
Pakistani batsman hits a boundary.”

Yeah, right. You can just see those frissons of delight passing through the national psyche, can you not?

That’s Partho Bhaduri on the front page, no less, of the Times of India. And reading that made me realize, not for the first time, what suckers we in the media are for the obvious narrative. India’s fate depends on Pakistan!!
Ooo — the delicious irony of it all, happening just days after India
had played its first cricket match with the Land of Lashkar after 26/11.

Shashi Tharoor, the Twitter-minister, posted about this last
evening; Partho and his mates have peppered the print media with riffs
on this theme; the TV channels are getting nicely warmed up as I write
this… and yet, have we done full justice to the tremendous potential [Excuse the emphatic itals in this post, please -- too much Dan Brown lately] of this story?

And then there’s the conspiracy angle. Will Pakistan want India in the final? Younis Khan says so,
but can we trust him, can we take his word for it and hope that
Pakistan will pull out all the stops? Isn’t it more likely that
Pakistan — who, as we all know, we can never really trust — will play
just below par in order to do the dirty on India? Imagine what a laugh
they will have in the dressing room after they’ve contrived to
lose to Australia, knowing that the old enemy, still engaged in its own
game against  the West Indies, now has to go through the motions
knowing that its last remaining hope has been scuppered!

Oh for a Subhash Ghai, a Sunny Deol, to do full justice to such a compelling storyline. What drama! What conflict!

What crap.

Item one, the outcome of the Pakistan-Australia game does not hinge
entirely — or even remotely — on whether Pakistan wants India to
progress or no. The Aussies under Ponting have, thanks largely to
England, rediscovered a large part of their mojo; there are signs that
the arrogant self-belief that characterized the team in its pomp is
gradually coming back. More to the point, the Aussies are playing very
good one day cricket just now; the skipper is back in form and that
fact alone makes a tremendous difference to a team that only lacked for
its one surviving member of the fabled world champion outfit to lead
the way.

Around him, the various bits and pieces are slotting nicely into
place to a point where they are not missing Michael Clarke all that
much; Mitchell Johnson cementing his place as a high quality
all-rounder gives them that additional edge;  and if Nathan Bracken’s
absence hurts the bowling lineup, Brett Lee is getting more into the
groove with each outing. Plus, Australia is at its most dangerous when
it is winning consistently.

Whether it fiddles
with its lineup or not, Pakistan will have its hands full with the
opposition in the game slated to begin early this afternoon — to
suggest that the outcome merely hinges on whether Younis and his men
want to do India down is ridiculous. The team is playing more than
decent cricket, but the catch with Pakistan is that spectacular
explosion and sudden implosion are two sides of a very thin coin [while
on which, what fun if Pakistan actually implodes today -- television
talking heads can live off that for the remainder of the tournament].

Beyond all of that is the fact that India has not, in this
tournament, had the look of champions — or even of a team deserving to
be in the top four. The batting has been patchy, the bowling has
oscillated between the good and the wild, the fielding standards are a
disgrace, and MS Dhoni is gradually finding out that an ability to keep
his cool is a virtue that cannot paper over every crack.

It had to happen — this after all is the Indian cricket team, and
it is therefore axiomatic that any rise in fortunes will be swiftly
followed by a precipitous decline. Thanks either to a beneficial
alignment of the planets or a fortuitous alignment of various talents
and form or both, Dhoni hasn’t felt real pressure since taking over the
captaincy — but that time had to come. He is still the best bet for
captain, and not merely in the short term — and if you take a long
term view, it is good that his thinking is being tested now, rather
than a lot closer to the next World Cup.

Mercifully, there is about Dhoni a touch of ‘if you can keep your
head while all about you are losing theirs’, as exemplified by this media interaction where the bulk of the questions appear to be about Pakistan. The money quote:

“Pakistan will not play their XI thinking if they win,
India will qualify,” he said. “Whatever they need to experiment they
will do because they have qualified, they will look at the future. They
might try out their reserves. It depends on them, what they want to get
out of the game. I don’t think they will consider that if they win and
if we win comfortably against the West Indies, India will qualify. I
don’t think that will be an issue.”

‘Pragmatic’ is the best way to be for the Indian captain today –
focus on the game, use it as an opportunity to begin treating the
symptoms of decline, and the heck with whether you make the last four
or no.

Given the players that form part of the squad, there are no tweaks
India can make to its lineup that can substantially alter its fortunes
– the best possible XI seems to be the one that took the field against
Australia. Change, hopefully, will be in the attitude — there has been
more than a touch of the defensive about the side in these last two
games, and that is not a mental makeup guaranteed to get you very far.

Of the many things Dhoni said in his press conference, there is one bit I disagree with:

The likes of Ishant and RP Singh were also well down on pace, but according to Dhoni, that wasn’t as much of a concern as their erratic line and length. “It’s
not about bowling 140 or 145-plus,” he said. “At the end of the day,
you have to bowl the right line and length to the batsman. If you
see the South African bowlers, they were among the quickest in the
tournament but they were also fetched for runs. That means it is not
about the pace, it is about where you are bowling and what field you
have got. So I don’t think pace is the only criteria, it is line and
length, the swing and the movement that you can get.”

I seriously hope that is not what he is telling Ishant [and yes, I
believe he is a serious talent, and hope he gets his game back on track
soon] — because the two things are not mutually exclusive. It is about
bowling the right length and line, yes, but if you can bring pace to
the package, so much the better. The South African example is not well
taken, because it largely is about Wayne Parnell who, not to put too
fine a point on it, bowled crap. Crap at some pace yes, but still crap.

The antidote to that is not to drop the pace down by 10-15 ticks,
because all that does is make you a medium paced trundler. A fast
bowler’s rhythm is different from a medium pacer’s — things fall into
place when he is running in fluidly with the intent to bowl as quick as
he is capable of. Tell him to slow down, and the natural rhythm is
automatically disrupted, control is lost, and rubbish results.

For all the hype, India has nothing really to lose in this game –
so I’d seriously hope Dhoni goes into the Wanderers and slips the leash
on not just Ishant, but the team as a whole. If there is one change I
would make in the unit that has played thus far in this tournament, it
is to do away with its defensive, almost apologetic, mindset and to get
out there buzzing with testosterone that might have come from last
night’s nookie, but which I hope comes more from a realization that
even absent Viru, Zak and Yuvi, the team still has enough skill to play
good cricket.

A good game today likely won’t get India into the semis — that is
miracle territory. But a great game at the Wanderers will reverse a
collective mindset that is increasingly unsure, tentative, and if that
is the only outcome of today’s game, I’ll still take it, and smile.

PS: Anyone watched the New Zealand-England game yesterday? There was
for me one moment worth noting, and it came at 66/0 at the end of the
first ten overs of the Kiwi chase. England, battered into submission by
McCullum and Guptill, was clearly looking forward to the end of the
mandatory power play overs so Strauss could spread the field and give
his bowlers a bit of elbow room to try and rein things in. Kiwi
vice-captain McCullum promptly called for the batting PP — brilliant,
I thought. Too many captains in too many games use the power plays by
rote where, ideally, it should be used as an unexpected weapon to
disrupt the opposition’s game plan.

One of these days, someone will hopefully look at a sizeable sample
of the last ten overs of matches in the pre-powerplay era, and contrast
that with a similar sized sample of games where the PP was taken in the
last ten overs, and tell me why it makes sense to hold the batting
power play for the death, when teams with wickets in hand go hell for
leather in any case.

PPS: Besides two games to follow, I’m trying to get the edition done
a day earlier than schedule. Busy, hence, and likely to be largely
absent from here. Random match thoughts, as always, here.

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By Prem Panicker – September 30, 2009


The League of Ordinary Gentlemen

During a recent conversation,
Harsha Bhogle had argued the case for reworking the structure of
domestic cricket in India. Shifting to a franchise-driven model would,
he argued, bring in more revenues, improve the quality of the game, and
enhance competitiveness.

The problem with such suggestions is, where do you start? You can
clearly see the Utopian ideal, but you can see with equal clarity that
there is no way out of the vicious cycle the game is trapped in. The
only ones who can bring about the change are the associations — and
they are also the ones who stand to lose everything if change happens,
and thus have a deeply vested interest in maintaining the status quo
ante.

Some revolutions begin with a blood and thunder storming of the
Bastille, but more often, radical change has small beginnings, Harsha
suggested later, once the interview proper was over and we were
chatting of this and that.

He might have a point, judging by the story of the Karnataka Premier League.

For starters, it avoids the mistake the ICL made and stakes out
territory the heavy hitters have no interest in. To wit, state-level
domestic cricket which, in terms of interest, ranks even lower than the
Ranji and other national competitions.

The teams are paid for and operated by private franchises who are
prepared, for a variety of reasons, to pay to promote the sport — thus
fulfilling one of the key points of Harsha’s argument.

The league provides a crisp, focused competition; it creates a
platform — and generates additional employment — for talent that
would otherwise have gone unnoticed; it generates spectator interest
within the defined geography [8000 people for one of the games? You
don't get that for a Ranji final].

The most interesting aspect, for me, is that the KPL is an example
of how public-private partnerships can work to the benefit of both –
the IPL model, scaled down to the grassroots. While on this, I was
somewhat surprised by Anil Kumble’s reaction to the development:

The decision to go with the franchise system drew some
flak, notably from Kumble and Srinath, who both wondered why the KSCA
needed external financial support to run the league when it receives a
grant from the BCCI. Kumble was typically blunt: “In its current form,
it would allow a backdoor entry into the KSCA for people not passionate
about cricket,” he said.

Anil has one of the most balanced voices in Indian cricket, hence my
surprise at his unstated subtext: that ‘passion for cricket’ is
exclusive to those who are part of the administration.

While the lack of infrastructure in the districts
remains a problem, the KSCA realises the need to move more of the
tournament outside Bangalore, which hosted all but six of the 31 games
this season. “We are planning to go, from the next edition onwards, to
other locations in Karnataka,” Srikantadatta Wadiyar, a descendant of
the Mysore royal family and current KSCA president, says. “The idea is
to ultimately take it to the respective locations and zones [of the
franchises].”

The problem and solution are closely interlinked. There is no
infrastructure in the districts because they don’t get sufficient
quality cricket to require the expenditure; take cricket into the
hinterlands, and the infrastructure will follow. Additionally:

The franchises are also looking ahead to the next
season. Mangalore has announced its plans to start an academy to spot
and groom talent. Belgaum is looking at providing equipment and forming
teams within its catchment area, and holding intra-zone tournaments.
“We are committed to four tournaments a year in Belgaum,” Hoover says.
“We will club some areas together and make a team; we plan to have five
or six such teams, who will then face off against each other.”

This is the other point that Harsha mentioned — and one that
directly refutes Anil’s contention. The KSCA gets grants from the BCCI
and hence has no real interest in developing talent. Private
franchises, which put money where the association’s mouth is, are
however aware that the players are its stock in trade, and thus tend to
be more proactive.

The biggest plus of the KPL is that it provides a model — of
partnership between franchises, the official association, and the local
media — that can be transplanted to other regions. Do that, and you
have created a platform to discover and hone fresh talent, re-ignited
spectator interest at the domestic level, provided additional
employment opportunities to a whole host of players currently on the
outside of the money trough looking in, and created a feeder system for
the IPL.

What’s not to like?

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By Prem Panicker – September 24, 2009


State of Fear

The last time there was so much of a fuss over the “future of the game” was when Chris Gayle in one of his typically nonchalant riffs seemed to suggest that Test cricket should die — the emphasis on ’seemed’, because that is not what he actually said.

There is a world of difference between saying ‘Test cricket should
die’ and ‘I wouldn’t be sad if Test cricket died’ — but that
difference was lost in the ensuing furor, with Andrew Strauss leaping
to the defense of Tests, various past worthies from the West Indies
’slamming’ Gayle for his remarks and demanding his head, or at least
his captain’s armband, on a platter, and the commentariat writing reams
about how Gayle’s statement could be the thin end of a dangerous wedge
that could split the cricket world wide open.

Fear is the key
Fear is the key

A character in the Michael Crichton novel State of Fear moots the theory that it is in the

The Culture of Fear
The Culture of Fear

interest
of the political class, the scientific/academic establishment and the
media to keep people in a state of permanent fear of something or the
other. A similar idea drives Barry Glassner’s non-fiction work The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of The Wrong Things.

It certainly seems to be in the interest of the cricket
establishment and the media to stoke some fear or other — the imminent
demise of the ‘game as we know it’ being the top of the pops. The
establishment quaked with this ‘fear’ [and the media recorded every
quake] when ODIs began to get popular — and the arguments then were,
there is much money to be made [and India, horrors, is the one making
it] in ODIs — so, oh, woe betide Tests.

And then, of course, the administration reacted to its own fear by
trimming the number of Tests in its global schedule and squeezing in
bilateral and multi-lateral ODIs wherever it could, producing a world
championship in the format, and then producing an interim ICC
Championship as well.

Fear makes you do strange things.

Now, ironically, the same establishment is in a pother about the future of — ODIs and Tests!

The latest to catch a ‘grave’ dose of the fear infection is Stuart Clark:

“What scares me the most is where does it leave the game
if people just go chasing large sums of money for a bit of
hit-and-giggle,” Clark said. “I think we as players all owe it to Test
cricket to try and keep it afloat.

Reminds me of late 1995, when a bunch of us quit our jobs with the
‘traditional’ media to join the yet to be formed Rediff. Friends
reacted with shock. ‘What’s wrong with you? You want to give up
journalism?!’ Clark, in similar fashion, contrasts ‘the game’ [uttered
reverently, to mean Tests] with ‘hit and giggle’ to mean T20s — and to
think that a decade ago, that is what they were calling one day
cricket. Here’s Clark again:

“I know the administration is working hard at it, but I personally hold grave fears for where the game is heading.
But while tournaments like the Champions League are very lucrative, I’d
personally like to think at this stage the players at New South Wales
would prefer to play for Australia.”

Ah yes, well, as someone said in the comments field of one of my
posts yesterday, thank god there are still top players prepared to put
country and honor — and even family — above filthy lucre. Like
Michael Clarke. Like, so. And on page two of the same article, there is this little nugget about the now fear-raddled Stuart Clark:

Stuart Clark ($US250,000 reserve) almost pulled out this
week but remains a starter, according to his manager Richard Errington.
“We were thinking, ‘Why bother,’ but the BCCI said, ‘No, we want you
there.’ Whether he gets picked up or not, we don’t know. If we do,
fantastic, if we don’t, Stuey will be starting his law degree,” he said.

Tag line of the story: Stuart Clark, even at a low reserve price,
didn’t attract a single bid at the February 2009 auction [Andrew
Flintoff, a day after turning freelance, has already begun to be courted -- for cricket in Clark's home country].

Moral of the story: Those who can, earn; those who can’t, express
‘grave fear’. Bonus moral because I’m feeling generous today: Not
everyone can turn freelance, because not everyone has this undefined
but very real ‘It’ factor to command the kind of remuneration that
makes freelancing worthwhile [why do you suppose even good journalists
prefer the security of a steady job to the uncertainties of writing
freelance?]

Michael Atherton makes a similar argument in his piece in the Times:

To describe Flintoff as cricket's first freelance
cricketer is a nonsense: Flintoff is doing what generations have done
before him, players such as Sir Garfield Sobers, who played for West
Indies when international cricket was less demanding than now, but then
plied his trade for Nottinghamshire and South Australia, and whoever
else would pay him to do so, outside his international commitments.
Cricket grew initially as a gambling game, the best players little more
than hired hands for gambling gentlemen.

Flintoff's position is only noteworthy now because it flies
against the trend in recent years, which has been for cricketers to tie
themselves exclusively to their national boards in return for decent
remuneration and extracurricular benefits denied to earlier generations.
It is unlikely, though, that Flintoff's move in a different direction
will encourage others to do the same, despite the whisperings from the
Professional Cricketers' Association, which is agitating for a greater
role at the expense of a governing body that it deems to be incompetent.

After all, there are few cricketers in Flintoff's position. Flintoff
is not unique, but there are precious few with the reputation already
made, the financial clout and the personality to gamble on going it
alone. Reputations are still made in international sport, not
franchise-based domestic tournaments, and sponsors demand the exposure
that is driven by international-based competition. His move does not
herald the era of the freelance mercenary, moving magnet-like to
whichever franchise pays the most.

In passing, note Atherton’s point underlined in the clip above, ref
the recent trend of cricketers to tie themselves to the national boards
in return for security. The supplementary point is, a player offered a
central contract had no choice, not really: He could either sign, and
enjoy a fairly decent wage even if during the period of his contract he
wasn’t playing at a high enough level to be picked for the team, or he
could sit on the outside looking in, and hoping to get the odd game
because the salaried players weren’t good enough.

What has changed now is that players — those who bring high skill
and the X factor — have a choice. And that is what is throwing the
establishment into a state of fear — a fear of its economic ecosystem
being damaged, which it tries to pass off as a more altruistic fear for
the ‘future of the game’. [While on this, a story from my archives: the
Wall Street Journal on the rise of the 'rabble'.]

In a post
on the subject of Flintoff and ‘the future of the game’ yesterday, I
was making the point that much of this ‘crisis’ owes to an
administration that refuses to rationalize its international calendar,
to give meaning and context to its playing schedule. Here, on a similar theme, is Grame Smith:

“I don’t think you can blame the individual, but it’s an
interesting time for cricket, and interesting to see where it goes
now,” Smith told Cricinfo. “The crucial aspect is the decisions the
leadership makes in the future. The ICC needs to give cricket a good
direction, and crucial to that is how they look at the Future Tours
Programme, because the decisions they make around that are going to be
so important for the future of the game.”

And:

“With the greatest respect, the seven ODIs taking place
in England at the moment are more for financial benefit than meaningful
cricket,” he said. “People want to see strength for strength, they want
to see international sides trying their best in competitive tours. I
mean, the Ashes was great to watch, it was competitive down to the last
Test match, and speaking for myself as a cricketer, that’s how you want
to see all cricket being played.

“But all these meaningless tours just sap your body, especially when
you are playing away from home for a long time,” he added. “I think the
ICC needs to really look at the format going forward, and really take
control of the international game.”

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By Prem Panicker – September 17, 2009


Happiness is…

…an unending interview with Viru Sehwag.

I’d thought, while posting
on the first part yesterday, that even Sehwag would be hard put to top
that effort. Boy, was I wrong — part two, today, is a laugh a minute
then think for two roller coaster ride through Viru’s weird and
wonderful world.

To isolate one gem from a diadem is to do the interviewee a
disservice, but still: I read through this with a broadening smile, and
at one point burst out laughing. This one:

What about being in the zone? Tendulkar said that
what people call the zone, he calls the subconscious mind. “' All you
need to do is look at the ball and play and the body is going to react.
The concentration is such that you don’t think of anything else.”
What’s your definition of being in the zone?

I have asked him many times what the zone is. He tells me
that’s when “I see nothing except the ball”. I ask how that is
possible. I have never felt something like that. I have asked Rahul
Dravid the same thing. He says sometimes when he is in really good
form, he sees only the ball - and not the sightscreen, the non-striker,
the umpire or who is bowling, he just sees only the ball. But I have
never entered that zone even if I’ve scored triple-centuries twice.
Maybe I will enter that zone they talk about in future.

Only a Sehwag could have tossed in that reference to his triple
centuries with such a precisely calibrated mix of insouciance and
self-deprecation.

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By Prem Panicker – September 17, 2009


Narendra Modi to head GCA

Narendra Modi has taken over the reins of the Gujarat Cricket Association and, in trademark fashion, hit the ground running.

“There is much to do in cricket world except playing the game by ball and bat in the field,” Modi said.

“I will sit with co-members of GCA to form a blueprint of
development of cricket, how to give it a professional touch,
development of cricket by an integrated approach and attracting youths
towards sports by using the popularity of Cricket,” he further said.

Ho-kay! We are all agreed that this is a good thing.

“It is a very good development. The CM will now be
closer to the issues of cricket in the state and will give impetus to
cricketing activities. I congratulate him and wish him luck in his new
endeavour,” said Chirayu Amin, BCCI vice-president and BCA president.

When asked how Modi as GCA president would help the game, Amin said,
“Any issues involving state agencies will get quick clearance.”

The reporter left the logical next question unasked: Name one such issue, please, that currently does not get quick clearance?

Before you read into this another ‘anti-Modi rant’ from a
‘pseudo-secular pseudo-intellectual or pseudo-secular-intellectual’ or
whatever, my grouse, and question, is this: have you ever wondered why
every damned politician in the country is in recent years hell bent on
improving the state of Indian cricket? [At this rate, pretty soon
election manifestos of the various political parties will have a
section on the game].

Ask the question and the answer you will get is, cricket is
important to so many people, it is a religion in this country, it
provides amusement to so many of us, so of course it is the
politician’s duty to do what he can for the betterment of the sport…

The answer you won’t get is, cricket generates as much money as the
top industries do; there is no way I can wiggle into top positions in
top industries but heck, I can sneak into cricket administration quite
easily, and once there, there is tons of money to be made. By me. For
me.

Hence, cricket is now a full-fledged battleground for not just
ambitious individuals but for political parties [remember the problems
Lalit Modi  -- who, incidentally, is the only individual to merit an entry in this wiki list of cricket associations, and how cool is that? -- faced after Vasundhara Raje lost Rajasthan?]:

GCA was till now controlled by Congress leader Narhari
Amin. But Modi’s Home Minister Amit Shah was engaged in long drawn
political as well as legal battle with Amin group for the last one and
half year for the control of cash rich GCA.

Recently, the BJP had managed to win over the Central Board of
Cricket of Ahmedabad (CBCA) which is a part of GCA from the Congress
group, after which Amin had resigned.

See? The BJP and the Congress, as represented by Amit Shah and
Narhari Amin, are so hell bent on improving cricket in Gujarat, they
have been fighting a legal and political battle for a year and a half
now — and here you were thinking politicians didn’t care.

So anyway, since we have reached a point where you can’t keep
politicians out of cricket even with a court injunction, I have a
suggestion: the BCCI should just amend its constitution to say that the
chief minister of each state automatically becomes the head of the
respective cricket association.

Why not? At the least, it puts and end to these power struggles and
year-long legal battles and such. And as the BCCI veep pointed out, all
issues relating to the state will get single window clearance.

And who knows? Maybe Muthuvel Karunanidhi in Tamil Nadu and Velikkakathu
Sankaran Achuthanandan in Kerala have bright ideas on all the things
you can do in the cricket world outside of playing with a bat and ball.

How
about Mayawati as head of the UPCA? Lucknow will get plastered with
statues of her playing a cover drive, and imagine what a boost that
will be for the development of cricket in the state.

Here’s Ramesh Srivats on Modi & Modi Inc.

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By Prem Panicker – September 16, 2009


Cricketer as mercenary

But if Flintoff pulls it off, and becomes a successful,
globetrotting cricketing brand, then the game will never be the same
again.

It is no wonder that Freddie Flintoff’s decision
to reject an England contract and turn freelance [interestingly, most
articles on the topic in recent times use the subtly pejorative
'mercenary', rather than 'freelance'] is causing considerable
heartburn. David Hopps gives you the reason why:

Players’ representatives were privately predicting last
night that England’s control of their most sought''after players will
now gradually weaken as Flintoff sets the trend. Such a scenario would
turn players into powerful mercenaries contesting a hotchpotch of club
Twenty20 tournaments, as well as international cricket, for the highest
bidder.

National boards thrive on their monopolistic hold over the game in
their respective regions. It helps them lock in the top players into
contracts that, in turn, permit them to dictate where the player can
play and when — and most importantly, how much or how little they can
get away with paying them.

Media reports of cricketers earning big money through central
contracts invariably omit one calculation. The board makes its money on
the back of the services of the players, so what proportion of its
earnings does the board hand out as remuneration, and is that a fair
proportion? In other words, the payment is ‘big’, as seen through our
eyes — but is it commensurate with the value the players bring to a
board that, absent good players, has no viable alternate revenue stream?

The answer, inevitably, is no. And in the absence of alternate
streams of employment, players made the best of the situation and took
what they were given.

What private leagues like the IPL have done is to change that
dynamic, to provide alternate avenues of employment — avenues that are
far more lucrative than the sums handed out by the national boards. For
instance, if Flintoff plays a year of ODI and T20 cricket, his central
contract will still not give him as much money as the IPL would if he
played one full season.

If Hopps’ fears turn true, cricket administration will have to
adjust to an entirely new way of functioning, and face questions they
never had before. Like, so:

His decision leaves a lot of questions unanswered. If
Flower wants a week’s get-together at Loughborough ahead of a one-day
series, will Flintoff feel obliged to attend? If England do not monitor
his form and fitness, who does?

It might be natural for golfers or tennis players to travel the
world on an individualistic search for personal fulfillment. But
cricket demands a compromise between individual ambitions and team
demands. Any perception that Flintoff had won special privileges would
not rest easily in any dressing room.

Agreeing with Hopps for the moment that cricket demands a
compromise, where does ‘compromise’ exist in the current scenario? The
board’s attitude is, these are the rules, these are the conditions,
this is what we are prepared to pay you, take it or else. Earlier,
there was no ‘or else’ — now there is, and suddenly words like
‘compromise’ creep into the discussion.

I suspect it would be wrong to see Flintoff’s action as purely
‘mercenary’ in its motives. For far too long international players, and
their association, have fought for a seat at the big table. They have
asked that the individual boards and the ICC take some of their urgent
concerns into consideration — as for instance the international
calendar, packed increasingly tight with money making opportunities for
the boards and for the ICC that it leaves little room for the cricketer
to rest, to recover from injury, to work on skill sets diminishing
under the attrition of constant match play.

This concern — which is just one example, and not the whole laundry
list — has been repeatedly voiced to the ICC by international captains
on the few occasions the ICC deigns to call them in for meetings, and
by the players associations. The ICC has routinely paid lip service to
the need to rationalize the calendar, and a day later added another
‘world’ tournament to the mix.

It could, because what was the player going to do?

Now there is an answer to that question — the player will
rationalize his own calendar. Flintoff is yet to speak of the reasons
behind his decision; the statements have all come from his agent who,
natural enough for the breed, focuses on the money to be made and in
the process has Flintoff painted ‘mercenary’ — but I suspect on the
basis of what I’ve heard from players over the years that if you sat
the all rounder down and talked to him, you would find that the
relentless grind he is subjected to, a grind that has grievously
impacted on his body, has as much to do with his decision as the money
to be made. In that connection, note that when players talk of choosing
between the IPL and international cricket, they do not say there is
more money to be made in the former — what they do point out is, they
make as much in two months of the league as they do in a year of
international duty. In other words, the considerations are money and time.

All of which likely comes as a nightmare for the administration –
which is reacting in predictable ways. England captain Andrew Strauss,
for instance, ‘leaves the door open’.

“If Freddie is committed to playing for England he’s
still a great asset for us in the shortest forms of the game,” Strauss
said. “I’m sure he still feels he’s got a lot of cricket left in him,
but it’s a bit too early to react to this at this stage. It’s a
conversation the ECB will need to have with him and his management over
the coming days.

“I think we need to sit down and speak to him as to the reasons he’s
done that, and then we will make an informed decision as to what that
means with his availability going forward. Obviously there is a reason
why he hasn’t agreed to it and we need to find out what that reason is.”

Check out this piece by Alan Tyres, that I stumbled upon through Cricinfo’s Surfer. The first point Tyres makes:

The Observer reckons that a full commitment to England for ODIs and Twenty20s could pay Fred just 30,000 pounds a year; although The Telegraph speculates that a figure of about 70,000 pounds is nearer the mark.

Either way, this is chicken-feed compared to his million-a-year deal
from the Chennai Super Kings. And here’s the problem for the Two
Andrews: England’s, ahem, mouth-watering one-day engagements against
mighty Bangladesh in the spring cut into the IPL schedule, meaning that
Chennai, not unreasonably, would not pay him the full-whack for half
the work.

Yeah, well, what earthly purpose will be served by the
England-Bangladesh bilateral ODIs [Consider for instance the absolute
lack of spectator interest in the ODI series England is playing right
now -- against Australia, no less]?

Another clip from Tyres, that speaks to the heart of my argument:

Should we be crying ourselves to sleep at night worrying
about the bank balance of this already very rich chap? Of course not.
But in this instance, I think England fans should say to Flintoff:
thanks for all that you’ve done, now go off and earn your money as you
see fit.

There will no doubt be plenty of people who will thunder that it is
a disgrace anyone could even consider playing for Twenty20 franchises
when there is a chance of an England cap on offer. To them I would say:
it’s only the England ODI side.

A lot of people would pay good money NOT to be in the England ODI
side at the moment, given the utter mediocrity and the endless slog of
meaningless fixtures.

If, for example, the ECB are trying to promote an ODI against West
Indies with a weakened XI while Flintoff is simultaneously off earning
a crust with the Durban Ringbinders or whoever, then they are indeed
going to have problems. But maybe that is not the end of the world: if they can’t sell the ODIs, maybe we will stop having so bloody many of them.

Exactly. The administration will harp on the ‘m’ words — money,
mercenary. But it will never admit that it has contributed to player
dissatisfaction through its non-stop drive to fill every available date
with yet another meaningless game [England versus Australia 7 ODIs? Three successive dead rubbers after the series is decided?].

Maybe a few more Freddie Flintoffs could be a good thing after all,
if it forces a modicum of rationality on those who administer the game.

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By Prem Panicker – September 16, 2009


The pragmatist

On a remarkably slow news day, thank god for Virender Sehwag.

Harsha, while talking to me recently of the phenomenon of Indian
players hitting the big time, tasting success, and then going off the
boil to the point where they get dropped, mentioned Sehwag in that
context, and then added “In my opinion, Viru is the most balanced of
the lot — in fact among the most balanced in the team.”

Here’s an interesting interview
with the man. In an interaction replete with interesting bits, this q
& a is to my mind the most typical of his brand of thinking:

There is this story about you declining a
nightwatchman, where you said you were not an able batsman if you
couldn’t last 25 balls at the end of the day. Is that true?

It is true. What is the difference between batting at the
end of the day or at the start? If you make a mistake you’ll get out.
So I don’t think a batsman really needs a nightwatchman, but it is
totally an individual decision. Whenever a captain or coach asked me
for a nightwatchman I would say, “No, why? If I can’t survive 10 or 20
balls now, then I don’t think I’ll survive tomorrow morning.” I believe
that’s the best time when you have the opportunity to score runs, when
everybody on the field is tired and you can score 20 runs off those 20
balls.

Also check out the bit relating to Sourav Ganguly’s take on Viru. While on that, this is my favorite Sehwag story.

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By Prem Panicker – September 16, 2009