India - bully or benefactor?

"India, your sport needs you".

This imaginative and evocative choice of words from Lawrence Booth is significant because, through these lines in the 2012 Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, world cricket and those that run it have formally acknowledged the substantial role the BCCI plays in shaping world cricket's commercial fortunes. In the same breath, however, the line appears to place the blame for the falling fortunes of every format of cricket other than T20 squarely on the shoulders of the BCCI.

The reactions to Booth's piece are almost predictable.

The BCCI has so far met it with the deafening silence that it reserves for such exhortations.

Cricket media at large has hailed it as a well-meant plea requiring a responsible and mature response from the BCCI while concluding that the latter is too obsessed with the IPL and other commercial interests to care.

And there is the inevitable argument that seeking leadership from the BCCI at a time when it is cricket's biggest financial stakeholder is just convenient because the request comes from the same entities which failed to exercise the very same responsibility and maturity when they ran the sport before the BCCI emerged became cricket’s biggest financial powerhouse.

World cricket is on the cusp of major change. This change is visible in a number of ways. The World Cricket League competitions now resemble a geography lesson - names like Denmark, Singapore and Tanzania are beginning to find their way into cricketing summaries. The T20 format and the success of the IPL have combined to give impetus to a number of similar leagues like the Bangladesh Premier League while the Big Bash League has become shinier and more visible. And the emergence of disturbing trends like spot fixing has brought into dramatic focus the increasing financial stakes in the game and their sometimes insidious side effects for the health of the sport.

Booth's comments, coming as they do when cricket is having to do what it does not always do too well – coping with change – underscore a somewhat worrying aspect of how cricket is run currently.

While there is no denying that the BCCI carries substantial financial clout in world cricket, the fact remains that cricket still is, and should be, run by the ICC – that is its primary role. Cricket boards like the BCCI, ECB, CA, CSA and others are all stakeholders, but the ICC should run the sport.

Hence, declaring that it is the responsibility of the BCCI to make sure that Test cricket is in the best of health amounts to abdicating responsibility for the state of the sport – a responsibility which is as much the ICC’s for cricket as it is FIFA’s for football. At the same time, turning to the BCCI and India, often portrayed as the bad and the ugly of world cricket, when cricket is seemingly in crisis, smacks of opportunism.

There is, though, one aspect of cricket where the role of the BCCI has dramatically altered the cricketing landscape – and that is through the IPL. It is easy, and convenient to dismiss the IPL as a money-centric, tawdry spectacle.

But as with any sporting event, spectator turnout remains the biggest barometer of the success of the event – and this is an area where the IPL does rather well. Most matches appear to be well attended, and in some cases, sold out and there is a generally impressive mix of spectators.

The commercial success of the IPL contrasts sharply with the tragicomic caper that was the Stanford Super Series – which remains one of the shadier chapters of cricketing history, as the ECB cavorted with the man now accused of Ponzi-scheming his way through several billions of dollars, money that was made up mainly of small savings entrusted to Stanford’s companies. The success of the IPL is also ironic – in that the BCCI, one of the early cynics of the T20 format, has managed to successfully sell the format, while England and the ECB, the inventors of the format, appear to have suddenly lost interest in it.

Booth appears only too willing to buy into one fallacy about the IPL – that is to believe that India’s love of the T20 format has something to do with the fortunes of the Test team – as evidenced from such clichés as “T20-based nationalism” alongside “the disintegration of India’s feted batting line-up”. Considering that the rise of the IPL preceded the fall of India’s test batting line up by some distance, such a perspective, coming from a man who has supposedly witnessed the IPL at close quarters, is disingenuous. Additionally, Booth insults the intelligence of the Indian cricket fan by insinuating that successes in the ODI format, like the World Cup help alleviate the pain of recent Test failures – and in doing so displays his ignorance of the how Indian fans feel at the 0-8 results the England and Australia series have produced. Hopefully Booth has not extended that further to suggest that with Dravid retiring, and Tendulkar and Laxman likely to follow suit, India will cease playing Tests altogether!

The central argument of Booth’s piece is apparently that the emergence of the T20 format, with the IPL its most visible manifestation, has damaged Test cricket, an outcome which he expects the BCCI to set right. However, the BCCI’s commitment to Test cricket shows itself in several ways.  The BCCI has shown willingness to commit to the FTP, and the BCCI regularly schedules Test series against all the marquee names – South Africa, England, Australia – on a home and away basis. Besides this is the rather unusual fact that the BCCI remains the only board which has recently begun offer home Test series free-to-web – admittedly only the India-WI series so far – in addition to the IPL and the main domestic tournament, Ranji Trophy.

So does the BCCI really have a role to play in the future of Test cricket, which goes beyond merely being a stakeholder? The numbers appear to support that contention – after all, India continues to be the biggest market for cricket at present.

But whether the BCCI would be really willing to do that would be determined by factors beyond its control. And the starting point, it would appear, would be to attempt to engage the BCCI in a more positive and constructive manner, rather than seeking to consistently portray it as the big bad bully of world cricket – a perspective which is all too easy to find on the web nowadays, and all too convenient an excuse in world cricket.

Why away performances matter

Mahela Jayawardene's twin centuries in the recently concluded test series against England were vital rearguard actions when he came in to bat with Sri Lanka in trouble having lost 2 wickets off consecutive balls on both occasions. However, Jayawardene’s heroics are probably to be expected from someone who not only has undoubted class but also has the third highest home average of batsmen with more than 4000 Test runs at home. It also brings into focus the value of performing in unfamiliar conditions.

Cricket attracts in many ways. Test cricket is a battle of endurance and skill, and the latest entrant to cricket, T20s - at the risk of angering the self-styled purists - requires a calm head in high-pressure situations, while the 50-over one-day version falls in the in-between category of requiring skills and composure but both in equal measure.

Despite all these varied challenges the game, when stripped to its most basic form, is about batting to score runs or bowling for wickets. But even there a player’s great challenge is that the exhibition - or the more new-fangled term "execution" - of these skills is greatly influenced by the conditions in which the game is played. This is where the emphasis lies on knowing the conditions - the weather, the ground, and the way the pitch is likely to behave - very well. To be able to perform even when these conditions are not familiar is what separates the good players from the great ones. To be able to do that consistently places players in a different league altogether.

Football has, for many years now, placed such an emphasis on away performances that a winner of a home-away series of games if tied on goals is the team that has more away goals. This, even though almost nothing changes in terms of the major factors like dimensions of the field, and the quality of the pitch with the only major change being the crowd which is so overwhelmingly backing the home team that it many teams consider the home crowd their 12^th player, an advantage the visiting team does not have.

In comparison, with cricket matches so much more matters than the crowd alone – with the pitch being the biggest factor along with the size and, in some cases, the shape, of the grounds, and the weather conditions, a player’s away performances have to be seen as the benchmark of quality. Batsmen and bowlers have to adapt to alien conditions when they tour and in the non-stop international schedule they have to come to terms with the conditions in a handful of practice games, and net sessions.

Sambit Bal made an excellent point of how Sachin Tendulkar and Brian Lara were the two finest batsmen of the generation for him because they averaged over 50 even in the 1990s when bowling attacks and pitches were much tougher. 

If cricket in the 2000s has tracks that tend to be more batsman-friendly then it is even more pertinent to focus on away performances since the basic nature of each country’s wickets is almost never lost. A flat track in Australia still bounces more than anything in India and a placid-looking wicket in Sri Lanka would still turn more than any pitch in England. Visiting batsmen have to adjust to these subtle changes which they probably would never have encountered in their years of development as a batsman. Then there are the totally different conditions like a green wicket at Headingley, a bouncing track at Durban or a square turner in Mumbai. These raise the bar on the skills and concentration required to a new high and many a batsmen generally recall those knocks as being their finest essentially because the conditions were so tough.

When playing in alien conditions batsmen have to make adjustments to a technique which is very well-developed in terms of the basics of footwork, back-lift and shot-selection. This adjustment is not easy as a lot of it also depends on the form the batsman is in. When in bad form and playing away from home shortcomings in technique get more easily exposed as a player tends to fall back on his natural game and that natural game is suited generally to home conditions. Batsmen from India playing in England have to be less gung-ho going after anything pitched up as the seam and swing could take it further way and induce an edge while a South African batting line-up cannot just lunge forward with hard hands against spinners with close-in fielders prowling about. Batsmen cannot learn new tricks overnight like coming down the track to spinners or playing the pull and the hook so it is all about knowing what they can do and adapting that to suit the conditions. It is fascinating to watch how different players approach these away conditions.

Differing conditions do not just affect the batsmen. The bowlers too have to do things differently. Pace bowlers have to learn to be more patient and less attacking on drier and flatter wickets while spinners cannot just toss the bowl around the off stump and let the pitch do the rest in places like Australia and New Zealand. Conversely pace bowlers from the subcontinent when playing on fast/bouncy or seaming/swinging wickets tend to get too carried away on finding pace-friendly conditions and in trying to do too much spray the ball all over the place. Bowlers end up having to do more to adjust to different conditions because a subcontinent tour can help spinners in the touring team while a tour to England can help the visiting fast and medium-fast bowlers.

If the thrill of watching players perform in alien conditions has to remain then cricket has to take a hard look at how it tends to regulate and over-react to the perceived quality of wickets. More damage is done to this game and especially the Test match format when both teams pile on a mountain of runs in an innings on wickets which are totally unresponsive than in  a Test match that gets over in three days. A short game full of wickets tumbling is a much greater exhibition than a meaningless one where even tail-enders help themselves to centuries. Cricket has to put an end to sanctioning pitches which are unpredictable and make scoring difficult just because visiting teams are not good enough to perform on those surfaces. The utopian wicket is one where there is seam and bounce on the first day, settling into a batting track for the next two before beginning to crack for the last couple of days. Such ideal pitches cannot be produced so it is best that pitches are allowed to be prepared favouring bowlers than batsmen.

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