They speak...I learn...or not

I have watched a few of the matches in the World Cup; bits and pieces of about 50% of them; major bits of about 25% and all the India matches except the second inning of the most recent game against Ireland.

From listening to the commentators this is what I have learned or realized:

Shane Warne: According to him - the best way to win a game at any point in time is to bowl a spinner, preferably a leg-spinner. Leg-spinners, no matter how filthy their bowling, are the best wicket-taking options in the world. Bar none. A pitch is magnificent no matter how many runs it leads to. Awwww.....is a new word that we should all learn to use in our daily lives.

Sunil Gavaskar: If a batsman is near a milestone, our man will sniff it out in a heartbeat. You can tell a lot about his mentality from the way he appreciates milestones, game situation be damned. Also, he has a curious habit of making a joke, explaining it, and then repeating the joke again for emphasis just in case we had forgotten it.

Sanjay Manjrekar: I actually like the guy and the insight he brings in each of his stints. He picks up a hatke point of view. Unfortunately, he will then spend the next 15 minutes beating it into the ground by repeatedly pointing it out. Glenn Maxwell was at the crease in a recent match en route to his first ODI century. Manjrekar stated early on that Maxwell is an atypical batsman in that he does not play the ball or the bowler but instead frames his batting based on the type of field being set. Brilliant point. And then, for the rest of the session this lesson was drummed into our senses with each Maxwell hit. I was hoping for further insight into how captains could counter that strategy or bowlers could plan and make Maxwell hit into areas he is less comfortable (or would take more risks) hitting to. I am still waiting for that.

Kiwi commentators:All the Kiwi commentators have been excellent so far. Treating the game with respect, discussing strategy, pointing out the good (and bad) things players are doing, and staying quiet when needed and letting the crowd shots tell the story at times. (Luckily I have not heard Danny Morrison so far).

Channel 9 commentators: Back-slapping, inside-joke telling, laughing out loud once-every-minute, Aussie propaganda stumping.  All of these are what I have (unfortunately) come to expect from them. They are rah-rah boys of the worst kind. They often don't even know who the opposing players are and sometimes will (shockingly) admit it. How can they not research the 22 players on the field before beginning their stint? How can the producers of the show let them get away with displaying such ignorance?

Mark Taylor: Special mention - he hasn't met a non-Aussie name that he hasn't mangled. I cannot fathom how he neither cares nor tries to pronounce players names correctly. That is just rude and inconsiderate and unbecoming of someone who, at times, has insightful things to say, especially related to strategy and game plans.

Rameez Raja: Like Ravi Shastri, he has about 10 stock phrases that he uses in varying patterns. Has not done much research for years and it feels as if the only cricket he watches or follows is the little bit he sees when he is commentating.

There are others, plenty of them. If you are interested shoot me their names and I will tell you what I think of them.

नदिया किनारे ...

A few weeks ago, while the Indian cricket team was getting shellacked in England, Hasha Bhogle and Sanjay Manjrekar took some time out to have some fun by the Trent River.  (Sanjay is quite a singer).

(Update:  It is mostly in Marathi, but if you listen carefully, you'll understand the gist of what they are saying.  Wait for him to sing, it is worth it.  Also interesting is the choice of songs.)

What's eating Gilbert Grape?

Jacques Kallis usually scores at about 45 runs per 100 balls. A big chunk of the criticism directed towards Kallis, and a huge reason why he is not revered as much as his mind-boggling stats indicate that he should be, is that he tends to hold one end up and bats in a frustratingly sedate, single-minded, plodding manner irrespective of the match situation.

Imagine my surprise when I saw the very same Kallis blasting his way to a 130 ball century. One of the hopes I held out for the 2nd day was that the South Africans would bat slowly, scoring only about 270-300 in the day's play. Instead they motored along at more than 4 runs per over and are extremely close to batting India completely out of it.

Blowing with the wind

I remember Sanjay Manjrekar once saying, very presciently, that the crowds in India are not fans of cricket, they are fans of Indian cricket. Suresh Menon has finally cottoned onto that fact in his latest article.

Now we expect Tendulkar to score a century every time he goes out to bat. This modern great has been jeered at in his own hometown, Mumbai. The Indian captain has been booed in Kolkata. Indian spectators expect too much from their players, and are not shy of expressing their disappointment when things go wrong. Nor do they find it necessary to cheer a visiting player when he performs. This is embarrassing.
(...)
India's fandom can be summed up in the reaction to Mahendra Singh Dhoni. When India bowed out of the World Cup in 2007, the walls of his house under construction were pulled down and stones were pelted. Now his fans want to build a temple where he is the presiding deity. Enough said .

It takes a village-r

India chased down a daunting total to win the first Test against England. The win was engineered by the trigger-happy Virender Sehwag. MS Dhoni admitted as much in the post-match interview when he said that had Sehwag not fired, India would have played for a draw. Yet, the rest of the fine folks who report on the game seem to think that the entire team shared Sehwag's will to win. I hope I am wrong in thinking so, but there is only one uncluttered mind in the Indian dressing room and he plunders his runs from the opener's spot.

(Incidentally, South Africa is in a similar predicament in their Test against Australia but they do not seem to have the belief that they can win).

Here are some of the items caught my eye in the aftermath of the famous win in Chennai.
a) Sambit Bal, fast becoming one of my favorite cricket writers, thinks that the only team that believed it could win, did so.

b) Sachin Tendulkar's history of disappearing in the crunch was put to the test and this time he came through for what may end up being the signature century of his glittering career. Afterwards, he spoke about the moment and what it meant to him and millions of other folks.

c) The Englishmen were left to look for slender positives from the game. Simply showing up to play has to considered a win for them.

d) Sanjay Manjrekar provides the Indian viewpoint, as only he can.

e) The elephant in the room that no one wanted to talk about was not the failure of Rahul Dravid to score any runs, but rather the failure of the premier spinner on either side to fair well on a pitch that should have supported them immensely. The boy named Mudhsuden is the one that copped the most flak, but the person who deserved more criticism for his non-show was the Turbanator, Harbhajan Singh. Michael Atherton brings this up in his match review.

After England's defeat, the spotlight has been trained on Monty Panesar, but before he is condemned to the gallows in the rush to promote Adil Rashid, it might be instructive to compare him with India's spinners. Harbhajan has played 73 Test matches to Panesar's 34 and he has taken 193 more wickets than Panesar. He was also in the groove, having played a Test series against Australia and a one-day series against England. Panesar, bedevilled by bad luck and his non-selection in England's one-day team, had not twitched his index finger competitively for the best part of four months.

Even though Harbhajan was in form, bowling at a ground he knows well and at batsmen short of match practice, he made little impression. I am not entirely sure that Harbhajan is the bowler he used to be, now that an overextended use of the doosra - the ball that spins to the off - has affected his ability to drift and spin his stock ball, the off spinner. Nevertheless, England, and Andrew Strauss in particular, played him superbly well.

f) Peter Roebuck, who is more engrossed in the Australia-South Africa, does find the time to talk about the Chennai Test in his distinctive style.

Judging from their responses to his vivid innings, England had not previously seen Virender Sehwag at his most audacious. Bear in mind that 12 months ago he had lost his place in the side. Australians, on the other hand, are well aware of his powers. Now he caused such disarray in the opposing ranks that in a trice fieldsmen were running hither and thither, most of them ever further from the bat. Yet Sehwag is no mere thrasher. Rather, he is an intelligent and consistent batsman who has managed to remain instinctive and creative. It is a most unusual combination. He is not remotely as barmy as he seems. Although he was removed before stumps, he had given the Indian innings its momentum and caused a furrowing of brows in the England camp.

g) To me, the best of them all was this extensive piece by Prem Panicker who, when his mind is focused on cricket, still cranks out well-thought out pieces that should be circulated to the cricket teams he dissects so well.

In the second innings, the team starts strong, but then two determined batsmen take the game away with controlled performances. At close on the third day the opposition is 247 ahead with seven wickets in hand; at lunch on day four that lead has been stretched to 319, seven still remaining in the hut.

Even occasional followers of Indian cricket will effortlessly recall dozens of such instances; they will recall, too, the inevitable denouement: India falls back on ‘defence’, which in context means spreading the field out and protecting the boundaries [‘They won’t mind the singles too much, it is the boundaries that will hurt’, commentators invariably say at such moments]. The result: the lead mounts, the home team’s hangdog air of oh shoot, we stuffed this up, let’s somehow get the misery over and done with, tomorrow is another day and another Test becomes more pronounced, and fans give up the ghost and go off to see if they can get tickets to Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi.

Not this time. For the second time in four Tests as captain, MS Dhoni employs his own version of active defence, packing one side of the field with placements aimed to make a monumental struggle out of every single taken. The bowlers all read from the same page, unwaveringly bowling the lines scripted by the think tank and operating with the fields set. The result – momentum snatched away [23 overs, 57 runs, 5 wickets] at just that precise point in the game when, in earlier times, the opposition tended to run berserk and bat India entirely out of the game.

And then the final, most welcome change: The team and its coach talk not of “saving the game” and “taking it session by session and seeing where we are” but of winning the game. Its buccaneer in residence then walks out to play an innings that would have attracted comment in a one-day situation, and was downright implausible in context of a Test match.

h) Finally, as the 5th day was playing out, Prem Panicker blogged about it, leading off with a brilliant treatise on the man who could be the king of them all if he (Sehwag) is able to duplicate the feats of the first half of his career. He provides a lesson from the past to shed some light on cricket's last gunslinger.

To call Sehwag’s batting “instinctive” – that is, an atavistic response to a situation that is not based on thought or prior experience and do not depend on prior learning – is to call it wrong: Sehwag’s secret is not that he does not think, but that he has cleared the clutter and reduced thought to its barest, most necessary essentials.

In his connection, I always think of one particular example – and it relates to when England came touring under Nasser Hussain. Sehwag, then batting low down the order, was sitting in the dressing room, fretting at the sight of his senior colleagues “tackling” Ashley Giles’ round the wicket, wide of leg stump line with their pads, butts and other parts of the anatomy.

In course of an eruption of profanity of which saala is the only quotable word, Sehwag blasted his mates and, in précis, said wait till I get out there, I’ll teach that &#%%$ a lesson.

Sure enough, his chance came. He greeted Giles with a murderous mow that almost decapitated short square leg, followed it up with a clinical reverse sweep, ran down the wicket to loft him over midwicket, charged down again to hit inside out over extra cover – and in the space of three overs, forced Hussain to take Giles out of the attack.

That was not “instinctive”, as the dictionary defines “instinct”. Rather, it was the result of Sehwag reducing the game to its essence: There was, he realized, no percentage in standing there watching the balls go by. Nor, given that line, was there the danger of his getting out bowled or leg before. That left “caught” – and reduced it to a straight contest between a bowler clearly unsure of his ability to effectively bowl the more attacking lines, against a batsman confident of his own mastery of the grammar of batsmanship.

Remembering the titan

Anil Kumble announced his retirement (from Test cricket, mind you, not all cricket) with minimal fanfare, and a lap of honor around the Kotla. Compliments have been pouring in from all quarters since then. All of them justified and apt.

Some words are common to almost all of them - dignity, respect, hard-working, gentle, giant, leg-spinner who did not turn the ball, broken jaw, Brian Lara, match-winner, greatest, timely retirement, captain, quiet, unassuming.....

But the word that comes up in all of them, either overtly or covertly, is underrated. If everyone thinks someone is underrated, then is that person really underrated? I don't know. I always thought that opposing teams respected Kumble's presence in the team more than any other Indian bowler's. (There were periods here and there where someone like Harbhajan broke through, but not in a sustained way). How does that make him underrated? Methinks that may have been the case in the early 90's, but not any more. Give the man his due. He was India's greatest and most reliable match-winner. Bar none.

Anyway, as previously promised, here are some of the better written tributes to Kumble. For each one I shall highlight the points in the article that stood out for me. (Click on the author's name to access the article).

1) First and foremost, the person who has probably spent the most time with him on a cricket field - Rahul Dravid. (This is an older, very well-written article, pubished soon after Kumble crossed Kapil Dev's mark of 434 wickets in Tests):

Anil is tough and I like that about him. He is the essential 100-per-cent cricketer, every day, every over, every ball, bringing great energy to the contest, facing every challenge with his jaw sternly set - or even broken for that matter!

2) Next up, Sanjay Manjrekar:

Recently I had the opportunity to attend a seminar on management issues connected with cricket; we were about four or five speakers there, and one of them was Kumble. His preparations were so hectic; he was working hard on his speech that he was going to give to the corporates next morning. I could see the same kind of effort and discipline going into his preparations for his speech that he would put into his preparations for a Test.

3) A statistical break down of Kumble's career by CricInfo's S. Rajesh and Matthew Verghese:

Where Kumble stands head and shoulders above the other Indian bowlers is in his contribution to team wins. He took 288 wickets in the 43 Tests India won - an average of 6.70 wickets per Test. The average was a remarkable 18.75, at a strike rate of 44.4 deliveries per wicket.

4) A sampling of former players and selectors by Nagraj Gollapudi of CrinInfo:

Vijay Bharadwaj , former Karnataka and India team-mate:
It was my first day as Karnataka coach back in the 2006-07 season and we were playing Mumbai at the Wankhede stadium. Both Anil and Rahul [Dravid] were available for the first couple of games. They were pulling my leg saying, "Vijay has already retired, Venky [Venkatesh Prasad] has already retired, and both of them are coaches now but we are still playing." On our return to Bangalore, before our second game, Anil called up to check if it was fine to get a 16-year-old legspinner as a net bowler. I just laughed. I told him he didn't need to call me to get permission. But he knew the coach was important and didn't want to break protocol, so he wanted to check. He could've straightaway taken the decision himself because of his stature. He is a guy who gave importance to each and every detail.

5) The CricInfo staff puts in another high-quality effort:

Bowden went up to him, handed him his cap and shook his hand again. Ditto Hayden. Amit Mishra came up to hug him; the baton was perhaps being passed. And then he was swarmed by his team-mates. Rahul Dravid and Zaheer Khan lifted him and after a while it was clear he was not comfortable with all that. Dravid and VVS Laxman tried it again before Mahendra Singh Dhoni, the strongest man in the team, took over the job alone and lifted Kumble on his shoulders. But Kumble was not happy; he wanted to walk on his favourite turf, soak it in one last time.

Not a person in the ground could stay seated through the farewell; they could sense a very important part of their lives going away. Kumble would have felt the same but, save a few emotional moments, he handled it with dignity and with equanimity. It was so like Anil Kumble.

6) Dileep Premachandran calls him one of the two pillars of Indian cricket:

As he walked off the square for the final time, Anil Kumble got a pat on the back from the only man who has been playing international cricket even longer than he has. Kumble's first Test, at Old Trafford in August 1990, was Sachin Tendulkar's ninth, and in the decade that followed they would be the twin pillars of a team that sought to establish itself as a big player on the world stage. Over time, they would be joined by other great players, a nucleus that would allow India to challenge Australia on a consistent basis, but the mind-boggling durability of the two main men remained a source of wonder.
(...)
After all was said and done and the match called off, he came back out to be chaired around the ground, part of the way on the shoulders of the man who will succeed him as captain. For someone who scaled the greatest heights, it was one of the very few occasions during the 18 years when his feet actually left the ground.

7) Suresh Menon uses that word in the title:

He played 41 Tests fewer than Kapil Dev to go past Kapil's Indian record of 434 wickets; he bowled India to more victories than the entire spin quartet of the 1970s, yet he was condemned to being defined by negatives. The pundits told us he did not spin the ball, that he did not have the classic legspinner's loop, that he did not bowl slowly enough to get the ball to bite. Kumble was described by what he did not do rather than by what he did.

8) Snippets from the press conference where he made his formal announcement:

"Thank you all for all the support I have received right through my career. I've built some great friendships and met some fantastic people along the way. You'll probably start calling me from tomorrow for quotes about somebody else. Give me a break for a couple of days and I'll certainly take all your calls." Like he has unfailingly answered the Indian team's calls for the last 18 years.

9) The scene in the Indian dressing room was how we'd imagine it to be, knowing what we have been told about the man:

In between, there was time for some humour as well. A player turned to Mahendra Singh Dhoni and quipped: “You have two empty seats now” (the Nagpur Test will be Sourav Ganguly’s last). But for those who are familiar with Dhoni’s style, the gist of his instantaneous reply did not come as a surprise: “Nobody can replace those two”.

10) Ian Chappell thinks the timing of the decision was right:

The defining moment for me and it encapsulated the career of Anil Kumble was his last wicket in Tests. He had been angered by the young legspinner, misjudging a catch in the outfield and the very next ball he took off after a skied catch off his own bowling, charged back even with his bad hand, took the catch and turned around and fired the ball back at the stumps as if to say to the young man, who will take over his role as a legspinner in the Indian team, that is the sort of the effort that you've got to put in every day if you want to be at the top of the game.

11) Rob Smyth of the Guardian talks about some of the high notes of Kumble's career:

Rarely has there been a sportsman who has combined flintiness and dignity so adeptly. He was hard, really hard, but utterly fair. Kumble forever walked the line, but rarely if ever crossed it. This was a fiercely proud man.

12) Peter Roebuck chips in from Australia:

He never gave up, and with unyielding will and high intelligence, made the most of his abilities. He scored a Test hundred and never let his side down. A thousand pities the Australians did not speak to him in Sydney. Throughout he has retained his dignity, it has been an immense contribution, and he did not outstay his welcome by a single day. Even in his retirement he served the side and Indian cricket.

13) Prem Panicker says goodbye:

And so he went. Not at the end of the series, or the end of the year, but now, when the arguments for his going were only as strong as, not stronger than, those for his continuing—and that, perhaps more than anything he has done on the field in course of an extraordinarily distinguished 19-year career, sums up all there is to know about Kumble the human being.

The more long-lived of Indian cricketers have invariably been players of extraordinary skills. They have had one other thing in common: they have all, without exception, undersold themselves; their accomplishments have been less than their promise.

Anil alone has been the converse: man who consistently rose above the sum of his own parts; almost, you could call him the Glenn McGrath of spin bowlers.

14) G. Rajaraman pays tribute to the Smiling Assasin:

A couple of years ago he joined world billiards champion Geet Sethi, former Test cricketer Sanjay Manjrekar and Olympian sprinter Ashwini Nachappa in conducting a management workshop for corporates. And I had the opportunity of watching him prepare his presentation on resilience. He spoke at length about developing the ability to bounce back – citing examples from his own career – but more than his oration, the quality of his preparation left me stunned and gave me an insight into how seriously he took any task.

15) Kadambari Murali has some inside stuff on the man:

Eight months ago, sitting under a lovely afternoon sun outside Kreeda, his elegant Bangalore bungalow, Anil Kumble casually said he didn’t think he would last out the year, career wise. “I’m hoping to make it to the Australian series this October,” he added, equally casually, “but it depends on my body”.
(...)
That Bangalore day, he grinned as wife Chethana disapprovingly commented, “He needs to think about himself”. “She’s being a wife,” he quipped, smiling at the woman he dubbed his “support system” and “partner in everything”. And then the smile became more wry. “What do I do?” he asked. “I’m exhausted. The last tour was very tough, mentally and physically and though I desperately want to play, I have to see how much I can take. I’ll know when it’s time to say goodbye.”

16) From the archives, an article by Anand Vasu, written soon after Kumble had crossed the 600 wicket mark in Tests:

Anil will not like this piece on him, though it is meant to be a tribute. He does not let his personal life become public and he would probably have preferred that what happened to him in England stayed private. He will be irritated that this mentions the time in 2004 when the Supreme Court of India granted sole custody of a child from an earlier marriage to the woman who is his wife, and was carrying his child at the time. “The Supreme Court cannot trace any deception in Kumble,” screamed the headlines. Justices Shivraj V. Patil and DM Adhikari never faced Kumble’s bowling, clearly.

17) To round it off, Harsha Bhogle uses almost all the words I mentioned above, and more:

The announcement itself was typical of the man: no grandstanding, no ostentation, no farewell tour. Anything else would have jarred, it wouldn’t have been Kumble. One of the greatest team-men the game has known did his job and said good-bye. In his last Test match, he had eleven stitches and was under general anesthesia for half a day. When the numbness vanished, when the body was over-ruled once more, he returned to take three more wickets.

See-sawing around Sehwag

The second Test match has become a bit schizophrenic in nature. When Sehwag is at the crease, the bowlers are merely hopeful while he plots his next run. When he is at the non-striker's end, all the doubts and demons in the minds of the batsmen come out to prey on their confidence. Murali and Mendis were completely ineffective against Sehwag. Gambhir and Laxman also played them with a measure of certainty but lost their wicket to balls they should have negotiated quite easily. But once the breakthrough was made, and Laxman departed, Mendis came to the fore. The rest of the Indian batsmen succumbed to him without having a clue about which way his deliveries would turn. Based upon these performances it is quite apparent that Sri Lanka should be able to run through many tails in the years to come. And when Lasith Malinga comes back, they will only get more potent. Watch out Australia!

Sehwag turned down two singles when on 199 in an attempt to shield Ishant Sharma from the strike. Those two singles will probably do a lot more, in my mind, for his stature than the massive centuries he has been piling up in the last 5 years.

The Sri Lankan innings began in a blaze of boundaries and it looked like they would run away with the game until Harbhajan got a fortuitous wicket against the run of play. Once Harbhajan got that wicket, he was suddenly transformed into a close rendition of the Bhajji of old. Could his troubles of late have merely been an issue of confidence? It will take more than just one good spell to convince me of that. After all, he has been sliding by with numerous bad spells of late, to have the slate wiped clean by one spell. With 4 wickets in the last session he clawed the game back towards India, albeit slightly.

Mahela Jayawardane, currently on the verge of another half-century, holds the key to the match. I agree with Sanjay Manjrekar's assesment on CricInfo radio, on the current state of this match:

SM: I see India slightly ahead at this stage. Mahela Jayawardene is obviously the key and if Sri Lanka get close to India's first-innings score, they will be the favourites purely because of the batting form the Indians have shown. Most of India's batsmen have been out of form and only one or two have shown some semblance of form. Sehwag, obviously, but he is in a different league. Gautam Gambhir has shown some confidence and to a lesser degree VVS Laxman.

If Sri Lanka are bundled out with more than 50-75 runs, then India are still in the game. But if Sri Lanka get very close, then they will be the fancied team. At this stage today, at the end of day two, India have a slight advantage.

I will be traveling the next couple of days so my blogging and cricket-watching will be severely hampered. The last time I was unable to follow an India Test match on its third and fourth days because I was traveling, I missed Laxman's career-changing moment. What will the outcome be this time?

The hungry Hyderabadi

VVS Laxman played an innings yesterday that would have made Rahul Dravid proud. The general impression about Laxman is that of a wristy player who is always looking to score runs in boundaries (almost 60% of his Test runs have come in boundaries). But like Scottie Pippen of the Chicago Bulls, his true worth may only be realized after his playing days are over.

Sanjay Manjrekar once described him as "an attacking batsman with the temperament of a defensive player." How true. Many an opposition captain believes that if you dry out the boundaries Laxman will perish. This is far from the truth. The man has played some monumental innings and you cannot do that by simply bashing every 5th ball to the fence. And if you do not believe me, compare his numbers with other contemporaries - only Hayden and Lara have a higher career best score in first class cricket. Laxman is the only person to score two triple centuries in the Ranji Trophy. (A certain recently-deposed former captain would do well to learn from Laxman's purple patch in domestic cricket which paved the way for his comeback to the Indian team).

And as the Tests pile up his list of important contributions to the fortunes of the Indian cricket team keep increasing. And yet people cannot look beyond that 281, expecting him to match it every time he wields the willow. It is time we did so. Here is one such effort to do just that.

At the end of the day Anil Kumble, he of the 100 Tests, discussed the days proceedings and other issues quite eloquently.