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.

Ignorance is blasted

A few days ago, I was talking to a friend who was adamant that Chris Gayle should make way for Darren Ganga as the captain of the West Indies squad. Calling him the "best captain West Indies never had", my friend convinced me that taking a Trinidad and Tobago team to the final of a T20 Champions League was just the proof of the pudding.

He then told me about Shane Warne and repeated the myth that the leg-spinner never captained Australia. I convinced him otherwise, pointing out that Warne did indeed captain Australia, contrary to popular belief. At this point, some doubts set in. I thought I remembered Darren Ganga captaining West Indies, too. Surely, I could not be wrong about that, could I?

Well, well, what do you know - Ganga played as many as 48 Tests for the Windies and even captained the Test team in two Test matches in England, both of which were lost by the visitors. The last Test Ganga captained was one in which Shivnaraine Chanderpaul was finally dismissed by England after occupying the crease for almost 18 hours spread over three Tests!

And so it ends...

When the IPL began in India I had decided not to follow it (reasons detailed here).

CricInfo decided that the game of cricket was far superior to the (not-so) hidden agendas of the BCCI head honchos and covered the event as best as it could. Their motivation, as eloquently described by Sambit Bal, the editor, can be summed up in this paragraph from the article:

We will live with the restrictions. You may keep us out of cricket grounds, but you can't take cricket out of us. Boycotting the IPL is not an option for us. Our commitment to cover cricket is absolute, as is our obligation to you. We are not blind to the significance of the IPL, which could be a seminal event in cricket, for better or worse. We will try to bring you every game with the same rigour and depth you have come to expect from us. Please bear with us if some matters like photographs are beyond us.

No one is bigger than the game. Administrators will come and go, but as long as cricket is around, Cricinfo will be here to cover it. That's a promise.

I did not follow the IPL for most of its duration, except to read about it in articles by columnists that I follow regularly (notably Peter Roebuck and Harsha Bhogle). One article that caught my attention was by Michael Atherton, the erstwhile captain of England. He touched upon the potential connection between Major League Baseball and the IPL.

Are Rajasthan Royals the Oakland A's of cricket? Devotees of excellent sporting literature will need no introduction to Moneyball, a terrific yarn about how the A's, a relatively low-budget baseball team ($41million - about £22million - to spend on players counts as low budget in American sport), consistently outperformed their more illustrious and wealthier rivals by dint of the unorthodox coaching methods of Billy Beane, their general manager.

Having read Moneyball, I can see where Atherton was going with this article. But the Rajasthan Royals differ from the Oakland A's in one BIG way - they won the championship. For all the success that Billy Beane has had over the years, maximizing the talents of his lowly-paid team, he has not been able to continue the success into the playoffs. In the playoffs, possibly because the "stars" are more immune to the increased pressure, the big guns win it all. Occasionally, a smaller-market team pulls it off, but rarely does that team sustain its success.

A lot of credit will go towards Shane Warne (it will get increasingly romanticized with time) as it must, but had they lost the final (which they barely won off the last ball, mind you) then the highest-paid player in the league - MS Dhoni - would have walked off with the crown.

There is, indeed, a fine line between being the GOAT and the goat.

Short-term memory

Steve Waugh is at it again. A few weeks ago he was talking about Ponting and Bradman in the same breath, as I mentioned here. Now he is according a similar status to another Australian - Shane Warne.

It's very hard to judge across eras but Shane Warne would sit pretty comfortably as Australia's second best player ever. The great Sir Don Bradman was the best but after that I believe Shane Warne would slot in pretty nicely at number two.

The wizard of Oz

What do I remember of Shane Warne?

A ten to fifteen step run-up, more like a walk-up, before a whirl of action slung the ball about 18 yards in the air, seemingly on a string, dipping, drifting, spinning, and usually drawing batsmen out of their shell and onto their doom (well, almost all batsmen).

Once the ball was bowled the real Warne emerged. If the batsman defended successfully Warne's left hand would circle his belly, the right hand would fold at the elbow while he grazed his chin reflectively with his thumb and index finger, his lips circling in a barely suppressed “ooh”. If the batsman was beaten, but not out, the “ooh” was more pronounced, sometimes followed by a brushback of the hair from his forehead. If the ball was convincingly hit away for runs the look stayed but was followed by a glare, as if to say that the batsman was lucky, just barely at that, to get the middle of his bat in the way.

Only rarely, very rarely, did the façade crumble. Such is the aura of the man that the opponents who got the better of him – Tendulkar, Laxman, Pietersen – are remembered for what they did to him and not for what Warne could not do to them.

To me, Warne’s greatness is just this – for 15 years he convinced people into thinking that he was the one in command and not the batsman. You can count on one hand the batsmen who are said to have had the better of him. In spite of all that, no one ever felt that they had completely mastered him

I will not miss his blatant over-appealing, which most other players would have been fined/suspended for. I will not miss his monotonous sledging when things did not go his way. I will certainly not miss his leg-side hoicking style of batting which got him the dubious distinction of scoring the most Test runs without ever recording a century.

What I will miss is his ability to put the ball wherever he wanted to. (His mystique is such that even when he bowled bad balls, people were convinced that it was by design). I will miss his (under-rated) slip catching. But most of all, I will miss the fact that when he was at the top of his bowling mark I held my breath because the next ball could be the wicket-taking one, irrespective of how badly he had bowled the previous one.

If the Aussie team since the early ‘90’s has had an unparalleled run of success it is in large part because Warne never felt that he couldn’t win. Warne is one of the few people I have seen who, even when bereft of ideas, did not concede that the cause was lost until it was undeniably so.

Having said that, I wish I could have seen Warne one more time against the Indians, in the very rare, and unfamiliar, defeated pose of his – bent over at the waist, hands on his knees, following the path of the ball as it thudded into the boundary boards. Instead I shall have to settle for watching him gorge on the deer-eyed English batsmen at Melbourne and Sydney.

Thanks for the memories, Warne.

Lead foot in the grave

The VVS Laxman of circa 2001 is no more. Back then the trademark of his batting against spinners was his decisive footwork when he danced down the wicket to play with and against the spin. Shane Warne will be the first to attest to that.

Today, Laxman stays rooted to the crease, putting a long stride forward, looking to smother the spin and venturing to put the ball away off the pitch only if the bowler errs badly in length, premitting him to rock onto his backfoot.

Why has this happened? My belief is that it stems from two reasons - one physical and one mental.

Physical: After that 281, Laxman injured his knee while fielding in a one-dayer and went to Australia to undergo reconstructive surgery. He hasn't been the same since. He is cautious when he runs, cautious when he has to stop and turn, cautious when he has to come down the track to the spinners.

Mental: With the supporters of the recently-deposed captain circling like vultures, waiting for a crack to appear in his edifice, Laxman has eschewed flair for substance. Today he looks to bide his time, nudging and nurdling singles, the occasional couple, and the rare four, as he bats with one eye on the ball and the other on the safe ground of personal milestones. It is no coincidence that only after he crosses the 50-60 run plateau does he begin to get expansive with his strokeplay. By then he probably believes that he has averted a removal from the team for another Test. For he knows that a Sehwag or Tendulkar can fail a few times and not be culled from the team, but his place is in constant jeopardy.

Sad really. A batsman capable of taking a game away from an opposition in a session or two is now just another regular middle order guy. Seriously speaking, is today's Laxman any more dangerous than a Bell or a Kallis or a Chanderpaul? A huge fall for a person who once walked with the Gods.

I just wish that the fear of failure is removed from his line of sight and we can once again relish the free flowing willow that caresses the ball to the boundary. Against the turn.