EL CRÍQUET

NB. This very short piece was written for The Cricketer and published in their September 2011 issue.

Belgrano Cricket Club, Buenos Aires

Deep in that most anglophile of South American cities, Buenos Aires, lies the historic Belgrano Athletic Club, venue since 1891 of an annual North versus South three-day cricket match that has first-class status. Skipper of the Belgrano Barbarians cricket, James Drummond, had been eagerly anticipating the upcoming Lord’s Test but predicts that “only a handful of die-hard fans with access to the internet will follow it live, as there’s no TV or radio coverage. The rest of us will check BBC for updates and reports.”

As well as scant media exposure, the impact of Test #2000 is further reduced by both a negligible Indian ex-pat presence in the city and the fact that “Argentina is also playing in a T20 tournament in Miami, which will be followed more keenly”, while local attention has been firmly on football’s Copa América, hosted by Argentina, which finished this Sunday [July 24].

Indeed, of the sports introduced by Brits, it was cricket that least took hold among the locals, being largely restricted to ex-pats in clubs like Hurlingham, Lomas, and St Alban’s. Anyway, adds Drummond, “the Argentines are quite fickle. Now it’s the rugby season, so the focus in the English clubs is definitely there.” That said, during the World Cup, Estebán MacDermott’s national cricket team did locate some all-night bars showing matches, where they duly rendezvoused to “follow individual players – like KP and Tendulkar – rather than teams”. Delightfully non-partisan (and very British)!

Tweet

McMAHON SEEKING MINOR CONSOLATION

A week ago last Monday, as the confetti and champagne-covered Tim Bresnan romped around the Oval celebrating his chunky contribution (16 wickets at 16.3 and 154 runs at 77) to England’s annihilation of India and ascent to the world number one Test ranking, his England under-19s captain from nine years earlier, Paul McMahon, could have been forgiven for casting a rueful eye over events and wondering what might have been. In that summer of 2002, when the best young players of England met their Indian counterparts (the maker of the painstaking Oval pair, Suresh Raina, included), off-spinner McMahon was on the verge of signing a four-year contract extension with home county Nottinghamshire. Today, when not busy in the North London office of international law firm Bird & Bird, he can be found barrelling up the A1 to Cambridgeshire, either to play club cricket for Peterborough (who last weekend fell at the final hurdle before the televised Cockspur National T20 finals), or to skipper the side that he has just led to a home Minor Counties Championship final against Devon at the picturesque March CC, starting today.

Of course, the story of a youthful prodigy drifting away from the first-class game is far from unique – one of McMahon’s predecessors as skipper of England under-19s, former Durham batsman Michael Gough, quit the sport aged just 23, citing a lack of enjoyment – but it is always tempting to wonder why it happened; or implicitly: what went wrong?

For the first three of his five years with Notts, while McMahon was up at Oxford reading Law (incidentally, he has the curious distinction of being the bowler who has dismissed Adrian Shankar most often in first-class cricket), the county employed Stuart MacGill to bowl on their famously swing-and-seam-friendly Trent Bridge pitches. Then, in 2005, a certain Graeme Swann joined the Outlaws, the moment McMahon now realizes he ought to have seen the writing on the wall: “I had hoped that when MacGill moved on I would be in a position to play regularly as the front line spinner. But that signing [Swann] has obviously worked out fantastically well for all concerned.” However, he now believes that “with hindsight, I should have left a couple of years earlier,” perhaps making the opposite journey to Swann, heading for the turning pitches at Wantage Road at the time when a strong Second XI record (175 Championship wickets at 20.8) would have outweighed the lack of first-team cricket in his final two years at Notts.

Perhaps there was an element of loyalty that kept him there, a difficult itch to scratch. Having learnt the game over twenty years at Wollaton CC in Nottingham’s western suburbs – the last three of which were played alongside recent England supersub, Scott Elstone; all in the company of his left-arm spinner father, Gerry, once good enough to take a hundred from Joel Garner in the Central Lancashire League – it was only natural that McMahon should want to accompany colleagues such as Bilal Shafayat, Nadeem Malik and Samit Patel from that England under-19 group into the first team at Trent Bridge. Ultimately, however, it wasn’t to be; not that there’s any trace of resentment: “I have never been a fan of hard luck stories,” affirms McMahon, magnanimously. “Professional sport is, in general, a fairly transparent and meritocratic environment; the cream will generally rise to the top and the players who win games and affect situations positively for their team are generally recognised and rewarded.”

So, having trialled unsuccessfully with Warwickshire 2nd XI in 2008 (largely due to reservations over his batting when compared with Ant Botha), he called time on his full-time aspirations and threw himself into a legal career, also immersing himself in the Minor Counties cricket he considers comparable in standard and intensity to Sydney and Melbourne first grade, and just as important to the respective system’s upward flow of talent. Following a couple of seasons with Oxfordshire, he switched to Cambridgeshire in 2010 and this year took on the captaincy with not inconsiderable success. Not that it has all been plain sailing, mind…

Squeezing through what was to all intents and purposes a straight shootout for the title with Staffordshire in the final round of group matches, Cambridgeshire were crowned Eastern Division champions despite accruing the lowest haul of batting bonus points since the three-day competition began in 2001: a paltry 10 in six games from a possible 24. Such have been the batting woes – four of their first innings have subsided to 62-5, 81 all out, 46-7 and 77 all out – that no one has managed to record three figures for them all summer (only Northumberland fared as badly), while none of their seamers has taken more than eight championship wickets. However, in McMahon and fellow Peterborough Town offie, Lewis Bruce, Cambridgeshire perhaps hold the trump card – indeed, in amongst their combined aggregate of 68 Championship scalps, both have already bagged 10-wicket match hauls at the March ground this season, McMahon’s match analysis of 45.2-15-90-13 against Northumberland the best in this year’s Championship.

Devon’s stand-in skipper, Chris Bradley, also an off-spinner, should therefore himself be relishing a bowl on the March track, but is wary of underestimating opponents who, despite their batting tribulations, have already this season overturned first-innings deficits of 117 (only that few thanks to a 101-run tenth-wicket partnership) and 156 to win, the latter, nervelessly, in that crunch game against Staffs. That said, Devon are just as battle-hardened, having coming through what was also effectively their own all-or-nothing eliminator against the eventual runners-up in the Western Division, convincingly seeing off Shaun Udal’s Berkshire (winners of the MCCA knockout) by 10 wickets.

Having dominated Minor Counties cricket for much of the 1990s, winning four straight championships under the erudite captaincy of Peter Roebuck (1994-1997) and two since, Devon are perhaps a little more relaxed going into what is a repeat of the 1994 final. Even so, club secretary Neil Gamble is certain that the current squad is hugely motivated to forge its own identity: “apart from [former Gloucestershire all-rounder] Bobby Dawson, it’s a completely different team to our glory years. The majority of the team are under 26 years old and weren’t involved then, so are desperate to write a new chapter in the county’s winning tradition.” 

With Cambridgeshire already having felt the disappointment of semi-final elimination in the 50-over competition, and not having won the Championship outright since their sole success in 1963, McMahon is acutely aware of how much it means to the Fenlanders and their support. As for himself, “winning the play-off final and contributing in a way that suggests I’ve continued to improve as a cricketer through my twenties would probably be one of the most meaningful things I’ve achieved in cricket.”

* An earlier version of this article appeared on the website of SPIN magazine.

Tweet

VIRENDER'S SURRENDER

He must have a pair on him, eh, that Sehwag? A king pair... I mean, to play a shot like that, in a situation like that, you’d need a couple of water melons squeezed inside the old protector. Grandes cojones, hombre.

Or perhaps you simply need to be insane. Or reckless. Or tired. Stupid, maybe. Even cowardly…

But let’s not speculate here as to why Sehwag threw the kitchen fucking sink at a king pair-avoiding length delivery off the world’s second-best swing bowler in murky light on a new-ball deck. No, let us wait a couple of paragraphs. Then we’ll spew forth our ill-informed conjecture, after some facts (well, perceptions masquerading as facts) have been considered.

First up, there’s the Asia-to-Blighty Respect-for-Conditions quotient – a drum banged so long and hard by Geoffrey Boycott on TMS during the Edgbaston Test, you’d have thought he’d marched straight in from the Shankill Road. The line of thinking, a corridor of hyper-certainty, goes thus: ‘e swans in to England, has a jazz game in Northampton (essentially still Nagpur; the ground’s name even sounds like an Indian tennis umpire at the Empire Builder’s Grand Slam Final between clay-courter Hernán Cortés and ol’ Cecil: “Ad-Wantage Road”), a game in which he makes a scratchy 8 against the second-string attack of a second-rate team, then goes straight in to the Test side. Cue apoplexy from Boycs, a man who very much likes his preparation. Indeed, for the bigger series, he advocates a minimum of seven three-day warm-up matches (ideally running parallel to another series in which he’s already playing, thus allowing him to bat for 14 hours a day. Plus nets). But Geoffrey, Geoffrey – they didn’t fly him over to watch now, did they? And it is not impossible to come straight off an injury and make a score (as was definitively proven, I think, by my post-broken elbow 40-ball half-century against Ottis Gibson in 1999).

Anyway, this is not about first principles: Thou Shalt Get Used to Nibble (coincidentally, also what the team nutritionist is advising him). No, the main thing was the manner of the pair. More than anything else, the dismissals smacked of mental sluggishness. Or end-of-Empire decadence.

In the first innings, you’ll recall, he dropped his hands too tardily to avoid a shortish (but not viciously climbing) ball from Stuart Broad, gloving to the ‘keeper. He then stood around – literally – for a couple of days while India’s ‘bowlers’ ‘toiled’ to ‘contain’ England, occasionally venturing off his shooting stick to console a fellow ‘fielder’ for a drop or a misfield. He didn’t even bowl his handy part-time twirlers, Dhoni instead utilising Suresh ‘Would you be so kind as to pitch it up to me, old chap?’ Raina’s penguin off-breaks.* Finally, he strapped ‘em on and, well, you know the rest… As he trudged off – I think he trudged off; I would imagine him to have trudged off – I half-expected him to be intercepted by Plod and arrested for driving without due care and attention. I mean, he looked trolleyed.

schnicky 

Cue what I thought would have been screamingly obvious headlines in the Indian popular press: “Viru-lent casualness to Indian efforts”. In actual fact, The Times of India and The Hindustan Times were both sombre and reserved in their assessment, although the oneindia website offered this Sidhuian synopsis of the “Nizam of Najafgarh”: “With caution thrown so irresponsibly and one would daresay [sic] insanely, to the wind, Sehwag had bitten into the bait wholeheartedly… India were 3/1 at that stage... and [there was] no hint of gritty counter-offence to look forward to, just another slip downward into the swamp of humiliation”. 

No, the real post-innings Viru vituperation – the sheer puritanical exasperation of it all – came from the English press. For instance, Nick Hoult in The Telegraph said he “deserved the barbs [because] in certain circumstances fame and fortune are better replaced by fight and fortitude,” while the normally sanguine Mike Selvey in The Guardian pronounced thusly from the press box on (very, very) high:

It was dismal cricket, a disgrace actually, from a player of his quality, no matter his entertainment quality. No doubt it will be predicated on Sehwag being Sehwag and “this is how he plays”. Not good enough. Not nearly good enough. Some discretion was needed to get through to the next day. It was the mindless play of someone who believes he might be above the industrious norms of some.

The slightly sanctimonious tone of such verdicts is perhaps borne of an understandable frustration at the utter one-sidedness of the series (and maybe its ramifications for the future of Tests), but they are doubtless also in part impelled by some atavistic impulse that leads us to search for heroes – for transcendence – in sport, a yearning deep within our DNA that Sehwag embodied some superhuman power, able, even after 26 half-arsed throw downs from Munaf, to show up Cook’s piffling 294 for the sport-destroying yawnfest that (the IPL would have us believe) it was. I mean, when Sehwag made 293 against Sri Lanka in December 2009, he made it from 291 balls fewer than Cook. (And let us not speak of his fastest-in-history fully-fledged triple centuries). 

But he couldn’t. His feet of clay went nowhere; he swished, shnicked, and shuffled off. Veni, vidi, Viru.

Clearly, Sehwag is a polariser of opinion – indeed, following Gower, Gilchrist, Jayasuriya and others, he’s the latest incarnation of the Swashbuckler’s Dilemma, a complex phenomenon that elicits just that sort of frankly hypocritical love-hate dynamics from the cricketing punditariat. “Madness” they yell, while praising Dhoni for breaking his run of bad form by…playing some shots. Madness, indeed. “Stick or twist? Stick or twist? Stick or twist?” he’ll gabble, banging his head against the bathroom mirror...

Besides all that, in an era of steroidally buff sportsmen, we should feel a deep, wistful contentment that the slightly pudgy, samosa-munching Sehwag can excel, that a man twice as likely to be seen hob-nobbing at the gymkhana as bench-pressing at a gymnasium is still able to make a triple-fucking-hundred in Madras (which any Cook’ll tell you is pretty hot).

Lord only knows what Duncan the Taciturn is making of all this, sat there with hulking inscrutability in a dressing room about as sanctified and ready for sweeping change as the Vatican (apologies for the Sehwagianly careless religious metaphor, for I would not want it to be presumed that they had a 27% chance of being career pederasts). But, beneath that outward impassivity, Behind the Shades, tangled up in the rarefied BCCI politics, he surely cannot be calm; no, Fletch – mentally, at least – must be flapping like a C-stream English language supply teacher at Knuckleduster Comprehensive who’s just been told he’s going to have a new asshole ripped for him by the nice young couple rearing their family at the back of the class.

They do what they want. They can no longer be disciplined. The power is theirs. And the same goes for schoolkids. 

Anyway, at some point very soon – probably late tomorrow, maybe even Sunday if weather and Straussian conservatism kick in – Virender Sehwag will come bouncing down the Oval steps – literally bouncing, should he stumble – and out to the middle to try and make some runs. Any runs (although a drop to short cover and scampered single isn’t likely). Otherwise, he’ll be doing what most other men on the verge of a mid-life crisis are doing: staring at an Audi that they don’t really want. 0000. Vorsprung durch Technik, as they say in Yorkshire: “Progress through Tech-neeeek”. 

The whole of India – the whole of cricket – hopes it’s temporary, of course. But what if it’s not a blip? What if this is the slippery slope?

Perhaps the decline is all down to his hair loss – or rather, down to the eternal Cricketers’ Cycle of hair loss and renewal: the perennial waltz of Mother Nature and Advanced Hair Studio. Warming down after all those 45-minute IPL slogfests (or “innings”, as Sehwag calls them) against Kallis, Warne and Doug the Rug, they must have chatted about something. One can only assume it was about re-seeding old wicket ends. Only, now that he has his hair back, he’s lost his powers: an inverse Samson. Forgive me Delilah, I just couldn’t take any more… (Of being a slapdash slaphead, presumably). 

I don’t know whether Sehwag’s a triskaidekaphobe or not, but as only the 13th bagger of a king pair in a 2003-Test history, joining other such luminaries as Adam Gilchrist and, erm, Javed Omar, I guess he could consider himself the victim of ill luck – until the point, that is, that he starts to analyse how it actually happened. But it’s not obvious that Viru has yet reached the point of thinking about it at all.

* flightless. 

Tweet

GOWER PEN: INSULAR?

There are certain things that you can only really admit when there’s little left of your bedraggled, bullet-riddled reputation left to salvage, when one’s stock is a-tumblin’ and unlikely ever to be restored. So it was that, halfway in toward the collection of skeletons in the deepest recesses of my closet, I happened across a somewhat corny poem that I had written as an 18-year-old (which in itself is an disclosure I’d rather not make) about a cricketer I greatly admired. (I won’t say a hee-ro, ‘cos what’s a hee-ro...)

The uninspired title of this uninspiring eulogy was ‘Ode to Gower’; the verse was penned in a blizzard of delusional self-congratulation and speedily despatched to the man in question, then of Hampshire, from whom I received a gracious if understandably perfunctory reply (pictured below), more of which in a moment…

While its tone was undeniably mawkish, a younger generation might not realize that Gower hasn’t always been the slightly leathery anchorman for Sky Sports’ international cricket coverage, a polite middle-class ying to Botham’s bumptious yang (albeit with the same Bacchanalian streak). No, he was once the flashing blade of English cricket, a man who hooked his first ball in Test cricket to the deep-square fence and thereafter scarcely reined in his attacking impulses, gathering 8231 Test runs at 44.25 to lie third on the England all-time run-scorers list behind men of utterly opposing character in Gooch and Stewart, quintessential sergeant-majors both. That said, in his Cricinfo profile, former Wisden editor Matthew Engel speculates, baselessly, that “his devil-may-care attitude hid some complexities, perhaps even an inner loneliness”.

Anyway, despite his stellar record, Lord Gower was always viewed with a certain degree of suspicion by the joyless roundheads at the TCCB (antecedent of the ECB) and thus was often, it seemed, playing for his place. They saw him as a dasher, a dilettante, dangerous and distracting. A scapegoat in, um, goat’s clothing (well, coiffeuse). Capricious. None of which quite mitigates my poem’s bootlicking butteriness, of course…

However, the benefit of an improved understanding of my teenage psyche – otherwise known as revisionism – now permits me to explain all this away as a ruse: clearly, the phrase “good that fortunes at Moddershall are improving” implies that I’d taken the trouble to inform him of our circumstances (we were in our third year in the NSSCL, then a two-division league, and would that year win promotion), no doubt in an effort to get Gower, then in his last year of international cricket, to attend an event at Moddershall CC – you know, a race night, quiz, pool comp, that sort of thing. As it was, he was probably out hunting yak. In a tiger moth.

The presumption – or, I suppose, optimism (naïveté, even) – is pretty staggering, now that I reflect upon it. At that stage I no doubt thought it entirely reasonable that a former England Test skipper would pop up to rural Staffordshire as a heartfelt thank you for a piece of cruddy adolescent verse – I hadn’t gone through the Copernican revolution of the self, and therefore still thought everyone else was a planet orbiting me, the earth (the sun, of course, shone out of my arse).

Anyway, the point is this – I can now pronounce, as a sort of politburo of my adolescent id, that the poem is not the unambiguous hero-worshipping schmaltz of a teenager. It is subterfuge, designed to get a famous face to help out my club (altruistic version) and in so doing garner myself a vast dollop of kudos (egoistic version). Given the unlikelihood of it happening, however, I might just as well have saved myself the trouble (not that it was much trouble), wandered down to some cricket ground at which he was playing, and bellowed, in the manner of madmen the length and breadth of the land: “Oi, Gower – come cut this ribbon for us, ya gifted square-driving twat, ya!” 

As you can see, Gower’s reply was entirely in keeping with the persona now familiar to us from the Sky chair: indulgent up to a point, but firm. For those struggling with his handwriting, it reads:

Dear Scott,
Thanks for the letter – and the poem: familiar, but nonetheless appreciated sentiments. Good that fortunes at Moddershall are improving – I hope all continues to go well.
Yours sincerely, David Gower.

Now, if I were feeling particularly sensitive, the phrase “familiar…sentiments” could be interpreted as a withering assessment of the hackneyed ideas in the poem, as cutting as it would be for WH Auden or WB Yeats to endure a critique of their use of zeugma or chiasmus [insert clever use of zeugma or chiasmus]. That said, I wasn’t writing for the Bridport Prize. I simply thought, in my own insane way, that I could get him to Barnfields for a beer. I’m still Waiting for Gower…

What’s that? Oh, the poem. Here. If you must:


ODE TO GOWER  
There’s no finer sight in the game of cricket 
than to see David Ivon Gower strolling to the wicket
at Lord’s, the opening Test of the Ashes,
the first act of another of those titanic clashes –
he enters the fray at 20 for 2,
all England praying he can make a few.
Languidly he stands at the crease,
running fingers through that golden fleece,
awaiting the bowler – fairly quick –
he rocks back, then…a little snick,
he offers a simple catch behind.

“What must go through that lad’s mind?”,
sighs a Yorkshireman in the crowd,
“Bloody terrible!!” he screams aloud.
“First ball he faces is wide and short,
flamin’ obvious he’d go and get caught,
but could he leave the damn thing alone…
now our chances of winning are blown;
another cheap wicket the Aussies have bought,
Mr Gower out for bloody nought.
Now, you know I don’t like to criticize
but I don’t think the lad even tries!”
His young son tries to disagree
but the wise old veteran interrupts his plea:
“Look, son, you’re barely a youth –
Gower couldn’t care less, and that’s the truth”.

Second innings and England are deep in trouble
chasing 330, Aussies starting to bubble.
Remember the phrase “cometh the hour…”?
Well, out to the middle strode David Ivon Gower.
30 for 3 and backs to the wall,
our cavalier – on a pair – awaits his first ball…
Short and wide, it’s crashed through the covers,
up leaps the Tyke with Gower’s other fickle lovers
and yells “Well played, son, smashing shot!!!” –
what short memories some folk have got.

Australia’s bowlers begin to cower;
with perfect placement and latent power,
with cuts and drives, glances and flicks,
Gower moves effortlessly to ninety-six.
Desperate, the Aussies, to find a match-winner,
they toss the ball to their number one spinner
who flights it up, with a hint of drift,
but Gower just dismisses it with a roll of the wrists
and as the ball speeds away over the ropes for four
the prince of cricketers is a hero once more.
The crowd stood to proclaim a scintillating ton
and within the hour England had won;
Gower was back as the idol of the nation,
as he drank in another standing ovation.

Now, our Yorkshireman came to realize
just what he’d seen transpire afore his eyes,
and that night, before he went to bed,
turned to his beaming son and said:
“Some folk criticize the way that he plays
but if they could see him on his majestic days
when a cricket ground would be brim-full
just to see one commanding pull,
a lazy flick or elegant drive,
the sort that brings the day alive,
they’d forgive him the odd mistake
(something simple, as you or I would make)
because what he has just cannot be taught:
the man’s a genius, a true God of our sport!”

Now you now why I pay twenty quid a ticket,
just to see David Ivon Gower walk to the wicket. 

Tweet

11 REASONS WHY ENGLAND ARE GOING TO BEAT INDIA

There has been a lot of talk about this series, a lot of pant-moistening hype and clap-trap, when it’s obvious that India cannot possibly win. Here’s why:

1/ OUR DADS ARE HARDER THAN THEIR DADS

Robert Clive of India meets Mir Jaffar after the Battle of Plessey (1757)

We have conquered them before (literally, I mean; not just at cricket). They have never conquered us. Go figure. Do the math. Go get the figures and do the math. Or, don’t bother, ’cos it’s one-fucking-nil to the In-ger-lund and, thanks to the Treaty of Versailles, that’s the way it’s going to stay, irrespective of their nuclear capability (which I don’t believe they have) and billion-strong population ripe for transformation into a war machine (or juggernaut/Jagannath). “Well, Geoff, England really do have an unassailable 1-0 advantage in the colonization stakes, which will surely feed back into the cricketing psyche of both sides and make the Indians a bit tentative in and around off stump”. “That’s right, Henry. Old scars are bound to be opened. Come tea time, the Indian batsman will have to dash off, chuck on some servant clobber, and put in a quick shift as punkah-wallah or chai-wallah for posh boy Strauss and his ilk”. Ya get me?

2/ VENERATION OF RUMINATION = GENERATION OF RUINATION

Due to the sacrosanct status accorded our beef-bestowing bovine buddies by the good people of India – for instance, allowing urban cows to wander (jaywalk?) the streets of already ludicrously congested and chaotic cities – it is almost certain that there will be sacred proscriptions preventing MS Dhoni from stationing fielders in Cow Corner. It’s for cows, see. And cows, the great big docile, four-stomached milk-gushers, can do what they want. In India, they’re not only street, cows – they’re also street-cows, and, as such, own the streets. So, given that Trott and Pietersen score 94.47 % of their Test runs through a no-go area for Indian fielders, it stands to reason that they’re going to make merry, ja? And to celebrate, they’ll probably go into their back garden (or vaals, or whatever it is they’ve got), kill some cows, and put ’em on the brai, ja? And that really would be rubbing salt into the wounds (which, according to page 37 of Trott’s book, Long, Drawn-Out yet Essential Preparations, is essential prepping), ja? 

3/ AGE PROBLEMS

Pakistan and India in happier times (i.e. when they didn't exist):
 Ali-Jinnah and Gandhi

India was born on 15 August 1947 (the same date as Pakistan, coincidentally, although the latter of these ill-starred twins has huffily decided to celebrate its birthday a day earlier as a result of some tiff I’m yet to get to the bottom of entirely…). Presumably, before this date, when the Indian subcontinent was a mere glint in, erm, another tectonic plate’s eye, Afghanistan, China, Nepal and the like would have been gently lapped by the warm waters of the Indian Ocean (no, I don’t know who had the prescience to name it after a then-nonexistent nation either, but kudos for that).

Anyway, what this all means, if you haven’t already worked it out, is that, mid-tour, the day after the inevitably gruelling 3rd Test at Edgbaston [see 6, below], India will be celebrating its 64th birthday, which, as The Beatles told us, is no age at all to be doing anything strenuous, let alone competing for the world number one slot: When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now / will you sign me up for the hair re-seed / like Kallis, Doug the Rug, and Rana Naved… And if any of you are thinking ‘Yeah, well, what about England: you’re positively ancient’, let me point out this: England is not a sovereign nation; that would be the United Kingdom you’re thinking of. Therefore, we – England – are ageless, immortal. And who would you back in a tussle: a 64-year-old geriatric or an immortal entity? Exactly!

4/ DAD'S ARMY 

India's shirking fogies try to remember what they were talking about ©AP

Yes, I realize this argument was used with Australia in 2006-07 and we had our arses (anti-)royally whipped by McGrath, Warne, Hayden, Gilchrist, Langer et al, but India’s middle-order is now the equivalent of the Arsenal back four of the late 1990s: no, not shit hot; ancient (and just as much protected by technology-deprived umpires as Dixon, Adams, Bould and Winterburn were protected by refs who bought their bus-hailing routine). They are so antiquated, in fact, that there are teams of anthropologists from Swiss universities among their entourage, there to try and decipher the symbolism of the highly ritualized way in which the initiated elders (Dravid, Tendulkar, Laxman) customarily and precisely strap on their “Mums and Dads”, and how that fits with the overall process known as “getting ‘em on”. (By the way, for what it’s worth, I believe Sachin must be on some form of steroid even to be able to wield a bat that heavy at his age.) Anyway, I fully expect these senescent has-beens to start nodding off halfway through an over of Stuart Broad’s “pass the stepladders, please” bouncers, all of which ought to help us bundle them out pretty cheaply. On the plus side, they’ll get preferential parking at most grounds...

5/ INDIA'S SEAMERS ARE GASH 

This nose was made for snorting... ©AFP

Excuse the Boycottian bluntness here, but let’s face it, someone needed to address the massive Indian elephant in the pre-series hype room, namely: their pace bowling resources are massively overrated, with the exception of teak-stiff seam-canting geometrician, Zaheer Khan, a man whose range of menace-irradiating glares and glowers is positively Stanislavskiyan in its subtlety, a gestural palette whose somewhat over-indulgent usage is, however, entirely responsible for the desultory over-rate that India purvey (not that this over-rate matters a jot, of course, on account of India running the whole sport). So, who’s the back-up to “Z” and what are their shortcomings?

* Clearly, the cumbersome bling-sway around the necks of ISHANT SHARMA and SREESANTH is liable to blind or choke one of them before too long. Ishant, in particular, is like a display bust in a hock jewellers, while Sreesanth’s general garb appears to be a kind of homage to the fashion car crashes of early 80s, Studio 54-era Noo Yoik. He is thus roundly expected to emerge from the Lord’s pavilion with rings of coke residue around his conveniently capacious nostrils (only cocaine offers a plausible explanation for his colossal attention-seeking and fidgety hecticness; he’s a nailed-on chalk head, if ever I’ve seen one).

* Then there’s MOO-NAFF PATEL, who burst on the scene in 2006 with a high action and close-to-the-stumps delivery, leading him to be trumpeted as India’s very own Glenn McGrath. He was soon left out, however, first due to the blasphemous name (since modified to the more conventional spelling: Munaf), then because his obsession with the man from Narromine led to him having a head transplant in order to look like the “original Australian” deck-hitting miser. Unfortunately, the head surgeon he saw was partially deaf, and so gave him the appearance of an aboriginal Australian – none of which he was aware of, mercifully, what with being under fairly heavy sedation during the procedure, not to mention being temporarily sans bonce... 

* PRAVEEN KUMAR – Who? (Why?) He’s the guy who’s effective only for the first 2.4 overs of an IPL game, until The White SG Ball Stops Swinging. Presumably, the Indian selectors thought his skiddy little swingers would be useful in England. Do they not realize why England don’t pick Darren Maddy to open the attack?

That’s your lot. No RP Singh, VRV Singh, inswingh or outswingh. If these boys can’t do it, they’re shafted... They’re shafted. 

6/ 'BRUMMY TUMMY'

After years of subcontinent-visiting English cricketers suffering from (or complaining of) “Delhi Belly”, shitting as though someone were trying to pass a molten starfish through their guts, surely it’s about time the Indian tourists ate some dodgy English nosh and had a couple of billion British bacillus get their micro-crampons into the intestinal walls of The Wall and his cohorts. Think of the sledging possibilities: “All the gear, and diarrhoea…” To this fiendish Machiavellian end, Birmingham’s Balti Triangle should be closed off on some ludicrous pretext (the English Dialect Society having come to purge the air of Brumminess, maybe) and the Indians should all be sent to a greasy spoon (or groicy spouwunn, as the locals call them) where slimy tinned mushrooms that resembe smoker’s catarrhy gobbets floating in puddles, polystyrene scrambled eggs, sodden fried bread, superannuated ox-bollock sausages, pseudo-bacon and “boiked boynes” would be served – then barfed – up.

7/ BATTING: ALL HYPE, NO SWIPE

his name is Yuvi and he dances on the sand... ©Getty

As has been irrefutably demonstrated above with regard to their bowling, the Indians’ batting is also overhyped, overblown, overrated, especially by themselves. Look up smug in the dictionary and a definition has been eschewed in favour of a picture of Yuvraj Singh’s mug. Yuvraj Singh’s smug. Invariably, he struts out to bat like he’s just finished carrying a couple of rolled-up carpets half-a-mile across town. And he can’t even get in the side! As for all the Yoraths – Murali Vijay, Virat Kohli, Suresh Raina, Chet Pujara, Rohit Sharma – they have been told to wait. Until they are fit to lace the boots of their elders (who, ironically, are all so past it and decrepit that they can’t actually lace their own boots):

DRAVID – “The Wall”? Maybe in 2002. Now it’s more like The Shoji. I’ve seen sturdier sandcastles.

SEHWAG – the pudgy, samosa-munching little scyther isn’t going to be playing, so, Matt Prior, no need to distract him with jellybeans on a length.

GAMBHIR – never makes runs in the Northern hemisphere, except for in India, Bangladesh, the West Indies and Pakistan (when they play there, which will be never again). Anyway, ask any Brazilian and they’ll tell you that gambiarra is only ever a bodge-job.

SACHIN – due a failure.

V.V.S. – never made 100 against us. Not even when James Ormond and Richard Dawson were in the attack. Together.

8/ STRIKE BOWLER

you could have someone's eye out with that. 
and them necklaces are dangerous, too... ©AP 

It is widely known that Ishant Sharma’s book-loving father named his son after Herman Melville’s short story ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’, a tale in which the eponymous hero, after a productive start to his new job transcribing legal documents, suddenly becomes sullen and introspective; thereafter, when asked to perform any sort of task, he simply says “I would prefer not to”. Somehow, he manages to escape the sack for his insolence – his indolence – and even takes to sleeping in his workplace: the Wall Street chambers of the narrator, his boss (Duncan Fletcher), a lawyer who is simultaneously baffled by his behaviour yet too emotionally tangled up, too full of pity, to able to fire young Bartleby. Instead, he simply abandons the office and moves his entire business elsewhere, leaving his erstwhile scrivener behind. However, the new tenants are faced with the same problem: they can’t get Bartleby to leave, as he “would prefer not to” (this was pre-tazers). The narrator attempts to intervene, with predictable results, and Bartleby is eventually imprisoned. When visited in gaol by his former employer, Bartleby is his same morose, uncommunicative self; the narrator leaves, bribing a guard to supply the prisoner with good and copious food, but on his return he discovers that Bartleby has died of starvation. Eat? He “would prefer not to”… 

Apparently, due to a poor Hindi translation doing the rounds in Delhi in the late 1980s, his bibliophile parents, re-translating back to English, decided upon naming their son “I shan’t” (less of a mouthful than “I would prefer not to” – and when it comes to mouthfuls, their son already has a Rubik’s cube stuck in his throat).

Anyway, my point is this: that Ishant the refusenik will cause problems in the squad, particularly for a skipper who has to “get by” with his four bowlers. Here’s MS: “Sorry Eeshy-bhai, but Z wants the Pavilion End. Have a crack from the Nursery End”. “I would prefer not to”. Not only that, even when he does pick up tools and bowl, he is about as sure of his lines as the cartographers of Kashmir…

9/ OTHER 'ABSENTEEISM'

It is now a commonly accepted sociological phenomenon that the burgeoning middle-classes of India’s, er, Cobra Economy are turning their backs on the professions in which they’ve been trained – airline pilot, vet, physicist – in order to take up the more lucrative, if tedious option of working in the call centres of British- or American-owned multinationals. Business Process Outsourcing, they call it. If chasing payments for British Gas and Barclay’s, selling mobile phone contracts or “Internet Service Providings”, is going to bring home more rupees than, I don’t know, inventing a new carburettor or preventing a cardiac arrest, then it makes economic sense, isn’t it…

It’s pretty well known how your average British punter feels about all this. The fact that the sometimes garbled ululations and unorthodoxly stressed pleadings (what their employers bemoan as the persistence of MTI, or “Mother Tongue Influence”) of their starch-collared punctiliousness – often a simulacrum of mannered Twenties Britishness, oddly – are often barely audible (or even comprehensible) across the hiss and crackle of ionosphere-and-back phone signals is almost guaranteed to raise the hackles of the very customers that their “customer service” is there to service. Even so, the eyeball-popping mega-fury into which Irate of Dorking, Doncaster and Devizes will habitually descend seems to be inversely proportional to the call centre operative’s general air of scripted unrufflement: the screamed frustration – the unscripted rufflement – is largely covered in the training, however, and barely knocks them out of the serene meta-alienation of their repetitive, piece-working stride.

Anyway, my point is this: that the trend will soon affect the cricket team. It’s nigh on inevitable that, come a new wave of recruitment from the UK’s Telecoms and Energy giants, the Indian cricket team will eschew the meagre spiritual and pecuniary rewards of their professions, abandon their training, and race off to white-collar sweatshops on the Bengaluru outskirts to don the head-set and intone: “Top of mornings, Mr Johnsons. I am Steve of Awiwa Car Insurance calling from the Birkenhead, and am today inwiting you to take opportunity of the lifetime...” Inevitable.

10/ DUNCAN FLETCHER

Here are some words: all, it, tears, in, end, will. Now make a sentence out of them.

11/ B.C.C.I.’s VENAL COMMERCIALIZATION OF ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING (or, what Marxists call the “real subsumption” of society under the capitalist relation) 

"excuse me ladies, but I am not at present able to see the action"

It’s no secret that the Board of Control for Cricket in India are plenipotent – the other nations now its whimpering leather-and-willow-wallahs, looking up longingly at the Olympians for hand-me-downs in a cricketing echo of Ray Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts – but it seems yet to have sunk in entirely down at the MCC that the image of power the Indians have embraced is not so much the obvious old world model of Empire, but a sort of intense parody of cynical profiteering à l’americain, pants down and fuck-you-all. The BCCI’s craven greed and bumptious autocracy is nowhere better expressed than through the preposterous commentarese splattered all over the IPL, epitomised by the obsequious platitudes of Ravi Shastri, a man now so far into negative-cool that he could hit twelve sixes in an over – I beg your pardon, a dozen “DLF Maximums” – and still be the last one picked in the playground.

Already, two years ago, Australian cricket writer nonpareil, Gideon Haigh, had this gaudy Shastrification of the commentary – a cynical permadvertising – utterly skewered (and griddled, gobbled down, and pooped back out). Since it cannot be bettered, I take the liberty of quoting him at length, albeit in abridged form:

Either Lalit Modi is pumping nitrous oxide into the commentary box, or the IPL is bearing out JK Galbraith’s observation that television allows for persuasion with no minimum standard of literacy or intelligence. One expects a certain degree of phoniness from Sunil Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri, who as IPL governing council members are busy getting high on their own supply. But the rest of Modi’s fawning courtiers, even super-smooth Mark Nicholas and pawky Jeremy Coney, have been reduced to carnival barkers, whether greeting a full toss slogged for six like the news of VE Day [or] pretending that the tactical time-out is something other than a sneaky commercial trick…The result is that whatever the game looks like, it sounds as forced as the canned laughter in an American sitcom… The commentators’ clueless desperation now feels as though it is working against the IPL. When something great happens, they have nowhere to go, no upper register left to use.

Doull, Mbangwa, Hogg, Morrison – these spouting buffoons’ self-whoring can all be traced back to the BCCI, who, with or without Modi, are a body whose take on Wall Street values is less ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ than Gordon Gekko: greed is good. Now, while the Westernization of the call centre worker is mandatory and deliberate, the Westernization brought about by money – agent of both Shastrification and social de-stratification, and the great post-modern leveller, albeit one not entirely denuded of the pre-modern caste system, as with the zero-to-hero American Dream Bolly/Hollywoodified in Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire – is presented as voluntary, sought after, aspirational. Certainly, the new India has a desire to prove it can do razzmatazz and spectacle just as well as the Yankee culture they’ve embraced. Well, forget Bollywood and the IPL: they can’t. It is a simulacrum. India will always be a nation with its top button fastened up – with or without a tie. And good for them. The IPL is the equivalent of your pissed uncle throwing shapes at a wedding. The mantra of HR departments at call centres is: “the geek shall inherit the berth”.

No, the Indians cannot really do cool. They do surgically precise wristy accumulation, flight and guile, and, in the case of their leaders, top-down ruthlessness and truculent hauteur. Indeed, the fetid odour of absolutism is hinted at in the very name: The Bored of Control [of] Cricket in India, perhaps... Anyway, if India’s nouveaux riches haven’t completely cast off the legacy of the caste system as an instrument for retaining, consolidating and codifying power, then Sharad Pawar – former head of BCCI, now of ICC (to all intents and purposes a de facto appendage of the former) – gives the lie to any supposed genetic superiority that comes with such exalted bloodlines. This is a man whose face appears to have undergone a series of landslides and ought to be poking out from under a tortoise’s carapace, although he’s clearly no lettuce-munching pushover. But I digress…

"I got the Pawar"

Combine the flagrant use of economic might to acquire a commensurable political power with the vulgar ethos of putting everything up for sale – even nouns, for fuck’s sake – and it is surely only a matter of time before their cricketers receive numinous orders to sign contracts obliging them to take such guards as lastminute.com middle-and-leg (“towards you a bit for lastminute.com…”), Patak’s one-leg and the like, all the while crouching down, as contractually stipulated, so that the stump mic’ picks up every last corporately sponsored syllable. 

Bowlers won’t be spared, either, by the omni-commercialization: “Change of bowling, batsman: coca-cola right-arm over the wicket”. And once that happens (around the time of the afternoon session of Day 3 of the Lord’s Test, sources tell me), the despondency will be all-pervasive. Indian (and thus world) cricket culture will enter meltdown. Rome will fall. And the Indian squad all know this already – ergo, they have no chance of winning this series…

As for the commentary, who knows which pundit will be invited by Sky as guest gushspout – the unctuous Shastri; the loquacious Laxman Shivaramakrishnan; the supercilious Gavaskar, a man who bristles so much he uses his own forefinger to brush his teeth; or that aphoristic agitator, Navjot Singh Sidhu (“all that comes out of a cow is not milk”) – but please, just let them go with the flow, for heaven’s sake, and use whatever Ferrari words come into their Dom Perignon heads at any given Rolex moment. (Personally, I advise you to avoid Sky anyway and listen to the joyously picaresque online musings of the Test Match Sofa crew.)

Whoever it is that enters the comm-box, they should bear in mind Haigh’s sage analysis, with which I now leave you:

The television commentator has always been sensitively placed. His network has paid good money to broadcast, and thus has an interest in the game being perceived as representing high-quality excitement – even when it is not. Richie Benaud didn’t become His Richieness by saying: “This is a boring game between two mediocre teams and represents an ideal opportunity for you to go mow the lawn.”
     With Twenty20, however, there is the added imperative of promoting a format in which exorbitant sums and giddying hopes have been invested. The consumer has not just to be sold the game he is watching, but the Twenty20 concept in general; persuaded that he is witness not just to a contest of teams, but a contest of genres, with Modi responsible for the most exciting breakthrough since penicillin. It forces the commentator even further from the ideal perspective of disinterested critic, bringing to bear a weight of experience and a talent for observation; it reduces him to sideshow huckster, flogging the game like a patent medicine from the back of his covered wagon. Nor am I sure it ultimately does the sponsors much good either.
     There are two sides to brand recognition: one where the sponsor's name conjures up warm and positive associations; another where it stirs irritation and objection, as a result, perhaps, of incessant, cloying, annoying repetition. So, yes, we now know which sponsors to find, and also, if so moved, those to avoid.

And that, Dear Reader, is today’s Pearl & Dean Pearl of Wisdom.

Tweet