Sanspareils Greenlands

The MMC Tennis School, Nungambakkam

2010-03-08T01:13:00.001+05:30

You know you're in India when the wall around a tennis school has pictures of Sania Mirza, Roger Federer and a bunch of cricketers.

You know you're in Chennai when that bunch of cricketers includes Cheeka and Sadagopan Ramesh.

Tendulkar, Coventry and the contours of greatness

2010-02-26T15:34:00.002+05:30

"At a time when immediacy masquerades as relevance in sport, a nuanced understanding of true greatness evades us. It takes something as monumental as what Sachin Tendulkar achieved in Gwalior against a South African side of no little quality to prompt us to filter out the shrill absurdities and begin to examine the contours of real greatness."

So begins today's editorial in the newspaper I work for.

I disagree with the point it makes, the one about immediacy and relevance. I don't think too many people with an interest in cricket, or in any other sport, would confuse the two.

Editorial writers should develop a nuanced understanding of people's reactions to things, and realise that someone getting excited about Yuvraj Singh's six sixes in an over doesn't necessarily mean he/she thinks it's a feat comparable to, say, Rahul Dravid's 148 at Headingley. I didn't read or hear any such 'shrill absurdities' from the serious sports media when it happened, or on any other similar occasion.

I don't think anyone fails to see real greatness when it's in front of them. Those that deny it - everyone, for instance, who approves of the right-wing hatred directed at MF Hussain - do so because they'd rather be blind to it, or are bigots.

I don't think the Gwalior knock prompted anyone to examine the 'contours of greatness'. The 200 mark in ODIs was waiting to be broken. Tendulkar, happily for the editorial writers, happened to be the guy who got there first. I wonder what they'd have said if Charles Coventry had scored six runs more that day against Bangladesh.

I'm not calling Coventry great - and I don't think anyone would - but I wish people had given his achievement a little more respect. Most people instead couldn't wait for someone to come and wipe his name off the record book, as if his temerity to score so many in an innings had somehow sullied cricket's integrity.

Contrary to what the editorial says, most journalists are hasty to deny the not-so-great their due when they accomplish something special. How often, for instance, do you see the sentence - "the word great is overused"?

Where were you?

2010-02-25T01:19:00.000+05:30

Today, Sachin Tendulkar made 200 in a one day international. First time anyone's done that.

You know all that. What you may not know, and this is important, is what I was doing when he went about his business.

The first part of his knock I spent in office. Where everyone, except me, was watching him bat on TV. If you're a regular reader of my other blog, you'd know why I wasn't watching. And no, I didn't even watch him bat left-handed on the glass of my cubicle. That would have been an interesting answer to the "what were you doing when the 200 barrier in men's limited-overs internationals was breached for the first time in history" question.

Just after he reached his hundred, I left office, to go cover a football game.

It was a particularly one-sided game. Integral Coach Factory beat Central Excise 5-0, in case you want to know.

When the score was 3-0, about five minutes into the second half, someone told me Sachin was on 196 not out. A few minutes later, someone else told me he'd reached 200.

I watched some more football.

What I dream about when I dream about Tendulkar

2010-02-17T23:16:00.002+05:30

A few months ago, I awoke from a disturbing dream. I dreamed of waking up. Of being woken up. By my mum. Who held a newspaper. Whose front-page headline announced that Sachin Tendulkar was dead.
I don't know what set the dream off. The details were fuzzy, but I saw clearly in the obituary that he had died aged 37. Which I guess was my mind playing around with a fact pulled from my memory - Victor Trumper's age when he died of Bright's Disease.
Once I'd properly woken up and reassured myself that Tendulkar was still around, I recalled something Ravi Shastri once said, sometime in the mid-90s, after Tendulkar had broken some sort of record.

"He is someone sent from up there to play cricket (pause) and go back."

Ravi Shastri can be very eerie sometimes. And the eeriness bursts forth without warning - against the run of play, he'd say - emerging unannounced from his usual stream of faux-testosterone-laden cliches.
Anyway, I can't picture a post-retirement Tendulkar. Can you? What do you see him doing?

The old scoreboard at University Union

2010-02-03T16:12:00.002+05:30

The Madras University Union ground only hosts lower division league cricket these days. It wasn't always so - luminaries like Srinivas Venkataraghavan, Subramaniam Badrinath and (no, really) Noel David have played here in the past.

When they played, they'd have seen their runs and wickets recorded on this scoreboard, this joyous contraption that requires the scorer to clamber up a ladder.

Now, the scoreboard's skeleton stands unused, hidden from view of the players by a newly constructed - and usually empty - spectator gallery. The scoreboard they now use is smaller, less cumbersome, and far less charming.

The cultural morass we inhabit

2009-11-24T16:18:00.003+05:30

Insidiously, unnoticed, something has infiltrated our collective consciousness. I speak, of course, of the word 'awww', in its multifarious, multiple-doubleyoued avatars. It's everywhere, waiting to make you cringe and bemoan the cultural morass we inhabit.

Cricket commentary, I noted happily - apart from Shane Warne's entirely acceptable "Aw, look mate," which possesses none of the fluttery-eyelashed connotations of its more copiously-doubleyoued cousins - was about the only thing in the universe free of its pernicious influence.

Until today, that is, when it emerged without warning from the unexpected lips of Laxman Sivaramakrishnan, when Gautam Gambhir drove Muttiah Muralitharan down the ground just after lunch.

Life as we know it will never be the same again.

Re-evaluating Gavaskar, the one-day batsman

2009-10-21T18:29:00.004+05:30

No one talks about Sunil Gavaskar's one day international career, and the one innings that does get spoken about casts him in horribly unflattering light. That 36 not out has come to define his one-day career, which I think is unfortunate. By no means was his limited-overs career a progression of stodgy knocks that drove everyone insane.

His numbers, certainly, were no worse than most opening batsmen of his era. He even scored his runs at pretty much the same strike rate as Gordon Greenidge or Desmond Haynes, as these figures would suggest (strike rates of batsmen with a minimum of 25 innings as opener up to 31 December 1989, for innings played at the top of the order).

Which is not to say he was a great one-day batsman. He wasn't. He scored too few hundreds for a start. And he did terribly in the '83 World Cup. But it's unfair to call the 36 not out his defining knock.

So what is Gavaskar's defining one day innings? I've picked two, both of which came in matches that shook Indian cricket. Both times, he was dismissed in the 90s.

The first was at Berbice in 1983, three months before the World Cup win. Gavaskar made 90 against a pace attack containing Michael Holding, Andy Roberts, Winston Davis and Malcolm Marshall, and from the platform he, Ravi Shastri and Mohinder Amarnath built, Kapil Dev exploded quite frighteningly to score 72 from 38 balls. India won by 27 runs, and West Indies had been beaten for the first time in a home one day international, portentously by the side that would knock them off their world champion perch.

Three years later, at Sharjah, Gavaskar made 92, out of an Indian total of 245 for seven. The fall of wickets column in the Cricinfo scorecard doesn't mention which over the wickets fell in, so I can't say how long was left when the second wicket fell at 216, but surely India should have finished with a bigger total. Gavaskar, seventh out at 245, clearly wasn't able to force the pace late in the innings.

But in the end, 245 nearly proved enough.

Now, while Javed Miandad's last-ball six has few parallels in limited-overs cricket for drama, I haven't quite understood how this match, the final of a relatively unimportant tournament, has resonated so much among Indian cricket fans, and how there's still so much dissection of Chetan Sharma's last ball. But in any case, this match is seen as the one that changed the equations of India-Pakistan cricket forever.

So coming back to Gavaskar, I see these two as 'defining' innings because they seem to represent his one-day career perfectly. Both times, his efforts were overshadowed, and rightly so, for Kapil's and Miandad's knocks belonged on a different level altogether. A level, perhaps, he wasn't capable of attaining in one-day cricket. But he was present, hovering in the background, a subtle but essential influence.

Anil Kumble versus Pakistan, Delhi, 1999

2009-09-18T01:06:00.004+05:30

In this blog post about underrated footballers, The Guardian's Rob Smyth mentions what he calls the Denis Irwin Rule - "If more than 40% of the population say you are underrated, you cannot be underrated."

Similarly, I think enough cricket writers have called Anil Kumble under-appreciated to fully compensate for the original under-appreciation. Still, I notice a tendency among some people to downplay Kumble's 10 for 74, and credit either the dustbowlness of the Ferozeshah Kotla wicket or the trigger-happiness of umpire A.V. Jayaprakash for the wickets he took. Even the Wisden Almanack report.

Here's a video of the spell:

Of the ten wickets, those of Youhana, Salim Malik and Saqlain are classic Kumble dismissals - straight deliveries, catching the batsman either playing down the wrong line or, in the case of Malik, across the line. None of them were helped in any way by the pitch, nor was Ijaz Ahmed's, another straight one, catching his boot on the full.

With Moin Khan, it was the ball that turned just a hint, as opposed to the stock straight one that he played for, aided by a bit of extra bounce. Bounce also accounted for Saeed Anwar and Wasim Akram, both caught at short leg.

Inzamam was entirely at fault for his wicket, playing away from his body.

Which leaves just two batsmen, Shahid Afridi and Mushtaq Ahmed. Mushtaq was unlucky to face the only ball that actually misbehaved - it caused a surface explosion, and reared nastily at his glove. On a fourth day wicket, the occasional cloud of dust is to be expected.

Afridi's caught behind is the only umpiring error I can spot. His bat seems to hit his front pad, and the replays show a gap between bat and ball as it passes. Wrong decision, but hardly a shocker.
So, in effect, one bad decision and one wicket aided by uneven bounce - hardly a biased umpire and a raging turner. Debate by all means whether this was Kumble's greatest spell (I think, for instance, that his seven for 48 in 2004 against Australia at Chennai was even better) but don't discredit his feat with inaccurate claims.

Three debuts, one highlights package

2009-09-14T19:33:00.000+05:30

Three men made their Test debuts at Old Trafford in 1974. This morning, I watched highlights of the third and fourth innings of that Test.

The first of the three to make an appearance on my TV screen was Madan Lal, running in earnestly as he would do throughout his career, attempting in vain to dislodge the feisty John Edrich.

Edrich, unlike his fellow left-hander David Gower, bats beautifully in highlights packages that I happen to watch. On this day he made 100 not out, cutting, pulling and picking off his legs with strong forearms and defiant lower jaw. This being a highlights package, and Madan Lal happening to go wicketless, all I saw of his bowling were military-medium long hops.

Set 296 to win on the final day, India was dismissed for 182, with 15 overs left.

Early in India's innings, Mike Hendrick, England's debutant, took a fantastic low catch, diving to his left from backward short leg to send back, appropriately, Eknath Solkar.

Hendrick then took another, much simpler catch, off the shoulder of Gavaskar's bat. Until Chris Old got one to rear in a distinctly ugly manner at his throat, Gavaskar had looked serene and undislodgeable - his 58 contained a couple of superb cuts, one late and one square, off Derek Underwood, and the best shot I've ever seen him play - Bob Willis bowled a fast, full inswinger on off stump, and Gavaskar waited, his feet perfectly still, until the ball pitched next to his right toe, and directed it just wide of gully for four.

Gundappa Viswanath made 50, an innings that the commentator, as was customary in those days, termed 'a brave little knock'. No one says that anymore. And no one calls a Test cricketer 'the Yorkshire skipper' anymore.

"That brought a big smile to the face of the Yorkshire skipper," the commentator - I'm not sure who - drawled, after Geoffrey Boycott caught Abid Ali, running towards the boundary from square leg with the ball dropping over his shoulder.

Before that, India's debutants had displayed a frightening level of Test match newbieness in the manner of their dismissals. First up, the massively-moustached Brijesh Patel swished at Old without moving his feet from their initial position in his crooked, exaggeratedly side-on stance - the ungainliest, most restricting stance I've ever seen, especially viewed next to the relaxed compactness of Gavaskar's stance or the potential energy of Viswanath's crouch, perfectly sprung to uncoil into that square cut of his.

Then, Bob Willis bounced Madan Lal, who turned his head away and flailed his bat at the rapidly-rising delivery in the hope of connecting. He managed that, but fell onto his stumps in a disorganised heap. Even tail-enders today look reasonably assured while facing the short ball - this ball must have scared the wits out of the helmet-less Lal, facing someone as quick as Willis for the first time in his life.

What do debuts reveal of cricketers? For Mike Hendrick, this was a Test pretty much like any in his career - four wickets in the match, precious few runs conceded - topped off by that brilliant catch.

Madan Lal proved a durable, if prosaic, international cricketer with averages of 23 and 40 the wrong way around - his batting and bowling will be forever associated with euphemistic adjectives like hard-working and honest.

For Brijesh Patel, this was the dunking in ice-cold water after domestic cricket's lukewarmness that has shocked so many Indian batsmen. Patel ended his career averaging five runs more per innings than Karnataka teammate Viswanath in first class cricket, but twelve fewer in Tests.

The middle overs

2009-09-12T18:14:00.002+05:30

It's pretty strange to find myself thinking about 50-overs cricket again, and how I used to like it, and watch every ball.

It happened back in May, or whenever it was that the IPL happened.

Idly, I flicked a button on the remote, and suddenly, Nathan Hauritz was bowling to a Pakistan batsman, possibly Misbah Ul Haq. Everyone was still in coloured clothing, but in the background, Geoffrey Boycott and Rameez Raja spoke of technique.

It was something about the need to play straight or about how the introduction of Hauritz and Michael Clarke had forced the batsmen into playing differently - nothing particularly profound. But it had upon my ears as sweet an effect as Mohammad Rafi or Talat Mahmood, after weeks of deadening chatter of DLFers and Citi moments of success.

But not just that. Here in the UAE, the birthplace of cricket as packaged entertainment, the two batsmen struggled to time the ball, but instead of the desperate measures 20 overs would have forced them into, they waited the spell out, played with soft hands, took singles. In short, this was how the middle overs used to be a decade ago.

If Twenty20 has done one thing, it's to vilify the middle overs. Let's take that out of one day cricket. Let's play Forty40 instead, or even Twentyfive25Twentyfive25.

In the late 90s when one day cricket had me in its spell, I loved the middle overs. I loved watching Azharuddin and Jadeja and Ranatunga and de Silva stroke the ball to the sweeper and walk singles. I loved watching Chris Harris and Sachin Tendulkar hop, skip, jump and deliver wobbly mischief to slightly unsure batsmen.

Nowadays, middle order batsmen don't play like that anymore, and medium pacers, both part-time and specialist, seem to bowl with far less imagination. The reasons for this obviously include pitches, meatier bats, shorter boundaries and so forth, but also, and I think equally significantly, the changed mindsets and techniques of this decade.

Yuvraj Singh, for instance, must have grown up playing a lot more one day cricket than Ajay Jadeja and it definitely had a big impact on how his game developed - both excelled in ODIs in their respective eras as middle order batsmen and finishers, but batted very differently. Jadeja hit quite a few sixes in his time, but his game revolved more around his dextrous hands than his ability to hit cleanly through the line. Jadeja never pulled good-length balls with the dismissive arrogance of Yuvraj, but his soft hands and manipulative wrists ensured he'd never look clueless against spin on slow wickets. Jadeja ended his ODI career with a strike-rate of 70 - perfectly good in his day, tedious now.

One of the best one day matches I saw occurred at the time of the divide - the older generation was nearly gone, and the newer guys had begun to establish themselves. More starkly, it showcased the Subcontinent-Rest of the World divide, which, unlike today, still existed.

This was the semifinal of the 2002 Champions Trophy between India and South Africa at Colombo's Premadasa Stadium. Herschelle Gibbs propelled South Africa towards its moderate target with ease, until cramps forced him off the field. Then, needing a run a ball for the last twelve overs or so, the middle order congealed, showing complete inability to manoeuvre Harbhajan and Sehwag's mixture of flighty off breaks and low, full darts - something Azharuddin or Ranatunga would have done with ease. In the end, with four wickets in hand, South Africa finished ten runs short.

Two days later at the same venue, subcontinental spin undid stiff-wristed Southern Hemisphere batsmen again - Aravinda de Silva's floated offerings completely bemused Australia. That too after Hayden and Gilchrist had pummeled the seamers for the first six overs. After that, the Aussies simply refused to set their sights lower and play old-fashioned middle-overs cricket.

The final, unfortunately, was washed out, denying the tournament - one of the best one day tournaments in recent memory - a proper finish. Strangely, they re-played the final, instead of continuing it on the reserve day. Sri Lanka therefore batted twice, scoring 220-odd and 240-odd, and India managed two barely-begun innings before the rains came. Surely, if either final was completed, we would have witnessed a proper low-scoring thriller.

Bottom-handedness

2009-09-10T19:41:00.003+05:30

This morning, I was watching the highlights of AB de Villiers's double hundred in the Ahmedabad Test against India last year, and I realised that I've never really liked watching him play. To my eyes, that knock contained not a single memorable shot.
There were a lot of great shots, don't get me wrong, remarkable in their bat-speed - his bat traced an arc that went beyond a full circle when he cover-drove Irfan Pathan, and a slog-sweep off Harbhajan Singh, which sailed well over the roof of the stadium, sent him tumbling onto his back in his follow-through.
But they made little impression on me. Watching his hundred at Perth was much the same - I instead became a Hashim Amla fan after his 53 in that same run chase.
Maybe it's because de Villiers's style isn't idiosyncratic enough. He's one of those gifted athletes to whom hitting the ball has come too easy.
Adam Gilchrist is similar - during that century in the 2007 World Cup final, I was struck by how every single shot he played was the result of exactly the same bat-swing, only directed from different hitting zones to different parts of the ground. At five, facing a tennis ball thrown by his dad, he might have swung his junior-size bat the same way, and middled everything.
Free your arms and swing through the line - it's possibly the cleanest, most efficient way to hit a ball, and de Villiers and Gilchrist discovered this almost organically - I conjecture - early in their lives. Ally this to their natural hand-eye co-ordination, and you get two guys who can strike a cricket ball squeaky-clean and score quickly nearly always, with lots of fours and sixes. They leave me cold, sadly.
It's the opposite with some batsmen who are in the mainstream considered ungainly, or even, as JRod would say, Probots. I love watching Paul Collingwood and Simon Katich bat, for instance - there's a structure to what these guys do, a way they approach an innings that you can take something out of. For instance, I recovered from a terrible slump in batting form in underarm Tests by restricting my backlift and follow-through like Collingwood.
But it isn't just that - I genuinely find them attractive to watch, right from the way they shuffle across their creases, to how crisply they clip the ball off their legs with minimal backlift and follow-through.
But this isn't a celebration of hard-earned batting techniques. I only observe how one style of batting doesn't press the right buttons for me. I'm as thrilled by VVS Laxman or Mohammad Yousuf or Sanath Jayasuriya as anyone else.
Having written all this, I detect a pattern - hell, I love watching bottom-handed players, or players executing the great bottom-hand-dominant shots - Gordon Greenidge's square cut, or Rahul Dravid piercing the midwicket-mid-on gap. Batsmen like Gilchrist and de Villiers have taken the celebration of the unencumbered top-hand-controlled bat-swing to its extreme, and the resultant style doesn't warm my heart, much as I try.
It perturbs me when coaches tell you that your top hand is the only one that matters, and even advocate that naturally right-handed batsmen become left-handers early in life - try telling that to Vijay Hazare, whose hands, according to Raj Singh Dungarpur, "moved up and down the handle like a flute player."

Holistic skin care

2009-08-29T13:30:00.000+05:30

Yesterday, at an intersection in Kodambakkam, a scooter waited alongside me for the signal to turn green. On it were a man and two boys - his sons, I presumed, returning from cricket coaching. One of the boys must have been in the under-12 group at his academy, and the other, squashed between his brother and father, in the under-10s.
What caught my eye were their feet, shod in dusty white with three red stripes on each side. It's a sight I see quite often while riding to or back from work.
In the days I attended cricket coaching, Adidas shoes weren't entirely absent, but they weren't ubiquitous, certainly not among the under-10s and 12s. A lot of them carried expensive bats in their kitbags, but maybe the need for pitch-cred didn't extend to the shoes you wore.
In any case, back then, we had Ponds.
Yes, the Ponds of sunscreens, talcum powders, anti-ageing creams and aloe-vera body lotions in those days manufactured cricket shoes with prolifically, protuberantly pimpled soles and uncomfortably stiff uppers. Or possibly another company with the same name, but in any case the shoes were a common sight on cricket fields in Chennai back then. And back then wasn't too long ago - my first (and last) pair of Ponds shoes was purchased as recently as the academic year 2000-01, when I was a ninth standard kid.
I wonder what happened to Ponds, the shoemakers.

Convoluted Cardus appreciation

2009-08-27T18:24:00.012+05:30

In the wake of Andrew Flintoff's retirement from Tests, a lot of people have attempted to answer the question of how greatness is measured. Simon Barnes and Michael Atherton, writing in the Times, have argued vehemently for and against Flintoff qualifying for greatness.
As expected from the Chief Sportswriter, Barnes dumps statistics in the dustbin:

Oh, you can delve into the stats all you like and you can prove by algebra that Flintoff was worse than this bloke and not even as good as that bloke. And you can say that since the Ashes series of four years ago, Flintoff has neither consistently played nor, when he has, consistently delivered. And all these things are true, but they do not affect the matter of greatness.

It isn't Flintoff's greatness or falling short thereof that I want to discuss. Instead, it's a historical parallel to Atherton and Barnes on a similar subject, and a paradox that emerges from it.
Today, David Mutton directed me to R.C. Robertson-Glasgow's 'Cricket Prints - Some Batsmen and Bowlers (1920 to 1940)'. In a chapter on Walter Hammond, 'Crusoe' writes,

To me he is, quite simply, the greatest cricketer who began in the last twenty years, and that, too, by a distance. In the word "cricketer" I count not only batting, bowling and fielding. In these combined arts there is not one, not Bradman, not Constantine, who could stand full and unbiased comparison with Hammond as he showed himself in the decade from 1925 to 1935; when he would make a hundred or two against Australia, then bowl down their first three wickets, then make with ease a slip-catch that others would not merely miss but would not even have rated a miss. But I also count those things which cannot be translated into words, far less into print, but belong to the brain and the heart. I mean the effect on his match of his presence alone; the influence on a bowler's feelings of the sight of Hammond taking guard at about 11.50 a.m., when lunch seemed far and the boundary near.

Quite similar, you will have observed, to Simon Barnes's assessment of Flintoff.
The passage of time, and the rise of statistics, has placed Bradman at an untouchable distance from anyone who's played the game so far; it's also stopped people calling Hammond a Test all-rounder. When both were still playing, however, most contemporaries rated Bradman only a notch above Hammond as a cricketer - and Robertson-Glasgow, on this evidence, not even that.
What's interesting is - Robertson-Glasgow played first class cricket for 17 years, and bowled to both Bradman and Hammond. He was, if you like, the Atherton of his time, and wasn't supposed to write this way.
Neville Cardus was, by all accounts, the Barnes of that age, who supposedly cared only for the game's aesthetic appeal and little else.
For example, in the 2000 Wisden Almanack, Stephen Moss writes of how modern cricket writing has no place for the Cardus style (I've highlighted phrases in bold for emphasis):

The convoluted, self-conscious style of the Cardus school is unwieldy for modern readers; we want our prose in black and white, not purple. Its anglocentricity is absurd for a game where the balance of power now lies on the Indian subcontinent and in Australia. The commemoration of the past is dangerous for a sport which must quickly find a role for the future. Cricket writing, like cricket as a whole, must remake itself. In doing so, the model should perhaps not be the elegance and erudition of Cardus or Alan Ross but the astringency of R. C. Robertson-Glasgow, the cultural breadth of C. L. R. James, the honesty and simplicity of style of Arlott, the perceptive qualities of David Foot, the coolness of Mike Brearley, the bloody-mindedness of Simon Hughes.

And yet, here's Cardus, writing on the Bradman-Hammond debate, during the 1936-37 Ashes. He doesn't sound convoluted or self-conscious to me.

The difference between Bradman and Hammond can be stated in a few words: Hammond can be kept quiet, Bradman never. Hammond in the Test match at Sydney batted nearly eight hours; and even on the third morning, when he was still not out, he had not made England safe. Bradman in the same time would have put all bowling to rout. At Adelaide, when Australia began their second innings, everybody knew that the match and the rubber depended on Bradman. England enjoyed a slight lead; a failure by Bradman would put the issue beyond question. Bradman played carefully - for him … As I saw Bradman putting his bat to the ball, with a short 'lift up', body near the line, I wrote something to this effect: 'It will be a pity if Test matches are going to ruin even the stroke-play of Bradman.'
At the end of an hour Bradman was fifty - and not once a single flash or thump or flourish. Without his major hits, without risk or hurry, he can score faster, over a long period, than any other batsman in the game at the present time.

Of the allegation levelled at Bradman that he was too mechanical, he writes, in an earlier essay,

He has all the qualities of batsmanship: footwork, wrists, economy of power, the great strokes of the game, each thoroughly under control. What, then, is the matter with him that we hesitate to call him a master of style, an artist who delights us, and not only a craftsman we are bound to admire without reserve? Is it that he's too mechanically faultless for sport's sake? A number of Bradmans would automatically put an end to the glorious uncertainty of cricket. A number of Macartneys would inspire the game to hazardous heights more exhilarating than ever … But this is a strain of criticism that is comically churlish. Here we have been for years praying for a return of batsmanship to its old versatility and aggression; we have been desperate for a quick scorer who could hit fours without causing the game to lapse into the indiscriminate clouting of the village green. In short, we have been crying out for batsmanship that would combine technique and energy in proportion. And now that a Bradman has come to us, capable of scoring 300 runs in a single day of a Test match, some of us are calling him a Lindrum of cricket. It's a hard world to please.

It has become fashionable to put down Cardus's writing. Sure, his flowery prose could sometimes cloy, and he embellished his quotes quite liberally.
But don't ignore his eye for detail, his ability to read the game and describe it perfectly.
Of Clarrie Grimmett he writes,

Grimmett is less a googly than a leg-break bowler. He used the wrong 'un sparsely; he is content to thrive on the ball which breaks away and leaves the bat; that is the best of all balls. A straight ball, wickedly masked, is Grimmett's foil to the leg-break. He makes virtue of a low arm; his flight keeps so low to the earth that only a batsman quick of foot can jump to the pitch of it.

It is timeless cricket writing, reflecting the timelessness of the game itself - he could have written this of Shane Warne.

It's not done. You simply don't play shots like that.

2009-08-22T14:58:00.018+05:30

This was a year ago - I was in my first or second month at my job, and sat on a chair under the banyan tree on the edge of the Pachaiyappa's College cricket ground. Globe Trotters was playing Alwarpet CC, and D. Vasu, at 40 Alwarpet's senior citizen and almost certainly the oldest player in the TNCA First Division League, sat next to me nursing a sore finger.
Vasu, batting at eight, had made 82 to help Alwarpet to 362 in the first innings. In reply, Globe Trotters was almost certain to take five points for the first innings lead (this was the third and final day, and an outright win wasn't possible) with Venugopal Rao breezing towards a hundred.
Vasu, bowling his easy-on-the-eye left arm spin, had sent down 25 tidy overs without really frightening the Trotters - his one wicket came from a catch at deep square leg.
Venugopal reached his hundred with a boundary off R. Raghuram, another left arm spinner, a decade younger than Vasu but with a midriff about five inches prouder in circumference. The next ball, he stepped down the track and swung through the line, without reaching the pitch, and holed out to mid off. Forty five runs to get, five wickets in hand. Forty runs later, all out. Raghuram picked up six, and when the last wicket fell, Vasu leaped off his chair, swooped with arms extended like Shoaib Akhtar celebrating a wicket, and ran to join his teammates, some of them young enough to be his sons.
Later, he said, "It's not done. You simply don't play shots like that."
Now, Vasu was a Tamil Nadu and South Zone regular right through the 90s, and was part of a spin trio - M. Venkataramana and Sunil Subramaniam were the other two - that went on to attain legendary status among followers of Tamil Nadu's always cursed fortunes in the Ranji Trophy. Off spinner Venkataramana was the only one to play Test cricket - his only Test came at Sabina Park in 1989 - but misty-eyed Tamil Nadu die-hards (whose judgment of selection issues we must always take with a couple of sodium chloride crystals) will tell you all three were Test class.
Whether or not Vasu was Test class, I cannot tell you; I never watched him bowl in his prime. But he was one of countless cricketers, among whom are numbered many spinners, who turned in consistent performances season after season in first class cricket, and never played for India.
In contrast, Venugopal played a few ODIs for India and IPL matches for Deccan Chargers, but never really fulfilled his early promise - In 2004, he made an unbeaten double hundred to help South Zone chase 501 in a Duleep Trophy match against an England 'A' side containing Kevin Pietersen, Matt Prior, Ed Smith, Simon Jones and Sajid Mahmood. At one stage, people were comparing Venugopal to a young Gundappa Viswanath. Now, in a league match in a college ground, he had thrown away his wicket, seemingly putting personal milestone ahead of team requirements, and indirectly lost his side the match.
Automatically, the temptation is to read into this one-off situation and throwaway quote one man's honest, unrewarded toil and the other's failure to maximise his potential. It is dangerous to do so.
Sadly, however, a lot of former cricketers and selectors do just that. How often, for example, do you see appearing in nearly all the news channels and most dailies, unsubstantiated (or "according to sources close to...") discussions of how cricketer X, dropped from the national side, wasn't considered for tour Y because of 'attitude problems'?
Rao is only 27. With the impending departures of Tendulkar, Dravid and Laxman, he still has a chance, if he has a couple of towering domestic seasons, to slip into Test reckoning - but as I type, I know I'm being naive. Seldom do 27 and 28-year-olds make Test debuts for India.
Seven or eight years on, you can imagine the picture. Venugopal Rao watches a talented young batsman throw his wicket away in a league match. He shakes his head. He says, "It's not done. You simply don't play shots like that."

Two delightful Derek Randall videos

2009-08-18T00:07:00.018+05:30

Late last night, I found myself craving intensely to watch Derek Randall bat. I wanted to watch the 174 he made in the 1977 Centenary Test at Melbourne. Thankfully, someone's stuck the highlights up on YouTube. Here it is!

If you watched it fully, you'll have observed Rodney Marsh calling Randall back to the crease, indicating that he'd taken the ball on the bounce, when umpire Tom Brooks gave him out caught behind off Greg Chappell. Randall was on 161 then, and with six wickets in hand, England had a serious chance of winning.
As a gesture, it's every bit the equal of Gundappa Viswanath recalling Bob Taylor in the Golden Jubilee Test in 1980 (funny how both incidents took place in commemorative Test matches), but while one is brought up as an example of sportsmanship at every opportunity, the other is barely mentioned, maybe because it doesn't fit Marsh's pantomime villain image.
Oh, a bonus video. This one's Randall again, getting to his hundred with two gorgeous pulls off Rodney Hogg in the fourth Test of the 1978-79 Ashes at Sydney.

Dwindling?

2009-08-09T17:57:00.012+05:30

It's now lunch at Headingley and Star Cricket is playing highlights from the 1994-95 Ashes. An ageing David Boon slashes a young Darren Gough for four, and a ripple of applause greets the shot. A ripple of applause from a very sparse MCG crowd. Three quarters of the seats were empty, on a day Australia piled on the third innings runs and pulled away decisively from England.
A couple of days ago, Zee Sports played the Trent Bridge Test from West Indies' 1976 tour of England. Now, the series is vividly remembered for how charged the atmosphere was in the wake of Tony Greig's 'grovel' comment, for Viv's 829 runs and Holding and Roberts tearing through the English batting. Nowhere will you see a mention of the near-empty stands that provided the backdrop for the first Test.
In twenty-first century England and Australia, crowds at most Tests seem far healthier than what I saw of the '94-'95 Ashes and the '76 Wisden Trophy on TV.
Yes, I agree that this is no indication of an overall rosy situation. Pakistan has played its precious few recent home Tests in front of ridiculously small crowds, and Test match attendance in New Zealand, West Indies has been middling to poor. South Africa, India and Sri Lanka throw up more conflicting pictures. But all this could be due to a number of factors. We need to interpret the situation the right way. What we need is more numbers.
Before anyone comments about dwindling Test crowds, therefore, it would help if they substantiated their claims with attendance figures from past decades. It would certainly be more constructive than all the rhetoric pundits have spewed over the last few months.
If we had this data, we'd be able to spot links between attendance and things like ticket prices, scheduling (early May brought thin crowds for the recent England-West Indies series), whether the series happened during a period of success or even promise for the home side or not (West Indies and New Zealand), the concept of 'traditional' Test venues (which might help the BCCI decide whether India should play Tests only in centres like Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai or rotate them everywhere) and so forth.

The Gordon Greenidge square cut

2009-08-08T18:55:00.015+05:30

For the last couple of weeks, Zee Sports has run its 70s and 80s rewind show 'Cricket Replay' at the perfect time slot for me to watch while I ingest my brunch before I head for work.
Today, they played the 1984 Lord's Test, the one where Gordon Greenidge made 214 not out and made it look like David Gower had declared with England 141 ahead and not 341.
I only caught the second half of the knock, which included a number of clinical hooks, a whip that sailed way beyond the square leg boundary and the hardest hit I've ever seen, crunched straight past whoever the bowler was, either Neil Foster or Ian Botham - both bowler and umpire dropped to the ground like Didier Drogba in the penalty box.
Of this period of play Wisden Almanack says:

Although England finally blocked his square cut, the midwicket and long-on boundaries saw plenty of Greenidge's 29 4s.

I only saw two or three of Greenidge's famed square cuts, therefore, all of which only yielded singles. But what square cuts these were.
Some batsmen slap fours through point all day without once playing a square cut. With Greenidge, however, you got exactly what the label promised.
The compact stance so full of potential energy, the slight hunch of his shoulders, the decisive certainty of his footwork, the whirl of wrists at the end, even how the peak of his cap seemed to point exactly where the ball would go - this was a man born to show the world how the square cut should be played.

The genius of Abhishek Mundhra

2009-08-02T23:54:00.012+05:30

Let me introduce you to a friend of mine. His name is Abhishek Mundhra.
A couple of years ago, I was so warmed by the amusement his batting radiated that I wrote a page about it. It ended with these, in retrospect unbearably smug, words:

You and I know that his bat was not straight and that his feet were in a position more appropriate for tribal war dance than negotiating what to you and me is an average legbreak. But he doesn’t know, and possibly never will. And it is best that way. Men like Mundhra enrich the game through the humour they unintentionally induce through their serious efforts to be good at it.

Well, last Wednesday, Abhishek Mundhra made back-to-back Test hundreds at the MCC.
Underarm Test hundreds, that is. At the Madhini Cricket Club, otherwise known as the backyard in front (front yard?) of the house that Rajesh and Pavan Madhini call home.
Back when his batting was such a source of amusement, we* made a little video of him, with Greg Champion's 'I made a hundred in the backyard at mum's' playing in the background.

At the time, he'd never made a hundred in his life. Now, as ungainly as ever, he's the new Bradman.
*Kartheeban shot the video, and I edited it on Windows Movie Maker. The chaps who feature in the thing are Mundhra, Arunesh, Rajesh, Subbu and me.

Harmless

2009-07-30T14:59:00.012+05:30

For a few days now, a friend of mine has been saying that England must pick Steve Harmison for Edgbaston. He has been on fire in County cricket, he's saying, and he's a matchwinner. He isn't alone in this - Vic Marks, one of the more astute and engaging cricket writers around, has written two separate articles in the Guardian calling for Harmison's inclusion.
Now, I refresh my Twitter homepage, and here again is my friend, tweeting "They better play Harmless!"
I think they mustn't. Here's why.
In 30 Test matches since the first Test of the 2005 Ashes at 2005, Harmison's figures show that he's been, well, harmless.
He's picked up 94 wickets, at the average of 38.53 and a strike rate of 68.1. Both his five wicket hauls in this period came in the same Test, at Old Trafford against Pakistan just over three years ago. Measure that against an overall average of 31.78 and strike rate of 59.3.
Even in the 2005 Ashes, the supposedly talismanic Harmison's series average and strike rate were behind those of Simon Jones, Andrew Flintoff and Matthew Hoggard - the Matthew Hoggard whose role in that triumph is forgotten against the backdrop of Harmison hitting people on the helmet in a Test England lost.
Let's compare the career trajectories of the two H-men, shall we?
In the period I mentioned above - Harmison's harmless phase - Hoggard took 88 wickets in 26 Tests, averaging 31.98 and striking every 59.9 balls, with two five-wicket hauls. Not much worse than an overall average of 30.50 and strike rate of 56.00.
Even so, after both were dropped after bowling badly in a terrible defeat to New Zealand at Hamilton in March 2008, it was Hoggard who suffered the worse fate, disappearing entirely from the Test side. Harmison, meanwhile, has played four Tests in three series in three different continents, doing nothing to suggest he'll give Australian batsmen nightmares.
Hoggard's 'nip', an intangible quality that he apparently cannot do without, is gone forever, it seems, while Harmison's fiery pace and steep bounce can be summoned up as soon as he breathes the air of Northumberland.
Agreed, Hoggard, at 32 is older than Harmison by two years, but this isn't really a 'bring back Hoggy' blog post. It is, instead, a blog post that has veered entirely out of track, but attempts now to return to what it started out trying to say - no, sorry, Harmison shouldn't play.

Venkatesh Prasad

2009-07-28T00:07:00.006+05:30

When I was a kid, a lot of the other kids I played cricket with bowled with Venkatesh Prasad's action, an action both idiosyncratic and robotic, and therefore ideal for a kid to copy and caricature. Except when I tried it, someone pointed out that I jump off the wrong foot.
Prasad's action went like this: an absolutely straight-line run-up, a towel flapping from the waistband of his trousers, and then, as he went into a side-on position, his arms would whirl in a motion that resembled a crankshaft and piston, at the end of which his left arm would drop downwards, and his right arm commence another rotation. As left elbow met hip, his right arm and left leg would form a line exactly perpendicular to the ground. At this point, he would release the ball, inevitably his stock delivery, the leg-cutter.
In the van that took me to school, the back rows discussed cricket. The joke that went around about India's bowling was - Venkatesh Prasad is a leg spinner wrongly labelled right-arm medium-fast, and Anil Kumble a medium pacer wrongly labelled legbreak googly.

Medium-fast

2009-07-26T00:20:00.007+05:30

This morning, Star Cricket telecast the highlights of the 1996 World Cup group match between India and Sri Lanka at Ferozeshah Kotla – the match where Jayasuriya and Kaluwitharana destroyed Manoj Prabhakar’s international career.
I’ve never seen Manoj Prabhakar bowl well; although I must say that all I’ve seen of his bowling are highlights packages from India’s 1990 tour to England, and now this match. He bowled at about 67 miles per hour, and needed a run-up as long as Waqar Younis or Wes Hall to achieve this speed.
Usually, bowlers who clock 67 miles per hour are placid-looking chaps who, as the cliché goes, know their limitations and bowl stump-to-stump. Manoj Prabhakar instead looked like he wanted to splatter the innards of batsmen all over the sightscreen at the other end and imagined himself easily capable of doing so.
As everyone knows, Manoj Prabhakar ended this match, and his international career, bowling off spin.
Immediately after this match, Star Cricket played the highlights of Sachin Tendulkar's 177 at Trent Bridge a few months after the World Cup. It made me chuckle, because here was another 67mph trundler who seemed to believe himself the spiritual heir to Frank Tyson - Dominic Cork.
Sachin punched Cork off the backfoot repeatedly and clinically, down the ground, through the off side and on. When he got bored, he waited a little while longer and cut him off his stumps, or moved across and whipped him off his legs. Despite all this, Cork continued to run in every ball with the aggression and flared nostrils of a slightly deranged bull.

Straight bat, high left elbow

2009-07-24T15:43:00.013+05:30

Table cricket games, I guess, have different names in different parts of the world. In India, it was (is?) called 'Gold Cup'.
The playing surface was a square of green cloth with a pitch, fielding positions, and concentric ellipses marked on it. When you hit the ball beyond the first ellipse, you got one run, the next one two, and so forth, until the last ellipse - the boundary, bounded by a plastic fence.
The bowler rolled a ball bearing down a slide, the slope of which he or she could steepen or make more gradual to vary the speed. You were out either if you were bowled, or if a fielder caught you - that is, when the ball rolled into a V-shaped gap in its base.
The batsman had a choice of bats. The simpler implement was a little bat-shaped bat that gave you a pretty decent range of shots. If you wanted power, however, you chose the mechanical contraption thingy, which ensured a perfectly straight bat and a gloriously smooth transition from backlift to follow-through. On the rare occasion you hit the ball using this device, the ball flew to the boundary, and once, a friend smashed a six over long off.

That's a bat, not a duck-billed platypus

What prompted me to explain all this in so much detail?
Well, this morning, Thilan Samaraweera scored 73, with 11 boundaries. His best shot was a cover drive off Umar Gul - he went down on one knee, and held his pose as the ball sped away. His bat was so straight, and his left elbow so high, that the first thing I thought upon watching the replay was - Whoa! that's a shot straight out of 'Gold Cup', and the sweetest, meatiest spot of the mechanical contraption bat.

Lara, Chanderpaul and alternate universes

2009-07-23T15:08:00.001+05:30

Does anyone have a smaller percentage of not out innings (apart, of course, from batsmen who've never been not out) than Brian Lara? Six not outs in 232 innings. Interestingly, within the six not outs are contained two of Test cricket's immortal innings - the 153 and the 400.
Even without statistics, no one would deny the claim that Lara has played in some pretty underwhelming sides. Statistics sharpen this picture, and starken (does this word even exist?) the contrast with batsmen from other teams.
Number of not outs is a reasonable measure of the effect playing for a good or bad team can have on a batsman. But it isn't foolproof; for instance, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, who has played alongside Lara for much of his career, has 32 not outs in 121 Tests.
On the other hand, number of declarations is a direct measure of a team's batting strength. During Lara's 131-Test career, West Indies declared fifteen times.
Let's apply the same measures to two other batting greats, who averaged over 50 like him, and whose careers ran parallel to his:
Sachin Tendulkar has played 147 Tests so far, and has 27 not outs in 261 innings. In those 147 Tests, India has declared 47 innings closed.
Steve Waugh played 168 Tests, batted 260 times, was not out 46 times, and Australia declared 65 times during his career.
What might have happened if fate had stuck Lara in the Indian or Australian line-up?
Nobody can say with any degree of certainty that batsman A would bat the same way if he were part of team X instead of team Y. It's still an intriguing thought.
Something tells me Lara would have averaged over 60 in a better batting line-up. Everything about his game - his method, his personality, his range of shots - would have ensured him top dog status in any line-up.
That leads me to another intriguing thought: Would Chanderpaul average as much, and be as hard to dismiss, if he was Indian or Australian?
The answer, I think, is yes - provided the selectors pick someone of his aesthetic otherness. He'd love being away from the limelight, he'd be the perfect guy for domineering types to bat in partnership with, and he has so much hunger for runs that it wouldn't diminish one bit even if he was batting in a team where every other batsman was Bradman.
What do you think?

Sri Lanka versus Pakistan, third Test, day three

2009-07-22T14:58:00.002+05:30

This afternoon, Misbah Ul Haq and Shoaib Malik inched Pakistan's lead towards 200 at the Sinhalese Sports Club.
From one end, Rangana Herath got the ball to loop and dip, and both batsmen played watchfully late. From the other, Chaminda Vaas, bowling in his last Test - left arm over, pitching middle and off, teasing the batsmen to reach out. No clouds, no swing; even so, 10-5-14-0.
Between deliveries, the TV cameras panned the crowd, contemplating the cricket as it consumed ice lollies.
A group of kids, led by Percy Abeysekara, Sri Lankan cricket's most exuberant fan, sang 'Happy birthday to you,' prompting Nuwan Kulasekara, 27 years and 0 days old, fielding on the boundary, to break into the biggest grin ever seen on a cricket field.

How do you beat Pakistan?

2009-07-21T15:34:00.001+05:30

Simple. Bowl badly when Younis Khan and Mohammad Yousuf are batting together.Younis's second-wicket partnership of 200 with Fawad Alam in the second Test against Sri Lanka at the P. Sara Oval was his third 200-plus partnership in a losing cause. The only other batsman in Test history to figure in three losing 200-plus stands? Mohammad Yousuf.
Younis and Yousuf are the only pair to figure twice on the list of losing 200-plus stands. The highest partnership ever in a lost Test? Younis Khan and Mohammad Yousuf, 363 for the third wicket against England at Headingley in 2006.

Background music

2009-07-20T17:17:00.003+05:30

Not too long ago, Andrew Flintoff walked in to bat during England's first innings at Cardiff. As he marked his guard, a bugler in the crowd bugled the Flintstones tune.

... Let's ride with the family down the street,
Through the courtesy of Fred's two feet...

Perfect.

This afternoon, Mohammad Yousuf repeatedly eased threes through the leg side on a slow Sinhalese Sports Club outfield. As usual, there was a brass band in the background, belting out not baila but Bollywood, and

Ye shaam mastani, madhosh kiye jaaye...

Just the right kind of tune for Yousuf's languid style.

Soft batsmen, or average bowlers?

2009-07-18T16:51:00.000+05:30

India's batsmen, historically, have scored a greater proportion of 'soft' runs than batsmen from anywhere else.

I base this statement on numbers. Dodgy they may be, and liable to scornful ripping apart by statisticians, but numbers, nevertheless. And there's an eerie pattern to all this as well.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves, though. Let me describe how I arrived at my conclusion.
First, I made a lot of assumptions, based solely on intuition.
My first assumption: drawn matches = batting-friendly conditions. Historically, I assumed, bat-a-thon draws numerically overwhelm rain-affected draws and games saved on spiteful wickets by tremendous batting.
So drawn Tests = batting-friendly wickets, and result Tests = sporting, or bowler-friendly wickets.
Runs scored in result matches, therefore, equate to hard-fought runs. This, obviously, ignores knocks played with a 'what the hell, we've lost; let me bash it around a bit' mindset.
Once I made these assumptions, I calculated (on June 16 2009, so recent series like the Ashes and Sri Lanka-Pakistan don't figure), for the eight major Test teams in history - Australia, England, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, West Indies - the ratio of centuries scored to number of Tests played.
I then calculated the centuries per Test ratio for each country, ignoring drawn Tests.
I subtracted the second ratio from the first.
And discovered that India has had, through Test history, the biggest difference between centuries per match and centuries per result match. That is, in result Tests, Indian batsmen have suffered the steepest drop in century-production from their average rate than batsmen from any other team.
Here's the table (click on the image to see a bigger, more readable table):
This either means that Indian batsmen have scored a lot of soft runs in helpful conditions, or it means that India's bowlers have let Tests drift into draws in conditions where bowlers from other teams have bowled match-winning spells.
Look at the averages of India's great bowlers - Mankad, Gupte, Bedi, Chandrasekhar, Prasanna, Kapil Dev, Kumble, Srinath - high 20s or low 30s without exception. India hasn't had anyone with a Jason Gillespie-esque mid-20s average, leave alone someone with an average approaching Curtly Ambrose or Sydney Barnes. Is Gillespie a greater bowler than Anil Kumble? No. Has he been part of better bowling attacks? Most definitely.
So I decided to do the same calculation for this century - the 2000s. India has regularly won Test matches abroad in this period, a period that's included a number of memorable matchwinning centuries, and seen the emergence of a pretty decent bunch of bowlers.
Here then is the eerie pattern I referred to before. India has done no better or worse in this period than through its history, and the clinching number is exactly the same as in the previous table:
0.24, the most significant number in the history of Indian cricket.

...and one who loves it passionately

2009-07-18T16:38:00.001+05:30

From a lovely Gideon Haigh article that materialised today on Cricinfo :

"Murali's greatness rests only partly on his capacity to set the ball in motion: there is his accuracy, his keen grasp of batting weakness, his encyclopaedic knowledge of opponents, his unflagging love for a game that has on occasion treated him pretty unkindly. In his affable autobiography, Bully For You, Oscar (2000), Ian Austin, provides a lovely vignette of Murali's assimilation at Lancashire.

I've never known anyone who knew so much about cricket - or anyone who could talk about the game for so long. There's a hell of a lot of international cricket being played all year round these days, but Murali knew all about it. He knew more about Lancashire's record than Lancashire players themselves. We'd be sitting in the dressing room or in the bar in the evening at an away game and he'd suddenly start talking about one of our games from years back. He'd know all the facts and figures and couldn't believe that the rest of us didn't remember every last dot and comma of the game he was talking about."

Cricketers who don't love cricket

2009-07-16T23:05:00.000+05:30

When Chris Gayle said he wouldn't really mind if Test cricket died, he showed himself to be the kind of person that makes me flail my arms wildly, look imploringly at the ceiling, and shed fat tears while sniffling noisily - the kind of person who's gifted at sport but doesn't really love sport.
And Chris Gayle, sadly, isn't the only example of that kind of person in the universe.
Accompanying me right through my schooldays, sitting next to me in class and walking down corridors alongside me, were guys, in not insubstantial numbers, who had far more natural sporting talent than me but cared more for, as the years went by, the Backstreet Boys, Joey Tribbiani and Quentin Tarantino than Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid.
This, I'm sure you'll agree, is like being slapped repeatedly in the face by a sodden wicketkeeping glove, for a sports-tragic who never managed to find a place in his school's cricket team. I don't mind people who merely have a lukewarm interest in cricket. I resent people who have a lukewarm interest in cricket and swat insouciant sixes.
Chris Gayle strikes me as falling into this category of cricketer, the category of cricketer that would find poring through old scorecards at Cricket Archive late at night, marveling at P.G. Wodehouse's all-round talent, a daft thing to do.
I suspect, sadly, that most gifted cricketers are like that.