Tendulkar, Coventry and the contours of greatness

"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?

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.

Re-evaluating Gavaskar, the one-day batsman

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.

The middle overs

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.