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.
Showing posts with label rahul dravid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rahul dravid. Show all posts
Monday, March 08, 2010
Friday, February 26, 2010
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"?
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Bottom-handedness
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."
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."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
