Anil Kumble versus Pakistan, Delhi, 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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."