Absolem, Absolem!

A little-known man called Alfred Absolem playing for a little-known team called the Hyderabad Heroes against another little-known team called the Ahmedabad Rockets in a little-known (well. . .) tournament called the Indian Cricket League has picked up a scarcely credible seven wickets in a Twenty20 game. After starting off with two wickets in his first over, Absolem underwent the mortification of a wicketless over, before picking two more in his next, rounding off with three wickets in his last over to finish with 7 for 15 off four overs. Local players aside, Absolem’s wickets included Wavell Hinds, Murray Goodwin, Damien Martyn and Heath Streak. A pity then, that all these worthies are long retired and the matches are part of a rebel tournament, so Absolem is unlikely to be in contention for a slot in the national team. But 7 for 15, he’ll take that I reckon. Here’s the match card.

Vaughan on Dunedin

“I know a lot will be said and written about our defeat to New Zealand at Seddon Park over the weekend. Different opinions are being offered for our defeat, but as the man at the helm, only Michael knows the real reasons.

“Yes, our bowling was one of the reasons for our defeat. But not in the way the media thinks. Yes, Harmy didn’t quite fire. But don’t tell me you expected it. We don’t come into a game thinking Harmy’s going to win it for us. It’s a team game, isn’t it, so we expect the ten others to cover for Harmy. To be honest, Harmy exceeded our (and his own, I think) wildest expectations: he bowled just the one wide in the entire game, didn’t he. Remember his first test in the Southern hemisphere last season? Our bowling disappointment has really been Ryan. The test would have meandered into a draw if Ryan had just followed the script: the hat-trick hastened the game and created a result. Monty’s three wickets didn’t help either. It was a dead wicket otherwise.

“Some insightful statisticians might point out that we played 228.1 overs in the test to score 458 runs, at a rate of just over two runs per over, and that if we had scored just one run more per over, we would have won comfortably. Well, it’s all well for critics to say that, but we have a responsibility to the test game. If we start treating test matches like one-dayers and play our strokes, we’d become responsible for killing the test game. No, Michael can’t take that to his grave. And don’t forget, it was a dead wicket – for batsmen as well. Sure, New Zealand scored at more than three runs per over in both their innings, I think Twenty20 is getting to them.

“I think we need to calibrate the media’s expectation with the English cricket team. Michael won the Ashes for them in 2005, in what is England’s greatest sporting achievement forever. But look at what England has achieved after that in the test arena. Thanks to Darrell and those inconsistent Pakistanis, England has managed to win against them. But they lost to Australia (lost? more like lambasted) away, to India at home, to Sri Lanka away. And I’m sure I’m forgetting some other lost series. With all that background, you expect us to win now? Come on, you might as well ask Harbhajan to keep quiet. Or Harmy to win matches, come to that.

“As with most disasters, there are some positives we can take out of the game. Vaughan scored a fifty in the first innings, so no one can say he’s in the team only because of his captaincy. Colly’s second innings stonewall shows that just because he is England’s one-day captain doesn’t mean he cannot defend. Monty’s heroic effort with the bat in the second innings means we have a spinning all-rounder for the first time after Ashley. And most importantly, considering where England is now, there is only one way ahead.”

(Michael Vaughan didn’t give this interview to the media after the Dunedin disaster as he was busy discussing James Whitaker’s travel plans.)

The pilgrimage

Despite at least half-a-dozen visits to London over the years, the Lord’s Cricket Ground has always proved elusive. Finally, the visit happened over the weekend, on Saturday, 1^st March 2008.

You step out of the tube at St. John’s Wood, and a bright sign greets you at the exit gate: Lord’s Cricket Ground 400 yards. Not a long distance, you think and start hitting the road, ignoring the Beatles’ coffee shop peeking at you from the corner. The first entrance you encounter, the North Gate, is, sure enough, just about 400 yards away. Except that this is England and we are dealing with the MCC, aren’t we, so this is not the entrance that lets you in; you’ve got to walk a further 200 yards or so, before you reach the real portal, the Grace Gate.

So I finally arrive at the Grace Gate at 10.25 am, all ready to be buried in history, tradition and the good doctor’s beard. Except that the ground tours start at 10 am and at 12 noon – too early for the first and too late for the next. After wandering around outside the ground for another hour (wondering about the people living in the vicinity and whether it is good or bad to live around the ground), I come back 11.30 am and start off by making my contribution to the running of the game - £12.

There’s still about 30 minutes to go, so you loiter around the museum. Considering Lord’s claims to be the home of cricket (as the signs outside modestly proclaim), it’s interesting that there are very few articles of interest in the museum outside of England (and, of course, the Ashes). Oh yes, there is a Brian Lara exhibition, on temporarily for Lara’s charity. One of the more interesting exhibits is a bat signed by Sachin Tendulkar with the following inscription.

The whole world knows Brian Lara as a cricket but I am fortunate to know you as both friend and cricketer.

Oh well, I suppose it’s a milder comparison than the monkeys and weeds that seem to be in vogue nowadays.

The tour starts with the long room, which is er, rather long at 90 feet. It feels a bit like a chapel – but surely that’s just the guide’s tone that makes it so. On match day, you can imagine members being too busy with their wine and other assorted liquors to be thinking of much else, oh a bit of the game perhaps, dear chap.

Then we move on to the dressing rooms, the home team’s (England, MCC, Middlesex) and the visitors’. It’s a nice feeling to be in the dressing room balcony, where Sourav Ganguly took his shirt off not too long ago (he was apparently chastised for breaking the dress code). And the walk from the dressing room – down the stairs, past the members and their wine glasses and through the wicket gate – no wonder debutants and first-timers at Lord’s tend to be nervous. But apart that, this is a ground, not a stadium, as the guide emphasises. It’s just a game, not a performance. Indeed.

The honours boards in the dressing rooms lend themselves to some genuinely useless trivia questions. As reward for still reading this post, here’s one for you: Who is the only player to figure in the batting (there’s a clue for you) honours boards in both dressing rooms? (Write in if you know the answer, free publicity guaranteed.) It’s also interesting to note the names that don’t figure on the honours boards – Sunil Gavaskar, Ricky Ponting, Sachin Tendulkar among the batsmen; Imran Khan, Shane Warne, Muttiah Muralitharan among the bowlers, to name just a handful.

The committee room where all the board members meet looks like nothing more than a board room of a corporate organisation. The view from here into the ground seems to be blighted by the sight-screen, except that the sight-screen at Lord’s is a nifty thing – the material is translucent (bordering on the transparent) from the inside and opaque from the outside. Should’ve been canvas or cloth, shouldn’t it, with all the tradition and stuff.

Oh yes, no photography inside the long room or in the dressing rooms. Too sacred or too secret? Just so our cameras don’t go to waste, we go to one of the stands (opposite Father Time, just in case you’re interested), from where we keep going click-click. A sunny day with blue skies affords some splendid scenery – write in for pictures, and I’ll let you have them for a pip.

The Media Centre at Lord’s looks a bit like a mobile phone in a pyramid, but it certainly is swank, well-equipped and roomy. And it affords a fantastic view into the ground. It is from here that one gets a good sense of the famous Lord’s slope – 8 feet 6 inches from one side of the ground to the other. (Considering how well Glenn McGrath exploited it, may be it should now be called the Pigeon’s Beak?)

The Lord’s Shop that rounds off the tour is, not to put too fine a point on it, disappointing, especially the book section. Considering Mike Brearley is the MCC president now, surely The Art of Captaincy should be available? And some of the other classics? The only one I find (and pick up) is A Majestic Innings, a compilation of articles by CLR James.

Membership at about £400 a year does not seem quite too forbidding for Lord’s, except that by the time you get through the waiting list (about 18 years), England may have stopped playing the game.

The buck does not stop

Steve Bucknor is nothing if not neutral – bat and pad are the same to him. You just had to see the first-ball dismissal of Mohammed Rafique off Morne Morkel (yes, Bangladesh and South Africa are playing out a test series, in case you care) to convince yourself of that. I’ve seen batsmen being given out lbw off a bat-pad, I’ve seen batsmen being given out lbw when the ball was either going too high or was missing the stumps, I’ve even seen batsmen being given lbw for being hit on other parts of the body, but Mohammed Rafique was perhaps the first to be given lbw for playing the ball with the bat – there was barely any pad in that defensive push of his. Well, ole’ Buck is just proving that those Sydney decisions were not malice-driven. Sigh!

The show begins . . .

Cricket has finally entered the market officially. Seventy-nine cricketers (including five pre-selected icons) were sold at the hectic auction of the Indian Professional League (IPL) today in Mumbai. No, don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean “sold” in a cattle sense; I’m just using it in its basic meaning of exchange of goods or services for legal tender. A collective sum of more than forty-two million US dollars has exchanged hands. Funny isn’t it, for a game that barely crosses the Atlantic, that the legal tender should be US dollars?

Will the IPL succeed? Is it good if it succeeds? Is this the end of cricket as we know it? Questions that are being asked, and questions that are being answered with an admixture of romance, hope, nostalgia, doomsday-prophetism, unbridled optimism, never-say-live pessimism and many such. For the moment, I’ll leave the future for a later date and focus (assuming that all the players will play the tournament in all seriousness) on some of the interesting pictures that emerge from today’s purchases.

The Hyderabad team sounds like the IPL equivalent of Australia, packed as it is with explosive batsmen like Adam Gilchrist, Andrew Symonds, Hershelle Gibbs and Shahid Afridi. Add to that the silken grace of VVS Laxman (though I still can’t imagine him doing well in this cramped form of the game), the under-estimated utility value of Scott Styris and the exciting new talent of Rohit Sharma and you have a potentially unbeatable team. The bowling line-up of Chaminda Vaas, RP Singh and Nuwan Zoysa may be one-dimensional, but they may just get away with that. Thanks to Laxman declining the icon status, Hyderabad is not even the most expensive team in the circuit. That honour goes to Kolkata (at $5.95 million), who are an interesting lot in their own right.

Ricky Ponting must be a relieved man, now that Ishant Sharma and he are on the same team. The moot question is whether Ishant is more than twice as valuable ($950,000 versus $400,000) as the Aussie skipper, but let’s not let money get in the way of the game, shall we? There’s more that’s interesting about the Kolkata team: old mates Ponting and Sourav Ganguly are in it together. So who will be the captain? And with Shoaib Akhtar in the side as well, I don’t know if either would want to put their hands up for the role. Another international captain, Chris Gayle, is also in the team, so will they pass the responsibility to him? And oh yes, did I mention that the coach of this potentially well-knit team is a certain John Buchanan?

The list of players who found it hard to sell themselves tells its own story. Metronomy (don’t waste your time scurrying to the dictionary; I just made up that word) obviously doesn’t sell in the IPL; hence Glenn McGrath really struggled before Delhi picked him. If any more proof is required that the West Indies are on the wane, here it is: two captains, a former one in Shivnarine Chanderpaul and the when-in-fit-current one in Ramnaresh Sarwan had to wait until the end to head towards Bangalore and Mohali, respectively. Just because your country selects you only for Twenty20 games does not mean much at the IPL sweepstakes; Loots Bosman had to wait forever before Mumbai finally ook pity on him. Considering his country didn’t even consider him for the more stately 50-over variety of the game, Justin Langer should be grateful that Jaipur took him without bargaining for a half-price sale. Finally, one small indication that the IPL isn’t quite cricket: Mike Hussey was among the last to find a taker. What do they call him down under, Mr. Cricket?

The business of cricket

Much has been said about the commercialisation of the game, about how there is too much cricket because sponsors and boards decree so, about how they are possibly killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Without ignoring the grains of truth inherent in all of these moans, what we don’t seem to have is a solution. “Ease up the calendar,” is easy to say, but when there are thousands of pounds (or whichever currency you deal with) to be made with every meaningless (meaningless in what sense?) bi-lateral one-day series, why would administrators desist? It’s a bit like asking a business house to control their sales for fear of a glut in the market. On the other hand, we probably don’t want to Wal-mart’ise the game either. So what do we do?

I suggest we begin with the humble calendar. Let each cricketing nation declare a formal and immutable calendar for the home season. England and Australia already have it, though they have started to stretch into the adjacent off-season weeks of late. Depending on the weather and the probable playing conditions, each team gets a pre-defined three-month window in a year to play the game at home. And with each team playing a full home season and one or two away series, we have steady cricket for each country for about six months in the year. Of the other six months, they play in the IPL or wherever for about three months (call it their incentive time if you will). And they have to compulsorily rest for three months. In the years of the World Cup (any of the three as they exist today), the host nation(s) gives up part or all of its season for the Cup.

So what’s the big deal, you may well ask. This is nothing more than a detailed way of saying, “ease up the calendar.” Yes, this only satisfies the players, in terms of the rigour of the international circuit; it does not cater to the profit motives of the administrators. How do we address that?

Shorn of all self-righteousness and pretence, what do the administrators want out of the game? They want to make the most out of the game, right? Is more cricket the only option? Is the money only on the field and in the corresponding television coverage? May be administrators can bring in business consultants and innovation gurus to analyse how else they can make money from the game? How else can we get a larger share of the spectator’s wallet apart from more and more cricket? How can we increase revenue at the gates and the venues? How can we bring in money on non-playing days? How can we create newer revenue streams and recurring income from the game’s interested followers? I’m sure a tight, focused business brief will generate the right answers. I have some ideas in this regard, but I’ll save them for my own entrepreneurial venture.

It’s time for cricket to apply the theory of constraints. Freeze on the schedule and then focus on generating ideas on how to get more revenue out of the game. Don’t treat the game as being in a single industry; instead, look at it as a conglomerate. If cricket had many profit centres like corporate houses like GE, Tata and Samsung has companies and divisions, would the way the game managed be different and better? I think so.

Time for England

In the days they used to lose more consistently, there was one aspect on which England always scored over the other international teams: coming up with excuses for their defeats. If it’s not Delhi Belly one day, it’s the dust in Multan the next and the configuration of the stars on the third day. And when all else fails, they turned to the crowded cricketing calendar.

So when they started winning (just a little bit) in the last couple of years, I worried that they would lose that touch.

But all’s well with us Englishmen, assures Paul Collingwood. After getting mauled by New Zealand in the first two one-day games, the English one-day skipper revealed he has settled into the role and is here to stay when he said, “It would have been a good thing if we’d have had a week until the next game so we can really talk about things and get in the nets and do plenty of work.”

Well, they’ve had one day between their two Twenty20 games; they’ve had two days each between their first three one-day games (and a three-day gap coming up between numbers three and four); they have three days between the first test match and the second and a further four between the second and the third (assuming all test matches last the distance). In today’s ICC calendars (not to mention ICL, IPL and other assorted abbreviations), that could hardly be called a whistle-stop tour. But don’t forget, we’re talking England.

And to be entirely fair to the poor sods, they are doing their best to make more time for themselves. They finished the first one-dayer with 20 overs to spare and the second with a delivery shy of 18 overs to go. They lost, you say? The game’s not all about winning, is it?