Autobiography of an Unknown Cricketer: Sujit Mukherjee

Eleven reasons why Autobiography of an Unknown Cricketer can lay claim to being one of the best cricket books ever written, probably the best by an Indian.

1. For not trying to explain India through cricket or to glorify cricket as a unifying force, as the opium for the masses. Sujit Mukherjee sees cricket as, wait for this, cricket.
2. For keeping the focus on the game, and the references to politics and power plays to the minimum, helped, no doubt by the fact that Bihar was not quite (and doesn’t look likely to ever be) a cricketing hotspot like Mumbai or Chennai.
3. For not trying to build or defend the author’s cricketing image. This was perhaps easy because while Sujit went on to represent Bihar in the Ranji Trophy, he was not a star cricketer.
4. For not name dropping. Notwithstanding point 3 above, Sujit has rubbed shoulders with the odd well-known name in Indian cricket. He writes about these in a wonderfully matter-of-fact manner, even the fact that he managed to tonk CS Nayudu for a few in an unofficial game in Kolkata in 1952 gets only a matter-of-fact coverage.
5. For the kind of insight he offers, almost by the side. Like when he conjectures on why Patna University fails repeatedly.
   

   One reason I thought was that our cricketers were so used to playing against one another that they got utterly out of depth when facing unknown opposition.

   Is it to overcome this problem that the English County Board allowed overseas cricketers in the county circuit? And then took it to the next level with the Kolpaks?
6. For faithfully reporting on local cricket from the U.S. – it turns out to be more interesting than the oft-repeated stories of Americans trying to understand the game.
7. For enabling you to read without having to refer to poetry books or lengthy literary classics. With no disrespect to those who adopt that style of writing, there is a certain sincerity that emerges from simple writing – Unknown Cricketer is a good example of this. This is all the more creditable considering Sujit was an English professor – surely he would have read some classics.
8. For, despite his fairly successful writing life, referring to it so unselfconsciously.
   

   An occasional writer of articles (like me) can never get over the fact that he is read. As for the rare writer of books (again like me), he can scarcely believe that he is purchased.

9. For the illuminating way in which he describes the selection trials for the Bihar state team. In three sparse and succinct pages, he reveals how the game is run in the country. I don’t think things have changed much even now, sixty-three years on.
10. For this passage, comparing watching a game at the ground and watching a game on television.
    

    Unavoidably, a sense of loss persists. The telecast shows me only what the cameraman wants to show; the telecommentary tells me only what the commentator is capable of telling, much of it pointless. Large chunks of the match, and not only of play, are left out completely; small chips of play are shown magnified beyond proportion of their significance.

11. For being only 168 pages long. And yet not sounding hurried.

Book Review: If Better is Possible: John Buchanan

I did not pick up John Buchanan’s book because I expected it to be a cricketing classic along the lines of The Art of Captaincy or Beyond a Boundary. I picked it up because I wanted to peek into the dressing room of the Australian team; I picked it up because I wanted some inside stories and trivia on some of those legends whom Buchanan strung together into arguably the greatest team ever to step on to the cricket ground; I picked it up because I thought Buchanan would throw light on some of the whispers that came out about his relationship with Shane Warne, Ricky Ponting and some of the other Aussie luminaries.

Talk about over-expectation. If Better is Possible is not even a book on cricket. Yes, you read that right: It is not even a book on cricket. IPL notwithstanding, it is common knowledge that Buchanan intends to focus on a non-cricketing career as a business consultant. If Better is Possible is his calling card for that profession. The cover page descriptor, The winning strategies from the coach of Australia’s most successful cricket team, is as revealing of the shaky language in the book as it is of the book’s subtle attempt at a crossover from cricket to business.

The book is a loose collection of Buchanan’s reflections on different aspects of coaching, and his attempts at tying those to business management. The constant jump from cricket to business is unsubtle, irritating, interfering and forced for the most part.

Buchanan’s career as Australia’s coach (1999 to 2007) has been fairly uninterrupted by failure. The two big blips they’ve had in this streak were the 2001 series in India and the 2005 Ashes. Here’s Buchanan’s take on these two.

First the 2001 series in India, specifically the Kolkata test.

The Aussies take a first innings lead of 274 and Steve Waugh decides to enforce the follow-on, because Australia, as is their wont, want to “be aggressive, dominate and bury the opposition.” Every one knows what happened, VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid, and then Harbhajan Singh. So what does St. John have to say?

There were some factors outside our control which conspired against us, such as India changing their batting order which allowed VVS Laxman to open after being 50 odd not out in the first innings, some dubious umpiring decisions, a rampant and highly charged Eden Gardens stadium, incessant heat, and ultimately two players, Laxman and Rahul Dravid, who played possibly the best innings of their careers.

Sounds a bit like the Englishmen after yet another defeat, don’t you think? Well, to be fair, the Englishmen put one past Buchanan’s Aussies, didn’t they, in the 2005 Ashes? How does Buchanan explain that?

Jamie Siddons had just taken over as assistant coach from Tim Nielsen for the Ashes. And to facilitate Siddons to get to understand the players better, good old John decided on a strategy: to pull back from the players so I could spend more time being strategic about our preparation, our opposition and about finding tasks and experiences to expand the horizons of the players. One part of his strategy succeeded: Siddons got to know the players well. But it turned out to be a case of winning a battle but losing a war. As the great man confesses, “the situation demanded the opposite approach.” There is something about some sight being 20-20, isn’t there? Of course, there were other reasons as well, as always.

We began the series not fully prepared for a range of reasons – some in our control, some not.

When you lose, there are always factors outside your control, aren’t there?

To be entirely honest, Buchanan does throw light on one character who plays but a cameo in the book. Before you start salivating, the character in question is not an Australian, but an Englishman. Buchanan had just taken over as coach of Middlesex in 1998. Mark Ramprakash had also been made captain just that season, and John and Mark meet for the first time. And Mark says: “You don’t change the rules of the club. The players don’t change the rules of the club. If there are to be changes, I am the only one to make them!”

The Buchanan staples are all there – the emphasis on processes over results, the obsession with “taking the game to the next level”, the importance of rituals, the elevation of Justin Langer to the same level as Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath and such like. The staples of a bad writer are in full evidence as well – a zigzag disjointed narrative, repetition of incidents, incomplete examples, careless language, the cardinal sin of telling-not-showing…

That the most interesting statement in the entire book is not John’s own, but a quote from Glenn McGrath (on the eve of the final of the 2007 World Cup, Pigeon says, “the final is why we are here”) tells its own story. If Better is Possible is a book begging to not be written.

Book Review: Men in White by Mukul Kesavan

The most interesting and unusual insight that emerged for me from Men in White is the distinction Mukul Kesavan draws between the Australians and the South Africans on the subject of match-fixing.

When Cronje was first photographed after his confession, he had his pastor with him for insurance… It’s hard to imagine Warne or Waugh turning up with their priests in tow; blokes don’t do that… they’d be laughed into the Tasman Sea. If they did bring anyone along, it would be their lawyers.

It seems to sum up the way they played their cricket even. Think of Jacques Kallis at the crease. Now think of Ricky Ponting.

Oh, oh, did I do a comparison? Kesavan strongly advocates against it, especially in the what-might-have-been sense. When people compare Graeme Pollock and Sunil Gavaskar, for example. Kesavan argues, and persuasively at that, that this comparison does not hold water because Pollock did not actually get an opportunity to play much at the highest international level. If he had, who knows, he may have turned out like Graeme Hick. (Well, may be Hick wonders whether he should have stuck to Zimbabwe – he may have evoked comparisons with Sachin Tendulkar later on.)

Having made such a persuasive argument, it’s a pity really that Kesavan falls into the what-might-have-been trap, comparing Gavaskar and Sachin Tendulkar. Sure, both played at the apex level, but the times were different, the circumstances were different, the pressures were different. So to say that Gavaskar never copped a hit on the head while Tendulkar did, does injustice to protective equipment – Gavaskar’s skull-cap could not have afforded a rap on the nut; not so with Tendulkar’s fibreglass helmet. May be counting the number of times the two padded up deliberately would’ve been more relevant. Or may be not even that – today’s umpires have a different attitude to deliberate padding than those of the past.

When Kesavan starts off the first piece by arguing that test match spectators are the modern world’s last audience for epic narrative, you know you’ve got an unabashed lover of test matches. And you approve of it. But when he goes on to say “Like war, Test cricket allows you to fill days and weeks of television programming with reliable action that pulls in reassuring viewership numbers,” you long for a more decisive editor. And the longing is for more than just that – Men in White is really a lazy book.

To begin with, there are no date stamps on the different pieces. This robs valuable context from the book. There does not seem to be much thought given to the sequencing of the pieces – there are two back-to-back pieces of the betting scandal, and another couple on Mohammed Azharuddin. And then there are the printer’s devils. Sanath Jayasuriya is referred to as Jayasuriya and Jayasurya, not across different passages, not across different pages, not across different paragraphs, but in the same sentence. And Gavaskar is credited with having scored 220 in the famous Oval test match, when in reality it was 221. The difference is just one run, but ask any cricket lover how much it matters.

Considering it is a collection of articles written over time, the book is rather predictable in flow, feel and ideas. Some praise here, some insight there (“Among the many things the West Indies have given to world cricket, being not-England was an important gift” is my favourite line in the book), some reform recommendations thrown in, some childhood reminiscence elsewhere, the odd comparison (Bradman and Shakespeare, in a predictable combination, with a rather schoolboyish wordplay of Bradman and Bardman), some idle (and sometimes specious, especially the one around hockey’s fall and cricket’s rise in India) speculation for variety. Mostly familiar stuff for the avid cricket fan.

The hard truth is that a cricket book reader is quite likely a test match aficionado – his expectations are bound to be quite high. Unfortunately, Kesavan does not deliver. There’s one thing Men in White demonstrates: A compilation of blog posts (with introductory paragraphs explaining why each piece was written) does not make a book.

Book Review: You Must Like Cricket?

Saumya Bhattacharya has stolen this book idea from us. You Must Like Cricket? is a book many cricket fans would have loved writing, we who belong to that section of the population whose “minds the day after a game… are like photocopy machines gone berserk, spewing out identical images over and over again.” The sub-title, Memoirs of an Indian Cricket Fan, is like the scorecard of a game, the dry facts demonstrating the reality of what the effort is about.

A quick breezy effort, You Must Like is a chronicle of author Soumya Bhattacharya’s life, seen through the lens of the key cricket matches he has either followed on the radio, watched in person or covered as part of his media job. An unusual approach, but not one that would disappoint you, not if you are a diehard cricket fan from India, or may be even from any other cricketing nation.

If you are cricket fan, you are unlikely to be a soccer fan. And if you are a fan of Sachin Tendulkar, then David Beckham is unlikely to mean a great deal to you. Therefore, you are bound to exult when Saumya asserts that “unlike David Beckham – perhaps the one sports star with a similar global media profile – Sachin makes the news only for his cricket.”

You Must Like covers a gamut of interesting incidents and matches, most of them the popular ones, like the Golden Jubilee test of 1980, the 1983 World Cup, Anil Kumble’s 6 for 12 in the Hero Cup final (and Sachin’s heroics in the semi-finals), VVS Laxman’s test of 2001 (the year the author’s daughter is born)… So a normal cricket follower from India should be able to relate with the book quite easily. There is the odd reference to happenings which can only be recollected by (and be of interest to) the cricket-mad fan – incidents like Alvin Kallicharan dropping his trousers on the cricket field at the Eden Gardens in 1979 and Chetan Sharma’s lone century in one-day internationals at Kanpur against England in 1989 – which would perhaps excite the more crazy of us. The equivalent of the changes of pace and other variations that punctuate a good spell of disciplined bowling. And they add credence to the author’s claim to cricket craziness. A claim a few million of us can make, just in India.

The odd inaccuracy, when the author recounts the great 325 chase at Lord’s and mentions that the winning hit was a boundary from Kaif, which in reality was an overthrow off a Zaheer Khan defensive push, is galling. Especially considering this comes right in the initial pages of the book. Thankfully, it turned out to be a one-off mistake. The other little irritation is when the author becomes a little too glib and philosophical with statements like “Indians need cricket to remain an exception. We can’t allow the players to slip – it would be too much of a worth to our sense of self-worth.”

Well, as with a good cricket match, the odd mis-hits and bad balls can be forgotten. The real strokes and wickets of this book are sumptuous and worth savouring.