The coach that crossed the road

Trevor Bayliss, who used to coach Stuart Clark at New South Wales, is now the coach of Sri Lanka. And as Sri Lanka and Australia square up in the coming months, Clark had this to say of his recent interchanges with Bayliss.

He’s told me that he knows my game inside out and that the Lankans will smash me around the park. I’ve told him that they’ve no chance if he’s basing that on his useless coaching tips.

Hmmm… now that’s a problem with coaches being shopped across the world. The man who spent three years shaping you goes off to coach your opposition, and now he can use all that knowledge against you. Of course we have county colleagues who are national opponents (and vice versa), but a coach is different – he works on tightening a player’s (and team’s) technique and addressing weak spots, so how would a player feel if his coach for a long time were to move over to the opposition? Will he become over-conscious of his weaknesses? Will his old insecurities resurface? In view of this possibility, can countries start getting coaches to sign non-compete clauses for defined time intervals, as tends to happen in corporate scenarios in some circumstances?

On a speculative note, if John Buchanan had been shopped midway through his contract with Australia, would the team that contracted him had better chances of beating Australia? I suppose we’ll never know.

The Mushtaq and Mushtaq Show

Watching Mushtaq Ahmed and Saqlain Mushtaq bowl in tandem for Sussex against Kent in the second semi-final of the Twenty20 Cup yesterday evoked a feeling of what might have been had the selection policy in Pakistan cricket been a bit more, er, logical.

Sure the Mushtaqs ended up on the losing side, but during the period of eight overs when they bowled through their quota, there was only one team playing cricket in the middle. Ahmed started with an expensive over and Saqlain ended with one, but the six overs that separated these two were just plain outstanding. Not a single boundary was scored (remember this is Twenty20, not good old test cricket), why, not a single genuine stroke was played. It was a miracle that the Mushtaqs grabbed only one wicket each. May be the Kent batsmen were not good enough to get out to them.

You may argue that Robert Key is no Kevin Pietersen. He most certainly is not, but don’t forget that Key is an English international of recent vintage, has played 15 test matches and has a test double hundred against his name. You may argue that Martin van Jaarsveld is no Graeme Smith. He most certainly is not, but don’t forget that Martin played for South Africa not too long ago. And you can’t argue against the fact that this was Cup semi-final night and that the game was played in right earnest.

Apart from their bowling actions and the fact that one turns the ball into the right hander (as his stock delivery) and the other turns it away from the right hander, the similarities between Ahmed and Saqlain yesterday were amazing. Bushy salt-and-pepper beards proclaiming their religious fervour, supreme confidence in every step, impish smiles after forcing the batsman into a false stroke (which was about 36 times in six overs, give or take the odd defensive shot) and, coincidentally, absolutely identical figures – 4-0-21-1. (To complete a day of spinning coincidences, that other magician Mutthiah Muralitharan had delivered exactly the same returns for Lancashire against Gloucestershire in the first semi-final, also in a losing cause.)

The other noticeable aspect of this passage of play was the way the Kent players approached the Mushtaqs. They had just two shots for them – the sweep and the reverse-sweep. Sure Graham Gooch did the orthodox one famously in the World Cup semi-final in 1987, but so did Mike Gatting, infamously, with the unorthodox one in the final of the same Cup. Surely the MCC coaching manual allows more shots to the turning ball?

On a different note, it is quite heartening that a team can bowl six absolutely unplayable overs in a Twenty20 game and still lose the match. That’s 30 per cent of the innings and 15 per cent of the game. It suggests that the Twenty20 is not such a slam bang game after all – there can be quiet passages of play in a winning cause as well. Ah, the possibilities are tantalising. Thanks – Mushtaq and Mushtaq.

Frenzy20

It’s a pity really, that umpires at the Twenty20 World Cup will “officiate in their normal, stock-standard way,” according to tournament director Steve Elworthy. And here we were, expecting umpires to give seven-ball overs, penalize bowlers for bowling dot balls, send batsmen on their way for conceding maiden overs, disallow direct hit run-outs, award runs for sledging and slam fielding captains for restrictive field-settings, among others.

Twenty20, by virtue of being one-day cricket on steroids, is likely to produce high octane cricket by itself. So why is there so much focus on the trappings? The game can take care of itself, thank you. What next? Cross-dressing match referees? Purple-striped pitches? Psychedelic sightscreens? Variable boundary lengths for different batsmen?

Wake me up when the game begins please.

Getting it "over" with

In its characteristic spirit of introspection and self-flagellation, the British media has been identifying reasons for England’s inability to grab the one final wicket that would’ve given them victory in the Lord’s test against India. The Spin has an insightful collection of “miniscule” reasons in this week’s edition. Some of the reasons are plausible; but I’m not sure I agree with point 4.

England can hardly complain when they bowled only 55 overs between 11am and 3.35pm, which is when they left the field for the last time. Granted, that kind of rate is par for the course these days, but England in effect cheated themselves out of five or so overs, even with Panesar bowling 13 of them and Michael Vaughan four. With clouds gathering, urgency ought to have been paramount.

Quite a few others in the British media have picked this point up as well. But the truth of the matter is that England’s over-rate in the fourth innings was not any worse than that of either team in the match – India bowled 91.2 overs in 395 minutes in the first innings at a rate of 13.9 overs an hour and 78.3 overs in 360 minutes in the second at 13.1; England bowled 77.2 overs in 352 minutes in the first innings at 13.2 and 96 overs in 414 minutes in the second at 13.9. Sure, Monty Panesar bowled quite a bit for England, but so did Anil Kumble for India.

The numbers, nevertheless, tell only one side of the story. The other argument is whether rushing through your overs in a bid to bowl more is necessarily effective. Sure, if you bowl more, you stand a better chance of grabbing wickets. But that is only if you’re bowling with a purpose. Remember how Sir Richard Hadlee used the over as a unit to plot batsmen out? Remember the rhythm of Waqar Younis (or Shoaib Akhtar) as he pounded in with his mile-long run-up? Remember Shane Warne working out his opposition? And remember the golden era of the West Indian quicks? They never seem to have bowled more than 80 overs in a day, but they still managed to regularly grab the 20 wickets required for their team to win, more often than not with time to spare. Taking wickets in test matches is about scheming, about adjusting your field incessantly, about keeping things changing. About taking your time.

England is beginning to play inspirational, effective cricket. Give them the space and time to do so. And if the weather denies them the odd victory, so be it. The world knows they can handle disappointment. At least at Lord’s, it was in an almost-successful pursuit of victory.

Pictures of cricket

The splayed legs of Gundappa Vishwanath as he executed yet another of his exquisite square cuts; an almost mystical Abdul Qadir in mid-stride, fingers reaching for his lips; the flying stumps behind the batsman with a menacing Michael Holding still in his follow-through; an agile Ian Botham celebrating yet another catch at second slip, the dramatic appealing of Dennis Lillee as he nailed yet another batsman… these were some of the images that initiated me into the game of cricket in the late 1970s and the early 1980s.

Images that came to us not through cricket web sites, not through dedicated cricket channels, not through 24-hour sports channels, not even through the inconsistent coverage of the national television channel, but through grainy black & white photographs in the daily newspapers and in exciting colour ones in the sports magazines of those days – The Sportstar (the only one still standing, albeit without the definite article), Sportsweek, and Sportsworld, and back copies of the defunct Sport & Pastime.

Of course, most of the dailies only carried postage-stamp-sized photographs of Sunil Gavaskar or Kapil Dev while reporting yet another of their centuries or five-wicket hauls, but considering the scarcity of imagery in those days, even these pictures were priceless and found their way into our scrapbooks – last year’s notebooks filled with all the pictures we could get hold of from the daily newspapers. (I remember having at least 10 identical pictures of Kapil Dev, beaming smile, drooping moustache and all, in one of my scrap books.) And every time a new picture was stuck (with glue or with particles of rice, never with adhesive tape), the entire scrap book was lovingly perused, the picture count made all over again, and the scrap book carefully put back in its place on the shelf.

Naturally, all our attention was on the cricketers and the action (such as there was), but even then we did not miss the fact that most of the pictures that came in from games outside of India were from one of three sources – All Sport, Adrian Murrell and Patrick Eager. The last named, Patrick Eager just covered his 300^th test when he took his regular position behind the lens in the just concluded test at Lord’s, where the weather ended up denying England the one wicket they needed to beat India to go one-up in the series.

Thanks, Patrick, for bringing the game alive in our minds.

Australia’s Twenty20 vision

I wrote about England’s selection for the Twenty20 World Cup in a post last week, about how they seemed to have dusted the who’s who editions of the past and pulled out people from the middle of their benefit games. Now Australia have announced their Twenty20 squad. And guess what they have done?

They’ve stuck to the tried and tested – taken the victorious World Cup squad, replaced the retired Glenn McGrath with the fit-again Brett Lee, and left the rest of the team intact.

Does this say anything about the difference between Australia and England (or any other cricketing side, for that matter), in terms of how they approach the game? It does, to me. Not just how Australia approach the Twenty20 version, but their attitude to cricket itself. The goal is to win – the best team will be chosen, the proven will be preferred.

It’s almost like a corporate organization – every project is equally important, every client is pursued zealously, every product has to hit home.

Comparison or . . .

As the India-England series gets underway, the media is awash with the expected admixture of nostalgia, all-time team lists, predictions and hopes, speculations on individual head-to-heads, wishes, superlatives and hype. And that one activity that cricket writers can never tire of – comparisons. Among the recent is the one comparing Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid on Times Online.

Much has been said against comparisons. They are odious, they are speculative, they are unfair, they are biased, they do not consider context appropriately, numbers aren’t everything… the rants go on. Of course most of this is true. But does that mean we stop doing comparisons?

Cricket, or for that matter any other sport (or entertainment even), loses a lot of its charm if you don’t compare players – within teams, across teams, across generations, across different forms of the game (I don’t remember reading a piece on whether Tendulkar in whites is better than Tendulkar in coloured clothing, but I’m sure there is one, or may be more than one)… the comparison parameters can be endless. And so can the debates.

Can you even talk cricket for any meaningful length of time without making comparisons?

For the rabid Tendulkar fan, Sachin is the No. 1 player, only because there are others who takes up slots No. 2 downwards. Which is comparison in itself, isn’t it?

For the Statsguru seeking number cruncher, Mutthiah Muralitharan is the best spin bowler in the world because his average is better than any one else’s. In his mind, there is no, er, comparison.

For the cricket-crazy connoisseur, David Gower is a better batsman than, well, any one else you care to name, for reasons only another cricket-crazy connoisseur can understand. What a waste that connoisseurship if he can’t make statements like that?

Of course, a comparison piece in the media is bound to evoke counter-arguments and denials, heat and fury. One reason for that is perhaps that a comparison is a personal opinion, so people react strongly when a journalist (who, for the most part, is expected to be fair and neutral) indulges in a comparison piece.

But may be there is more to it. Any comparison is not likely to find more than fifty per cent of readers supporting it; the other half are likely to go the other way. And what good is a comparison if it does not invoke that polarisation? And what good is a comparison if you do not get an opportunity to counter it?

Compared to a comparison, what would you rather have?