Why bother, Virat?

I’m always late at doing stuff like this. I do it after the din has died down and there’s no one either talking or hearing about it anymore.

But then, if Simon & Garfunkel have taught us anything, it is the importance of speaking and listening as opposed to talking and hearing. The delay lets you reflect which is a bit like chewing your food well.

And so, long after even Virat Kohli would have forgotten about what he exactly said, I’m going to try and pen (keyboard?) a rejoinder. People who write way better than I do and more importantly, who know much more about cricket than I do have already penned theirs. For some context, you can read what Virat said here — http://www.espncricinfo.com/india/content/story/950957.html and Sharda Ugra’s rejoinder in letter form here — http://www.espncricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/951641.html. Then, Samir Chopra came up with something of his own here — http://www.espncricinfo.com/blogs/content/story/952281.html.

I’m sure there must have a myriad variety of responses more to what Virat said, elsewhere on the internet. It’s a tall order to write something after all of that and perhaps that’s why I should try. I’ve always loved successful chases in the fourth innings, with the match all but out of your grasp. For that matter, I also love it when batsman after batsman can just shut shop and a team can produce an honorable draw from a sinking ship.

Let me start with something personal that I’m sure happens with many people who belong to my age group. We live alone, and afar from our parents; we put in long hours at office and around 9 pm or so, we receive a call from our mothers asking us if we’ve left office or not and / or if we’ve had dinner or not. I’ll keep my hand on my heart and confess that the thought that since my mother has never worked in the kind of job that I am right now, she doesn’t know the pressures that come with it. Yes, I know that I’m not thinking it right and that I am not a national icon like Virat is and many other pieces of logic that defy my analogy, but what does stand is this — there’s a thin line of difference between sympathy and empathy. Media analysts of the game can sympathize with what an international cricketer goes through but empathy… sorry, mate. Not for a moment am I even saying that media analysts shouldn’t do their jobs, but yes, surely they can be mindful of when they become too vainglorious. For example, when a team gets out for a low score, are “abject surrender” the words you want to use?

Harsha Bhogle recently wrote a longish Facebook post about he doesn’t find the future of Indian cricket media too bright. One needs to have seen for himself the coverage that many Indian news channels do when the team loses to know what Harsha is getting at. And Virat is absolutely right in saying that many Indian fans are not fluent readers of what Cricinfo and its ilk dish out so beautifully match after match. It’s one thing to want your team to win every match it plays, it’s completely another thing to castigate the team whenever it loses. Some semblance of respect for the players, in good times and bad, will go a long way in the journey towards the media earning the respect of the current crop. The most disheartening aspect of all of this is how former players who could barely turn out average performances in the chances that they got over much more talented contemporaries regularly take to social media to peddle adjective filled, half baked randomness against the Indian cricket team. In my book, they’re worse than the media because they can empathize with what an international cricketer goes through but couldn’t be bothered to do it probably because it wouldn’t pay as much.

Virat also mentions the support that Australian cricketers seem to receive from their country’s press and commentators and what not. Well, for one, the current crop of Australian commentators are surely not the benchmark for the rest of the world. I can hunt down some YouTube videos but the two I remember off the top of my head should be good enough. There’s one in which Ian Chappell has to tell Michael Slater to calm down and not behave as if he was out in the middle. There’s another one in which Ian Healy and Mark Taylor try to invent all sorts of excuses to justify Justin Langer not walking after a clear cut edge goes to slip in a Test match against Sri Lanka off Chaminda Vaas. This second one is worse than what Stuart Broad could come up with. Yes, it is good to listen to your heroes from yesteryear express their thoughts about a live game but if they’re going to take this route, then it can only get embarrassing. To balance this argument, I’d tell Virat once again what Samir Chopra has already said so eloquently — Australia has won Test series in every damn country of the world. If they do enjoy a little extra support from their country’s cricket loving journalists, it is perhaps because they’ve earned it over many years of cricket world domination. I’d not go into what their newspapers do simply because I haven’t read enough of them.

There’s something that needs to be added here — ever since the powers that be at BCCI have decided to have their own roster of commentators for Test matches played in India, that part of the game has been all but taken away from us, the viewers. The commentators seem to be so guarded about everything that they say that as an Indian cricketer, you’d take neither their brickbats nor their flower bunches seriously. They’re all singing from the same hymn sheet, the boring one.

I have a sense that part of Virat’s diatribe also stemmed from the criticism that the pitch for the Nagpur Test received both within and outside India. Without getting into my opinion of the pitch, let us first put down the principles — a pitch can be of absolutely any type as long as it makes the Test match last for 4–5 days between two teams that do not have too much disparity between them in terms of ability and that are playing to win. So, in that sense, any judgement of the pitch will invariably involve a judgement of the playing teams as well. Whichever camp you may choose to stand in, I think the common ground can be that South Africa still doesn’t know how to play high quality spin well but the pitch also wasn’t the best suited to Test cricket. That being said, there are pitches all over the world which are just as bad (dead flat tracks in Australia included) and they form part of the reason why fans always relish the best performances of their heroes on foreign soil. There’s this stupid argument being peddled around these days that Indians shouldn’t care so much about overseas performances since the Aussies or the English don’t seem to do that. It’s complete bunkum simply because two wrongs do not a right make. Also, you must ask Ricky Ponting how relieved and elated he must have felt when he could finally display complete mastery of whatever Harbhajan Singh could bowl at him at the Bull Ring in the 2003 World Cup final. There’s nothing better than being able to proclaim to the other country that you can doctor your pitches all you want, my player will still score a terrific century / take a brilliant 5+ wicket haul against you in your own backyard. And so, while Virat can go ahead and say that they will never criticize any pitch anywhere in the world, my point is that the criticism won’t change the final result of the recently concluded series and therefore, he shouldn’t be too bothered about it. This is also why Virat must realize how his hundreds in New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa, often scored in the face of enormous scoreboard pressure will always remain etched in the memories of Indian cricket fans. If he can somehow find a way to inspire the whole team to perform like he does on these trips abroad, now that he is the captain, Indian cricket fans and Indian cricket media will surely find newer ways to hero worship the cricketers.

Till then, he must do what he does best — raise the bar for Indian cricket with his very own attacking brand of cricket and lead his teams to victories everywhere in the world. He must find a superhuman way to control the very human urge to be appreciated all the time and march on. There are surely enough supporters and well wishers and former players who’d do anything to tell the world how proud they are of him and his team. And while he’s at it, he might want to take out a few pages from that master of equanimity, Rahul Sharad Dravid. Newspapers and media and the ilk… why bother, Virat?