The magic of bat on ball

I am not sure if what I saw in Melbourne last week was the start of a major new movement in world cricket but I have no doubt at all that it was a step in the right direction.

For all those who were apprehensive about what the new concept would throw up, the answer rang aloud. It works.

Part of the aura, a major part of it in fact, was provided by the Colonial stadium; a magnificent structure, a bit awesome initially but one that grows on you with time. It is just a year old so it doesn’t evoke the aura that comes with the tradition at a place like the MCG for example. It is a bit like going to a games arcade actually, with all those joy sticks and video effects that twelve year olds understand so much better than 35-year-olds. That to me is precisely why we need more cricket here, because we need to appeal to the 12-year-old as much as we do to the traditionalist.

It was interesting to see the reaction of the players though. Steve Waugh, who has an acute sense of the history of the game and the responsibility that each generation carries, admitted to feeling excited at being part of a new movement. “Fifty years from now it will be nice to say I was part of the first game played indoors,” he said, and I see no reason why this form will not last that long.

Admittedly, there were a few apprehensions in the couple of days before the event when journalists and players huddled around in the cold. The temperature itself was a bit of a concern and during the first game, it touched 7 degrees which must have taken a bit of the comfort away from watching a cricket match that had already burnt a bit of a hole in the pocket. But the major areas of uncertainty were the lights, the outfield and the run-ups. By the time game three was over, none of those three could be classified as a major concern.

Unlike traditional day-night matches (and remember, when day-night matches first began, they were thought to have broken with the tradition of the day!) that are played with either four or six towers that poke their head onto the ground and illuminate it, the Colonial stadium has lights all around the circumference. The only concession made to the game was to take off the lights directly above the batsman’s eyeline but the presence of so many others meant that everytime a ball went up, the fielder would see it coming out of at least one set of lights.

In fact, I went down to one of the boundaries at backward square leg and imagined I was getting under a top edged pull shot that was taking the ball in an arc to long leg. In a normal stadium, I might have seen the ball go into and out of one set of lights. Here it seemed I had a search party staring at me. It was just as well that the match was played between the two best fielding sides in the game and at the end of it all, only one catch went down in the deep, which was a tribute to the stadium and even more so, to the ability of the fielders. It was poetic in a sense as well that the first man to come under a skier was the incomparable Jonty Rhodes.

There is often talk in the game about other fielders being as good as Jonty Rhodes. Dispel it. Throw it in the bin. He is the ultimate master and I am certain a major part of the reason is that he is proud of what he is doing and he enjoys it like he does nothing else in the world.

The outfield was a bit soft and in the times to come, that might bother some players. It needed to be soft because they play Australian Rules football on it but a couple of cricketers had sore feet by the end. And they had to spend a lot of time taking the mud off the spikes. The groundsman had cut the grass down from 35 mm to 16 mm and yet, the general perception was that the ball would travel heavily on it. Admittedly it wasn’t the fastest outfield but there was enough momentum on the ball to allow a good hit to reach the boundary.

Normally, the momentum on the ball for drives and cuts comes from the fact that it lands on the square around the pitch which is necessarily harder than the rest of the outfield. Here at the Colonial stadium, given that there was only one pitch slipped into a hole that was created, the outfield, in a manner of speaking, began where the pitch ended. Still, given that the ball was landing on soft grass rather than hard turf, it did well enough.

The cricket itself, sadly, wasn’t outstanding and that is often unimagineable when two teams with such intensity play each other. If the matches grew close, and Australia must kick themselves for not having made it 3-0, it was really because both teams played below par. Australia bowled well and fielded brilliantly, and we have come to expect that from them, but their middle and late order batting was very clumsy.

After having won the first game in which South Africa played the most insipid cricket I have ever seen them play, Australia allowed match-winning situations to slip out over the next two games with batting that strangely lacked purpose and vision. They dawdled in the middle overs and South Africa turned the heat on in the two departments they were best at; discipline and fielding.

There was a huge lesson there for India for we tend to be a team built around personalities rather than a purpose. In the final game, South Africa were, effectively, without Cronje, Gibbs, Donald, Rhodes and Boucher and yet, the replacements were able to fill the gaps well enough for them to beat a full strength Australian team. This is a remarkable fact for it highlights how differently the game is played by the leading nations. South Africa create a unit with purpose and discipline and individuals merely occupy slots in them. And so however skilled they might be, if the replacements have the same work ethic, they can fill the slot reasonably well.

In India, we tend to pick stars and build teams around them. So if the star isn’t around, the core vanishes and the replacement can never be good enough. Our cricket is like our movies where a script is written around a star and the film depends, for its success, on his ability to play the role.

South Africa are a bit like a good stage production where actors easily interchange roles. That is why people like Andrew Hall, Nicky Boje and Roger Telemachus were able to succeed so admirably. And that is why the real star for South Africa is the production, the unit, rather than the hero, or the individual star. The pity is that in India we close our eyes to this reality, we don’t want to see the world around us.

But there is one thing this short series told me. The magic of bat on ball can never die. Those that run cricket in India, and some of those that play it, sometimes allow themselves to think they can control the sport. If there is one thing that cricket has taught me, it is that thoughts like these can only exist in petty men. Cricket is a game for small, simple minds not large bloated egos. After all that has happened in India, to see the game played by two intense teams was like a giant flush draining all the sadness out. It was brilliant.

Tailpiece: It might have been Australia versus South Africa on the cricket ground but off it, in the sponsor’s box, I could have been at Chepauk. Pentasoft, who were sponsoring the series, and that was wonderful to see in itself, had laid it on. Idli, vada, dosa and upma with sambar and avial on the table with a whole party of people humming Ilaya Raja tunes in Melbourne made it all a bit unreal. But I don’t think I was complaining. I had cricket and I had avial and nobody was talking of match-fixing or bribery. I couldn’t have asked for more.

Harsha Bhogle

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