Michael Holding on Racism

 

On Cricket Commentary - WHY CONTEXT MATTERS

Mukul Kesavan in The Telegraph

The idea that we should respond to cricketers in purely cricketing terms is a piety that cripples commentary on the game. Cricket commentary’s organizing conceit — that at every turn in a Test there is a technically optimal choice to be made — produces formalist bromides that explain neither the course of the match nor the performances of its main characters. A good example of the technicist fallacy was Michael Holding’s criticism of Sri Lankan bowling tactics during the second innings of the second Test at Headingley. The Sri Lankan pacemen were bowling short at Joe Root (picture) who wasn’t comfortable. He was hit on the splice, on his gloves, on the body which encouraged the Sri Lankans to work him over for about half an hour. This provoked Holding into Fast Bowling Piety One: bowling short is all very well but you have to pitch it up to take wickets. Coming from Holding, one of the great West Indian quartet that unnerved a generation of batsmen with scarily fast and lethally short bowling, this was greeted in the Sky commentary box with general hilarity. Holding insisted that the tales of West Indian bouncer barrages were overstated and offered as proof the number of batsmen who were out lbw or bowled. Botham, from the back of the box offered an explanation: the balls must have ricocheted off their faces on to the stumps. Nasser Hussain spoke up to make the point that Joe Root seemed to have provoked the Sri Lankans while they were batting, and they, in turn had decided to see if they could sledge and bounce him into submission. Given Root’s visible discomfort, Hussain argued that a short burst of intimidatory bowling was a reasonable tactic. In response Holding produced his clinching cautionary tale: opposing fast bowlers once peppered Michael Clarke with short balls and he ducked and weaved and got hit but he had the last laugh by scoring more than 150 runs in that innings. Middle-aged desis recalled a very different precedent: the 1976 Test in Sabina Park where the West Indian pace attack led by Holding hospitalized three top order Indian batsmen with a round-the-wicket bouncer barrage and battered Bedi’s hapless team into surrendering a match with five wickets standing because the batsmen who weren’t injured were terrified. Holding was a member of the West Indian team that ruthlessly ‘blackwashed’ England after Tony Greig stupidly provoked the West Indians by promising to make them grovel. His inability to see that Mathews’s targeting of Root was a symptom of an angry team’s determination not to take a step back was a sign of how completely the conventions of cricket commentary can distract intelligent commentators from the real contest unfolding in front of them. Sri Lankan teams have long felt slighted by the ECB’s habit of offering them stub series or one-off Tests early in the English season. They have been treated like poor relations and this time round they felt not just patronized but persecuted by the reporting of Sachithra Senanayake’s bowling action during the ODI contests that preceded the two-Test ‘series’. It was this sense of being hard done by, this collective determination to be hard men, not game losers that played a part in Senanayake’s Mankading of Jos Buttler, in Angelo Mathews’s refusal to withdraw Senanayake’s appeal and in the public support that Sangakkara and Jayawardene gave Senanayake when Cook and Co. threw a hissy fit afterwards. And it was this keenness to give as good as they got that spurred the Sri Lankan captain to go after Joe Root who had been noticeably chirpy in the field. That passage of play, with the Sri Lankans bouncing and sledging Root and Root battling it out, was the series summed up in half a dozen riveting overs. This is not to argue that short pitched bowling is more effective than pitched up bowling when it comes to taking wickets: merely to suggest that producing axiomatic pieties as a commentator without accounting for context is pointless. If Mathews had persisted with a failed tactic over the best part of the day as Cook did when Mathews and Herath were building their rearguard action, Holding might have had a case. But he didn’t, so Holding’s inability to recognize that this spell of short pitched hostility was a flashpoint in this two Test struggle for superiority is a good example of the way in which orthodox nostrums glide over the action they are meant to illuminate. It wasn’t just Holding who lost the plot in the Sky commentary box, so did David Lloyd. When Mathews began sledging Root and, in spite of remonstrating umpires, calmly carried on sledging Root, a historically minded commentator might have seen him as a worthy heir to Arjuna Ranatunga, that smiling, pudgy, implacable eyeballer of umpires, winder-upper of oppositions and, by some distance, Sri Lanka’s greatest captain. But all Bumble saw was a captain who, because he was sledging Root, had lost focus and lost control of the match. So what for the rest of the world was a spell of purposeful hostility with Mathews testing Root’s will to survive, was for Lloyd, a failure by the Sri Lankan captain to focus on his main job, thinking Root out. Just as Mathews’s sledging was read without context, the larger contest between England and Sri Lanka went unframed. On the one hand there was the English team backed up by a prosperous, hyper-organized cricket board which surrounded its Test team with a support staff so large that journalists joked about it, and on the other there was a Sri Lankan team at war with its board, whose players frequently went unpaid and whose principal spinner, Rangana Herath, had to apply for leave from his day job before going on tour. I learnt more about the Sri Lankan team from one brilliant set of vignettes on Cricinfo (“The Pearl and the Bank Clerk” by Jarrod Kimber) than I did through 10 days of Test match commentary. Do television commentators do any homework? Are they interested in the individuals in the middle or are the players they describe just interchangeable names on some Platonic team sheet? Virtually every commentator in the world is now a distinguished ex-cricketer; are these retired champions meant to embody totemic authority, to exude experience into a microphone, or should they pull information and insight together to tell us something that we can’t see or don’t know already? One answer to that leading question might be that ball-by-ball commentary has, by definition, a narrow remit. The answer to that, of course, is that you can’t take a form that originated with radio where the commentator had to literally describe the action in the middle and transfer it to a different medium without redefining it. Sky Sports’s stab at redefinition consists of more graphical information. We have pitch maps and batting wagon wheels which are useful, but surely the rev counter on the top right hand corner of the screen is an answer looking for a question. Does the fact that Moeen Ali gets more revs on the ball than Rangana Herath does make him the better spinner? Sky’s little dial seems to think so. The best human insights on the Sri Lankan-England series came from Shane Warne and he wasn’t even in the commentary box. The series cruelly confirmed his criticisms of Alastair Cook’s captaincy: having moaned about Warne’s unfairness and huffed about Buttler’s Mankading, Cook led his team to defeat with all the grit of a passive-aggressive Boy Scout. In the Sky box, we had Mike Atherton who earned a 2.1 in history at Cambridge but you wouldn’t known it from his commentary: he was as indifferent to time and context as his fellow commentators. Ian Botham was, as always, the Sunil Gavaskar of English commentary while the point of Andrew Strauss’s strangled maunderings escaped foreigners in the absence of subtitles. The one exception to the tedium of Sky commentary was Nasser Hussain simply because he was alert to the politics of a cricket match, to the personal and collective frictions that makes Test cricket the larger-than-life contest that, at its best, it sometimes is. I like to think that the reason for this is that he’s called Nasser Hussain and has an Indian father and an English mother so he can’t pretend that cricket is a self-contained country. Pace Holding, the rehearsal of textbook orthodoxy might be a necessary part of cricket commentary, but it ought to be a baseline on which good commentators improvise, rather like the tanpura drone that provides soloists with an anchoring pitch. Too often, though, cricket commentary amounts to just the drone without context, insight or information. If English commentators are frustratingly literal and narrow, their Indian counterparts make Holding and Co. sound like John Arlott channelling C.L.R. James. Policed by the BCCI, desi commentators are so mindful of their contractual obligations and so formulaic in their utterances that they could be replaced by bots without anyone noticing. Watching a cricket match glossed by the BCCI’s Own, is unnervingly like playing the FIFA video game with automated commentary, where software produces the appropriate cliché whenever the onscreen action supplies the necessary visual cues. Readymade words for virtual football are bad enough but canned commentary on real cricket needs a special place in hell. Tracer bullets, kitchen sinks, cliff hangers, pressure cookers, sensible cricket, best played from the non-striker’s end, give the bowler the first half hour, leg-and-leg… it never stops, and its petrifying banality turns live cricket into lead. With five Tests to play, this is going to be a long, hot summer. Welcome to purgatory.

It's not how you begin...Players who failed to light up their debuts but went on to shine later in their careers

by Steven Lynch

	When he started out, Shane Warne didn't give any hint he would become the greatest legspinner in the game © Getty Images Enlarge
Related Links Players/Officials: Marvan Atapattu | Shane Warne | Sir Leonard Hutton | Sir Viv Richards | Merv Hughes | Graham Gooch | Michael Holding | Jeff Thomson | Gautam Gambhir | Brad Hogg | Saeed Anwar Teams: Australia | England | India | Pakistan | Sri Lanka | West Indies

Marvan Atapattu
As an opening batsman you can't do much worse than begin your Test career with scores of 0 and 0, 0 and 1, and 0 and 0 (and, reports suggest, even that one run was actually a leg-bye). That was the nightmare start that Sri Lanka's Atapattu endured in three Tests from 1990 to early 1994. It was - perhaps not surprisingly - more than three years before he got another game, when at last he got into double figures. But he did very well after that, finishing a 90-Test career with 5502 runs and 16 centuries, no fewer than six of them doubles.

Shane Warne
In January 1992, when Warne was rather rounder than he is today - Ian Healy commented back then that Warnie's idea of a balanced diet was a cheeseburger in each hand - the great legspinner made an undistinguished Test debut in Sydney, taking one Indian wicket for 150 in 45 overs: his victim was Ravi Shastri, out to what Wisden called "a tired shot" after having amassed 206 in 572 minutes. After no wickets in the next Test, and 0 for 107 in the first innings of his third one, in Colombo in August 1992, Warne had a bowling average of 335.00 when he was handed the ball again in the second innings as Sri Lanka closed in on a probable victory. Suddenly things started to get better: he secured an unlikely win, taking three wickets for no run in 11 deliveries. The rest, as they say, is history.

Len Hutton
England tried out a new opening pair against New Zealand for the first Test against New Zealand at Lord's in 1937. James Parks (the father of the 1960s England wicketkeeper Jim) made 22 and 7, while a young Yorkshireman - he celebrated his 21st birthday on the rest day - made 0 and 1. Only one of them was named for the next Test - and, you've guessed it, it was Hutton who was retained. He scored 100 at Old Trafford, and the following year made 364 against Australia: in all he won 79 caps, and scored nearly 7000 runs. Poor Parks, however, never played another Test.

Viv Richards
One of the most intimidating batsmen of all time, Richards made a less than scintillating start in Tests, managing only 4 and 3 against India in Bangalore in 1974-75, falling in each innings to the whirling legspin of Bhagwat Chandrasekhar. But any thoughts of a weakness against spin were banished in the next Test, in Delhi, where Richards slammed six sixes in an imperious 192 not out to set up an innings victory. That was the first of 24 Test centuries for the "Master Blaster".

Merv Hughes
After taking just one wicket for 123 in his first Test, against India, Hughes was pasted all round the Gabba by Ian Botham in the 1986-87 Ashes opener. After the next Test Merv had a bowling average nudging 50, and hadn't even looked like scoring a run. You'd have got long odds on him achieving the Test double of 1000 runs and 100 wickets, but he turned himself into a serviceable batsman and did just that. And his bowling improved out of sight too: he finished up with 212 Test wickets, most of them celebrated by squeezing a few well-chosen words through that famous bushy moustache in the general direction of the departing batsman. Probably Hughes' greatest sledge came not long after Pakistan's Javed Miandad had labelled him "a fat bus conductor". A few balls later Hughes dismissed him, and charged past, yelling "Tickets please!"

Graham Gooch
On his Test debut against Australia at Edgbaston in 1975, Gooch had a moustache to rival Merv's - and his batting was as productive as Hughes' in his early Tests. Gooch departed for 0 and 0, tickling a couple of catches to the predatory Rod Marsh, and after one more match returned to county cricket for three years to tighten things up. He re-emerged, tightness personified, to kickstart a Test career that ultimately brought him 8900 runs, still the England record.

Michael Holding
We remember Holding now as just about the perfect fast bowler - athletic, graceful, and above all scarily fast. But it wasn't all plain sailing at first: he took 0 for 127 in his debut Test, in Australia in 1975-76, and finished that chastening series - which the Aussies won 5-1 - with just 10 wickets at 61.40, being reduced to tears at one point as things went against him. Things began to look up later in 1976, though, when Holding blew England away with 14 wickets on a slow pitch at The Oval. "Whispering Death" had arrived.

Jeff Thomson
One reason the England tourists Down Under in 1974-75 didn't take much notice of Thomson's pre-series bluster about how much he liked to hurt batsmen was that they knew he had played just one previous Test, against Pakistan in 1972-73, and finished with 0 for 110 in 19 expensive overs. But what Mike Denness and Co. probably didn't know was that Thommo had been nursing a broken foot in that match - he thought he'd better play, in case he never got another chance. The next call duly came in Brisbane two years later, and Thomson shook England up with 6 for 46 in the second innings, then 5 for 93 in Perth in the next Test, both of which Australia won comfortably. By the time he ruled himself out of the series by injuring his shoulder playing tennis, Thommo had taken 33 wickets in four and a half matches, and the Ashes were back in Australian hands. He ended up with 200 Test wickets, exactly 100 of them against England.

	Saeed Anwar: nothing impressive about him, eh? © ESPNcricinfo Ltd Enlarge

Gautam Gambhir
Test stardom - and multi-million IPL contracts - probably seemed a long way off for Gambhir after his first Test for India, against Australia in Mumbai in November 2004, produced scores of 3 and 1 on an admittedly dodgy pitch (India won in three days, bowling Australia out for 93 in their second innings). The selectors stuck by Gambhir, who repaid them by making 96 in the next Test, against South Africa, and 139 against Bangladesh a few weeks later. Despite trouble with injuries, he now has more than 3500 Test runs.

Brad Hogg
Cricket's most famous ex-postman made his Test debut in Delhi in October 1996, replacing Shane Warne, who was recovering from surgery to his hand. Hogg, an unorthodox left-arm spinner, had an undistinguished start: his 17 overs cost 69, although he did claim the wicket of Sourav Ganguly. He didn't play another Test for six and a half years, although he did have a long run in Australia's one-day side. One story has it that Hogg had longed all his career to hear Ian Healy growl from behind the stumps, "Well bowled, Hoggy" ... but bowled so indifferently that it was never actually said.

Saeed Anwar
Given Pakistan's capricious selection policies, the deliciously wristy opener Anwar might never have played again after he bagged a pair in his first Test, against West Indies in Faisalabad in November 1990. As it was, he didn't win another Test cap for more than three years - but made it count when he did, with 169 against New Zealand in only his third match. Anwar ended up with 4052 runs in Tests - and more than double that (8824) in one-day internationals.

Steven Lynch is the editor of the Wisden Guide to International Cricket 2011.

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