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Showing posts with label cruel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cruel. Show all posts

Monday 4 May 2015

The beast that is batting

Jon Hotten in Cricinfo

There was no crueller moment at the end of the Barbados Test than the few seconds that the camera spent on Jonathan Trott. In Bridgetown, the floodlights were on and the twilight was coming, followed by the dark. For Trott something more than a match was over, and it showed in his face. "Sadder still to watch it die, than never to have known it…" as someone once wrote.

A few summers ago I had the chance to talk to a man who had worked closely with England at Loughborough. The conversation got on to Trott and his debut against Australia in the final Ashes Test of 2009. There had been some debate over his selection. There was a last-minute swell of emotion behind a romantic recall for Mark Ramprakash, who was coming towards the end of his great sunburst of runs in the county game. Trott, averaging 97 for the season himself, won the call, and, "as he walked to bat," said the guy I was talking to, "I knew that there was no one that I'd rather see going out there."

Trott made 41 and 119. He had a habit of scoring runs on debut - 245 for Warwickshire 2nds, 134 for the 1st team - and by the summer of 2011, when he made a double-hundred against Sri Lanka in Cardiff, he was established at number three and his average was approaching 67. He was a curio, a gem, a rapidly emerging cult hero. Trott was a batsman whose idiosyncrasies showed. Along with a practice regime that was quickly becoming legendary, his batting had the ritualistic edge that externalised some of the mental processes required to score heavily against the world's best bowlers. Each delivery faced, even those with the most banal outcome - a leave, a defensive push - brought a long routine of walking and scratching and scraping at the crease. Here was a mind that sought to impose order and control on the unpredictability and ever-present danger of batting.

His game was similarly risk-averse, his scoring areas clearly defined and stuck to, his shot selection pragmatic and appropriate. Once set, he sought simply to carry on. His mental landscape appeared entirely different to those of players like Pietersen or Ponting, who needed the challenge to escalate as they batted, and who would escalate it themselves if the bowlers wouldn't, taking risks, provoking conflict that ratcheted up the stakes.

"I play cricket to be effective and I have my things I do to get myself ready for battle. Maybe it can mess with their over rate or whatever, but it's just what I do and I won't be changing it," Trott said in 2009 after the South Africans grew frustrated with the time he was taking between deliveries. 

The mental and physical sides of batting are two halves of a whole. It is a tenuous way to make a living and the stresses and scars can be incremental. They affect everyone differently. When batting defines your professional life, when it becomes a part of who you are, then its vulnerabilities are obvious. Trott's departure from the tour of Australia was never going to be easy to recover from, because the foundations of his batting, the toughness he had built up over a long period, were so savagely undermined, along with his sense of self.

As Trott tried to rebuild with Warwickshire and then the Lions, Alastair Cook also fought for his career. Yet there was always the sense with Cook that he was primarily battling a physical, technical issue, a flaw in his game that he could overcome. It had a psychological element, of course, and doubt must have played its role through his long drought, but it never seemed quite as hurtful as Trott's difficulties. At the same time Stuart Broad was struck a very painful and frightening blow that has put his batting into reverse. Broad is not dependent on the bat for a living, and yet the decline is ominous and clear.

All three are at different points on a spectrum that shows just how implacably hard batting can be. It is a brave occupation, and the brilliance of the very best sometimes obscures how difficult it is, even for those blessed with the greatest of gifts.

Jonathan Trott's difficulties have been associated with the short ball, and that strikes at the very heart of the psychology of batting. It is about many things, but failing courage isn't really one of them. Trott has never been more courageous than when he walked out for the second innings in Barbados, having been bounced out in the first. It was moving because, in all probability, he knew that it would be the last time that he did it. He went anyway, and he exits the battle with honour, taken out on his shield.

My favourite quote in cricket comes from Viv Richards, when he was asked how he'd like to be remembered. "With the bat, I was a soldier…" he said.

That's beautiful and true, and we must salute all of those who understand its meaning.

Friday 24 April 2015

Sport is a vicious monster we make


First the win, then the spleen: Bob Willis vents at the end of the Headingley Test in 1981© Getty Images


The games we follow are brutal, unforgiving and unjust, but we wouldn't have them any other way

SIMON BARNES in Cricinfo| APRIL 2015

Sporting events are put together with a number of things in mind. The idea is, (1) to make as much money as possible, (2) to provide as much entertainment as possible, (3) to provide an opportunity for the best possible sport. Very much in that order.

The best ways to do this, also in order, are: (1) make huge demands on the athletes, (2) make even bigger demands on the athletes, and (3) make near-impossible demands on the athletes. That, after all, is what they're for. It's hardly surprising, then, that at the end of every competition, most athletes seem a bit mad.

Some are light-headed with euphoria, others are speechless with relief. Some are in a post-coital haze, others are at the compulsive-talking stage. Some love the whole world, some - even the victors - hate everyone, starting with their own team-mates. Some want someone to hug, some want someone to punch.

Steve Redgrave, winning his fifth gold medal in his fifth Olympic Games, chose the occasion for a bitter jibe at the press - and we responded by applauding him in heartfelt admiration. Bob Willis celebrated one of the all-time greatest displays of fast bowling at Headingley in 1981 with a prolonged rant at that convenient target, the press, while Sebastian Coe responded to his gold medal in the 1500 metres at Los Angeles in 1984 by shouting abuse at the great massed banks of press seats in the Olympic Stadium.

Matthew Pinsent wept uncontrollably after winning his fourth gold medal at rowing; Fu Mingxia took each of her diving gold medals with an air of complete calm; Usain Bolt looked mildly gratified that the world had cottoned on to to his greatness. It's all in the way these things take you, but it's seldom straightforward.

That's because the demands we make on our athletes are extreme in every possible way. That's what sport means. The winners of the cricket World Cup were required to play nine matches in six weeks, all in the public glare, and had to win the last three of them.

The more it costs the athletes, the greater the entertainment. We want nerves to be shredded. We long for truly exceptional performances, and accept that all great victories are built on the disappointment of others. "It is not enough to succeed," said the writer Gore Vidal. "Others must fail."

In sport that statement is not funny. It's an accurate summary of the way sport works. We must put our winners through the hell of nearly losing if we are to be truly satisfied: and put the losers through the hell of thinking they were about to win, before dashing their hopes to the ground.

Thus the England cricket team went to Australia in 2013 having won the last three Ashes series and strongly fancying themselves to do so again. They were beaten 5-0 and are still suffering from the traumas they endured.

Or take the Brazil football team, seemingly inevitable winners of the 2014 World Cup. They were the story of the tournament, and yet they lost 7-1 in the semi-finals to Germany, the eventual winners. This was a humiliation: a misery that you wouldn't wish on anybody.

And yet sport works by setting up opportunities for such misery. That is what brings people in: for reasons of partisanship, in search of drama, and also in search of genuine sporting excellence. None of these things can be done satisfactorily without putting the performers to an extreme test.




And some mourn: David Luiz and Thiago Silva after Brazil's horrific loss to Germany in the 2014 World Cup © AFP

You test rather more than their physical skills. You also test the temperament, from the glossy surface down to the abyssal depths. Thus we had the extraordinary, ridiculous, hilarious and horribly cruel events of the semi-final of the World Cup of 1999.

Yes, the one when, with scores level against Australia, Lance Klusener of South Africa called for a mad single and Allan Donald at the other end forgot to run - and then dropped his bat as he tried to make up for this lapse. He was run out: South Africa were defeated in horrific circumstances. It remains a classic example of minds twisted and broken by sport.

Sport was designed as a pleasure: as a way humans could get together and test themselves in various forms of competition and mock combat. But like sex, everything in sport changes the instant people watch and when people are paid for doing it.

Sport is a triviality made serious. It was at first an opportunity in which a participant could test and savour his own courage in a comparatively safe and non-threatening way. But because of the demands of the audience - that's you and me, by the way - it has become an industry based on the breaking of human beings.

Sport is an opportunity to display bravery in public: a courage-op; and we who look on find it compelling and frequently edifying. I remember watching a super-heavyweight weightlifter set a new world record, and then Andrei Chemerkin of Russia, lifting last, had the weights increased to a level beyond even that. Then he showed the glorious strength and courage to lift it. This was at the Atlanta Olympic Games of 1996 and the entire hall was roaring in empathy with his giant effort.

It is absurd, perhaps even unfair, to ask such prodigious things of sporting performers, and yet we do it on a daily basis. We make still greater demands when it comes to the biggest tests of all. Always we are looking for ways to make life still harder for the athletes.

Anyone can catch a cricket ball. But when you're told that catching a cricket ball will earn you a million bucks, you might find it a little harder - even though you are twice as eager to catch it. Of course, some people find that extra difficulty an inspiration: and that's the sort of thing we are looking for when we set these extraordinary tests for our athletes.

It's like walking along a kerbstone. Most of us can manage to do this when the drop to the gutter is two or three inches. It would be a different matter if the drop was 3000 feet.

Reality television shows are all about trying to torment people: to make them cry on television, to make them crack up in public. Call it Masterchef Syndrome. Well, it may be cruel, but the participants choose to be there. If you don't like the heat the solution is in your hands.

But the greatest reality TV ever devised is sport. Sport brings us Garry Sobers hitting six sixes in an over; and for every such wonder, there's always a Malcolm Nash at the other end, the poor bowler who will always be remembered for that, rather than for his worthy career in cricket with nearly 1000 first-class wickets.

Hardly surprising, then, that there is always something a little odd about great performers in sport. They live in circumstances cruelly devised to test them to their limits. Those who achieve genuine greatness are never satisfied by victory, and are only ever inspired by humiliation. They must have no compunction whatsoever about inflicting humiliation on someone else.




In sport we search for drama and misery © AFP

Sometimes they are asked to do one extraordinary thing on one very special day: like a World Cup final, like competing at the Olympic Games. Sometimes they are asked to do the same thing again and again, day after day, for weeks, even years, on end.

The best of these are asked to produce both kinds of courage: the enduring kind and the kind that responds to the greatest of tests. Yet we are surprised, and sometimes contemptuous, when these people fail, or show themselves wanting in certain areas.

Thus the England cricket team fell apart. It seemed that the only thing that unified them was their hatred of Kevin Pietersen. So they got rid of him and found that they couldn't cope without him either. Sport tears people apart and it does so because it's supposed to.

Some teams find inspiration in the most difficult circumstances, as Imran Khan's cornered tigers did when Pakistan won the 1992 World Cup in Australia. Sometimes circumstances find the most unlikely of heroes: who would have tipped Roger Binny to be the hero at the World Cup in 1983?

The fact is that sport is vicious, vindictive and unfair. And if it wasn't, it wouldn't be any fun. Thus at the end of any great event there are always casualties, and often enough, the casualty is celebrating victory. Often the greatest success is the undoing of the person who achieves it.

Sport feeds on its victims: gourmandises on them. There's a passage in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, in which the narrator has to consider publishing a vicious review of a new book. "So far as I was concerned the juggernaut of critical opinion must be allowed to take its irrefragable course. If too fervent worshippers… were crushed to death beneath the pitiless wheels of its car, nothing could be done. Only their own adoration of the idol made them so vulnerable."

Sport is about exactly the same process.

Monday 21 October 2013

Robert Fisk: It took decades for truth to be revealed in Algeria. How long will it take Syria?

ROBERT FISK in The Independent


Algeria’s ‘timid’ historians shy away from revealing the ugly truths about war


Major General Jamaa Jamaa was not a popular man in Beirut. One of Syria’s most senior intelligence officers in Lebanon until the withdrawal of Bashar al-Assad’s troops in 2005, he was headquartered in the run-down Beau Rivage Hotel in west Beirut and also in the Bekaa town of Anjaar, where Lebanese men would be taken for interrogation and later emerge – or not emerge at all – sans teeth or nails.  He was a loyal, ruthless apparatchik for Bashar’s father Hafez, and his mysterious killing last week in the Syrian war provoked no tears in Beirut.  The UN had interviewed Jamaa about the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri whose 2005 assassination brought about the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon.  But how did Jamaa die?  Syrian state television would say only that he was “martyred while carrying out his national duties to defend Syria and its people and pursuing terrorists (sic) in Deir el-Zour”.

All kinds of rebel groups – including, of course, the equally ruthless al-Qa’ida affiliates – wanted to add his name to their “kills”.  He was shot in the head by a sniper in the eastern Syrian oil town.  Jamaa was also killed, we were informed, by a booby-trap, and blown up by a suicide bomber.  All that we can be sure of is that his remains, such as they were, were taken for burial in the village hills above Lattakia where he was born.  How long before we know the truth?

I am brought to this question by the secrecy which still smothers the 1954-62 Algerian-French war of independence where a cruel French regime of occupation fought a war against an equally cruel and determined Algerian resistance, primarily led by the National Liberation Front, the FLN. French officers indulged in an orgy of torture while their Algerian opposite numbers slaughtered each other – as well as the French – in a Stalinist purge of thousands of their own followers suspected of collaborating with the French occupation. For decades, the French refused to discuss this most dishonourable of wars – censoring their own television programmes if they dared talk of torture – while the subsequent FLN dictatorship only published infantile accounts of the heroism of their “martyr” cadres. The French, you see, were fighting “terrorism”.  The FLN were fighting a brutal, Gaullist regime.

The parallels are, of course, not exact. But over the past months, a remarkable phenomenon has made its appearance in Algeria.  Dozens of elderly Algerian maquisards from the conflict that ended just over half a century ago, have turned up at small publishing houses in Algiers and Oran with  private manuscripts, containing frightening accounts of the savage war in which they fought and in which their officers tortured and massacred and assassinated their own comrades. Rival Algerian resistance groups – not unlike the “Free Syrian Army” and their Islamist rebel enemies in northern Syria today – also slaughtered each other.

Take, for example, the death of Abane Ramdane. The “architect” of the Algerian revolution, a friend of the French philosopher and revolutionary Franz Fanon, organizer of the Soummam congress which created the first independent Algerian leadership in 1956, Ramdane – a man almost as keen on his own personality as he was on the classless revolution he helped initiate – was assassinated in Morocco the following year, allegedly by the French.  For decades, he was extolled as a martyr who had “died under French bullets”.  But now a former member of the FLN has dared to suggest the names of his real killers:  Krim Belkacem, head of the FLN’s third wilaya (district) and later a minister of defence and foreign affairs in the newly independent government of Algeria;  Abdelhafid Boussouf, the vicious “father of intelligence” in all the Algerian wilayas, who condemned many of his own comrades to death;  and Lakhdar Ben Tobbal, a guerrilla leader who later negotiated with the French at Evian.

Then there’s the sinister figure of Si Salah, head of wilaya 4, who was persuaded – by French intelligence, although he did not know this – that hundreds of his own men were collaborators. On Si Salah’s personal instructions, almost 500 of his comrades were tortured to death or executed. But Si Salah, fearful that the FLN’s military wing might be defeated by the French, secretly opened negotiations with De Gaulle – and was then himself assassinated, supposedly by the French, but almost certainly by the FLN. The French investigative journalist, Pierre Daum, has spoken of the “extreme timidity of Algerian historians”, and recounted how one Algerian publisher said he lacked the courage to print a book on the infiltration of the FLN. 

“In 2005, this guy came to see me,” the publisher told Daum. “I refused his manuscript because it was filled with names, ‘X tortured Y’, and so on.  Imagine the children of a ‘martyr’ – who believe their father died under French gunfire – discovering that he perished under Algerian torture!”

The real story of the much more recent Algerian war – between the Islamists and the government in the 1990s (total deaths 250,000, a hundred thousand more than in Syria today) – still cannot be told by Algerian historians.  It has been left to today’s Algerian novelists to cloak facts in fiction in order to reveal the truths of this terrible conflict. One such tale – a real incident – is recalled in a novel. A junior officer in the Algerian army, it seems, was discovered to have betrayed his comrades to Islamist rebels. His wife and children were summoned from their village and taken by military helicopter to the barren hillside where the captured soldier was being held.  And there, in front of his family, the man was tied to a tree, doused with petrol, and burned alive.

How long must we wait, then, for the secrets buried beneath the rubble of the Syrian war?

Wednesday 5 September 2012

Some cruelest foods


Menaka Gandhi in Mathrubhumi

In the last 5 years meat eating has risen to the highest levels it has ever been. The reason for this is that India is, thanks to TV, turning non-vegetarian. Soon we will lose the magic and mystery of India, the soul and the gurus who have kept it alive, and become just another struggling, boring nation full of viciousness. According to the Mahabharata, the Kalyug started on the day that man discovered he could eat his fellow creatures. From there it was a short step to wars, slavery and wickedness to all humans.

All animals that are grown for meat are raised, trucked and killed with extreme cruelty. But man has taken unkindness to an art form. Let me give you a list of the cruelest foods. I am sure I can give you at least 100, but let me start with ten.

1. A Japanese dish , Ikizukuri means 'prepared alive'. It is the preparation of fresh raw meat, usually of fish, cut into thin slices made from live seafood and served as sashimi. The victims are fish, octopus, shrimp, and lobster. You choose the animal. The chef uses his skills to partially gut and cut the animals up and serve it. He must cut the fish without killing it. With its heart exposed and beating, gills still working, trying to gasp for air and painfully conscious while its body is being cut up. Often the chef will take the pieces he cut from the fish and 'reassemble' them like some nightmarish jigsaw puzzle. The Chinese have Yin Yang Fish, which involves dipping the living fish into oil and frying it alive, but again just enough that it is still living right up until you plunge your fork into it and put it wriggling into your mouth.
2. Ortolan is a tiny songbird native to most European countries and west Asia. It is about six inches long and weighs just four ounces. The French capture these birds alive, blind them using a pair of pincers and then squeeze them into tiny cages where they cannot move. The bird is fed millets, grapes and figs till it reaches 4 times its size. Then it is drowned in a liquor called Armagnac, roasted whole and eaten, bones and all, while the diner drapes his head with a linen napkin to preserve the aroma of the brandy – and probably to hide from God.
3. 'Foie Gras' means 'fatty liver,' and it comes from ducks or geese. Adult ducks and geese are taken to a dark room and put in fowl coffins. A long metal pipe is shoved down the bird's oesophagus and a machine pumps pounds of fat greased corn mix directly into their digestive systems, which then gets deposited in their livers. This goes on till their livers reach six times their normal size. The birds writhe in pain for three weeks but they are stuck in boxes where they cannot even spread their wings. Then their throats are cut and the cancerous liver taken out and sold as a delicacy for rich people.
4. This is a dish invented by people who are known for their culinary cruelty – the Japanese. The victims are baby Dojo loaches (Mudfishes). The recipe calls for boiling water. When the water is heating up, a block of soyabean tofu is placed in the vessel. The baby loaches are added and they try to escape being boiled alive by plunging straight into the still cold tofu. The tofu starts cooking and the little fish are cooked alive inside it. The final product resembles Swiss cheese, the holes created by panicked baby loaches trying to escape boiling water.
5. A product of that other compassionate civilization, the Chinese who brought it to Tibet – or vice versa - Feng Gan Ji means 'wind dried chicken.' The chicken is not killed. Its stomach is sliced open and its intestines are cut out and replaced with spices and herbs as stuffing. The stomach is sewn up again in the still living bird and it is then strung upside down to die and dry in the wind.
6. Another dish known in China as Huo Jia Lu meaning 'Live Donkey'. The animal has its legs tied and its body held down, while the cook cuts its body and serves it immediately to the diners who quietly eat it among the ear splitting cries of the animal. The flesh is actually eaten raw without cooking. The diner uses a special fork and spoon to scoop out some of the flesh from the donkey. The meat is dipped into the fresh red blood before it is eaten. A variation of this dish is called Jiao Lu Rou ('Water Donkey Meat'), where the donkey's skin is pulled off and boiling water poured on its raw flesh until it is cooked.
7. Nagaland has its dog variation. A dog is tied to a tree and kept hungry for a week. It is then given a bucket of rice, lentils and vegetables to eat. It stuffs itself. It is then turned upside down and its stomach split open while alive and the food scooped out and eaten.
8. Nothing like eating your own relatives. A monkey is forcibly pulled to the dining table, tightly bound with hoops over its hands and legs. One of the diners uses a hammer to create a hole in the live monkey's head. Its cracked skull opens from its head and the diners use a stick to extract the brain. The monkey usually screams terribly before dying. Diners use their spoons to scrape through the bloody monkey's brain. Others dip the raw brain into a herb soup in order to add to the aroma while eating.
9. We in the Northeast have another amazing way to eat the most intelligent and emotional animal on the planet – the pig. A sharp iron rod is poked through the pig's anus and pushed in till it comes out through the mouth , tearing up all the organs on the way. The still living pig is then roasted over a fire.
10. Another popular Far Eastern dish - a newly born rodent and a selection of vegetables are brought to the table. The diner uses a special skewer to stab the live rodent. The rodent, who cannot bear the pain of being pierced, squeals as it is impaled on the skewer. The diner dips the still-live rodent into the boiling oil and then eats it.

Next week I will tell you 10 more. Put yourself in the animal's place.

I cannot imagine the people who enjoy this – and then believe that praying to the gods will result in something good for themselves.

Sunday 5 February 2012

An Ode to India's Batting Triumvirate







Show me a hero, wrote novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I will write you a tragedy. Sporting heroes come pre-loaded with the tragedy gene. A Muhammad Ali who goes one fight too far, a Kapil Dev who is carried around till he breaks a record, a Michael Schumacher who returns to the scenes of his triumphs but as an also-ran—sport is cruel. The sportsman’s dilemma is simply stated: should he retire when the performances sag or give it one last shot so he can go out on a high? At either end of the performance scale, the temptation is to carry on—either to prove yourself worthy, or to establish there is life in the old dog yet.

Australia’s Ricky Ponting was on the verge of being dropped when he made a century and then a double against India, and must be wondering now how far he ought to push. His inspiration to continue playing, Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid, are probably wondering too. They have had phases before when nothing went right, but it was business as usual soon enough.

Last year, Dravid made more runs than anybody else in world cricket; the previous year, that record belonged to Tendulkar. Great sportsmen hate to go gentle into that good night; they, like fans on their behalf, rage against the dying of the light. For over a decade-and-a-half, these two, V.V.S. Laxman and the oldest of the group, Sourav Ganguly, gave India their best batting line-up, their greatest victories and their top ranking in world cricket.

Tendulkar made his debut in the same year as the Berlin Wall fell; Nelson Mandela was still in jail, and Mike Tyson was the world heavyweight champion. Now pieces of the Berlin Wall decorate homes of tourists who have visited the site, Mandela has graduated from being a president to a concept, and no one knows who the heavyweight champion is. But Tendulkar plays on, a boyish eminence grise in a country whose average age is nearly the number of years he has been an international cricketer.

Pundits have been calling for the heads of the champions, but what is startling is the reaction of the average fan. That no effigies were burnt and no players’ houses stoned after the Australia tour suggests a level of indifference that is painful to behold.

Clearly, we are in the mourning period; in sport, mourning sometimes precedes the end. But mourning can also be a period of celebration. These cricketers have meant something special to a nation shaking free the coils of mediocrity in so many fields and emerging self-confident and ready to take on the world on its own terms.

At 18, V.V.S. Laxman decided to give himself four years to make it as a cricketer; plan B was a career in medicine, the profession of his parents and many relatives. At 22, Rahul Dravid told a friend, “I do not want to be just another Test cricketer; I want to be bracketed with Sunil Gavaskar and G.R. Vishwanath.” Sachin Tendulkar was 17 when he responded to the standard query on the distractions of big money thus: “I will never forget that it is my success on the field that is the cause of the riches off it.”

 How distant the 1990s seem now. A new India was dawning. A feted finance minister breathed life into the vision of a prime minister whose version of glasnost and perestroika was filed under the less romantic label of “market reforms”. Politicians tend to make poor poster boys of their own reforms. Happily, Tendulkar presented himself as the candidate.

It all seems ordained now, but that is only time imposing order and meaning to events. Tendulkar had everything—he was a Test cricketer at 16, and by 19 had made centuries in both England and Australia. He was so obviously mama’s boy—the manager on his first tour of England, Bishan Bedi, spoke of how all the older women wanted to mother him and the younger ones seduce him—and patently non-controversial. And he had the best straight drive in the business; and in the early days a fierce way of handling the short-pitched delivery that reduced those fielding on the leg side boundary to mere ball boys and collectors of the cricket ball from the crowd.

Received wisdom is that India’s climb to the top of the rankings began with that epic Calcutta Test against Steve Waugh’s Australians, who had won their previous 16 Tests in a row. Laxman’s 281 and the 376-run partnership with Dravid ensured India won the match after following on.

The more likely candidate for the turnaround is the Headingley Test of 2002. India won the toss on a seaming track made-to-order for the England bowlers. Nine times out of ten, they would have, as a defensive measure, fielded first on winning the toss. But this was a new India and new captain Ganguly decided to bat. India played two spinners and didn’t pick opener S.S. Das who had made 250 against Essex in their previous match, preferring Sanjay Bangar for his medium pace bowling and adhesive batting.

It worked. India made over 600, with centuries from Tendulkar, Dravid and Ganguly, and won by an innings. It was reward for boldness, imagination and supreme self-confidence.

For a decade and more, that middle order (now strengthened by the arrival at the top of Virender Sehwag) planted the Indian flag on grounds all over the world—at Leeds and Adelaide, Multan and Harare, Kingston, Johannesburg, Nottingham, Perth, Galle and Colombo.

Individual records came as byproducts of team efforts. Tendulkar’s driving on either side of the wicket was sheer joy. As a 16-year-old, he attacked the leg spinner Abdul Qadir, hitting him for 27 runs in an over. It wasn’t an official international, but it brought together the batsman’s impetuosity and creativity in one nice packet. He was actually beaten in flight once, but trusted his instinct and his forearms to hit high into the crowd.

Where were you when Tendulkar made his Test debut? In India, opposition parties were coming together under the banner of the National Front and projecting V.P. Singh as the “clean” alternative to prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. V.P. Singh took charge while the Indian team was in Pakistan, and Tendulkar was taking his first steps towards cricketing immortality. Those not yet born when Tendulkar made his debut are well over the voting age now.
It is a difficult idea to get your head around—the idea that one individual has been a part of our national consciousness for so long. For those who see everything in black and white, it is easy to ask for the heads of our cricketers; the ingratitude of fans is a running theme in sport. But Tendulkar, Dravid and Laxman have an influence well beyond runs made and victories achieved.
For one, it is entirely possible that Indian cricket itself might have taken a long time to recover from the match-fixing allegations a decade ago. Skipper Mohammed Azharuddin confessed to having manipulated results and without the obvious integrity of men like Dravid and Laxman, and those who have retired like Ganguly, Anil Kumble, Javagal Srinath and Venkatesh Prasad, the game might have been destroyed.

Significantly, these batsmen brought to the game an Indianness, the inherited technique and uniqueness of a nation that is sometimes reduced to the cliche, ‘oriental magic’. You can bowl to Laxman anywhere you want, and he will use his wrists to send it between fielders on either side of the wicket. There is no apparent effort, only the most elegant of bat swings, visually all curves and gentle arcs. Laxman’s bat makes no angles to the wind.

Dravid, the man who chose to “walk” when on 95 on his debut at Lord’s, formed a wonderful relationship with Laxman. They have taken over 300 catches between them at slips, and they relax, as Dravid explained, “by talking about our families, the plumbers and carpenters when we were building houses and so on”. When you saw a serious look on the ever smiling face of vvs at slip, it was probably because he had just realised that plumbers in Hyderabad charged more than those in Bangalore. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the camaraderie, and the fact that nearly every catch was taken.

These three players have played 118 Tests with each other. For Tendulkar and Dravid, make that 146. That’s nearly two years in number of days, and if you add the one-day matches, the travel, practice days and camps to that, that’s more days spent in each other’s company than many couples stay married.

Dravid has scored more runs for India than Tendulkar in the same period, a statistic that is not widely known or appreciated. One of the great sights in recent years has been his authoritative square cut or the pull that brooked no response, played while his helmet dripped honest sweat over a long innings. Year after year, we believed when he was batting that god was in his heaven and all was right with the world.

In their growing years, players make huge sacrifices, leading an almost monastic life, the focus on the game and nothing else. By the late 30s, when other professionals—the accountants and managers who do not cause a nation to stand up and demand their resignation—are looking to settle down, the life of a sportsman is over. Your brief career is done, but you have a lot of life left. How do you cope if you are not into the media or coaching or the cauldron of politics known as cricket administration? Especially since cricket is all you know. At 30, Tendulkar was asked what his favourite book was, and he answered with child-like charm, “I haven’t started reading yet.”

The players may not fully understand their future yet; but ironically, we do not fully understand their present (or past) either. The Owl of Minerva, wrote Hegel, “spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk”. We understand a historical condition just as it passes away. In the next couple of years, as we come to a greater understanding of what Tendulkar and company meant to us, let us not regret anything crass in the manner their twilight years were handled. Indianness and integrity have been important aspects of the cricket of the threesome. Indian cricket needs to handle such stalwarts with dignity and maturity.

There is a sense that an Indian team will change from being an old-fashioned one (in terms of behaviour, “old-fashioned” is a compliment) into a modern, unimaginative one where joy, sorrow, exasperation, irritation, ecstasy, sense of achievement, aggression, love and all emotions are expressed with a four-letter word or its many Indian versions involving close relatives. Virat Kohli is a superb batsman and a future India captain, but his response on getting to a century in Adelaide was juvenile. The Kohlis and others like him need to learn from the earlier generation about self-respect and respecting the game itself.

Not that the older lot have been pussycats, rolling over to be tickled. Initially, Dravid’s shyness was mistaken for weakness, but not after he responded to an Allan Donald taunt in the course of his first century in South Africa. The Bangalore boy told the fastest bowler in the world to assume an impossible anatomical posture, not in those words exactly, but in a crisp, short phrase.

The message went home not only to that bowler but to all bowlers around the world. No one tried riling either Dravid or the other two again.

Indian cricket may be at the crossroads; the retirement of the great players will see the end of a civilisation as we know it. But the Tendulkars, Dravids and Laxmans—seen by many as part of the problem now—can easily be part of the solution. India’s next series outside the subcontinent is in Zimbabwe in July 2013. Then come the series in SA and New Zealand. Time enough to rebuild.
Not so long ago, we used to canonise our heroes. The modern method is to spit at them. Our great players deserve better.


(Suresh Menon is editor, Wisden India Almanack, and author of Bishan: The Portrait of a Cricketer.)