Lucky Dip

by Girish Menon

Shiv is in a bind

Got no more options

Throws the ball to the leggie

Abdul save me from my plight

What should I do skip?

Flight or darts?

The game will be lost

In a jiff or in time

Do what you please

Take a risk if you wish

Take the field that you want

Save me from my fate

I will be deposed

My record exposed

Personally divorced

Abdul, take the risk

You don't have to worry

It is my flutter

Just get me a winner

Abdul flights the ball

Six runs to win

Twelve balls to play

Three wickets left

The ball slips from his grip

Dips and hits a divot on the pitch

Shoots along the mud

Hits the batter on his foot

The ump raises his finger

The crowd is happy

The experts begin to rave

At the great bowling change

I still have some hope

My record intact

My family safe

The match is won soon after

The experts sing my praise

The cup is saved

I will remain captain again

  

Many wins follow

Folks call me the greatest

Skipper and tactician

That ever played

But if it was not for Abdul

And the divot on the pitch

Daily I’d be walking to Tesco

To buy a lucky dip.

Only successful people can afford a CV of failure

Sonia Sodha in The Guardian

A Princeton professor’s frankness hides the grim reality about work for many young people

 

Students at Princeton University. Photograph: Mel Evans/AP



‘One of the most strangely inspirational things I’ve ever read.” “This is a beautiful thing.” These aren’t plaudits about the latest Booker shortlist, but some of the praise directed at a “CV of failure” published by Princeton professor Johannes Haushofer. I have to confess that when I heard about the failure CV, I too thought it was a lovely idea. But when I read it, while it’s clearly very well intentioned, it made me feel a little uncomfortable. Professor Haushofer explains at the top of his CV that most of what he tries fails, but people only see the success, which “sometimes gives others the impression that most things work out for me”. The failures he lists include not getting into postgraduate programmes at Cambridge or Stanford, not getting a Harvard professorship and failing to secure a Fulbright scholarship.

I’m sure this was aimed at a small group of his students, to demonstrate that even successful professors get papers rejected by academic journals, but I suspect that the overwhelmingly positive reaction the CV has received in academic circles and on social media tells us more about our idealised view of success than the reality.

Those who are most successful have an understandable interest in emphasising that they got there through old-fashioned grit, persevering in the face of failure, never letting setbacks beat them down. Quite frankly, it’s a far more attractive way to package success than sharing a story of how it just happened to fall in your lap or how your innate abilities are so brilliant that they effortlessly propelled you to the top. Our favourite success story goes: sure, I may have some natural advantages, but I’m essentially like you, I just worked really hard to get where I am.

This also has the advantage of fitting the narrative that we want young people to buy. Work hard, keep plugging away and success will be round the corner. If you don’t put the effort in you won’t get there. It’s supported by the theory of success documented by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers: people with exceptional expertise have invariably invested at least 10,000 hours of practice.

Of course, this is an important life lesson. We don’t want young people thinking that success is a matter of luck, otherwise they might feel like packing up and going home rather than slogging their guts out at school. There’s no question that effort is often correlated with success. but there there’s a serious danger that in patting ourselves on the back in sharing lessons about failure, we miss out some hard truths about the world. It’s much easier to talk about failure from the vantage of success. Oh yes, I know I get to write columns for a newspaper, but did I tell you about failing my driving test three times?

Sure, that’s a little flippant but there are lots of times when failure doesn’t end in success, and those stories contain as many important truths about how the world works. Those stories are much harder to share: like most people, I’d find it much more painful and difficult to be open about failures in those areas of my life that I don’t consider a triumph than those that I do.

Taken to the extreme, the risk is that telling ourselves these nice stories of success in terms of trying, failing, learning and trying again makes us too complacent that that’s the way the world really works. Sometimes, it does. But not always. Recent research has discredited Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule, suggesting that practice accounts for just 12% of skill mastery and success. Buying too much into this myth in the face of the evidence undermines our understanding of a depressing and universal truth: the world is stacked against some young people before they’re even born.

 

Professor Johannes Haushofer said he had been judged by his successes. Photograph: Princeton University

I think it would be more useful for successful people to write a “CV of good fortune” than a “CV of failure”. A sort of: I’ve had much luck in my life: being born into a middle-class family and having any natural ability nurtured by my parents and then by the education system. It’s not to say that I can’t take any credit for any successes I might have had, but I think my own good fortune CV would contain more hard truths about how the world works than my failure CV.

Of course, good fortune CVs would send the wrong message to young people, who we want to be brimming with determination and resilience even when the world is stacked against them. We’ll never be able to eliminate the role that good fortune plays, but the flipside of encouraging young people to try, fail and try again is that we need to do much more to lessen its influence and to increase the relationship between effort and success.

Today’s labour market is tough enough for young people. Recession has hit their pay packets the hardest and it is not uncommon to find graduates working in a bar on a zero hours contract. Even while businesses complain about young people lacking employability skills, there is evidence that they are underinvesting in young people’s skills. On-the-job training has fallen in recent years and too many businesses have diverted government training subsidies for apprenticeships towards training that they would have been delivering anyway.
It’s only going to get tougher for some groups of young people. Yes, there will be new and exciting jobs in highly skilled careers we haven’t even dreamed of. But some growth sectors will be of a distinctly less glamorous sort, such as caring for our growing older population. These are currently low-skill, low-paid jobs, done mostly by women, held in low esteem. Yet there is a dearth of thinking about how we can make these jobs more fulfilling, better paid and more respected. It’s almost as if we’re hoping that the jobs at new frontiers of artificial intelligence will create enough trickle-down excitement to soften the blow for the young people who won’t get to do them.

Learning from failure is important but so is being able to get a job in which you’re invested in, supported to learn from your failures, and encouraged to progress. Yet we are reluctant to talk about the fact that, for too many young people, those jobs simply don’t yet exist when they reach the end of their education. It’s hard to see what good a failure CV will do them.

A CV of failure shows not every venture has a happy ending – and that’s OK

Julian Baggini in The Guardian


 

‘JK Rowling was a single mother on benefits, but others talked this up into a rags to riches fairy story.’ Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian


In my memory box I have a fine collection of rejection letters from editors and agents unimpressed with my first attempt at a book. Unsurprisingly, these mementoes of failure are the odd ones out in a collection that generally catalogues the highs rather than the lows of my life. We do not generally keep pictures of ex-partners from disastrous relationships on our mantelpieces, or photos of our sullen selves trapped inside a rain-swept, half-built motel.

But according to Princeton psychology professor Johannes Haushofer, we should do more to remember our failures. He has tweeted a CV of his setbacks, including lists of degree programmes he did not get into; papers that were rejected by journals; and academic positions, research funding and fellowships he did not get. Ironically, this little stunt has been a huge hit. “This darn CV of Failures has received way more attention that my entire body of academic work,” he said. Expect a TED talk and book to follow.

CV of failures: Princeton professor publishes résumé of his career lows


But the irony runs deeper. Haushofer probably would not have paraded his failures in the first place if he were not now a high-flying Princeton professor. Admitting to past defeats is easy if ultimately you have emerged the victor.

Haushofer’s confession has been praised as a breath of fresh air, a brave display of honesty. But sharing our past trials and tribulations is mainstream, not radical. No success story is complete without the chapter about overcoming adversity. Indeed, I often suspect that many people exaggerate their earlier problems in order to fit this standard narrative and if they don’t, others will do it for them. JK Rowling was a single mother on benefits, but others talked this up into a “rags to riches” fairy story. She has explicitly denied that she ever wrote in cafes to escape from an unheated flat, a story that never made much sense, given the price of a cappuccino in Edinburgh.

It is much harder to, if not celebrate, at least embrace failures when they are more than temporary setbacks. Would Hausfhofer have shared his list of rejections had they not been followed by acceptances? If so, he is braver and more honest than most. Increasingly our culture peddles the myth that with enough belief, determination, and perhaps even hard work, you can achieve anything you want. So if you do terminally fail, that can only mean that you have not tried, believed, or worked enough.

This is pernicious nonsense. The harder truth to accept is that success is never guaranteed. Luck plays its part, but there is also the simple fact that we do not know what we can achieve until we try. Success requires a happy coincidence of talent, effort and fortune, so if you try to do anything of any ambition, the possibility of failure is ever present. When our plans fail, there is no reason to think that necessarily reveals a deep failure in ourselves.

I’m not sure what I was thinking when I saved all those rejection letters. At the time, I didn’t know whether they would record mere setbacks or a thwarted ambition. But either way, they would have served a purpose. Had I not go on to have a writing career, they would have reminded me that I did at least try and that the reason I did not succeed was not for want of effort. That reminder would be sobering and humbling, which is why it would have been so valuable. If we are to go to our graves at peace with ourselves, we must be able to accept our disappointments and limitations as well as our successes.

Since I have gone on to earn my living by writing, I could wrongly take them to be proof of how my refusal to take no for an answer ensured that my talents were eventually recognised. The more honest way to see them is as evidence of how fortunate I was that eventually someone chose to take a punt on me.

In Hollywood, every failure simply serves to make the eventual success more inevitable. In real life, every past failure should be a reminder that a happy outcome was never guaranteed. Our failed relationships, terrible jobs and bad holidays reflect our characters and the reality of our lives at least as much as the good times, which often hang on a thread. Thinking more about our failures might just help us to be more grateful for the successes we enjoy and kinder to ourselves when, more often, they elude us.

How to improve your luck and win the lottery twice (possibly)

Richard Wiseman in The Guardian

A British couple have just won £1m in the EuroMillions lottery for a remarkable second time. In doing so, they have beaten odds of more than 283 billion-to-one. So are they exceptionally lucky, and is there anything we can all do to increase the chances of experiencing such good fortune?

British couple celebrate winning second £1m EuroMillions prize

 

Read more

A few years ago I conducted a large-scale investigation into luck. I studied the lives of more than 400 people who considered themselves exceptionally lucky or unlucky. There was remarkable similarity among the volunteers, with the lucky people always being in the right place at the right time, while the unlucky volunteers experienced one disaster after another.

I asked everyone to keep diaries, complete personality tests and take part in experiments. The results revealed that luck is not a magical ability or the result of random chance. Nor are people born lucky or unlucky.

Instead, lucky and unlucky people create much of their good and bad luck by the way they think and behave. For example, in one study we asked our volunteers to look through a newspaper and count the number of photographs in it. However, we didn’t tell them that we had placed two lucky opportunities in the newspaper. The first opportunity was a half-page advert clearly stating: “STOP COUNTING. THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER.” While a second advert later on said: “TELL THE EXPERIMENTER YOU’VE SEEN THIS AND WIN £150.”

The lucky people tended to be very relaxed, more likely to see the bigger picture, and so quickly spotted these opportunities. In contrast, the unlucky people tended to be very anxious, more focused on detail, and so missed the advertisments. Without realising it, both groups had created their own good and bad fortune.

Eventually we uncovered four key psychological principles at work in lucky people:

1. They create and notice opportunities by building a strong social network, developing a relaxed attitude to life, and being open to change.

2. They tend to often listen to their intuition and act quickly. In contrast, unlucky people tend to overanalyse situations and are afraid to act.

3. They are confident that the future will be bright, and these expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies because they help motivate lucky people to try even when the odds are against them. Unlucky people are sure that they will fail and so often give up before they have begun.

4. They are highly resilient, and keep going in the face of failure and learn from past mistakes. Unlucky people get dragged down by the smallest of problems and take responsibility for events outside of their control.

Lucky people tend to be very relaxed, more likely to see the bigger picture

In a second phase of the project, I wanted to discover whether it was possible to change people’s luck. I asked a group of 200 volunteers to incorporate the four key principles into their lives by thinking and behaving like a lucky person. The results were remarkable. Within a few months around two-thirds of the group became happier, healthier and more successful in their careers.

But is it possible to use these techniques to win the lottery? Unfortunately not. Lotteries are purely chance events, and no amount of wishful thinking will influence your chances of success. However, the good news is that being lucky in your personal life and career is far more important than winning the lottery.

Oh, and one last tip. If you are feeling bad about never hitting the jackpot, spare a thought for Maureen Wilcox who, in 1980, bought tickets for both the Massachusetts lottery and the Rhode Island lottery. Incredibly Maureen managed to choose the winning numbers for both lotteries. Unfortunately her Massachusetts numbers won the Rhode Island lottery and her Rhode Island numbers won the Massachusetts lottery. She didn’t win a penny.

Cricket, Poker, Luck and Skill

Chris Bradshaw in Wisden India

About the only thing that the Rio Casino in Las Vegas has in common with Lord’s is that it attracts a disproportionate number of men with a liking for bright red trousers. Superficially, there’s little in common between the home of the World Series of Poker and cricket’s traditional headquarters. Dig a little deeper though and there is a surprising amount that cricketers, and especially captains, can learn from their poker-playing counterparts.

Richie Benaud famously said: “Captaincy is 90 per cent luck, only 10 per cent skill – but don’t try it without the 10 per cent.” Despite being more of a horse-racing man than a card sharp (Benaud restricts himself to wagers on things that cannot speak), his adage sounds remarkably similar to something written by Doyle Brunson, one of the greatest poker players who has ever lived.

In his best-selling 1978 strategy book Super System: A Course In Power Poker, the two-time World Series of Poker Main Event winner wrote: “Poker is more art than science, that’s what makes it so difficult to master. Knowing what to do – the science – is about 10 per cent of the game. Knowing how to do it – the art – is the other 90 per cent.” Not identical to Benaud’s line but near enough to warrant a closer look.

Poker players loosely fit into two main playing styles. Tight players proceed cautiously and wait for the best hands. Loose players will play with any two cards. Taken to its extreme, a super-tight player would only play a pair of aces while a hyper-loose player would try his luck with anything, even 7-2 off suit, the worst starting hand in Texas hold ’em. Allied to the tight and loose tendencies are levels of aggression. Aggressive players are always on the front foot, looking to attack, while passive players tend to fear losing rather than trying to win.

In the long run, both tight and loose aggressive poker players can be successful. It’s possible, but much harder, for tight passive types to make much money. Loose passive players might as well set fire to their bankroll.

Those tendencies are often clearly visible on the cricket pitch. A tight captain will wait until he has a ridiculous lead before setting a declaration while a looser leader would dangle a carrot. Andrew Strauss was a prime example of a tight, aggressive captain. The commentary box moaners may not have liked his seemingly defensive fields but by employing a sweeper early in the innings – rather than having an extra slip, say – Strauss preferred to retain control rather than speculate. When and only when, the game was in his team’s favour would Strauss go on the attack.

Brendon McCullum, on the other hand, is much more akin to the loose aggressive poker player and willing to have a gamble. If he sets an attacking field and the ball flies through the vacant cover region to the boundary, so what? An unorthodox bowling change may mean conceding a few runs but it might also pick up a wicket. If the rewards are big enough, he’ll follow that hunch even if the results are costly if he’s proved wrong.

The flip side of that aggressive stance can be seen in any number of delayed England declarations and botched run chases. Take the home side’s 2001 capitulation to Pakistan at Old Trafford. Alec Stewart’s side went from tight aggressive to tight passive with disastrous results. With the score at 174 for one and needing another 196 runs from 45 overs for a famous victory, England lost a wicket then shut up shop. Instead of going for the win, they tried not to lose. One session and eight wickets later, Waqar Younis and co had tied the series.

***

The stereotype of the poker player as a fast-talking, cigar-chomping, road gambler is an outdated one. You’re far more likely to see a softly spoken Scandinavian wearing headphones and a hoodie in a top tournament these days rather than a Stetson-wearing Texan. Technology has transformed poker and the statistically-minded are in the ascendancy.

Virtually every professional poker player now uses a database to log every raise, every bet size, every fold, every call, every unexpected all-in move and just about everything else that happens at the online tables. Crunching the numbers to identify opposition weaknesses and their own technical deficiencies has become a crucial weapon for even semi-serious players of the game.

Cricket’s own statistical revolution has mirrored the one undergone by poker. Every delivery is tracked by an analyst, every shot monitored by a specialist coach and every potential technical frailty probed by the team’s brain trust. The captains in the Sky commentary box (what is the collective noun for a group of England captains? A disappointment? A grumble?) may say that a third man should be in place. The figures in black and white suggest otherwise.

Of course it’s all well and good for a team to have a plethora of stats at their disposal, but if they don’t know how to use them it can cause more confusion than clarity. Despite enjoying some recent success, England have been accused of producing teams full of cricketing automatons, unable to think on their feet or adapt in the face of changing circumstances. If the plan discussed in the dressing-room isn’t working, England’s C-3POs have often seemed too rigid to do anything about it. “The stats said we should bounce them out. We’ll carry on bouncing them, even though the ball is disappearing to the boundary twice an over.”

A good captain, like a good poker player, will use the stats but won’t be a slave to them. He will still trust his feel for the game to assess the strengths and weaknesses of his opponent.

The concept of pot odds is also one that is easily transferable to cricket. A poker player may have to pay to chase his straight or flush draw but if the odds are right, it becomes a mathematically correct move to make. It’s a risk, but in the long run the rewards justify taking that chance. Similarly, a bowler might dish up three half volleys, knowing that they’ll likely be despatched through an extra-cover region deliberately left vacant. The fourth delivery, a fraction shorter and a touch wider, gets nicked and is pouched by the slip fielder who could have been patrolling the covers. The bowler may have given up a few extra runs but has been rewarded with a wicket. A good poker player knows when to take a gamble as if he hits his outs, he’ll make a big profit. A cricket captain should be able to do the same.

“Play aggressively, it’s the winning way,” Brunson writes. Being aggressive isn’t a call to suddenly awaken your inner Merv and start mouthing off at the competition. It simply means taking control and dictating terms. “Timid players don’t win in high-stakes poker.” They rarely win at cricket either.

It sounds obvious but the great captains, like the best poker players, are always thinking one move ahead of their opponent. A successful poker player will recognise when to adapt as the conditions of the game alter. The arrival of a deep-stacked, ultra-loose player can completely change the dynamics of a table, just as a big-hitting tail-ender can totally change the momentum in cricket. An intuitive captain will know when to attack and when to hang back and wait for a more profitable opportunity. “Changing gears is one of the most important parts of playing poker. It means shifting from loose to tight play and vice versa,” writes Brunson.

Andrew Strauss was a prime example of a tight, aggressive captain – who would wait until he has a ridiculous lead before setting a declaration. © Getty Images

The same is true of players going on a hot streak and winning a number of pots in quick succession. “Your momentum is clear to all players. On occasions like this you’re going to make correct decisions and your opponents may make errors because they are psychologically affected by your rush.” Brunson could be writing about any captain whose side has inflicted a crippling batting collapse on the opposition.

To succeed, “you’ll need to get inside your opponent’s head,” writes Brunson. In the modern game, there has been no better exponent of this than Shane Warne (just ask poor Daryl Cullinan). Being able to turn a leg-break a yard was famously Warne’s greatest asset. His mastery of the dark arts of mental disintegration helped shape the aura that accompanied him wherever he played though, especially against England. Before every series there was talk of a new mystery delivery. The zooter, the clipper, whatever you want to call it. The new phantom ball rarely appeared but the seed had been planted, the trap set, the bluff laid. And Warne was ready to collect.

Of course a cricket skipper can utilise the team members he has at his disposal while a poker player rides solo. For Steve Waugh, having Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath in his side was like being dealt aces every hand. Aces make you a favourite, but they do get cracked if they’re not handled properly. Poker players are dealt duff hands most of the time. The best players get the best out of what they’ve been given.

Even though he’s now in his eighties, Brunson still manages to play in some of the biggest cash games around, with thousands of dollars at stake. Successful “old-school” players have welcomed the way the game has changed and adapted accordingly (you won’t hear a Truemanesque “I don’t know what’s going off out there” from Brunson). Like cricketing tactics, poker techniques have evolved over time. If Brunson played the same way now as he did when he won his first world title in 1976 he’d be eaten alive by the twentysomething maths geeks. The basic philosophies outlined in Super System still hold true though. The precise tactics may have changed but the instincts that served him so well at the start of his career continue to do so today.

The poker world these days is peppered with current and former sporting greats. Footballers Tony Cascarino and Teddy Sheringham have earned six-figure paydays on the tournament circuit. Rafa Nadal and Boris Becker act as ambassadors for a major online poker site. Given the storm surrounding match-rigging and spot-fixing, it’s probably understandable that most cricketers have steered clear. The obvious exception is Shane Warne, who regularly clears a couple of weeks from his commentary schedule to play at the World Series of Poker.

In a brief stint as captain of Australia’s one-day side Warne enjoyed great success, winning 10 out of 11 matches. The same formula brought IPL glory to the Rajasthan Royals and promotion and one-day success to Hampshire.

Ian Chappell once wrote that the leg-spinner who most resembled Warne was the feisty Australian Bill “Tiger” O’Reilly, a man who openly hated batsmen. “He thought they were trying to take the food out of his mouth and consequently he was ultra-aggressive in his efforts to rid himself of the competition,” wrote Chappell. “Warne had a similar thought process and he was constantly plotting the batsman’s downfall.” Sounds like ideal card-room strategy. It’s no wonder Warne’s now a pretty good poker player.

Mike Brearley’s The Art of Captaincy is usually the first book off the shelf for budding skippers. Potential leaders could do worse than making Super System their second.

Global tremors: bure sitare can bring bure din i.e. bad stars can bring bad days

Swaminathan Aiyer in the Times of India

Narendra Modi’s first six months in office reflected “achhe sitare” (lucky stars) more than “achhe din” (good days). But luck can turn nastily. Suddenly, dark global clouds over Russia (and maybe even China) signal the risk of “bure din” (bad days) ahead.

Is last week’s rouble collapse the start of a debacle like the 1997-99 Asian Financial Crisis? Will the Chinese slowdown end in a hard landing? The chances are probably no more than 10-15%, but India could suffer serious pain.

The 1997-99 crisis was sparked by the exit of foreign investors from all emerging markets, causing currencies and commodity prices to crash. Russia and other countries defaulted on foreign debt. The crisis spread globally, exposing all emerging markets as brothers in vulnerability.

Last week, the Russian rouble, once worth 30 to the dollar, collapsed to 70 before recovering a bit to 60. The slide began with western sanctions, was exacerbated by falling oil prices, but became a debacle only when panicky investors (and Russians) began fleeing roubles for dollars. This crisis is one of finance more than oil.

Other emerging market currencies have also fallen, from 5% for India to 15% for Turkey. Crashing oil prices threaten to bankrupt Venezuela and Nigeria. If any countries default on foreign debt, the contagion could infect many emerging markets (as in 1997).

China has slowed from 12% growth to a projected 7.5% this year. Even this estimate looks inflated, says analyst Ruchir Sharma: growth of car and electricity sales is just 2%, and demand growth for steel and oil is zero. This is the biggest reason for the halving of prices of iron ore, coal and oil. China’s high growth boosted all world economies in the 2000s. Its slowdown may sink them.

Indians are delighted with the fall in oil and food prices. Wholesale price inflation is zero. What’s not to like? Alas, if commodity prices fall enough to wreck important economies, panic can cause global finance to flee all emerging markets, sinking country after country. What started as a Thai financial crisis in 1997 snowballed into a gigantic collapse of all emerging economies. This caused India’s GDP and industrial growth to crash, many companies went bust, and the Sensex halved from its peak. The rupee fell from Rs 35 to 49 per dollar between 1997 and 2001.

Today, India and all other emerging markets today are much better prepared to face a financial crisis. They have substantial forex reserves, lower current account deficits and foreign debt ratios, and bigger contingency borrowing arrangements. Yet some (notably Russia, Nigeria and Venezuela) look vulnerable.

West Asian oil exporters are major destinations for Indian exports and labour, so crashing oil prices can mean a steep fall in India’s exports to and remittances from the Gulf. This will be offset by cheaper oil imports, but the equilibrium may be reached at a slower GDP growth rate.

Foreigners find western bond yields very low, and so have invested over $5 trillion in higher-interest bonds in emerging markets like India. But when the local currency begins to depreciate, bond investors rush out: their potential currency losses far outweigh potential gains from higher interest rates. That outflow was evident last week.

Global finance may be poised to exit from emerging markets anyway with the end of quantitative easing and expected rise in US interest rates in mid-2015. Remember, when the Fed indicated higher interest rate in August 2013, a tidal wave of dollars exited all emerging markets. This took the rupee from Rs 55 to Rs 68 per dollar and the Sensex crashed. That panic subsided in a few months. The Fed said it would not raise rates for quite some time. Money flooded back into India and other emerging markets in 2014. Modi’s victory and the promise of reform made India a global favourite, and dollars flowed in.

Can global events now spark another panicky outflow of 2013 magnitude, driving down the rupee and stock markets? It’s possible, though not probable. Of the $43 billion of foreign financial inflows in 2014, $36 billion went into bonds. So a bond outflow could be very large. India is much better paced to withstand this than it was last year, yet could suffer a lot.

Let’s not overdo alarmism. Today’s financial panic may subside and be reversed, just as in late 2013. The US Fed may decide not to raise interest rates in 2015 given ultra-low inflation. So, emerging market currencies and stock markets may rise again.

Yet we stand warned. Optimists like finance minister Jaitley predict 6.5% GDP growth for India next year.

But none should assume a painless upward path. We can hope for achhe din, but must prepare for the possibility of bure din.

An Ode to Pankaj Singh or The woeful world of Pankaj Singh

Jarrod Kimber in Cricinfo

Lawrence Booth, editor of Wisden, met Pankaj Singh in a lift. They talked about Pankaj's day, which turned into Pankaj's luck. It was exactly the sort of conversation you would expect from any bowler in the world when talking about a wicketless day. At the end, Pankaj left Booth with the words: "That is cricket".

****

There is a ball that Pankaj Singh bowled in the IPL that hit the pitch and cleared the keeper's head. That is a combination of pace and bounce. He also has swing. Lovely curling outswing that he can maintain even with an older ball. Then there is his offcutter. That makes him a bowler who can move the ball both ways, get bounce and bowl in the mid-80s mph.

His action is uncomplicated and rugged. His body seems to have been chipped from solid stone. His wrist position at release is good. He has got a smart bowling brain. He works with his captain on his fields. He works batsmen out. He bowls to plans. He is willing to do grunt work.

This is an international bowler. And for the last ten years he has been a domestic bowler. This Test may send him back there.

****

If you were playing Indian Quick Bowler Bingo, Pankaj would go close to completing your sheet. He played U-19 cricket for India, went to the MRF pace factory, was a quick bowler, became a slower swing bowler, played one ODI, toured Australia without bowling a ball and then went about playing some IPL.

Pankaj is not a good IPL bowler. He averages 33 with the ball; he goes at over 8 an over. When you YouTube an Indian bowler's name, you generally just find clips of them disappearing into riotous, crowds. Pankaj has a large selection of them. It's not his format. So there is no hype for him.

Between his tour of Australia and this tour, India have used roughly 43 million other fast bowlers. Despite the fact that year after year Pankaj is near the top of the wicket-takers list in first-class cricket. Despite the fact that he has helped Rajasthan win the Ranji Trophy. Despite the fact he is obviously just a really good cricketer.

His one ODI game was in the Zimbabwean Triangular series of 2010, which was a tournament so useless, relocated witnesses running from the mob could have sat openly in the stands and not been found. His first ball almost took the edge of Upal Tharanga. But he ended with no wickets that day as well. He disappeared off India's radar so completely that he might as well have been in a witness relocation programme.

****

Cricket Journalists ooze cynicism from every single pore of their being. It's the first thing you're asked about when you apply for the job. So it's rare that they get behind someone with match figures of 0 for 179. Usually that would invoke snide remarks, casual jokes and general chuckles. Something about Pankaj meant they didn't do that.

Cries of "Get Pankaj on", "Give Pankaj a bowl", "Come on Pankaj" were heard as Pankaj thudded around the outfield. Sure, they still laughed when he fell over fielding the simplest ball. But no one thought he deserved the worst figures ever by a debutant. No one thought he hadn't been unlucky. No one wanted the loveable lug to fail.

Even on Twitter where snark is king, people just seemed to feel sorry for him.

"@reverse_sweeper Please, someone give Pankaj a hug. Is there a backroom guy for that?"

"‪@SpiceBoxofEarth Would be a real shame if Pankaj Singh was judged on just his figures alone. This has been a very decent debut. "

"Yogesh ‏@YOGESHBOND The Oscar for making the unluckiest debut ever in tests goes to pankaj singh.. This guy needs a jaadu ki jhappi.. #UnluckyPankaj "

"Mark Pougatch ‏@markpougatch I'm not alone am I in really wanting Pankaj Singh to get a wicket?"

He is the MHMOTS (Most huggable man of the series).

****

A right arm bowler coming around the wicket to a left hand batsman that can take the ball away is quite a skill. Few can do it. Pankaj can. He angles the ball in, Cook pushes at it as it seams away. His pace and bounce ensure it carries to slip. But Jadeja doesn't take it.

Later Dhoni will try one of his leg slip traps to Ballance. To help make it work, Pankaj bowls the perfect inswinger on middle stump which Ballance gets enough bat on for it just to drop short of leg slip.

At the 80 over mark, Pankaj is promoted to new ball bowler status. Reward for being the best bowler of the day. Then he placed a ball on leg stump. Every single batsman in the world knew that meant it was slipping down leg. But it didn't slip down, it didn't even straighten, it came back towards middle. It was the ball swing bowlers wet dream over. It could not have been more perfect.

Pankaj appealed.

He appealed like he was trying to feed his family, his village, and every single person he had ever met. It was about as emotive as a human being could be. It was the closest any human being had ever been to making themselves explode. He wanted a wicket, he deserved a wicket, every single molecule that went into this impressive chunk of cricketer pleaded for a wicket.

Not out.

****

Rohit Sharma got a wicket with a ball that missed the bat. Moeen Ali got one from a half tracker. And Ravi Jadeja, the man who cost Pankaj a wicket, and perhaps India a Test, took one with a half tracker down the legside that if you received it in the nets you would catch it and throw it back.

****

Pankaj did not bowl overs full of the sweetest peaches at all times, he also bowled poorly. He couldn't group the ball together enough. He got tired. And when England attacked he didn't seem to have many answers.

The worst was Buttler. Buttler 'Bryce McGained' Pankaj. In five balls he took 20 runs. Pankaj probably won't remember much more than a front leg clearing and a bat flying through. But the 20 runs in that over in England's first innings was the 20 runs that helped him fly past Sohail Khan and Bryce McGain as the worst-ever bowling figures by a debutant in Test cricket history.

If he was unlucky not to get a wicket, then we need a new word to describe that achievement.

****

There are many small things to like about Pankaj. On day one, it was his nipples. Which were probably the best seam bowling nipples seen in England's South. He is also an unusually violent ball shiner. His throwing style is more like that of the local butcher playing a club game that a professional athlete. He doesn't stop balls in the field as much as runs along beside them. His shirt is often untucked. He is an older player who has earned his position through deeds. His running often makes it look like his shoulders are too big for him to stay upright. And he bats like a proper 1930s tailender.

Pankaj is part of a small club of cricketers who have been stumped facing a seamer with the keeper standing back. It happened because he wanted to sledge Ajit Agarkar for bouncing him. You have to commend him for standing up for himself against a senior player like Agarkar. You have to laugh at him for getting stumped while he did it.

When Pankaj was asked what he would do with a million dollars, he said he would build schools, improve infrastructure and find jobs for his village. In almost every way he is a thoroughly lovable big lump of lad who has spent years trying to make it.

****

There is brief excitement in the eyes of Pankaj as he sees another ball take the outside of Cook's bat. The ball flies in the air towards a well set double gully trap. Had Mohammed Shami bowled the ball, it could have probably nestled into the hands of one of them. But this is Pankaj, so the excitement quickly becomes pain, then acceptance.

For a few seconds, he stares in the direction of the ball, even though it has been returned. He waits for Dhoni to say something, but nothing comes. Then he turns, a turn so heavy you can hear it from 100 metres away, and he gingerly walks back to the umpire, Rod Tucker, who is smiling sympathetically. It is the smile of a man who spent 103 first-class matches bowling luckless spells. Tucker says something and gives his cap back.

Pankaj walks alone towards the boundary. None of his team mates go over, the time for encouragement has passed. They know he has probably bowled his last ball this match, and possibly the last of his entire Test career. He fields one more ball, and then walks off the ground to get some treatment. No one claps, no one pats him on the back, he just moves through the few spectators and support staff, three stairs at a time.

Just as he is about to disappear into the changeroom, he takes off his cap and slams it on his leg.

That is cricket.

Australian Cricket: hubris, despair, panic

Clarke and Co find themselves where England were in the 1990s. But how did the two nations fall into such a state?

Ed Smith

July 24, 2013

	Sport suffers from the delusion that great leaders can change everything about their circumstances. They cannot © Getty Images  Enlarge
Related Links Players/Officials: Michael Clarke | Darren Lehmann Series/Tournaments: Australia tour of England and Scotland Teams: Australia | England

I have been watching Michael Clarke, but the shadows I see following him around - to my eyes, anyway - resemble the ghosts of old English nightmares.

When Clarke stood at slip on the third day at Lord's, with the match over as a contest but unmercifully drawn out as a spectacle, he experienced what every captain dreads. He could move the deckchairs, but the boat was sinking. He could change the bowling, but it would be determined by a sense of fairness and sharing the burden rather than to swing the match; he could set new fields, but more to protect pride rather than ensnare opponents; and, worst of all, he had to weigh up how fully to engage in captaining the fielding effort, and how much emotional energy to preserve for when his turn to bat came around. Captaining the team, captaining your own mood, managing defeat, managing the draining away of hope.

I bumped into Mike Brearley during the long afternoon slaughter and we agreed: no captain, so far behind in the match and still awaiting a slim chance to save the match with his own bat, can captain flat out in the field all day. He inevitably dips in and out of full engagement, the long spells of routine steadiness in which he preserves emotional energy interspersed with shorter bursts of activity and invention designed partly just to keep up his own sense of interest and alertness. And what emotional outlook should you adopt? Is it easier to retain optimism and be perpetually let down? Or better to accept the inevitable, release the burden of pretence, and just wait to bat with coolly detached precision?

And that is why the shadows looked so English to my eyes. I thought of Michael Atherton and Nasser Hussain, hurling their considerable competitiveness and intelligence at the effort to win the Ashes - pick any moment you like, really, between 1993 and 2002-03 - and ending up exhausted, holding a losing hand of cards, looking within once again, wondering how much more they still had left to give when called upon to bat.

Clarke, when the series is over, will doubtless seek honest conversations with men who have experienced similar suffering. Ironically, the opposition coach, Andy Flower, knows more than most about how to retain exceptional standards while playing for an inferior team.

All of which leads me to the central point: if you are interested in leadership (and I have never met a sports fan without strong opinions about captains, managers and selectors) then you have the obligation to be equally interested in context. Sport, like political analysis, suffers from the recurrent delusion that great leaders can change everything about their circumstances, that they can engineer a new reality out of will power and charisma alone. They cannot.

Just think how beside the point the analysis of Darren Lehmann's character and personality now sounds. It is the same Lehmann - with the same sense of fun and enjoyment, the same sharp cricketing brain, the same mischievous enthusiasm. All of which is being applied to the same tendency of Shane Watson to get lbw, the same Phillip Hughes weakness against spin, the same holes at the top of the order, the same shortage of new cabs on the rank. No coach can solve all those problems in a few weeks. So it is largely irrelevant to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of the man currently trying to do so. Mickey Arthur is suing Cricket Australia for damage to his reputation. Perhaps he should be sending them a cheque and a letter of thanks for preserving it.

So let us leave behind the soap opera, the tidbits of gossip and intrigue. No causal truths reside there. What David Warner's brother thinks of Shane Watson did not lose Australia the Test match, nor did the sacking of Arthur, nor homework-gate, nor an incident in a nightclub, nor even an alleged rift in the team. There was, in fact, no news from Lord's. Old failings, long present, were simply exposed in a clearer light.

Players, they are the problem; performance, that is the flaw; culture, that is the cause.

Before the 2010-11 Ashes, I suggested that the pillars of Australian excellence - club cricket, state cricket, and a hard-bitten unified cricketing culture that ran through their game at all levels - had crumbled. One firm push and the citadel might fall. I first put my theory to a distinguished former England captain. He didn't quite ridicule me, but he smirked at the idea that an enemy that had inflicted so much pain on him might now suffer structural decline. I deferred to his greater experience, cut short my conversational theorising, and steeled myself for print instead.

This is what I wrote in the Spectator on 20th November 2010:

The idea will not leave me alone. A sneaking question keeps coming into my head: are Australia losing their cricketing edge? And I don't just mean the Ashes. I mean the whole legend of the Aussie battler that has been constructed over decades of flinty toughness…

[Once] self-reliance was as central as toughness. Rod Marsh's coaching advice was simple: "Sort it out for yourself." That spirit ran through the great tradition. Bradman taught himself to bat by hitting a golf ball against a wall with a stick. Learning to bat was another form of looking after yourself, like pitching a tent in the outback. That resilience was compounded by the sense that Australians had a point to prove, that the world too often underestimated them. Cricket was a means of getting even…

I was brought up on the received wisdom that it was the Australian system that made them so tough - the strong club cricket, the fierce inter-state rivalries. Each has now declined, at least to some extent. It may be a very long time indeed - a full turn of the dynastic wheel - before Australia will again be able to boast such a record of dominance.

	let us leave behind the soap opera, the tidbits of gossip and intrigue. No causal truths reside there. What David Warner's brother thinks of Shane Watson did not lose Australia the Test match, nor did the sacking of Arthur, nor homework-gate, nor an incident in a nightclub

Since then, Australia have lost five Ashes Tests, several disastrously, and won just one.

It has become a truism that Australia now find themselves where England were in the 1990s. Less explored is the question of how the two nations fell into such a state.

Here is my abbreviated history of England's decline. First, phase one: "Cricket is our game; we run it. We have the oldest, richest and most fully professional game in the world. We know best and won't take any lectures from New World upstarts."

Well, that didn't work too well. After decades of being overtaken by leaner, hungrier cricketing nations, the original decline was compounded by the following over-reaction. Let's call it phase two: "England must now copy Australia, who are the best team in the world. We must reshape our character as well as our institutions to follow a new model."

Hubris, in other words, gave way to despair, confusion and panic. Sound familiar?

Yes, that is now the lot of Australia. First, phase one of decline: "We win because Aussies are tougher, braver, better mates and grew up getting bounced and abused in club matches tougher than war zones. We are cut from different cloth, born of a different gene pool. The rest of the cricketing world is effete and soft. Leopards don't change their spots. Seen one Pom, seen them all…"

At Lord's, Australia entered phase two: despair and confusion. History tells us to expect all manner of wrong turns and pseudo solutions, sackings and scapegoats, false dawns and bad logic. Most of it will be aimed at the wrong targets.

The English should be wary of gloating. After all, it took decades of quick fixes and attempted root-and-branch reform before England eventually emerged from the darkness. That was through luck as well as planning. Sporting success is increasingly determined by wealth and England can invest in success because it has deeper pockets, thanks to the bounty television rights, than any nation except India.

Conclusion: the best guard against hubris is continuing to recognise the role of fortune. Just ask Australia.