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Benaud, the effort behind the effortless

His charismatic presence on and off the field has been well documented, but few, if any, speak of how hard he worked to achieve that

Daniel Brettig in Cricinfo

Expression serious, gaze intense, and concentration fixed - Richie Benaud is at work © Mark Ray



Among countless images of Richie Benaud, both fluid and still, a most striking shot captures him away from the microphone, the television camera and the commentary box. It was taken by Mark Ray during a Perth Test match between Australia and England in 1991, and shows Benaud typing away fastidiously at a computer while his friend, pupil and fellow commentator Ian Chappell watches.

There is nothing mannered about the image, nor posed. Benaud's face does not bear the warm, wry expression that greeted television viewers the world over for more than 40 years. Instead, his expression is serious, his gaze intense and his concentration fixed. The beige jacket is hung up, and reading glasses sit on his nose. Maybe he is writing a column, maybe he is sending correspondence. Whatever the task, it is abundantly clear that Benaud is working.

Of the many and varied tributes that are flowing for Benaud, most speak of his charismatic presence both on the field as a captain and in the broadcast booth as a commentator. Most talk of his way with words, his mastery of when to use them, and more pointedly, when not to. Many say we will never see another like him, and that he was a unique gift to the game. Few, if any, speak enough of how hard he worked to be all these things.

Benaud was 26, and a four-year fringe dweller in the Australian Test side, when the 1956 Ashes tour concluded, England having kept the urn for a third consecutive series. Most of Ian Johnson's unhappy team-mates could not wait to get home, but Benaud stayed on after asking the BBC if he could take part in a course of television production and presenting. By that stage, he was already working as a police roundsman for The Sun in Sydney, chasing ambulances when he was not honing his slowly developing leg-breaks.

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Benaud's tips for aspiring commentators

Everyone should develop a distinctive style, but a few pieces of advice might be:

Put your brain into gear before opening your mouth.

Never say "we" if referring to a team.

Discipline is essential; fierce concentration is needed at all times.

Then try to avoid allowing past your lips: 'Of course'... 'As you can see on the screen'... 'You know...' or 'I tell you what'... 'That's a tragedy..." or "a disaster...". (The Titanic was a tragedy, the Ethiopian drought a disaster, but neither bears any relation to a dropped catch.)

Above all: when commentating, don't take yourself too seriously, and have fun.
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The broadcasting and journalism apprenticeship Benaud put himself through was exhaustive and exacting. He grew gradually in grasping the finer points of each trade, and would combine both when he stepped away from playing eight years later, having matured brilliantly as a cricketer and a captain. Cricket and leg-spin had taught Benaud about the level of commitment and perseverance required to succeed - as Bill Lawry has recalled, other players admired how Benaud emerged, not as a natural but a self-made man.

"I think the key to that for all of us was that he wasn't an immediate success," Lawry told The Age. "He worked very hard for four or five seasons, trying to establish himself in the Australian side. He went on one or two tours and hardly played a Test match. The fact he was so dedicated, he won through in the end."

When Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket emerged from its clandestine origins in 1977, Benaud's broadcasting apprenticeship paid off in much the same way as his cricketing one had done. More than 20 years of experience in broadcasting with the BBC and the ABC, among others, meant that he was not only Nine's host and lead commentator but also a sort of consulting producer, someone able to give direction to a crew ostensibly at the ground to direct him.

The polish of Nine's broadcast was there largely because Benaud had applied it himself, with the help of a gifted pair of brains behind the camera in David Hill and Brian Morelli. Having lived through the hectic earlier overnight shifts at The Sun and austere days learning the ropes at the BBC, broadcasting the cricket on Nine was a challenge well within Benaud's range - his unscripted introductions and summaries were as assured and comprehensive as those of the very best broadcasters.

If anything, he was too careful about expressing his opinions, a trait his more outspoken brother and fellow journalist John was never shy in offering a good-natured ribbing about. Nevertheless, Benaud's care with words reflected that he had learned much by spending time writing and speaking on the game. He knew the power of word and image, and made doubly sure he would be prepared enough to make the most of both.

Such dedication is commonplace among professional cricketers, and has become ever more so with each generation following on from the World Series Cricket revolution. But the path Benaud followed from playing into broadcasting has become the road less traveled, if at all. While so many within and without the game will say how much they loved and admired Benaud's work, precious few can be said to have made a genuine fist of following his example.

Chappell is one such figure, having worked assiduously at his writing down the years though never being trained formally as a journalist. Another, Mark Nicholas, traveled the world as a cricket correspondent for various publications including the Telegraph while still playing for Hampshire, and has clearly tried to take after Benaud as much as possible.

But it is a sad truth of 21st century cricket and its broadcasts that no one has truly held themselves to the standards that Benaud set for himself. Too few cricketers see themselves taking up a job in journalism or broadcasting until they can see the end of their playing career looming. Even if they do, it is generally understood that getting an "in" to the commentary box is more a matter of looking the part and having the right relationships than it is about training or aptitude. For that, the broadcasters themselves are as much to blame as the players.

So it is only to be hoped that the lessons of Benaud's life are made ever more indelible by the pain of his death. There will never be another Richie Benaud, but that does not mean that the game's players, writers and broadcasters cannot aspire to emulate him. It is not a matter of pulling on the beige jacket Benaud so often wore on the air, but of working as hard as he was in Ray's photo.

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Sachin mania: it's about religion

Ahmer Naqvi in Cricinfo

Tendulkar: a cult figure if ever there was one  © Associated Press

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Sachin Tendulkar has finally retired. As I type this, there are a fair few letting out sighs of relief, because the sheer hype and hoopla surrounding his farewell Test series has left many feeling distinctly uncomfortable. The cynical nature of the BCCI's scheduling, the hyper-opportunism displayed by politicians and corporations, and the general hysteria of the crowds has left many decrying the spectacle as slightly unnerving.

As a Pakistani, I have been relatively immune to Sachin's appeal for most of my life. It was only in my more mature years that I came to support any Indian players at all. Even then, it was the likes of Rahul Dravid and perhaps Yuvraj Singh and MS Dhoni whom I admired, rather than Tendulkar.

Yet over the past few days, the backlash against the Sachin celebration has left me intrigued. Why were certain opinion-makers so visibly aghast at the treatment being accorded Sachin? Why were the sights of delirious crowds being countered with stats showing Sachin to be the 29th best batsman of all time?

The answer lies in an area that many people find to be naive at best and disastrous at worst. It is an area that carries significant political influence, and is always, always an incendiary topic to bring up. The answer lies in religion.

In Europe, and much of the developed world, historically, religion has been the cause of brutal and terrifying political battles over the centuries, which determined not just who ruled but also the intellectual world-view underpinning those governments. Consequently, speaking of religion in Western society can often invoke memories of violence and persecution, and can even be seen to be a resistance to progressive ideas.

In South Asia, religion has been and continues to be a major driver of violence and conflict. In a region that is one of the world's most diverse ethnically, religion often shows up as a fault line in a bewildering array of instances. Yet at the same time, religion (believe it or not) is also the reason why such distinct peoples have managed to live together for thousands of years. The idea of syncretism, which, broadly speaking, refers to the fusion of seemingly contradictory beliefs, is central to life in South Asia.

The prime example of such syncretism is found at festivals or melas held to commemorate the lives of famous saints. From Kabul to Chittagong, these are a ubiquitous feature of the subcontinent, and are attended by pilgrims from near and far. Most importantly, they witness an annihilation of conventional identities. So a saint from one religion has devotees from various faiths. You can have a Muslim saint whose shrine is visited by Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, and others.

It is impossible to distil and explain these practices in a few lines, but to put it simply, the reason such practices exist is because people believe that a truly holy person transcends conventional religious differences. Thus the revered saint becomes a pathway to a more immediate and direct bond with the divine - in a relationship that not only exists outside the regularly prescribed rituals, but is one that is only made possible due to the exalted life and efforts of the saint.

I think this is the context one needs to view Sachin's farewell in.

I am not taking the popular sentiment of calling him "god" and trying to run away with it, and I doubt many people consciously and spiritually see him as a saint on par with the rest. But the sentiment that underlines his retirement and the rapture he is generating cannot be seen as mere sycophancy, commercial exploitation, or celebrity-fuelled hysteria. Undoubtedly, all of these things play a part in this festival, but they are not what it is limited to.

When people ask why all this is being done for one person, or why Dravid, Sourav Ganguly and VVS Laxman didn't get such farewells, or why the FTP is being disrupted for one man, they are asking valid questions but ones that are irrelevant to this context. The debate about who was great and who wasn't ends here with the people. Because ultimately, this celebration is not for Sachin, it is for his devotees.

It is for the people who turned to him as a symbol of hope, as a symbol of perseverance. It is for the people who refused to give up because their Sachin hadn't. It is for the people who believed they could break barriers and limitations because Sachin had shown them it could be done. It is for the people who know that it is time to let go of someone they relied upon for their smiles and the unburdening of their sorrows.

Perhaps all this hype and obsession makes "cricket" fans feel uncomfortable. Perhaps there are fans despairing at this cult-like behaviour. Perhaps there are those who feel that all this undermines Sachin's own credibility. To all of them, I paraphrase the patron saint of cricket writers, Hazrat CLR James, when I say: "What do they know of Sachin, who only Sachin know?"

What is talent in sport?

Is it just natural ability or the consistency that comes from perseverance?

Harsha Bhogle

June 17, 2011




My father believed - as was the norm with respectable middle-class families in the years gone by - it was important that his children were good at mathematics. If your child was good at mathematics, you had imparted the right education and fulfilled one of your primary duties as a parent.

He often quoted to us what his friend, a respected professor of the subject, used to say: "There should be no problem that you encounter in an examination for the first time." It meant you had to work so hard that you had, conceivably, attempted and vanquished every situation that could find its way into an exam paper. It begs the question: if you did achieve 150 out of 150 in an exam (which my wife very nearly did once, much to my awe), was it because you were extraordinarily intuitive or because you had worked harder than the others, so that you didn't "encounter any problem in an exam" for the first time?

In other words, is getting a "centum" (a peculiarly Tam Bram expression) a matter of genius or a matter of perseverance? It is an issue that many intelligent authors around the world have been debating for a while, and one that is at the heart of sport. Would anybody who solved a certain number of sums get full marks? Would two people, each of whom put in 10,000 hours (Malcolm Gladwell's threshold for achievement) produce identical results? Or are some people innately gifted, allowing them to cross that threshold sooner?

We pose that question a great deal in cricket when we argue about talent. Players who play certain shots - the perfectly balanced on-drive for example - are labelled "talented" and put into a separate category. They acquire a halo, and in a near-equal situation they tend to get picked first. "Talent" becomes this key they flash to gain entry. And yet it is worth asking what talent really is.

Is it the ability to play the on-drive or, more critically, the ability to play that on-drive consistently? It is a critical difference. Consistency brings in an element of perseverance that you do not normally bracket with talent.

Let me explain. I have often, while watching Rohit Sharma bat, said "wow" out loud. I probably said it because I saw him play a shot I did not expect him to. Or maybe it was a shot very few players were able to play. Just as often, I find myself going "ugh" with frustration at him. It is probably because, having had the opportunity to go "wow", I now expected him to play the same shot again. And so, without explicitly stating it, I am invoking the assumption of consistency to assess talent. The old professor of mathematics would have said, "Play the shot so often that it is no longer a new shot when you play it."

It is while I was debating this in my mind that I became aware of why Sachin Tendulkar paid such high compliments to Gary Kirsten for throwing him balls. Tendulkar wanted to perfect a shot and needed someone to throw him enough balls to attain that perfection, so that when he attempted it in a match he wasn't doing it for the first time. And in a recent conversation he said he was at his best when he was in the "subconscious", not distracted by the "conscious", and able to play by instinct - which he had perfected through practice.

Now we often call Tendulkar a genius, and yet, as we see, the talent that we believe comes dazzling through is, in essence, the product of many hours of perseverance. Is Tendulkar, then, the supreme example of my father's friend's theory of doing well at maths? And assuming for a moment that is true, shouldn't we be honouring perseverance because that is what it seems "talent" really is?

And so it follows that when we complain that all talented players don't get to where they should, we are in effect saying that they didn't practise hard enough to be consistent. Maybe it means we should all use the word "talent" more sparingly; not bestow it on a player until ability has been married to hard work long enough to achieve consistency.

This is also the starting premise of a new book I hope to continue reading - Bounce by the former table tennis champion Mathew Syed. I am delighted by its opening pages, one of which said "talent is overrated". It is something I have long believed.