Reading the Batsmen

Video footage is well and good, but there are also plenty of clues for bowlers to pick up from their opponents' grips, back-lifts and stances

Aakash Chopra

August 12, 2010

	Gilchrist's grip: bigger downswing, greater reach © Getty Images Enlarge
Related Links Players/Officials: Adam Gilchrist | Sanath Jayasuriya | Sachin Tendulkar

What if a bowler could read a batsman's mind - predict how a batsman would play before bowling a ball to him or having watched him play? Wouldn't it bolster his chances, give him leeway to plan, and buttress his skill?

Some may call it wishful thinking, others a secret science, but often just looking at the grip with which a batsman holds his bat tells you something about his preferences in terms of shots, and the way he stands may help you place your fielders.

Will a batsman be a good driver of the ball or more comfortable scoring off the back foot? Will he prefer scoring runs through the on side or the off? It's important to observe the finer nuances of a batsman's grip, stance and back-lift to size him up and plan accordingly. While it may seem utterly useless in this day and age of exhaustive analysis based on video footage, which is available to almost all professional teams, observation was one of the tools players relied heavily on in the past, and it continues to be useful.

The grip
Most batsmen playing professional cricket hold the bat correctly with regard to the Vs made by thumbs and forefingers. The top hand is firmer and the V its thumb and forefinger makes opens out towards the outer edge of the bat, while the bottom hand plays only a supporting role.

A correct grip allows a proper downswing, which in turn enables a batsman to play the ball with the full face of the bat. The right grip is also imperative if you want to play the entire range of shots.

While the basics remain the same, lots of batsmen do enough with the grip to give some information away. For instance, Sanath Jayasuriya holds the bat close to the bottom of the handle, and Adam Gilchrist higher up. Now the coaching manual recommends that one holds the bat in the middle of the handle, but to say that successful players like these two don't hold the bat correctly would be grossly incorrect. While there are pros and cons to each approach, it all boils down to what suits your game best.

Holding the bat closer to the bottom gives you more control and helps you generate more power at the point of impact. In such cases, since the bottom hand becomes dominant very often, you don't need a high back-lift to hit the ball long and hard. That's why Jayasuriya is ever so good with his short-arm jabs. Such players generally are more comfortable on the back foot, and horizontal bat shots are their bread and butter. The flip side of holding the bat close to the base of the handle is that the arc of the downswing gets radically smaller, which in turn reduces the reach and makes driving off the front foot that much difficult. But some players are exceptions to this rule. Sachin Tendulkar holds the bat close to the bottom of the handle but has managed to overcome the shortcomings with ease.

On the contrary, Gilchrist's batting is built on the extension of the arms, and holding the bat high on the handle compliments the extension. With this grip, the arc of the downswing becomes bigger, and hence increases the reach of the batsman. Lower-order batsmen tend to prefer this grip to enhance their reach. That's how the phrase "using the long handle" was coined. The flip side of such a grip is that you may not have enough control and you have to rely on the downswing to generate power. Players with such grips prefer playing on the front foot and can also be a little circumspect against quick short-pitched bowling. Gilchrist, like Tendulkar, is an exception here.

Then there were those like Javed Miandad, who had a gap between the top and bottom hands. The textbook recommends keeping the hands close to each other on the handle, to ensure that they move in unison. Yet Miandad's grip allowed him to manoeuvre the bowling and milk it for singles, though he possibly sacrificed some fluency in the bargain.

The stance
If the grip on the bat is the first giveaway, the manner in which a batsman stands is the second. While the coaching manual recommends the feet be about a shoulder span apart, lots of batsmen have toyed with different options to suit their game.

People who stand with their feet too close to each other are often good back-foot players and the ones with wider stances are generally stronger on the front foot. Here, too, there are snags: you lose some balance if both feet are too close, and too wide apart results in lack of foot movement.

A stance that's too side-on or too open-chested also tells you a bit about the strengths and weaknesses of a batsman. While you'd be suspect against inswingers if your stance is too side-on, you'd struggle against away-going deliveries if it is too open. Sachin Tendulkar's is the closest to what would be a perfect stance - though even he tended to lean too much towards the off side when he started.

	The textbook recommends keeping the hands close to each other on the handle, to ensure that they move in unison. Yet Miandad's grip, with hands apart, allowed him to manoeuvre the bowling and milk it for singles

Even the way you take guard can give the bowler a pointer or two. Generally players who ask for a leg-stump guard are good on the off side, for they try to make room by staying beside the line. And the ones who ask for middle stump are good on the leg side, for their endeavour is to whip it through the leg side. It's not a hard-and-fast rule but any information is better than none at all.

If a batsman is falling over, with his head not in line with his toes - which is the case with a lot of batsmen - he will predominantly be an on-side player, but would still be susceptible to sharp, incoming deliveries. Also, the intended ground shots on the leg side will probably travel in the air for a while, and hence positioning a fielder at short midwicket comes in handy. Such a batsman would also be unsure of his off stump and hence might play balls that are meant to be left alone.

The back-lift
The last clues before the ball is finally bowled come from the height of the back-lift and its arc. Ideally the bat should come down from somewhere between the off stump and first slip, to ensure that the bat moves straight in the downswing.

Players who bring the bat in from wider than second slip, like Rahul Dravid, need to make a loop at the top of the downswing, or else they will find it difficult to negotiate sharp incoming deliveries. Should they fail to make that loop, the bat won't come down straight, which means meeting the ball at an angle instead of straight on.

Batsmen with higher back-lifts find it difficult to deal with changes of pace, because with higher back-lifts it's tougher to pull out of a shot after committing. Also, there's always a possibility they will be late in bringing the bat down to keep yorkers out. Ergo, yorkers and slower ones might just do the trick.

Since players with short back-lifts, like Paul Collingwood and Andrew Symonds, don't have a reasonable downswing, they rely on the pace of the ball to generate power for their shots. They tend to struggle if the ball has no pace on it, so taking the pace off isn't a bad move against them. On the contrary, short back-lifts are almost ideal to keep yorkers out with.

If anyone has to think on his feet in cricket, it is the bowler. For it is he who initiates the action and everyone else reacts to what he delivers. Yet, these days he's the game's underdog, constantly at risk of being on the receiving end, and bound to follow a plan to render himself effective. Since video data isn't available to teams before they reach a certain level, most bowlers rely on observing the finer nuances of their opponents in order to strategise.

Former India opener Aakash Chopra is the author of Beyond the Blues, an account of the 2007-08 Ranji Trophy season. His website is here

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A home schooling success story

 

Portrait Of A Prodigy

• Ranked 33rd in IIT entrance exam at 14
• Gold medal at International Biology Olympiad at 14
• Bronze medal at 14, silver at 13, at Asian Physics Olympiad
• Passed Class X at 12, Class XII at 14
• Won Nehru Planetarium's Young Astronomer Award at ages 10 and 11

***

Sahal Kaushik keeps mostly to himself as he makes his way around the sprawling IIT Kanpur campus with student guide Soumyajit Bose. It's his first day of class and, at 14, he is the youngest ever student to enter the portals of an IIT; no little feat, but amplified by his somewhat unconventional education—home-schooling, no less—and the award of a gold medal at the International Biology Olympiad in Seoul.
Not surprisingly, his reputation has preceded him here. As  second-year student Soumyajit puts it, "There is a lot of curiosity about him on campus, because making it to IIT at the age of 14 is quite an unprecedented feat."
But the reticent and somewhat withdrawn Sahal, who has enrolled in the five-year integrated MSc course in physics, would rather not have the spotlight trained on him. And mostly he won't be prodded beyond brief, sometimes monosyllabic, responses on his remarkable success story.
Ask him how he rates himself academically and a disinterested "I don't know" is all he'll offer. Did he expect to crack the Joint Entrance Exam? "Yes. But I did not expect such a good (all India 33rd) rank." On subjects that catch his fastidious fancy, however—like astrophysics, for one—he is more obliging. Says father Tapeshwar, an army officer, "When he interacts with participants at the olympiads, he can talk for hours. He is comfortable with people who share his interests."
That precondition should be easily met at IIT, where, even though his classmates will be senior by 3-4 years, intellectual wavelengths should be in sync. Institute director Prof Sanjay G. Dhande has no qualms about handling such a young student. He believes that once someone is ready to participate intellectually, age is not a consideration. Sahal's mother Ruchi isn't anxious either, recalling how, as a newly anointed teen, Sahal spent all of eight days in Bangkok at the Asian Physics Olympiad last year, with 'peers' older by five years or more and didn't feel a wee bit out of his depth.
To meet the challenge of ensuring that school and home, too, provided Sahal with similar levels of stimulation, Ruchi, a doctor, had hung up her white coat for good to home-school the prodigy. Clearly not a mother in the usual mould, she decided quite early to teach her children herself until they were seven or eight. But when Sahal's unusual mental abilities surfaced—reciting multiplication tables up to 100 when he was only three and juggling binary numbers a year later—she had to make that crucial decision. Did she want to send him to school at all? "Had I sent him to school at seven, he would have been restricted to addition and subtraction whereas he had already moved on to trigonometry and logarithms," she says.
So, in the face of all the naysayers' words of caution that a boy who wasn't sent to school or didn't go out and play (and never watched TV either, their home doesn't have one) would be socially maladjusted, the Kaushiks knew what they had to do. And while Sahal today is, the Kaushiks admit, "very reserved", his Facebook account has as many as 295 friends (he reveals the number after much coaxing). He met them through all the science camps he has attended, and a few of them will be keeping him company at IIT too.
But just how enviable is it to be a minor—and a gifted one at that—among adults in a fiercely competitive and demanding environment? Consultant psychologist Anuttama Banerjee says, "There are some emotional challenges. There could be jealousy among his older classmates, which might lead to inter-group conflict. Older kids might not wish to include him when they are hanging out or just chatting about their girlfriends." She adds, however, that if such a child's social and emotional intelligence is on the same level, he would be able to match up.
Only the next five years will tell if he does. Sahal's parents don't seem too apprehensive, yet, tellingly, they've reorganised their lives just to extend his comfort zone. They have planned their own relocation from Delhi, to a housing complex near the campus, so that Sahal, who is a day scholar, could come back home every evening.
It may sound suspiciously like a case of ambitious parents living vicariously through a super-achieving son. But the Kaushiks argue, with some eloquence, that this is not a hat that fits them—they're just parents who want to provide the right environment for a gifted child. "The thirst for knowledge was his own. We were there basically to provide him with whatever information he wanted," says Ruchi. Interestingly, the same set of parents allowed Saras, Sahal's 12-year-old sister, who is also home-schooled, to take her own time to get started on her education. "Till the age of eight, Saras could not even write her mother's name in Hindi," says Tapeshwar. "If society can accept a delayed learner like Saras, why hold back a fast learner? Why is someone who is good at something that others generally aren't comfortable with made out to be a geek?" argues Ruchi, making a strong case for greater recognition, by society, of the needs of gifted children.
The decision to try for IIT so early was, says the family, Sahal's own. He had sailed through the Class X and XII board exams, but to crack the JEE he needed specialised training. And so from the world of stimulating, flexible home-based learning, the Dwarka boy made his way to what many would regard as its polar opposite: a coaching institute. Excited by the opportunity to help Sahal achieve his feat, teachers at the Narayana IIT Academy coached him individually, with chocolates and juices as incentives to spur on their little student.
IIT will be a much longer, tougher journey down the road of formal education for this home-schooler, who wants to be a researcher one day. "Sitting in a class of 400 is a first for me, but I'm enjoying it," he says in one of his more talkative moments. "He must learn to fend for himself," says Tapeshwar on the transition. "After all, he has to make his own way." That seems to be Sahal's style already, right from the day he looked through a refractor as a young child, set his heart on astrophysics, and decided to follow the stars wherever they might lead him.

How the FBI "in a free country" hounded historian Howard Zinn!

 

Why The Feds Fear Thinkers Like Howard Zinn

By Chris Hedges

02 August, 2010
TruthDig.com

Today I will teach my final American history class of the semester to prison inmates. We have spent five weeks reading Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States." The class is taught in a small room in the basement of the prison. I pass through a metal detector, am patted down by a guard and walk through three pairs of iron gates to get to my students. We have covered Spain's genocide of the native inhabitants in the Caribbean and the Americas, the war for independence in the United States and the disgraceful slaughter of Native Americans. We have examined slavery, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the occupations of Cuba and the Philippines, the New Deal, two world wars and the legacy of racism, capitalist exploitation and imperialism that continue to infect American society.

We have looked at these issues, as Zinn did, through the eyes of Native Americans, immigrants, slaves, women, union leaders, persecuted socialists, anarchists and communists, abolitionists, anti-war activists, civil rights leaders and the poor. As I was reading out loud a passage by Sojourner Truth, Chief Joseph, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B Du Bois, Randolph Bourne, Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, I have heard students mutter "Damn" or "We been lied to."

The power of Zinn's scholarship—which I have watched over the past few weeks open the eyes of young, mostly African-Americans to their own history and the structures that perpetuate misery for the poor and gluttony and privilege for the elite—explains why the FBI, which released its 423-page file on Zinn on July 30, saw him as a threat.

Zinn, who died in January at the age of 87, did not advocate violence or support the overthrow of the government, something he told FBI interrogators on several occasions. He was rather an example of how genuine intellectual thought is always subversive. It always challenges prevailing assumptions as well as political and economic structures. It is based on a fierce moral autonomy and personal courage and it is uniformly branded by the power elite as "political." Zinn was a threat not because he was a violent revolutionary or a communist but because he was fearless and told the truth.

The cold, dead pages of the FBI file stretch from 1948 to 1974. At one point five agents are assigned to follow Zinn. Agents make repeated phone calls to employers, colleagues and landlords seeking information. The FBI, although Zinn is never suspected of carrying out a crime, eventually labels Zinn a high security risk. J. Edgar Hoover, who took a personal interest in Zinn's activities, on Jan. 10, 1964, drew up a memo to include Zinn "in Reserve Index, Section A," a classification that permitted agents to immediately arrest and detain Zinn if there was a national emergency. Muslim activists, from Dr. Sami Al-Arian to Fahad Hashmi, can tell you that nothing has changed.

The file exposes the absurdity, waste and pettiness of our national security state. And it seems to indicate that our security agencies prefer to hire those with mediocre or stunted intelligence, dubious morality and little common sense. Take for example this gem of a letter, complete with misspellings, mailed by an informant to then FBI Director Hoover about something Zinn wrote.

"While I was visiting my dentist in Michigan City, Indiana," the informant wrote. "This pamphlet was left in my car, and I am mailing it to you, I know is a DOVE call, and not a HOCK call. We have had a number of ethnic groups move into our area in the last few years. We are in a war! And it doesn't look like this pamphlet will help our Government objectives."

Or how about the meeting between an agent and someone identified as Doris Zinn. Doris Zinn, who the agent says is Zinn's sister, is interviewed "under a suitable pretext." She admits that her brother is "employed at the American Labor Party Headquarters in Brooklyn." That is all the useful information that is reported. The fact that Zinn did not have a sister gives a window into the quality of the investigations and the caliber of the agents who carried them out.

FBI agents in November 1953 wrote up an account of a clumsy attempt to recruit Zinn as an informant, an attempt in which they admitted that Zinn "would not volunteer information" and that "additional interviews with ZINN would not turn him from his current attitude." A year later, after another interrogation, an agent wrote that Zinn "concluded the interview by stating he would not under any circumstances testify or furnish information concerning the political opinions of others."

While Zinn steadfastly refused to cooperate in the anti-communist witch hunts in the 1950s, principals and college administrators were busy purging classrooms of those who, like Zinn, exhibited intellectual and moral independence. The widespread dismissals of professors, elementary and high school teachers and public employees—especially social workers whose unions had advocated on behalf of their clients—were carried out quietly. The names of suspected "Reds" were handed to administrators and school officials under the FBI's "Responsibilities Program." It was up to the institutions, nearly all of which complied, to see that those singled out lost their jobs. There rarely were hearings. The victims did not see any purported evidence. They were usually abruptly terminated. Those on the blacklist were effectively locked out of their professions. The historian Ellen Schrecker estimates that between 10,000 and 12,000 people were blackballed through this process.

The FBI spent years following Zinn, and carefully cutting out newspaper articles about their suspect, to amass the inane and the banal. One of Zinn's neighbors, Mrs. Matthew Grell, on Feb. 22, 1952, told agents that she considered Zinn and another neighbor, Mrs. Julius Scheiman, "to be either communists or communist sympathizers" because, the agents wrote, Grell "had observed copies of the Daily Workers in Mrs. Scheiman's apartment and noted that Mrs. Scheiman was a good friend of Howard Zinn."

The FBI, which describes Zinn as a former member of the Communist Party, something Zinn repeatedly denied, appears to have picked up its surveillance when Zinn, who was teaching at Spelman, a historically black women's college, became involved in the civil rights movement. Zinn served on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He took his students out of the classroom to march for civil rights. Spelman's president was not pleased.

"I was fired for insubordination," Zinn recalled. "Which happened to be true."

Zinn in 1962 decried "the clear violations by local police of Constitutional rights" of blacks and noted that "the FBI has not made a single arrest on behalf of Negro citizens." The agent who reported Zinn's words added that Zinn's position was "slanted and biased." Zinn in 1970 was a featured speaker at a rally for the release of the Black Panther leader Bobby Seal held in front of the Boston police headquarters. "It is about time we had a demonstration at the police station," Zinn is reported as telling the crowd by an informant who apparently worked with him at Boston University. "Police in every nation are a blight and the United States is no exception."

"America has been a police state for a long time," Zinn went on. "I believe that policemen should not have guns. I believe they should be disarmed. Policemen with guns are a danger to the community and themselves."

Agents muse in the file about how to help their unnamed university source mount a campaign to have Zinn fired from his job as a professor of history at Boston University.

"[Redacted] indicated [Redacted] intends to call a meeting of the BU Board of Directors in an effort to have ZINN removed from BU. Boston proposes under captioned program with Bureau permission to furnish [Redacted] with public source data regarding ZINN's numerous anti-war activities, including his trip to Hanoi, 1/31/68, in an effort to back [Redacted's] efforts for his removal."

Zinn and the radical Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan had traveled together to North Vietnam in January 1968 to bring home three prisoners of war. The trip was closely monitored by the FBI. Hoover sent a coded teletype to the president, the secretary of state, the director of the CIA, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of the Army, the Department of the Air Force and the White House situation room about the trip. And later, after Berrigan was imprisoned for destroying draft records, Zinn repeatedly championed the priest's defense in public rallies, some of which the FBI noted were sparsely attended. The FBI monitored Zinn as he traveled to the Danbury Federal Prison in Connecticut to visit Berrigan and his brother Philip.

"Mass murders occur, which is what war is," Zinn, who was a bombardier in World War II, said in 1972, according to the file, "because people are split and don't think … when the government does not serve the people, then it doesn't deserve to be obeyed. … To be patriotic, you may have to be against your government."

Zinn testified at the trial of Daniel Ellsberg, who gave a copy of the Pentagon Papers to Zinn and Noam Chomsky. The two academics edited the secret documents on the Vietnam War, sections of which had appeared in The New York Times, into the four volumes that were published in 1971.

"During the Pentagon Papers jury trial, Zinn stated that the 'war in Vietnam was a war which involved special interests, and not the defense of the United States,' " his FBI file reads.

By the end of the file one walks away with a profound respect for Zinn and a deep distaste for the buffoonish goons in the FBI who followed and monitored him. There is no reason, with the massive expansion of our internal security apparatus, to think that things have improved. There are today 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies working on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States, The Washington Post reported in an investigation by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin. These agencies employ an estimated 854,000 people, all of whom hold top-secret security clearances, the Post found. And in Washington, D.C., and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together, the paper reported, they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings—about 17 million square feet.

We are amassing unprecedented volumes of secret files, and carrying out extensive surveillance and harassment, as stupid and useless as those that were directed against Zinn. And a few decades from now maybe we will be able to examine the work of the latest generation of dimwitted investigators who have been unleashed upon us in secret by the tens of thousands. Did any of the agents who followed Zinn ever realize how they wasted their time? Do those following us around comprehend how manipulated they are? Do they understand that their primary purpose, as it was with Zinn, is not to prevent terrorism but discredit and destroy social movements as well as protect the elite from those who would expose them?

Zinn's book is revered in my cramped classroom. It is revered because these men intimately know racism, manipulation, poverty, abuse and the lies peddled by the powerful. Zinn recorded their voices and the voices of their ancestors. They respect him for this. Zinn knew that if we do not listen to the stories of those without power, those who suffer discrimination and abuse, those who struggle for justice, we are left parroting the manufactured myths that serve the interests of the privileged. Zinn set out to write history, not myth. And he knew that when these myths implode it is the beginning of hope.

"If you were a Native American," one of my students asked recently, "what would have been the difference between Columbus and Hitler?"

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

'The more the pressure, the stronger I got' - Imran Khan

 

The charismatic former Pakistan captain on wanting to be fast, teaching Wasim and Waqar to bowl, the allrounder wars of the 1980s, ball-tampering, and more

Interview by Sam Collins

July 30, 2010

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Imran Khan is Pakistan's most famous player and most successful captain. As smooth off the field as he was competitive on it, he made his Test debut as an 18-year-old medium-pacer, transforming himself into a genuinely quick opening bowler and formidable batsman. He led Pakistan to victory in the 1992 World Cup, after which he entered Pakistani politics.

	''I'd been determined to be a Test cricketer since I was nine and there was never any chance that I would give up" © PA Photos
Related Links Players/Officials: Imran Khan | Sir Ian Botham | Sir Viv Richards Teams: Pakistan

Was it inevitable that you would become a cricketer?
My two cousins were Test captains. One, Majid Khan, became Test captain while I was playing. One was an Oxford Blue [Javed Burki] and one a Cambridge Blue [Majid]. If you're living up to people who have made it big, you face more pressure than ordinary cricketers. Doors open easier but you're always judged against them. I was always told that I had less talent than them.

You made your Test debut in England aged 18. What happened?
I had always had ambitions as a batsman but I was selected as a fast bowler because Pakistan hardly had any. I'd played very few first-class matches, and while in home conditions my slingy action was effective, in England I was totally at sea. I was dropped after that first Test and my team-mates openly told me I'd never get back into the team. But I'd been determined to be a Test cricketer since I was nine and there was never any chance, no matter how many setbacks I faced, that I would give up.

What turned you into a quick bowler?
In 1972, Australia came to England. I watched Dennis Lillee bowl and that's when I decided I wanted to be fast. It was the first time I'd seen a genuine fast bowler. Pakistan didn't have any, and I just loved it. It appealed to my instincts, my aggressive way of playing. I was a medium-pacer then and Worcester would encourage me to bowl that because I had a natural inswinger. But I was never satisfied, so if I ever got hit, I would try and bowl faster. That's how I got this aggressive streak, to seek revenge when a batsman tried to dominate, that made me into a fast bowler. I understood the limitations of how I used to bowl, so I completely restructured my bowling action between the ages of 18 and 25. I spent the winter after I finished at Oxford University [1975-76] in Pakistan, and that was really the turning point, because on those wickets you needed to have air speed. My first-class team [Pakistan International Airlines] encouraged me to bowl fast. In a year I'd gained pace and was genuinely fast.

You came third behind Jeff Thomson and Michael Holding at the famous speed test in Perth in 1978...
We were bowling bouncers and Jeff Thomson was bowling full-tosses, so there was a slight distortion, although he was probably still quicker. Out of eight balls I bowled, seven were quicker than Holding. I wasn't even at my peak - I was quicker in the next two years. In my peak I got nearly 100 wickets in about a year, 40 in a series against India, but I did my shin bone and missed three of my best years as a bowler.

What are your memories of Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket?
It was the highest standard I've played. It was the greatest number of fast bowlers ever concentrated in one place - very high-calibre fast bowling. There were people like Tony Greig, Lawrence Rowe, Roy Fredericks, who were outstanding batsmen, but all three of them sank under the barrage of quick bowlers.

Did captaincy improve you as a player?
The more pressure I took, the stronger I got.

Teams follow captains they believe in. I used to tell them: "Do not be scared of losing, you'll never know how to win." I discovered why I was successful and others who were more talented than me weren't. My whole policy was aggressive: how am I going to win? Most who captained me used to enter a match thinking we should not lose. The result was that team selection became defensive. It's a big difference in strategy and attitude. I took this fear of losing away from them and that's why we used to pull off incredible victories from losing positions. We played superior opposition and did very well. You become fearless and that is a very important component in successful people, organisations, even countries.

	"Waqar was a very strong bowler, not as gifted as Wasim but much stronger physically. Mentally Waqar was very tough. Wasim would give up a little bit when things got down; Waqar would keep coming back"

Did you find it difficult being a bowling captain?
Batting captains never had a clue about bowlers. Most captaincy is done on the field. As a bowler I was far better equipped to deal with that than batting captains. The only batting captain I rated was Ian Chappell. He had a very good cricket mind and could deal with bowlers well. Apart from him, very few were good because they didn't understand bowlers. Because I was a bowling captain, I taught Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis from scratch. They had hardly played any first-class cricket and I would tell them what to do every ball because I had been through the process myself. I would set their fields and I would tell them what to think.

What were the raw ingredients that you saw in Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis?
Wasim was the most talented bowler I have seen apart from Holding. A natural. But he needed the art of taking wickets, fitness and advice, which I gave him. Waqar was a very strong bowler, not as gifted as Wasim, but much stronger physically. Mentally, Waqar was very tough. Wasim would give up a little bit when things got down; Waqar would keep coming back. But Wasim was much more talented.

How do you compare with the three other great allrounders from the 1970s and 80s: Botham, Hadlee, Kapil Dev?
We were all great competitors. I had my duels with all three. Botham was a better batsman than all of them, Hadlee was a better bowler than the others, and Kapil Dev, at one point, had great batting potential but never developed it. It's not easy at that level to keep developing both skills.

Ian Botham peaked very early. I think he was already on the downer at 26 or 27 because he had become very big. He started off as an allrounder of more promise than all of us because he had a great side-on bowling action and outswing. But by his late 20s his bowling was no longer effective. And batting-wise, the reason I don't think he fulfilled his potential is his performance against West Indies. I judge batsmen on their performance against the big boys and in critical situations. In that sense, Botham's performance against West Indies was just appalling - averaging about 14 with the bat and around 40 with the ball [in fact, 21 and 35].

Your bowling average was 21 against West Indies, the dominant team of the era. Did you raise your game against them?
The tougher the competition, the better it got out of me. Sometimes I used to lose motivation against the smaller teams. The lure of beating West Indies in the West Indies was the main reason I came out of retirement [in 1988]. We drew 1-1 but with neutral umpires we would have won 2-0 and I would have retired then because it was my ambition to beat the ultimate team in world cricket. I'm the only captain that never lost to West Indies in three series, all drawn.

They tested you completely. It demanded the greatest concentration, guts and a proper technique to face them. The batting was great too. Viv Richards was head and shoulders above everyone else. A genius. It was his reflexes, his timing, lightning footwork and his attitude. He was very courageous - a batsman who would take on challenges. His statistical record does not reflect his ability or the number of match-winning innings he played. He used to get bored, whereas other batsmen would bat for their averages.

What are your memories of the 1992 World Cup?
Great euphoria. I handpicked that young team and for them to win the World Cup from that impossible situation was a source of such happiness to the Pakistanis. I was so proud of that team. When I retired, I left the best Pakistan team in its history. I was very disappointed that it never achieved its potential. Match-fixing allegations dogged them.

	"If I ever got hit, I would try and bowl faster" © PA Photos

Do you regret admitting to using a bottle top during the 1981 county season?
I regret that it distorted the whole discussion on ball-tampering; it took it to another level. I was trying to explain that ball-tampering had always been part of cricket. It was only when you crossed a certain limit that it became cheating. He [journalist Ivo Tennant] asked me point blank and I said, "Yes". I'd played a match at Sussex against Hampshire. It was a dead wicket, petering towards a draw. We had drinks and there was a bottle top. I scratched the ball trying to get resistance on the other side. I said: "That is cheating, you've crossed the line." I was illustrating the point. Then other people jumped in, people trying to settle scores, people taking money from tabloids to say: "I saw Imran ball-tampering". They were such liars and they made money. In that sense, I regretted it.

There must have been times when the pressure got to you, leading Pakistan for 10 years?
Cricket is the only captaincy in sport where you face pressure. In Pakistan the pressure is more than in other places because when the team loses, the captain's head comes on the chopping block, otherwise the board is removed. There were about 17 changes in the 10-12 years after I left. When I came in, there was a players' revolt against the captain and I was the compromise. In my 10 years I never had a problem. I had the complete respect of the team.

How did cricket prepare you for politics?
Politics is cut-throat. I find myself far better equipped than my colleagues because I learnt to compete and take knocks from sport. There is no better preparation for politics. It is the ultimate in character-building. Being a political leader is like being a cricket captain. You walk out to a stadium full of people, all responsibility on you, and if you can learn to take that responsibility, it equips you to do anything in life.

Shirtfront strategies - Bowling on dead pitches

 

What do you do when the curator has it in for bowlers? You plan, persevere and pray

Aakash Chopra

July 29, 2010

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	Zaheer Khan: adept at bowling on dead pitches © Associated Press
Related Links Players/Officials: Zaheer Khan | Lasith Malinga | Daniel Vettori

The tracks laid out for the first two Test matches in the ongoing Sri Lanka-India series have pretty much dictated the course of the matches. The Sri Lankan tracks, like most in the subcontinent, are batting havens - classic "win-the-toss-bat-first" surfaces, which in most cases push the team losing the toss into playing catch up for the duration of the match.

On these featherbeds the ball refuses to change its path after pitching, for spinners and fast bowlers alike, and the odds are stacked heavily against the bowlers and the fielding side. Yet there's a job to be done - to dismiss the opposition, failing which you need to brace yourself for a dreadfully long haul. Nothing hurts a player more than the feeling of helplessness against the inevitable, which in this case is the declaration from the batting side.

Does this mean one resigns to fate and does not plan at all? Definitely not. In fact, bowling on such tracks might need more planning than on helpful surfaces. But planning alone is often not enough; it needs to be complemented with lots of perseverance.

Fast bowlers with the new ball
A fast bowler's planning depends on the ball being used in the match. If the match is in India, it is the SG Test ball that is used, which of course behaves quite differently to the Kookaburra.

The SG ball moves negligibly in the air while it's new, and so it's important to hit the deck hard till one side gets rough. You often see Zaheer Khan bowl cross-seam deliveries right at the beginning of a spell to hasten this process. And I vividly remember Glenn McGrath employing similar tactics in the 2004 series in India.

Unless the team has three seamers at their disposal, it isn't a bad idea to hold back the two frontline quicks till one side of the ball loses its sheen. A part-time quick or a spinner comes handy in these conditions. This was the job Angelo Mathews did for Sri Lanka in India last year.

Once the ball starts swinging, releasing it right, instead of hitting the deck hard, becomes the mantra. The track might not offer lateral movement but the ball will likely swing in the air, if delivered properly. Since the swing in the air may not be complemented by movement off the surface, field placements may still need to be a little conservative. The bowlers must stick to a line, set their fields accordingly and err only on the side of fullness, for balls pitched short won't even move in the air.

Bowlers must employ different tactics while bowling with the Kookaburra, which, unlike the SG ball, moves appreciably when it's new. Hence the endeavour should be to release the ball properly, pitch it slightly fuller and extract movement in the air. Smart bowlers use the more pronounced seam to bowl cutters too.

Lasith Malinga did something remarkable in the first Test match, in Galle. He bowled fuller to start with, dismissed Gautam Gambhir cheaply in both innings, and then used the hardness of the ball to push Virender Sehwag on to the back foot with a barrage of well-directed bouncers when he saw there wasn't much swing on offer. He knew that once the ball lost its hardness, he would have to wait for it to start reverse-swinging to inflict damage. The trick is to assess the conditions quickly and then react appropriately, be it the SG Test or the Kookaburra ball.

Fast bowlers when the ball gets old
The brand of ball makes very little difference in the approach when the ball gets old, when there isn't much conventional swing, no movement off the surface, and it's too early to get reverse swing going. That's when discipline and patience take centre stage.

	The brand of ball makes very little difference in the approach when the ball gets old, when there isn't much conventional swing, no movement off the surface, and it's too early to get reverse swing going. That's when discipline and patience take centre stage

Zaheer is a master operator in these situations, especially in post-lunch sessions in the subcontinent. He bowls at about 70% of his optimum speed, sticks to a line a foot outside off stump, employs a 6-3 or 7-2 off-side field and waits for the batsman to commit hara-kiri. He has the advantage of the natural angle working for him, taking the ball away from the right-hander even when it isn't swinging.

Another tactic, if executed well, is to accept that there isn't enough movement to find the outside edge, and that even if you do, it's unlikely to carry to the slips. Then one must bowl wicket to wicket, keep the catching fielders in front of the stumps and hope to either breach the defence or expect the batsman to get carried away and hit in the air. You need to be persistent rather than imaginative to see through such phases. But consistency in line and length is imperative, else you'll be punished, for the margin of error is really small. The only thing you must constantly vary is the pace. Rolling your fingers over the ball to bowl slower ones and cutters are among the few ways to create doubt in the batsman's mind in these conditions.

Another tactic is to get two fast bowlers to bowl bouncers in tandem from around the stumps, with both fine leg and square leg on the fence. Since there's nothing happening otherwise, there's no harm in trying something different.

Once the ball starts reverse-swinging, good quick bowlers come into their own. One is still required to stick to a line (you don't want to bowl on both sides of the wicket) but lengths can, and perhaps must, vary with almost every delivery. The last thing you, as a bowler, want when the ball is reverse-swinging is to be predictable. Even a toe-crushing yorker doesn't have the same effect if every ball is in the block-hole.

Once again, Malinga used the old ball quite effectively in the first Test match to break the back of the Indian batting line-up, dismissing Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar and MS Dhoni. Michael Kasprowicz did something similar in the series against India in 2004. He was so ruthless with his lines around the middle and leg stumps that he could do without a slip or a gully fielder.

While talking about masters with the old ball, it would be criminal not to mention Waqar and Wasim. But these two were special bowlers with special skills and others can only dream of emulating them. Don't they say: planning and plotting is for lesser mortals; geniuses carve their own road.

Spinners
Slow bowlers are your workhorses on dead surfaces, for good captains rarely give their fast bowlers long spells. Spinners are required to do the donkey's work of bowling extremely long spells with or, mostly, without any assistance from the surface. They need strategies too, but unlike for their quicker counterparts, their plans don't vary from Kookaburra to SG Test, for balls don't behave radically differently depending on their brand when in the hands of a spinner.

	Vettori: chokes off the scoring and waits for mistakes © Getty Images

Length is not negotiable: they must stick to it for as long as they are bowling or pay for it dearly. The lines and the pace, though, must keep changing, along with the introduction of variations like the doosra, googly or the arm ball.

The lack of purchase from the surface, unless you're a Murali or Warne, might make a spinner monotonous, and that's what they must guard against. They must keep using the drift, experiment with angles by coming over and around the stumps, and use fielders cleverly to play with the batsman's mind. There may be nothing happening but the batsman must always get the impression that there's a plan in place. And the most likely way for a spinner to get a wicket on these surfaces is to put pressure on the batsman by making run-scoring difficult and thus making him commit a faux pas.

I really like how Daniel Vettori operates on good surfaces against quality players of spin bowling. He tries to block their working areas - i.e. behind square leg for a left-hander and point for a right-hander - by altering his line and length and placing a fielder to cut off the single. By doing so he challenges the batsman to do something different, like go over the top or play against the spin. He may not always be successful, though he mostly is, but his intentions are absolutely right.

In batting-friendly conditions it helps to have a multi-dimensional attack: a couple of attacking bowlers who're expected to go for wickets, though they might be a little expensive in the bargain, along with a couple of defensive bowlers who'll stem the flow of runs and also give their more aggressive counterparts some respite.

Ideally one would always have tracks like the ones England dished out for the recently concluded Pakistan-Australia Test series, which had enough in them to keep the bowlers interested. But expecting them from curators in the subcontinent would be a bit too optimistic. While I have written about how a bowler can plan, it's still a bloody tough job to be a bowler in the subcontinent. Unless we make a conscious effort to prepare sporting wickets, it may well cut a few careers short, either due to injury or lack of results. To those who're still standing and delivering in these inhuman conditions: take a bow!

How to beat depression – without drugs

 

• Jake Wallis Simons
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 July 2010 22.00 BST

Up to 20% of the UK population will suffer from depression – twice as many as 30 years ago, says Steve Ilardi. Photograph: Rob Lewine/Getty/Tetra

Dr Steve Ilardi is slim and enthusiastic, with intense eyes. The clinical psychologist is 4,400 miles away, in Kansas, and we are chatting about his new book via Skype, the online videophone service. "I've spent a lot of time pondering Skype," he says. "On the one hand it provides a degree of social connectedness. On the other, you're still essentially by yourself." But, he concludes, "a large part of the human cortex is devoted to the processing of visual information, so I guess Skype is less alienating than voice calls."


Social connectedness is important to Ilardi. In The Depression Cure, he argues that the brain mistakenly interprets the pain of depression as an infection. Thinking that isolation is needed, it sends messages to the sufferer to "crawl into a hole and wait for it all to go away". This can be disastrous because what depressed people really need is the opposite: more human contact.


Which is why social connectedness forms one-sixth of his "lifestyle based" cure for depression. The other five elements are meaningful activity (to prevent "ruminating" on negative thoughts); regular exercise; a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids; daily exposure to sunlight; and good quality, restorative sleep.


The programme has one glaring omission: anti-depressant medication. Because according to Ilardi, the drugs simply don't work. "Meds have only around a 50% success rate," he says. "Moreover, of the people who do improve, half experience a relapse. This lowers the recovery rate to only 25%. To make matters worse, the side effects often include emotional numbing, sexual dysfunction and weight gain."


As a respected clinical psychologist and university professor, Ilardi's views are hard to dismiss. A research team at his workplace, the University of Kansas, has been testing his system – known as TLC (Therapeutic Lifestyle Change) – in clinical trials. The preliminary results show, he says, that every patient who put the full programme into practice got better.
Ilardi is convinced that the medical profession's readiness to prescribe anti-depression medication is obscuring an important debate. Up to 20% of the UK population will have clinical depression at some point, he says – twice as many as 30 years ago. Where has this depression epidemic come from?


The answer, he suggests, lies in our lifestyle. "Our standard of living is better now than ever before, but technological progress comes with a dark underbelly. Human beings were not designed for this poorly nourished, sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially isolated, frenzied pace of life. So depression continues its relentless march."


Our environment may have evolved rapidly but our physical evolution hasn't kept up. "Our genome hasn't moved on since 12,000 years ago, when everyone on the planet were hunter- gatherers," he says. "Biologically, we still have Stone Age bodies. And when Stone Age body meets modern environment, the health consequences can be disastrous."


To counteract this Ilardi focuses on the aspects of a primitive lifestyle that militate against depression. "Hunter- gatherer tribes still exist today in some parts of the world," he says, "and their level of depression is almost zero. The reasons? They're too busy to sit around brooding. They get lots of physical activity and sunlight. Their diet is rich in omega-3, their level of social connection is extraordinary, and they regularly have as much as 10 hours of sleep." Ten hours? "We need eight. At the moment we average 6.7."


So we should all burn our possessions and head out into the forest? "Of course not," Iladi shudders. "That would be like a lifelong camping trip with 30 close relatives for company. Nobody would recommend that."


Instead we can adapt our modern lifestyle to match our genome by harnessing modern technology, such as fish oil supplements to increase our intake of omega-3. All well and good. But I can't escape the feeling that the six-step programme seems like common sense. Isn't it obvious that more sleep, exercise and social connectedness are good for you?
"The devil is in the detail," replies Ilardi. "People need to know how much sunlight is most effective, and at which time of day. And taking supplements, for example, is a complex business. You need anti-oxidants to ensure that the fish oil is effective, as well as a multivitamin. Without someone spelling it out, most people would never do it." Ilardi practises the programme himself. He's never been depressed, he tells me, but it increases his sense of wellbeing and reduces his absentmindedness (his college nickname was "Spaced").
It all makes sense, but will I try it myself? I don't suffer from depression, but wellbeing sounds nice. I'm not so sure about the fish oil, but I might just give it a go.

Enjoy the sunshine, get plenty of sleep – and be sociable

▶ Take 1,500mg of omega-3 daily (in the form of fish oil capsules), with a multivitamin and 500mg vitamin C.▶ Don't dwell on negative thoughts – instead of ruminating start an activity; even conversation counts.
▶ Exercise for 90 minutes a week.
▶ Get 15-30 minutes of sunlight each morning in the summer. In the winter, consider using a lightbox.
▶ Be sociable.
▶ Get eight hours of sleep

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Sending Off the Ref

View From UK

The government's disastrous new deregulation programme means that the poor will be fouled by the rich. It will be forced to re-regulate, but not before large numbers of people have been hurt.

George Monbiot
 
Twelve bookings and one dismissal: the World Cup final wasn't pretty. Both sides argued with the referee, but no one was stupid enough to believe that the match would have been a fairer or a better one without him. Yet we have been asked to imagine that the outcome of the power struggle between corporations and the public would be fairer and better if there were no referee.
The referee is government. It is always biased and often bought, but in principle in a democratic society it exists to prevent us from being fouled. More precisely, it is supposed to prevent those who have agency – the rich and powerful – from planting their studs in the chests of those who don't. When the government walks away from the game the rich can foul the poor with impunity. Deregulation is a transfer of power from the trodden to the treading. It is unsurprising that all conservative parties claim to hate big government.
This one has just lit its long-promised bonfire of regulations. The Conservatives claim that deregulation will save money and relieve business of unnecessary burdens. But the government's new policies go far beyond simplifying a cumbersome bureaucracy.
Last week the health secretary Andrew Lansley sought to shift responsibility for improving diets and preventing obesity from the state to society. He blamed the problem on low self-esteem and deplored what he called "a witch hunt against saturated fats, salt and sugars"(1). In future poor diets would be countered by "social responsibility, not state regulation." From now on, he announced, communities will be left to find their own solutions. The companies which make their money from selling junk food and alcohol will be put in charge of ensuring that people consume less of them. I hope you have spotted the problem.
This is care in the community for public health, whose outcomes will be similar to those of the previous Tory government's care in the community for mental health. Volunteers have neither the power nor the motivation to fight slick, well-financed PR professionals working for big business.
Lansley would do well to read the analysis published by the Government Office for Science. "For an increasing number of people, weight gain is the inevitable – and largely involuntary – consequence of exposure to a modern lifestyle. This is not to dismiss personal responsibility altogether, but to highlight a reality: that the forces that drive obesity are, for many people, overwhelming."(2) Advances in neurobiology, it argues, show that the hunger drive is far stronger than "satiety cues" (knowing we've eaten enough), and easily exploited by advances in taste technologies and presentation.
The same study points out that obesity rates are much higher among the poor than the rich; that they are likely to double between now and 2050(3), and that, by then, the problem will cost the NHS £10bn a year at today's prices, and the economy £50bn. This was all before the food companies were let off the leash. So much for deregulation saving money.
Lansley's assault on public health is just one skirmish in the Tories' new war on regulation. The government has now set up a task force to deregulate the farming industry(4). Farming is the major cause of the loss of biodiversity in the UK. It is one of the two top causes of water pollution. It has the highest rates of death and injury of any industry in this country(5). Now the industry has been asked to police itself.
The chair of the task force is the former director general of the National Farmers' Union. His deputy is a senior NFU official. The rest of the task force is composed of another farmer, three corporate executives, a county council official and … well this is where it gets interesting. The eighth member, the government tells us, is "a Nuffield Scholar who has been involved with developing an animal welfare scheme"(6). In reality he is yet another farmer, who supplies milk to Sainsbury's. This selective citation suggests dishonesty on the part of Caroline Spelman's food and farming department. The last member is the head of public affairs at the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust. This group purports to protect wildlife, but it runs fox snaring courses(7) and gives advice on setting spring traps to catch smaller predators(8). There is no one on the task force representing rural workers, and no one outside the industry seeking to defend the landscape or the wider environment, water quality or animal welfare.
Private Eye reveals this week that the government may scrap property developers' obligations to provide social housing(9). This won't save money or streamline the state, but it will allow developers to create enclaves for the rich and ghettos for the poor, ensuring that the UK becomes an even more divided society. The department for transport tells me that it will be discouraging local authorities from erecting speed cameras(10). The department's own studies show that deaths and injuries are reduced by 42% where cameras are deployed(11). This, among more obvious benefits, saves the NHS and the emergency services a packet. Again the poor will be hurt most: pedestrians in the poorest areas are three times more likely to be killed or injured by cars than pedestrians in the richest areas(12). Drivers will instead be urged to regulate themselves: the department tells me that it wants councils to use "more publicity campaigns" instead.
As the economist Willem Buiter observed, "self-regulation is to regulation as self-importance is to importance."(13) The financial crisis was caused by government expectations that the banks could police themselves. That provoked the state spending crisis, which the government is now using as an excuse to administer more of the poison which started it.
The difference in approach between this government and the last is quantitative. New Labour capitulated to the corporations across all the industries I have mentioned here, but it didn't go as fast or as far. The Tories can carry off this coup partly because the opposition has squandered the moral authority required to fight it. Hearing Andy Burnham criticising Andrew Lansley for deregulating the health sector is a bit like watching the Dutch side going into conniptions about a Spanish foul: they might have been right, but by that stage in the game it wasn't a credible protest.
So here's what's going to happen. The failure of big business to police itself will cause a series of crises: in public health, social provision, quality of life, the environment. The state will have to shell out billions to put them right. Eventually (think of BSE, the railways, tobacco advertising) the government will be forced to re-regulate, but not before large numbers of people have been hurt. In the meantime we'll be instructed to pull our socks up and take responsibility for issues out of our control. It's an age-old story from which governments learn the square root of nothing. It happens as predictably as a punch-up when the referee quits the pitch.

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