Poor basics have brought down the standard of cricket

Test teams are more competitive these days, but it's probably because the fundamentals of backing up, running between the wickets and catching are being ignored

Ian Chappell in Cricinfo

August 10, 2014

 

Are pre-game routines designed to build on cricket's fundamental skills? © Getty Images

The wildly fluctuating series between India and England reflects Test cricket in the last decade. Where there was once domination by West Indies and then Australia, we now have parity, at least among the top five or six teams. Certainly there's a tendency towards home advantage, but as we've seen with India and England, there's very little standing between the top teams.

Is parity better for the game than dominance?

There's no doubt cricket is a more interesting spectacle when there's a genuine tussle, as witnessed in the contrasting Tests played at Trent Bridge and Lord's. Give bowlers some encouragement and the contest can be compulsive viewing.

Unfortunately, parity has come about because the standard of the better sides has slipped a little rather than it being a case of the lesser teams raising the bar. Still, it's preferable having a logjam at the top of the table rather than one standout team followed in the distance by a bunch of also-rans.

Why has parity only been achieved through a dip in standards?

We are constantly told that batsmen are more dominant these days and that fielding standards are better than ever, but the information doesn't match reality. Batting survival techniques have deteriorated. It's power-hitting that has dramatically improved. And while some amazing catches and saves are enacted near the boundary, in the crucial area of the close cordon, chances are too often spilt because simple but critical footwork is lacking. The pursuit of the spectacular has outstripped the desire to master basics.

Much of the pre-game routines are fairy-floss rather than the meat and potatoes that help win cricket matches. One of my main concerns when the idea of international coaches was first mooted was that decisions would be taken to justify a large contract rather than be in the best interests of the player. It seems that many coaches want to leave a monument behind, and consequently there are numerous theories in existence replacing good old-fashioned tried and tested techniques.

It's interesting to reflect on the thoughts of two great practitioners of their art, Australia's Bill O'Reilly and West Indies' Sir Garfield Sobers. O'Reilly once advised a young cricketing hopeful: "If you see a coach coming, son, run a mile." Sobers was even less subtle. When some ill-informed official had the temerity to suggest he didn't have the required qualifications to coach, Garry exploded: "What do you think I got my f#@%&*! knighthood for, singing?"

Sobers deplored the fact that "great cricketers are treated as freaks; admired for their feats but ignored for the way in which they achieved them".

The basics of backing up, running between wickets, catching in the slips, and some to do with ground fielding, are being ignored. There's a tendency to salivate over the latest fashionable theory but gag on tried and tested techniques.

Two classic examples are slip catching and running between wickets. Many chances go down in the cordon because of the failure to initiate the slight turn of the foot that balances a fielder before attempting a catch away from the body. The tendency is to attempt a spectacular catch by simply falling sideways - at the risk of spilling the chance.

Why do batsmen turn blind, not watch the ball leave the bowler's hand when backing up, and insist on running down the on side of the pitch after playing a stroke when that greatly increases the chance of a collision with a partner?

These are violations of simple basics that have brought good results. They should be learnt before a budding cricketer reaches teenage years, and be ingrained in him by the time he reaches voting age.

While many coaches seek fame, players tend to concentrate on methods most likely to earn their fortune. While the former is lamentable, the latter approach is understandable.

No other sport has three vastly different forms of competition, and this complicates the issue of technique, especially in batting. However, Kumar Sangakkara is a classic example of how you don't have to sacrifice the basics in order to succeed in all three forms.

The aim should be to achieve parity by raising the overall standard.

Crocodile Tears

The Indian mythology of happy old age

Shiv Visvanathan in The Hindu

Indian culture seems too distant and fragile to sustain old age. A sense of tragedy haunts the future. One is forced to ask what is the use of the idea of India, of all our pride in our culture, when the old are left to die or live in indifference

One of the most hopeful sights one can see on Marina Beach, Chennai, is to watch groups of old people walking together, talking boisterously, comparing notes, showering each other with a barrage of anecdotes. Occasionally, one can see an old couple walking like a dignified pair, content with each other, as if their walk is a continuation of their love affair. There is dignity, a companionship and a beautiful everydayness to it. Parks and beaches are often scenes for the celebration of old age. I must confess that these scenes are public and reassuring. Yet, as one probes further, one discovers that this is a small slice of the reality of the old age in India. The HelpAge India report (2014) on old age abuse provides an altogether different picture. The statistics are frightening and the few interviews, deeply disturbing.

Based on a sample study of 1,200 people from six Tier I cities and six Tier II cities, the report suggests that old age is a frightening prospect, an ecology of violence where over half the elderly interviewed report to experiencing abuse within the family. Oddly, while the percentage of abuse has gone up, the report indicates that at least 41 per cent of those abused did not report it. Abuse, choked within and caged in silence festers like a sore. Fear and helplessness that there is no one else to depend upon and few to report to, adds to the penumbra of silence. While our myths and advertisements perpetuate the myth of happy old age, the data tells us the behaviour of our society is an insult to old age

Old age, a commodity

When cities are ranked in terms of the level of abuse, Bangalore tops among Tier I cities with the sample reporting 75 per cent of abuse. Among Tier II cities, Nagpur is highest with 85 per cent interviewed reporting abuse. What is interesting is that such abuse is not occasional but sustained with verbal abuse (41 per cent), disrespect (33 per cent), and neglect (29 per cent) emerging as the three most frequent types of abuse reported by the elderly. Despite their helplessness, the elderly are good sociologists, analysing the roots of their abuse to emotional dependence, economic dependence and the changing ethos of values. There is a sense that in a deep and fundamental way, we are no longer a caring society.

While the numbers speak loudly, the interviews, even if sparse and bald, capture the sociology of old age more graphically.

For many, old age is a space of helplessness, callousness and indifference. Despite being caught in the web of symbolic and physical violence, the old are still able to provide an ethnography of despair. They point out quietly that old age has become a commodity. The younger generation commodifies old age by seeing the old as sources of pension, property, income. The old are like the goose that must lay the golden eggs and move on. Waiting for the old to die seems an unnecessary inconvenience. Yet, when the old have nothing more to give, they are seen as dispensable. Keshav, a 65-year-old from Kolkata, complains that his wife and he are constantly abused because they do not earn. His wife cooks for the entire family and yet they have to plead for a fair share of the food. Worse, as the report notes tersely, “even requests for medicine or clothes are met with taunts of their impending deaths and termed as a ‘waste’ on them.” The political economy of our new old age becomes clearer in interviews. Old age is not a part of the ritual cycle, a natural process where the old retire with dignity, providing a richness of emotion and memory to the family. Today, when the elderly wither away as a commodity, a milch cow to be milked by greedy children, they become waste to be abandoned. One literally sees them as “useless eaters” to be denied food and medicines and to be eventually abandoned in the dust heap and suffer in silence and indifference. Many of the old reported that they went hungry to sleep.

Politics of abuse

What makes the report so devastating is that it is so baldly written. It’s a no-nonsense approach, its census of violence becomes even more devastating because of a sheer absence of sentimentality. It provides the facts and asks you to feel, feel angry or embarrassed. When parents complain that they have been reduced to being less than domestic servants, denied even their basic needs, one wonders what happened to the idea of India, our sense of a civilisation, the empty boast about our Indian-ness.

The report shows that the vulnerability of old age is created out of the political economy of dependency. The old probably grew up expecting their children to nurture and protect them, sustain their sense of worth and dignity. What breaks them is the fact that their children see them as being useless, a burden, and yet what adds to the desperate poignancy is that they are not able to cut loose. The family, memory, emotion becomes a guise of dependency perpetuating the violence as the old feel there is nowhere to go and no alternative system which could sustain them. The extended family or the neighbourhood, the local politician or the policeman are of little help. To the vulnerability that abuse creates, one adds a sense of helplessness. Old age is now an iron cage from which there is no exit.

There is a touch of the new to this politics of abuse. The tyranny of the regime is enforced by the son and the daughter-in-law. The daughter-in-law is the new Hobbesian sovereign in these sociological anecdotes as the mother-in-law becomes a desiccated old creature, unrecognisable from the soap operas of old which glorified her power and authority. The son sides with the wife against the mother upturning one of the oldest norms of domestic politics. It is also clear that there is a generational change here. The new generation wants the old to give them property but then move on. They are not seen as part of the ritual cycles of domestic life. The old grammar has changed. Old age, once a sign of status, a rite of passage to dignity, is now redundant or pathological, a problem for policy and social work, not for the family which states its indifference ruthlessly.

The report can be read both as a sociology and a social policy. As sociology, the old themselves ponder on the distance between generations, the absence of ethics and memory that could have provided dignity to old age. As a teacher I often ask my students — a sensitive lot — to talk about their grandmothers, to give me details about stories they have heard or food cooked. Most of them seemed embarrassed, surprised with such intrusive questions; only one could talk of his grandmother’s pickles with a zest that summoned a whole sensorium. For most of them, grandparents have become occasional question marks, ritual burdens. Few have recollections of stories told, preferring the narratives on TV or the Internet. It is almost as if grandparents are like creatures out of Tussauds; features that can be ignored. I asked one student to describe the touch of her grandmother. She almost felt repulsed exclaiming, “God, she is so old and scaly.” An absence of memories and ethos of sharing disrupts the ecology of old age. Dignity has become a rare word as abuse becomes the sociological constant.

The report also adds that for the elderly, there is little knowledge of helplines or sources of appeal.

Shift in values

The report however raises a deeper question in a tacit way. One has to understand that ours was a civilisation where the old were honoured, where old age was a position of dignity and wisdom. Somehow with modernisation, consumerism, individualism, the values of old age are no longer part of our society, at least as reflected in the survey sample.

The question is does such a problem have to be solved civilisationally or is it merely an act of repair, a creation of social security to be effected by public policy? It is the erosion of values that disconcerts one to suddenly realise that your grandparents are not a refuge, a bundle of stories, a ganglion of memories, an appeal against parents but an appendage, economically useless and burdensome. The question is do we rethink the norms of old age, treat it as a commons of stability and wisdom, and change the values of our culture? The other alternative is to accept that old age is a problem and accept that new institutions of support outside the family have to be built. Social policy as a piece of plumbing and repair haunts the report. Culture seems too distant and fragile to sustain old age. A sense of tragedy haunts the future. One is forced to ask what is the use of the idea of India, of all our pride in our culture, when the old are left to die or live in indifference. As children, we used to laugh when we heard that the Japanese were buying land for old age homes in India. Maybe they had a better sense of the future than us.

Mindfulness is all about self-help. It does nothing to change an unjust world

Why are we trying to think less when we need to think more? The neutered, apolitical approach of mindfulness ignores the structural difficulties we live with

• 
• • Suzanne Moore
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 6 August 2014 18.00 BST

Marina Abramović uses many techniques of mindfulness – but it’s an exercise guided by ego. Photograph: Mike McGregor for the Guardian

Most of what is wrong in the modern world can be cured by not thinking too much. From psoriasis to depression to giving yourself a "competitive advantage" in the workplace, the answer touted everywhere right now is mindfulness. Just let go for few minutes a day, breathe, observe your thoughts as ripples across a pond, feel every sensation around you. Stop your mind whirring and, lo, miraculously, everything will improve "at a cellular level".

Sorry, it's not working for me because I cannot rid myself of the thought: "Why this, why now?" There is nothing wrong with trying to relax: the problem lies in the "trying". And there is nothing new about meditation, so why has it suddenly gone mainstream?

What was once the province of people who had backpacked across India has been gentrified and repackaged as a great cure-all, legitimated by doctors and scientists. Now everyone from Rupert Murdoch to Lena Dunham and William Hague is giving it a go.

The City is awash with bankers trying to quiet their minds. Schoolchildren are given mindfulness training to help them with their anxieties. Yoga was once a bit countercultural, too, and now it vies with Zumba, rumba and Pilates classes.

We know the west takes hold of eastern mysticism, ignores its history and faith and turns it into a secular and accessible pastime. For mindfulness is Buddhism without the awkward Buddhist bits. A complex philosophy is rendered as self-help. What does freedom from attachment and desire mean in this self-centred world? What is radical acceptance? Why practise non-judgment? Those who have practised meditation all their lives may not say it's to get a promotion or be less stressed. There is a whole history of thought here.

But no, once Arianna Huffington is on the case, you know there is money to be made in commodifying blankness. Indeed, the whole of Silicon Valley has hugged mindfulness close, as have the US marines, who use it as part of "mind fitness" to help soldiers relax and learn "emotional intelligence".

These are basic meditation techniques being sold as a way to function better in an over-connected world. Thus, in the finance sector, companies where bankers are super-stressed – unlike poor people – arrange for their staff to have 10-minute daily meditations. It's all scienced-up with names such as Mind Lab to shake off the hippyish/religious/psychic-adventurer connotations. Keep fit for the brain.

It's even in art galleries. I wandered around Marina Abramović's 512 hours waiting for enlightenment. Or something. She is using many of the techniques of mindfulness, from counting grains of rice to staring at walls to get us to slow down. I like her work because she is a powerful presence, but when she took my hand and guided me to sit down, as ever, I wondered why I must do as I was told and why everyone else was so passive. But they were clearly having spiritual experiences. Or were asleep. This exercise in mindfulness then, was guided by ego – which is fitting, as the art world is the most ego-ridden, sensationalist and utterly mindless spectacle of all.

Much of the cult of mindfulness is a reaction to technology. It speaks the language of detox, of decluttering. There is too much information. We need to clear our minds. Be and not do. The new ascetic is someone who goes for a walk without their phone or takes a week off Twitter to cleanse themselves. This version of meditation requires no more than the faith that we can all be self-improving part-time gurus. It requires no commitment to a community, and it's cheap.

The corporate world sees that it can make its workers more self-reliant, balanced and focused. What could be better? Take your medicine, because the mindfulness movement is symptomatic of what late capitalism requires of us. A contemplative space opens up where religion used to be. We learn techniques to make us more efficient. This neutered, apolitical approach is to help us personally – it has nothing to say on the structural difficulties that we live with. It lets go of the idea that we can change the world; it merely helps us function better in it.

Living in the moment, non-judgmentally, being more self-aware, it's all good. But, actually, more and more people are switching themselves off. They cannot even watch the news because they feel so powerless to do anything about it.

The mindfulness coalition of life coaches, business people and healers cannot – and does not –promise peace, but why are we to think less when we need to think more?

Something here is, well, mindless. Maybe a mantra is all you need and maybe we should all devote more time to changing our minds. But for the time being I am just letting that thought drift right through me.

ISIS Caliphate, Israel-Palestine War & Pakistan's Anti-TTP Operation - Focus Ep171

Cricket - The fear of the ringer

 

Jonathan Wilson in Cricinfo

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Slow straight bowling can become infused with mystery and terror when you think you're facing a ringer  © PA Photos

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Cricket, probably more than any other sport, encourages the ringer. Everybody who has ever played at any kind of amateur level knows that Sunday morning feeling, either calling round mates and mates of mates to see if anybody fancies making up the numbers, or getting an unexpected phone call from somebody you last saw in a bar at university ten years earlier seeing if you fancy a game.

It happens in other sports as well, of course, but cricket, as an individual sport dressed in a team game's clothing, seems more conducive to the ringer. A footballer or a hockey player suddenly introduced to an unfamiliar team will stand out a mile, the holistic nature of those sports meaning he won't be making a run he needs to, or he'll be providing cover where none is needed. In cricket, though, you pick up the ball and bowl, or pick up the bat and bat, and - apart from knowing the idiosyncrasies of how other batsmen run or the vagaries of who fields best where, essentially you can just get on with it. 

Even better, because of the self-regulatory element of cricket, the way a batsman can retire, or a bowler can be taken off if he's bowling so well he threatens to unbalance the game, it doesn't really matter if there's one player who's far better than everybody else. It doesn't really matter if there's one player who's far worse: even good players score ducks, so the weak link doesn't stand out as he would in another sport.

The best ringer I ever played with was the West Indies offspinner Omari Banks who, aged 16 or 17, for reasons I can't recall, joined our college team for a tour. He was an up-and-coming star, we were told, a bowler who was expected to play Test cricket sooner rather than later.

A first glance was confusing. He belted the ball miles and clearly had a superb eye, but his frequently short offbreaks were remarkably unthreatening. He must be a quick taking it easy on us, we thought; five years later, he was taking three wickets (for lots) and scoring 47 not out as West Indies chased down 418 to beat Australia in Antigua. There was something rather comforting in that: he'd seemed far more like a batsman than a bowler to us.

Clean though his hitting had been, the truth is Banks had been a little bit of a disappointment to us. Hearing we were getting a West Indies bowler, we'd assumed we could play along and then chuck him the ball as soon as a partnership began to get annoying, effectively guaranteeing wins.

Absurdly, the following year, I found myself cast unwittingly in the Banks role - in relative terms; nobody would ever have pretended I was on the verge of a Test debut. I'd just finished my Masters and was temping at a data entry centre in Sunderland. A mate was working at the City of Newcastle Development Agency and called me one day to see if I fancied playing against British Airways the following day. By starting work early and taking only 15 minutes for lunch, I was able to get up to Ponteland, to a bleak field near the airport, in time to play.

"What do you do?" the captain asked. The honest answer would have been, "Nothing very well," but I grunted, "Bits and pieces."

He nodded and, having won the toss and opted to bat, asked me to open. I had occasionally opened for my college Second XI as an undergrad, so it didn't seem that odd, although at Durham I'd tended to bat at seven or eight for the Graduate Society. On a horrible, sticky pitch, I ground my way to 27 at which, having heard the grumbles from the boundary, I slashed at a wide one and was caught at deep cover. My slow start having forced others to play overly aggressively, I ended up top-scoring as we made 90-odd in 20 overs.

That, I assumed, was that. I fielded at backward point and took a catch, but the game seemed to be drifting slowly away from us when the captain suddenly asked me to bowl the 13th over. This seemed very strange, but I wasn't going to say no. The batsman was set, had scored 30 or so, and looked far better than anybody else in the game.

My first ball, a pushed through offbreak, was blocked. The second he clubbed through midwicket for four, although it had turned a little and it had come slightly off the inside edge. The third ball I tossed up, it didn't turn, he played for spin that wasn't there and chipped it to cover. "Thinking cricket," said the captain, apparently in the belief there'd been some element of skill of planning in what had just happened.

What happened next was mystifying. The new batsman blocked out the over. They blocked out the 15th over as well. Ludicrously I had figures of 2-1-4-1. Suddenly they needed over a run a ball. The third over, the batsman, having to force the pace, came down the track, yorked himself and was stumped. Two balls later the new batsman did the same thing. We ended up winning by 12 runs and, without really knowing how, I'd taken 3 for 14.

It later turned out my mate had rather oversold me, or rather, our captain had assumed the level of college cricket at my university was rather higher than it was. After I'd batted so sluggishly, he'd assumed I must be a bowler and so had decided to give me four overs at the death. He'd even let on to the opposing captain that I was a ringer, with a suitably inflated suggestion of my abilities. When I'd then fortuitously dismissed their best player, it confirmed their fears, which explained the nine successive balls nobody had tried to hit. Slow straight bowling had become infused with mystery and terror.

None of it was real, of course. The wickets had been conjured by fear of the ringer. It was a valuable lesson: pretend you know what you're doing, and opponents might just destroy themselves by believing you.

Sick of this market-driven world? You should be

The self-serving con of neoliberalism is that it has eroded the human values the market was supposed to emancipate

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 5 August 2014 21.05 BST

‘The workplace has been overwhelmed by a mad, Kafkaesque infrastructure ... whose purpose is to reward the winners and punish the losers.’ Photograph: REX/High Level

To be at peace with a troubled world: this is not a reasonable aim. It can be achieved only through a disavowal of what surrounds you. To be at peace with yourself within a troubled world: that, by contrast, is an honourable aspiration. This column is for those who feel at odds with life. It calls on you not to be ashamed.

I was prompted to write it by a remarkable book, just published in English, by a Belgian professor of psychoanalysis, Paul Verhaeghe. What About Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society is one of those books that, by making connections between apparently distinct phenomena, permits sudden new insights into what is happening to us and why.

We are social animals, Verhaeghe argues, and our identities are shaped by the norms and values we absorb from other people. Every society defines and shapes its own normality – and its own abnormality – according to dominant narratives, and seeks either to make people comply or to exclude them if they don’t.

Today the dominant narrative is that of market fundamentalism, widely known in Europe as neoliberalism. The story it tells is that the market can resolve almost all social, economic and political problems. The less the state regulates and taxes us, the better off we will be. Public services should be privatised, public spending should be cut, and business should be freed from social control. In countries such as the UK and the US, this story has shaped our norms and values for around 35 years: since Thatcher and Reagan came to power. It is rapidly colonising the rest of the world.

Verhaeghe points out that neoliberalism draws on the ancient Greek idea that our ethics are innate (and governed by a state of nature it calls the market) and on the Christian idea that humankind is inherently selfish and acquisitive. Rather than seeking to suppress these characteristics, neoliberalism celebrates them: it claims that unrestricted competition, driven by self-interest, leads to innovation and economic growth, enhancing the welfare of all.

At the heart of this story is the notion of merit. Untrammelled competition rewards people who have talent, work hard, and innovate. It breaks down hierarchies and creates a world of opportunity and mobility.

The reality is rather different. Even at the beginning of the process, when markets are first deregulated, we do not start with equal opportunities. Some people are a long way down the track before the starting gun is fired. This is how the Russian oligarchs managed to acquire such wealth when the Soviet Union broke up. They weren’t, on the whole, the most talented, hardworking or innovative people, but those with the fewest scruples, the most thugs, and the best contacts – often in the KGB.

Even when outcomes are based on talent and hard work, they don’t stay that way for long. Once the first generation of liberated entrepreneurs has made its money, the initial meritocracy is replaced by a new elite, which insulates its children from competition by inheritance and the best education money can buy. Where market fundamentalism has been most fiercely applied – in countries like the US and UK – social mobility has greatly declined.

If neoliberalism was anything other than a self-serving con, whose gurus and thinktanks were financed from the beginning by some of the world’s richest people (the US multimillionaires Coors, Olin, Scaife, Pew and others), its apostles would have demanded, as a precondition for a society based on merit, that no one should start life with the unfair advantage of inherited wealth or economically determined education. But they never believed in their own doctrine. Enterprise, as a result, quickly gave way to rent.

All this is ignored, and success or failure in the market economy are ascribed solely to the efforts of the individual. The rich are the new righteous; the poor are the new deviants, who have failed both economically and morally and are now classified as social parasites.

The market was meant to emancipate us, offering autonomy and freedom. Instead it has delivered atomisation and loneliness.

The workplace has been overwhelmed by a mad, Kafkaesque infrastructure of assessments, monitoring, measuring, surveillance and audits, centrally directed and rigidly planned, whose purpose is to reward the winners and punish the losers. It destroys autonomy, enterprise, innovation and loyalty, and breeds frustration, envy and fear. Through a magnificent paradox, it has led to the revival of a grand old Soviet tradition known in Russian as tufta. It means falsification of statistics to meet the diktats of unaccountable power.

The same forces afflict those who can’t find work. They must now contend, alongside the other humiliations of unemployment, with a whole new level of snooping and monitoring. All this, Verhaeghe points out, is fundamental to the neoliberal model, which everywhere insists on comparison, evaluation and quantification. We find ourselves technically free but powerless. Whether in work or out of work, we must live by the same rules or perish. All the major political parties promote them, so we have no political power either. In the name of autonomy and freedom we have ended up controlled by a grinding, faceless bureaucracy.

These shifts have been accompanied, Verhaeghe writes, by a spectacular rise in certain psychiatric conditions: self-harm, eating disorders, depression and personality disorders.

Of the personality disorders, the most common are performance anxiety and social phobia: both of which reflect a fear of other people, who are perceived as both evaluators and competitors – the only roles for society that market fundamentalism admits. Depression and loneliness plague us.

The infantilising diktats of the workplace destroy our self-respect. Those who end up at the bottom of the pile are assailed by guilt and shame. The self-attribution fallacy cuts both ways: just as we congratulate ourselves for our success, we blame ourselves for our failure, even if we have little to do with it.

So, if you don’t fit in, if you feel at odds with the world, if your identity is troubled and frayed, if you feel lost and ashamed – it could be because you have retained the human values you were supposed to have discarded. You are a deviant. Be proud.