Why has the quality of spinners in India declined?

 Ranji pitches? Overcoaching? The IPL? A defensive mindset? Five experts share their thoughts

Interviews by Nagraj Gollapudi

October 3, 2014

Narendra Hirwani: "My message to spinners like R Ashwin is, bowl your stock delivery 80% of the time in first-class cricket" © AFP

Two years ago, when England won the Test series in India 2-1, R Ashwin, India's favoured offspinner since the dropping of Harbhajan Singh, took 14 wickets at 52.64. This summer in England, Ashwin played the final two Tests of the five-match series; Ravindra Jadeja played in the first four. Their combined aggregate of 12 wickets was seven fewer than the tally of the best spinner in the series: England's Moeen Ali, a part-timer.

On India's domestic circuit, spinners have ceded place to seamers. In the last three seasons of the Ranji Trophy, only Shahbaz Nadeem, the Jharkhand left-arm spinner, has finished among the top-five wicket-takers. Till the turn of the millennium, Ranji teams had high-quality spinners who were at par with those playing for the national side. Now, a country that boasted the likes of Erapalli Prasanna, Bishan Bedi, BS Chandrasekhar, Maninder Singh, Narendra Hirwani, Venkatapathy Raju, Anil Kumble, Sunil Joshi and Harbhajan Singh suddenly finds its pool dry.

What are the factors that have contributed to this decline? Five experts - Bishan Bedi, Maninder Singh, Narendra Hirwani, Murali Kartik and Amol Muzumdar - share their thoughts.

A lack of quality spin

Bishan Bedi (former India left-arm spinner and captain): Where is India's next-generation spinner coming from? We are at a very strange crossroads where everybody and anybody wants to get into the team in a fast manner. That does not happen when it comes to spin bowling. Spin bowling is all about learning your craft over a period of time. You can't learn spin bowling by just delivering four overs in a T20 match.

Murali Kartik: (former Railways and India left-arm spinner): We have come to a stage where even a part-time bowler is being looked at as a spinner. To bowl spin there are lots of important basics in technique that need to be developed. That is not happening right now because the youngsters at the grass-roots level are playing the limited-overs versions. Before you are learning what your action is, learning how to bowl the conventional form of spin, the thing that is happening now is, because of the lure of money, youngsters want to play the shortest format.

At the age of 18 or 19, if you ask a spinner to play T20 and then ask him to bowl well in four-day cricket, it will not be possible. Even within India, you are not getting spinners to bowl well, even if you give them spinning pitches. So they do not have the wherewithal to bowl at all overseas.

Amol Muzumdar: (former Mumbai batsman and captain) The spinners are not a threat anymore. When does a batsman feel threatened at the crease? Only when the ball has fizz. If you are darting the ball at him, I am happy [as a batsman], absolutely happy to face that. But when the ball fizzes off the surface, when it has flight and spin, then batting is not easy. And that is not seen anymore.

I remember facing Venkatapathy Raju in Mumbai in my early years of first-class cricket. I could hear the turn in the air. Same with Maninder Singh. That really put me in my crease. I told myself I had to be careful. They put me on the back foot.

Narendra Hirwani: (former India legspinner and former national selector) There was a time when the level of spinners at Ranji Trophy and Test level was virtually the same. That divide has become very big now. During Bishan paaji's time there were Padmakar Shivalkar and Rajinder Goel, who were equally good left-arm spinners.

Today the youngsters are a little too smart for their own good. When you become too smart, you become cautious. But these youngsters do not understand that every batsman is afraid of spin.

Maninder Singh: (fomer India left-arm spinner) This is a concern. The BCCI did not either realise or it did not bother to make sure young spinners coming up did not start drifting towards T20 cricket. I will give the example of Akshar Patel, the Kings XI Punjab [and Gujarat] left-arm spinner. He darts everything in to the batsman, which is absolutely fine for T20, but I hope it does not become a habit.

	"I would feel good only when I had bowled sufficient hours to get confidence in the nets, which then I could take in to the match. I would bowl at least seven to eight hours every day. I was obsessed"Bishan Bedi

The part pitches play

Kartik: It was a knee-jerk reaction [making green pitches] when we lost Test series in England and Australia in 2011 and 2012. The thought process was we needed to play on wickets which are conducive to fast bowling.

In India, say I win the toss on a green pitch and ask the opposition to bat. I play three seamers, a batting allrounder who can bowl a little, and a spinner. Generally, if you bundle out the opposition anywhere between 120-220 runs, the next thing you do is you ask for a heavy roller when it is your turn to bat. So over four innings, by the time the match is into the third day and when the wicket is supposed to disintegrate, because the heavy roller has been used, the wicket is no longer green for the seamers. It becomes a flat deck. And because of the grass cover that has been rolled time and again, there are no natural variations, there are no footmarks. So even on the fourth day there is nothing for a spinner.

Also, the SG Test ball, which is used in domestic first-class cricket, starts [reverse] swinging once the ball is 30 to 40 overs old. By the time the spinner comes in to bowl the ball is about 60 overs old. But he gets only about ten overs to do the holding job on a pitch made for the seamers.

I bowled a total of 71 overs during the 2013-14 season in seven matches for Railways. Out of that, for ten overs I ran in and bowled seam-up against Tamil Nadu at the Jamia Millia ground in Delhi. At times we have played on pitches that resembled the Wimbledon tennis courts.

I can still bowl on those wickets because I have bowled in the conventional four-day method. Harbhajan Singh has done that. [Ramesh] Powar has done that. Sunil Joshi has done that. But Ravindra Jadeja, Iqbal Abdulla, Vishal Dabholkar have learned only the restrictive way of bowling: round-arm, undercutting. That is what is happening closer to the grass-roots.

Making spin-friendly pitches is no foolproof solution. By doing that the spinner goes in with a false sense of confidence that he has taken lots of wickets. But you are still not a complete bowler. Your skill sets are not up to the mark.

Hirwani: I have always said that a spinner should train on a wicket where he needs to make the ball turn. Not on pitches that take turn easily. It should be a pitch where you need the skills - not everyone can spin on it.

A defensive attitude

Bedi: There is no imagination. You are only playing a waiting game. So the batsman will always be on top. You have to make a batsman do what you want him to do. Spin bowling is a philosophy. How to outwit your opponent. It can be compared with playing chess. It is not bowling flat, like young Indian bowlers, even Jadeja, are doing.

	Maninder Singh: "Akshar Patel darts everything in to the batsman, which is fine for T20. But I hope it does not become a habit" © BCCI  Enlarge

Hirwani: I feel the main reason behind that is if the idea is to minimise the runs I want to concede, I need to not reduce the spin on the ball. If you spin less, then you could give less runs, but you also reduce the chances of taking a wicket. So if you minimise taking risks, you also cut down your chances of taking a wicket. The shorter versions of the game have started affecting some spinners.

Take even Harbhajan Singh. Why did he slide in the latter half of his career? He started to focus more on checking the runs. His line started to go towards the middle stump and that reduced his chances of taking wickets. An attacking line for an offspinner is pitching on the fifth stump [outside off], where he is trying to get the batsman bowled by breaking in. The moment he brings the line inside, he starts becoming defensive. That means only if the batsman makes a mistake will you get a wicket. But then how are you forcing the batsman to commit a mistake?

My message to even senior spinners like R Ashwin is: bowl your stock delivery 80% of the time in first-class cricket, and for rest of the time you can use the variations as a surprise. A spinner should not become predictable.

Kartik: Even in first-class cricket, spinners and captains now place a long-on, long-off, deep point with silly point and short leg, when all you are doing is darting the ball. To dart you do not need to know the fundamentals of spin bowling. To bowl flight, to beat the batsman in the air, to spin the ball, you need the basics to be very strong. It takes time.

Is modern coaching to blame?

Muzumdar: Earlier there were spinners with different actions. In the 1980s there was Maninder Singh, Ravi Shastri, Venkatapathy Raju and so many others. But all had different actions which were natural. That is the essence of spin bowling - keep your action natural. I think now we are over-coaching some youngsters.

Take Harmeet Singh, the Mumbai left-arm spinner. When I saw him a few years ago in the indoor nets in Mumbai, he had a unique action. It was not the conventional action. His front foot would land with a heavy thrust on the ground. That was his skill and it helped him deliver the ball nicely. But now he delivers with a much lower arm and that is because he has changed his action. I fear we have lost one more good spinner due to over-coaching.

Maninder: As a coach, I do not try and change the action at all. I try to look at the strengths of the youngster and coach accordingly. But I have seen certified coaches teach kids about the arm coming from a certain height and degree. I would rather focus on the youngster's natural arc and polish that.

Hirwani: Many of my students at my academy in Indore tell me: "Sir, I have bowled 60 balls. Sir, I have bowled 50 balls today." I tell them: if you want to make cream, you have to condense it, and that only happens after boiling it for a period of time. A good rabri [sweet] is made only when the cream rises. For quality you need quantity.

I would bowl minimum of 90 overs a day as a youngster at the Cricket Club of Indore. I would bowl at just one stump for a couple of hours. In all, I would bowl for a minimum of five hours. If you are bowling at one stump you end up bowling about 30 overs in an hour. This kind of training, bowling at one stump, is equivalent to vocalists doing riyaaz [music practice]. You build your muscle memory.

Bedi: I keep hearing about pitching it in the right areas. The right areas is between your ears, in your mind.

I also had an outstanding coach. He gave me a lot of cricket sense. Cricket ability and cricket sense are two different things.

You just have to bowl. Bowl and bowl and bowl. I would feel good only when I had bowled sufficient hours to get the confidence first in the nets which then I could take in to the match. It took me a long, long time to learn good bowling. I would bowl at least seven to eight hours every day. I was obsessed.

The importance of captains

Muzumdar: As a captain you have to be patient. You need to relax even if a four or six is hit off a spinner. Nowadays batsmen go after a slow bowler, especially ones who do not impart too much spin on the ball, as soon as he comes in to bowl. So the captain immediately says to keep it tight till his fast bowlers can come back.

I saw the rise of Sairaj Bahutule under Sanjay Manjrekar, Ravi Shastri and Sachin Tendulkar. After about four years, I think, Sairaj picked his first five-for. You had to be patient. And I saw the development in Sairaj in that period. Against Delhi in a Ranji Trophy match, Ajay Sharma was taking control but Manjrekar persisted with Sairaj and Nilesh Kulkarni though Sharma was playing aggressively against the spinners. In the end Mumbai won that match.

Kartik: A captain can make or break a spinner. So he should understand what the spinner goes through, how they function and how they can be turned to match-winners. When the captain wants you to give as few runs as possible, he is not giving the spinner any confidence.

Maninder: Take the example of Gautam Gambhir. I have seen him in T20 cricket place a silly point and a short leg as soon as a wicket falls, when a spinner is bowling. Dhoni does not do that when a new batsman comes in in a Test match. When I had those close-in fielders my focus and concentration went a notch higher. But for that you have to have the habit of bowling with those fielders. With time your confidence goes high and also you stop worrying if you bowl a long hop or a full toss.

	"If a spinner starts at the age of 12 or 13, he needs seven to eight years to understand his bowling"Murali Kartik

New talent on the horizon

Kartik: There are a few slow bowlers but not a spinner. When I started playing first-class cricket there were good spinners who were not getting a place in their state squads. Sunil Joshi, Kanwaljeet Singh, Sunil Subramaniam, Narendra Hirwani, Rajesh Chauhan, Bharati Vij, Sunil Lahore, Pradeep Jain, Rahul Sanghvi, Sarandeep Singh, Harbhajan Singh were quality spinners. Now I can't take a single name.

Hirwani: I have faith in two: Bengal offspinner Aamir Gani, who just turned 18. He has the skills and the desire. I also like Kuldeep Yadav, the chinaman bowler from Uttar Pradesh. He is an attacking bowler.

Maninder: Kuldeep Yadav, if the slight technical flaw in his front arm is fixed.

The problem with T20

Kartik: T20 cricket is not only harmful for a young spinner, it can also affect a senior bowler. Take Pragyan Ojha. He went at the rate of five an over, did not get a wicket in his 35 overs in the one Test he played on the India A tour of Australia in July. This is a spinner who has taken more than 100 Test wickets. He is confused after he has come back. So you can imagine the state of a young bowler who does not know his game inside out. All he is doing is bowling four overs for 25-30 runs and getting one wicket off a good or bad ball, because you know the next day you are up and running for the next T20 match.

Bedi: The modern generation is all about the IPL. Tell me if you get Rs 9, 10, 12 crore why would you want to bowl 35 overs [in a first-class match] for five lakhs? Sport is about money in the modern context.

The way out

Maninder: It is the BCCI's responsibility. When the IPL started, it had a lot of enemies. But that was also the time the BCCI should have taken the challenge of creating a pool of young talent and putting them under the expert guidance of former players or greats. These guys would not just talk about the specifics of spin bowling but also talk to them about how to sustain in the longer format of the game. If you speak to Bishan Bedi, the way he communicates, you would think: five-day cricket is what I want to play.

Kartik: If you are trying to push 11-year-olds into T20 cricket you are never going to learn the art of spin. Till the age of 21 at the state and age-group level at least, there should be no exposure to T20 cricket. Kids should play only three- or four-day cricket - learn to flight to ball, learn to get hit. By getting hit your natural survival instinct kicks in. Right now the natural instinct in T20 is to bowl quick. When you do that you cannot go back and bowl in four-day cricket, where you are trying to prise out a wicket.

If a spinner starts at the age of 12 or 13 he needs at least seven to eight years to understand his bowling: to bowl up and over, to flight the ball, to give the revs, and such things. You can coach, but if you are not allowing the player to first learn and understand his own game there is no point. Technically Test cricket is the deep end because getting a wicket when the batsman is defending is difficult
.

Neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us

An economic system that rewards psychopathic personality traits has changed our ethics and our personalities

• 
• • Paul Verhaeghe
  • theguardian.com, Monday 29 September 2014 09.00 BST

'We are forever told that we are freer to choose the course of our lives than ever before, but the freedom to choose outside the success narrative is limited.' Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP

We tend to perceive our identities as stable and largely separate from outside forces. But over decades of research and therapeutic practice, I have become convinced that economic change is having a profound effect not only on our values but also on our personalities. Thirty years of neoliberalism, free-market forces and privatisation have taken their toll, as relentless pressure to achieve has become normative. If you’re reading this sceptically, I put this simple statement to you: meritocratic neoliberalism favours certain personality traits and penalises others.

There are certain ideal characteristics needed to make a career today. The first is articulateness, the aim being to win over as many people as possible. Contact can be superficial, but since this applies to most human interaction nowadays, this won’t really be noticed.

It’s important to be able to talk up your own capacities as much as you can – you know a lot of people, you’ve got plenty of experience under your belt and you recently completed a major project. Later, people will find out that this was mostly hot air, but the fact that they were initially fooled is down to another personality trait: you can lie convincingly and feel little guilt. That’s why you never take responsibility for your own behaviour.

On top of all this, you are flexible and impulsive, always on the lookout for new stimuli and challenges. In practice, this leads to risky behaviour, but never mind, it won’t be you who has to pick up the pieces. The source of inspiration for this list? The psychopathy checklist by Robert Hare, the best-known specialist on psychopathy today.

This description is, of course, a caricature taken to extremes. Nevertheless, the financial crisis illustrated at a macro-social level (for example, in the conflicts between eurozone countries) what a neoliberal meritocracy does to people. Solidarity becomes an expensive luxury and makes way for temporary alliances, the main preoccupation always being to extract more profit from the situation than your competition. Social ties with colleagues weaken, as does emotional commitment to the enterprise or organisation.

Bullying used to be confined to schools; now it is a common feature of the workplace. This is a typical symptom of the impotent venting their frustration on the weak – in psychology it’s known as displaced aggression. There is a buried sense of fear, ranging from performance anxiety to a broader social fear of the threatening other.

Constant evaluations at work cause a decline in autonomy and a growing dependence on external, often shifting, norms. This results in what the sociologist Richard Sennett has aptly described as the “infantilisation of the workers”. Adults display childish outbursts of temper and are jealous about trivialities (“She got a new office chair and I didn’t”), tell white lies, resort to deceit, delight in the downfall of others and cherish petty feelings of revenge. This is the consequence of a system that prevents people from thinking independently and that fails to treat employees as adults.

More important, though, is the serious damage to people’s self-respect. Self-respect largely depends on the recognition that we receive from the other, as thinkers from Hegel to Lacan have shown. Sennett comes to a similar conclusion when he sees the main question for employees these days as being “Who needs me?” For a growing group of people, the answer is: no one.

Our society constantly proclaims that anyone can make it if they just try hard enough, all the while reinforcing privilege and putting increasing pressure on its overstretched and exhausted citizens. An increasing number of people fail, feeling humiliated, guilty and ashamed. We are forever told that we are freer to choose the course of our lives than ever before, but the freedom to choose outside the success narrative is limited. Furthermore, those who fail are deemed to be losers or scroungers, taking advantage of our social security system.

A neoliberal meritocracy would have us believe that success depends on individual effort and talents, meaning responsibility lies entirely with the individual and authorities should give people as much freedom as possible to achieve this goal. For those who believe in the fairytale of unrestricted choice, self-government and self-management are the pre-eminent political messages, especially if they appear to promise freedom. Along with the idea of the perfectible individual, the freedom we perceive ourselves as having in the west is the greatest untruth of this day and age.

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman neatly summarised the paradox of our era as: “Never have we been so free. Never have we felt so powerless.” We are indeed freer than before, in the sense that we can criticise religion, take advantage of the new laissez-faire attitude to sex and support any political movement we like. We can do all these things because they no longer have any significance – freedom of this kind is prompted by indifference. Yet, on the other hand, our daily lives have become a constant battle against a bureaucracy that would make Kafka weak at the knees. There are regulations about everything, from the salt content of bread to urban poultry-keeping.

Our presumed freedom is tied to one central condition: we must be successful – that is, “make” something of ourselves. You don’t need to look far for examples. A highly skilled individual who puts parenting before their career comes in for criticism. A person with a good job who turns down a promotion to invest more time in other things is seen as crazy – unless those other things ensure success. A young woman who wants to become a primary school teacher is told by her parents that she should start off by getting a master’s degree in economics – a primary school teacher, whatever can she be thinking of?

There are constant laments about the so-called loss of norms and values in our culture. Yet our norms and values make up an integral and essential part of our identity. So they cannot be lost, only changed. And that is precisely what has happened: a changed economy reflects changed ethics and brings about changed identity. The current economic system is bringing out the worst in us.

Radovan Karadžić awaits his verdict, but this is two-tier international justice

The ex-Bosnian Serb leader has been prosecuted, yet the war crimes tribunal resists calls to indict others

• 
• • Ed Vulliamy
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 30 September 2014 20.15 BST

Illustration by Belle Mellor

There he was, on the other side of the bullet-proof glass: Radovan Karadžić himself, inches away, accused of genocide and other war crimes across Bosnia during the 1990s. He saluted me with an entwinement of avuncular cordiality and cold-like-ice.

This was an “interview” to which Karadžić, defendant at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, is entitled before his prosecutors called me as a witness, back in 2010. During cross-examination, Karadžić posited the bizarre notion that only ONE person had died in the infamous concentration camp at Omarska it had been my curse to uncover in 1992.

This week, nearly five years after his trial began, come the closing arguments that will lead either to Karadžić’s acquittal or conviction for ordering the hurricane of violence he himself called ethnic cleansing between 1992 and 1995.

If nothing else, the prosecution will serve to remind us that carnage of that kind is still possible in modern Europe: death, torture, mass rape and mutilation in the camps; the siege and torture of a great European capital, Sarajevo; the summary massacre of 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica. Karadžić has asked for 17 hours to outline his explanation for all this, under his alleged command.

Karadžić was political commissar of the Bosnian Serb project for a racially “pure” state during those years and, along with the verdict on his military counterpart, General Ratko Mladic, the outcome will be the highwater mark of the two-decade enterprise in what was to be groundbreaking international law enforcement by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

The man leading the Karadžić prosecution, Alan Tieger, was there at the outset prosecuting its first defendant in 1996, a parish-pump sadist and murderer called Dusko Tadic, now free after serving his sentence.

I was called by the tribunal in the early days, when it was lean, keen and felt right on its side. The court had been established in 1993 through both contrition and ambition. Contrition, because the UN had already become inept and cynical to the point of complicity in the slaughter it now sought to prosecute (though ironically, the worst was yet to come in 1995, when Dutch troops delivered the “safe area” of Srebrenica to the slaughter). Ambition, because the ICTY was seen as putting into action a brave new world of human rights, whereby the bullies of history would be held to account.

A lot can happen to a UN organism in 20 years. I testified in eight trials, have given months of work to the tribunal, and watched it bloat: heard clear language of law and liability replaced by jargon and anagrams; watched communication become a logjam of bureaucracy and hierarchy; listened to the wretched survivors summoned to testify, and wonder how much money was being made in their name. Answer: one hell of a lot.

But more important clouds have gathered over the ICTY. One concerns the promise – oft-spoken and crucial to the Hague’s raison d’etre – that its existence would deter mass murderers of the future. President Assad of Syria shows no sign of such quaking in his shoes.

A second was the tribunal’s extra-judicial brief: that it not only judge those accused, but also promote reconciliation. One of the tribunal’s major achievements has indeed been that the narrative of the war was told from witness chairs during “victim testimony”– the voices of the survivors. But there has been no reconciliation.

Bosnia is a living example, because there has been no reckoning. Reckoning, a prerequisite to reconciliation, is a harsher word which entails coming to terms with the calamity, staring at oneself in the mirror, and making amends – historical, political and material. This has not happened in a land still riven by partition as dictated by the vanities of the Dayton peace agreement, which ended the war by rewarding Karadžić’s project and granting his “Republika Srpska”, where children attend two schools under the same roof, where denial of the massacre at Srebrenica and concentration camps is still de rigeur and a means of maintaining power.

To this reality even 20 years on, the ICTY has added little or nothing: one could argue that more community-level bonding between ethnicities resulted last year from protests against privatisation, flooding, and the qualification of Bosnia’s football team for the World Cup in Brazil.

And doubts raised by recent verdicts have seemed to unravel the ICTY’s own work. Two rulings in the appeals chamber in 2012 and 2013 overturned the crucial convictions of the Croatian general Ante Gotovina and the commander of the Serbian (Yugoslav) army Momčilo Perišić. Chaired on both occasions by Judge Theodor Meron – a Holocaust survivor, former Israeli diplomat and US citizen – a majority of judges ruled that theevidence lacked “specific direction” to the troops under the generals’ command to commit atrocities. In other words, the buck stops short of the top, even when we all know war crimes have been committed.

This was galling for prosecutors because once the dramatic “victim testimony” was entered against small fry like Tadic, the hard, drier, work had been to establish chains of command that connected the political and military leaderships to the atrocities. For instance – in a tip to President Assad – the bench under Judge Meron deemed that to shell a community into the rubble until the survivors flee does not constitute deportation, since the emptying out of population was not “specifically directed”.

There were vehement dissenters from the bench in both cases: but back home, to illustrate the point about reconciliation, Bosnian Croats whooped and celebrated the liberty of Gotovina while spitting their outrage at that of Perišić; Bosnian Serbs did exactly the reverse. One’s own side cannot commit a war crime, it seems – only the enemy – in the land of un-reckoning.

But the most severe doubt about the ICTY, which does not concern its remit so much as its legacy, is who gets prosecuted in the brave new world of human rights. When Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote in the Observer that former British prime minister Tony Blair should be indicted for war crimes in Iraq, he raised the question: how high are future indictments at the permanent international criminal court or other ad-hoc tribunals like the ICTY going to aim? So far, the ICC has failed to indict a single person who is white. It staunchly resisted calls for an indictment for General August Pinochet of Chile; Blair is not even on its radar screen, for all the archbishop’s pleading.

The questions remain, beyond Karadžić. Why Charles Taylor and not Blair, Bush or the Israeli bomber command that targeted schools in Lebanon and civilian shelters in Gaza? At what point does the ICC address environmental or corporate crime: mining companies before which entire communities in Africa and Latin America vanish, or banks involved in systematic laundering of the profits of drug cartels?

Legal philosopher Costas Douzinas has written a book daring to suggest that “human rights” are becoming tools of the powerful nations, more than sacrosanct principles as defined by his ancestors in Greece, the French revolutionaries and Tom Paine.

It has been a long, worthwhile haul from the Tadic trial to that of Karadžić, and an acquittal over “specific direction” would be grotesque while the earth still gives up its dead around Srebrenica and the camps. But after that, for Douzinas to be proved wrong, the lucrative carousel of international justice needs to raise, not lower, its sights.

Awkward questions for Tesco should be answered by its accountants too

Auditors are vital to the financial markets. But when they miss a catastrophe in the offing, they’re not doing their job

• 
• • Aditya Chakrabortty
  • The Guardian, Monday 29 September 2014 20.49 BST

Illustration by Daniel Pudles

So the supermarket that shoved horsemeat in its burgers now admits to sprinkling horse manure on its balance sheet. That quip has been doing the rounds since Tesco confessed last week to exaggerating its profits by £250m, and it strikes at the heart of the scandal. Just as a meat patty is manufactured, so too are a set of accounts. Neither falls from the sky, or gets slung together by a solitary bloke at twilight. They are instead a huge co-production of staff, auxiliaries and quality controllers, and they reflect the culture of the environment in which they are assembled.

Conversely, whoppers as large as the one Tesco has been caught telling won’t suddenly have popped out of the mouths of a mere handful of managers. Profits forecast for the biggest of FTSE 100 retailers will have been chalked up by advisers working to standard company practice, sweated over by executives and signed off at top levels of the company. Yet the result, according to new chief executive, Dave Lewis, is the kind of accounting he hasn’t seen during 27 years in business.

The horsemeat disgrace exposed a systemic dysfunction in capitalism: the abuse of suppliers by all-powerful supermarkets resulting in dinners that families couldn’t trust. Last week’s accounting scandal opens the door on another systemic breakdown: how one of those same giant businesses, struggling to pep up a flagging stock price, produced numbers that the business world couldn’t believe.

For understandable reasons, the press has largely spun this as the latest episode in the downfall of Tesco. Who wouldn’t tell that story? It’s simpler, starker and focuses on a high-street institution – what could be more satisfying than a tale of hubris at one Britain’s last remaining world-leading companies, especially if it allows a moist recollection of former Tesco boss Terry Leahy, one of the country’s dwindling number of business people of international repute.

But then awkward questions arise that force us to pull back the frame. The one that foxes me: where were Tesco’s auditors in all this? PwC is one of the Big Four accountancy firms who between them carry out around 90% of all audits for FTSE 350 companies. The £2.7bn-turnover partnership went over Tesco’s accounts for the 12 months to February this year, and gave the supermarket chain a clean audit in May. Just a few weeks later, on 29 August, Tesco executives issued their now infamous forecast – the one that exaggerated their likely profits by 25%.

You can imagine that in the course of a not-so-balmy summer, one of Europe’s biggest businesses suddenly went off its collective trolley and put out a confected set of figures – which, let me emphasise, were not checked over by its auditors. But consider this: back in May, PwC plainly was not entirely comfortable with the numbers it was signing off for Tesco. It went so far as to note its concern over commercial income – the fees paid by suppliers for Tesco giving their products prominence within their stores, and the income overstated in August by the supermarket chain.

On page 66 of the annual report, the auditors note that “commercial income is material to the income statement and amounts accrued at the year end are judgmental. We focused on this area because of the judgment required in accounting for the commercial income deals and the risk of manipulation of these balances.” In the polite, formulaic world of company reporting, this is a warning klaxon. And yet the auditors then went on to list the measures they’d taken to allay their concerns – and to sign off the numbers.

PwC has been Tesco’s auditor for over 30 years. For that service, Tesco paid PwC £10.4m in the last financial year – plus another £3.6m for other consultancy work. Of the 10 directors on the supermarket’s board (leaving aside the chief executive and the chief financial officer, both of whom are relatively new), two are ex-PwC: Mark Armour, a non-executive director, and Ken Hanna, chair of the company’s own audit committee.

Now imagine yourself as a senior executive at Tesco. The business has never been the same since Leahy left. The slump has dampened consumer spirits, some of the company’s foreign adventures now look ill-judged, and Aldi and Lidl are eyeing up your customers. And your remuneration partly depends on the share price – which is listing, badly. How and when to count commercial income is already one of the greyest of grey areas in accounting. Why wouldn’t you be a bit more “aggressive” in your forecasting?

To be clear, we don’t know that anything like this happened – yet it’s exactly to avoid such suspicions arising that we have auditors. This is why the government demands the vast bulk of limited companies (and hospitals and charities) have their accounts audited.

Just as with credit-rating agencies, auditing is a necessary part of the financial markets – but the auditors are paid by the very companies they are judging. Just as with S&P and Moodys, they form a small but powerful “oligopoly” – what was once the Big Eight shrank to the Big Five and, after the Andersen debacle at Enron, to the Big Four. And just as with the credit-raters, the result is often so unsatisfactory as to be useless.

All those banks that collapsed in the crisis were signed off as perfectly sound by PwC and its fellow auditors. But then, as Jeff Skilling, chief exective of Enron, said in 2004: “Show me one fucking transaction that the accountants and the attorneys didn’t sign off on.”

Nor was that a one-off lapse: in May this year, the regulators at the Financial Reporting Council noted that PwC audits, while generally of “a good standard”, were also too accepting of management fudge. As Prem Sikka, professor of accounting at the University of Essex, argues: “If some used car dealer was engaged in a fraction of the shortcomings, warnings and scams that big accountancy firms have been involved in, he would be put out of business.”

For their part, accountants are often aware of their industry’s shortcomings. For his book Accountants’ Truth: Knowledge and Ethics in the Financial World, Matthew Gill interviewed 20 young accountants at the Big Four firms. He found a bunch of men well aware of the boredom of the audit and of the shortcuts they were forced to make.

Some defended what they did. One told him: “I don’t think there’s anything unprofessional in giving views of facts directed by whoever it should be.” Another described his discomfort at working in his firm’s corporate-finance department and supporting what he described as “immoral” and “borderline corrupt” tax wheezes. But rather than voice his qualms, he simply moved department. Whistleblowing was not for him: “I would have felt I would look slightly ridiculous.”

Read that last sentence and recall that the person who blew the whistle this month on Tesco wasn’t the company’s audit committee or ethics committee – and they don’t appear to be from PwC either. As far as we know, the anonymous whistleblower worked for Tesco’s UK finance director, Carl Rogberg, and their report was at first ignored.

When last week’s scandal broke, Tesco chair Sir Richard Broadbent airily opined: “Things are always unnoticed until they are noticed.” He forgot to mention that that goes double if people are paid to turn a blind eye.

Branson's fine print on unlimited leave for staff

 

We should be open to the idea of self-managed holidays, but it won’t work in a climate of anxiety

• 
• • David Boyle
  • The Guardian, Friday 26 September 2014 18.20 BST

'If you had to be 100% certain that you were up to date on everything, would you ever dare to pack your bags, let alone head off on holiday?' Photograph: Isopix/Rex Features

Half Brazilian, half Austrian, Ricardo Semler runs one of the strangest companies in the world – though perhaps “runs” is the wrong verb. He recently held a party to celebrate 10 years of not making any decisions.

Semco is a Brazilian engineering conglomerate, and over the past two decades Semler has led a dramatic series of experiments to find ways of accessing the enthusiasm of his staff.

They now manage the company themselves. They work in teams without job titles. Like Richard Branson’s much-heralded experiment announced earlier this week, they choose their own holidays and their own hours. However, although Semco is on the syllabus of most of the world’s business schools, few business graduates have copied it. Quite the reverse: iron control by IT system seems to be the trend.

But the salaries, holidays and hours Semco’s employees choose are transparent, and therein lies the power. It isn’t so much the power of self-control but the power of peer control. The most imaginative companies have realised the same thing in recent years: that group pressure may be a good deal more effective at controlling their workforce than an IT system, powered by a top-heavy, heavy-handed human resources department.

It is the same revelation that hit Muhammed Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank. He realised that peer pressure by borrowers on each other was far more effective at avoiding bad debts than the traditional command-and-not-quite-control.

Branson is only the most recent business leader to grasp this – he got the idea from Netflix – and the power of small teams answerable to each other has done wonders for productivity in companies such as General Electric and WL Gore.

But before we take Branson’s approach at face value, there are a few things we need to think about. Peer control can be pretty ferocious. It can lead people to extremes. Even some of the most disillusioned first world war soldiers, such as Siegfried Sassoon, went back to the trenches willingly – strove to do so, in fact – so as not to let their colleagues down.

I’m self-employed. I have complete control of my holiday entitlement and I still don’t take it. It may be that self-managing teams can also be kinder and more understanding, once you have earned their trust. Given the choice between working in an Amazon warehouse, timed when I go to the loo, and in a self-managed team choosing my own holiday schedule, I know which one I would prefer. But that isn’t to say it would always be comfortable or that there wouldn’t be places where people suffered the consequences of coercive, bullying, group dynamics.

There are two other peculiarities about Branson’s thoughts on the subject, which are taken from his new book The Virgin Way. One is that it applies only to his head office staff in the US and UK – just 170 people. Virgin doesn’t do much except invest and rent out its name to other companies. Behind this apparent empire is a vast database and linked call centres, but not much else. Branson’s company owns just half of Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Trains, and only around a tenth of Virgin Media, a subsidiary of a different company entirely.

He says he will be encouraging them all to use the same idea if it is successful. But the real test is whether similar arrangements are offered to frontline staff bearing his logo, which he barely has the power to do.

The other peculiarity is that Branson seems to be trying to have it both ways. He reveals himself to be not quite the radical, bearded, liberal-minded guy he might occasionally look like.

He rather gives the game away on the company blog when he “assumes” that his staff will only take holidays “when they feel 100% comfortable that they and their team are up to date on every project and that their absence will not in any way damage the business – or, for that matter, their careers!” This convoluted sentence faces all ways at once. It seems to be saying you can manage your own holiday entitlement – if you dare.

The self-managed holiday idea is a radical experiment and needs testing out. But in Branson’s formulation, it is doomed from the start: if you had to be 100% certain that you were up to date on everything, would ever take a long weekend, let alone head off on holiday?

It is a sentence that seems to emerge from a nervous manager in a bit of a muddle. He is opening the doors of the cage but not quite daring to put down the whip.

India’s Mars mission could be a giant leap

Critics say India has too much poverty for such an endeavour. But space exploration should not be the preserve of the rich west

• 
• • Priyamvada Gopal
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 24 September 2014 20.44 BST

Staff from the Indian Space Research Organisation celebrate after the Mars Orbiter Spacecraft successfully entered the Mars orbit on Wednesday. Photograph: Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty Images

After a journey of 300 days and 420 million miles, an Indian satellite has arrived in orbit around Mars. To have done so on an economy ticket – at $74m “the cheapest interplanetary mission ever to be undertaken by the world”, according to the mission’s leader – only adds to the significance of the event.

India’s space agency – the Indian Space Research Organisation – is a late entrant to the space race, and the success of Mangalyaan (“Mars craft” in Hindi) makes the country an Asian leader in space exploration, if not yet a global one. The mission has been received with delight on India’s social media and across its political spectrum, where “national pride” is the watchword.

To reach a distant world, where others have failed, might have had special significance for Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, as he finally heads off to the United States for an official visit, having been denied a visa in the past because of doubts over his role in the 2002 Gujarat bloodshed. Modi and his ministers have been quick to assert collective pride in Mangalyaan as part of their vision of a globally ascendant India, ignoring the fact that the mission was actually fostered by their predecessors.

But questions are being asked. The Economist, not a known advocate of the poor or of government spending on social welfare, demanded to know – not only of India but of Sri Lanka, Belarus, Bolivia and Nigeria, all “minnows” with fledgling space aspirations: “How can poor countries afford space programmes?” Cut aid to such over-reaching parvenus, some in Britain have suggested. The criticism seems partly directed at the fact that the mission was not privately funded, as research in the west increasingly is; state money was channelled towards it without any marketable product emerging.

But inquiry and exploration are not the prerogative of advanced capitalist western nations – with the rest of the world eternally condemned to be a footnote in the history of science, even as its historical contributions to knowledge are forgotten. A country, however “largely third world” its “reality”, as one peevish British economist put it, does not have to circumscribe its sphere of achievement to feeding its people, important as that is. Indeed, it can be argued that in a better world the search for knowledge and the quest for social justice would be necessarily intertwined. As the Economist concedes, India’s weather satellites helped reduce the number of deaths during cyclone Phailin last year.

The real problem, of course, is that in economies that are in addition seeking to win the global capitalist growth race, such symbiosis between people and science is increasingly rare. It’s what the progressive economist Jean Drèze may have had in mind when he described the Mars mission controversially as a flag-waving “delusional dream” – when public health and energy needs ought to be met first. Recent floods in Kashmir speak of failures, technological and political, to anticipate and respond to natural disasters. Indeed, placing industrial development over ecological interests often causes such disasters in the first place.

Serious questions remain about whether science and technology – and not just in poorer countries – can have a greater good in mind when the bottom line is profit. The space race between the US and the Soviet Union was not an affordable luxury undertaken for the sake of knowledge, but intrinsically tied to the military-industrial complex. Whatever the intellectual commitments of India’s space scientists, there’s no doubt that the language of national “heroism” and technological “might”, which underpins a dangerous religiously inflected military and nuclear standoff in the region, afflicts much of the praise poured on the Mars mission’s success.

Perhaps national science and technology policy can be fully prised away from corporate and defence industry interests, and placed firmly in the province of economic justice and social progress. But the current administration’s record is not encouraging: Indian ministers have flouted scientific advice by fast-tracking environmental clearances to corporations including mining firms.

Yet India is fortunate in having a long and diverse history of campaigning science movements that have sought to draw both on indigenous knowledge traditions and direct modern scientific research towards progress in health, literacy, environment, nutrition and sanitation. The best way for India to commemorate the success of Mangalyaan would be to reopen a national debate about how science and technology can best be harnessed in the widest interests of its people.

The American War against ISIS the ‘Islamic State’ is headed for failure | Here’s a 5-point plan to kill the cancer

by Tarek S. Fatah • September 19, 2014 • 

“Islamic State is being formed exactly the way Saudi Arabia was formed when thousands of bloodthirsty jihadis rose from the Sultanate of Nejd and invaded the Kingdom of Hejaz, slaughtering the country’s citizens into submission in 1925.”

Tarek Fatah
The Toronto Sun

When U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry sat down in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on the 13th anniversary of 9/11, surrounded by the leaders of 10 Arab states, to build a coalition against Islamic State (ISIS), the scene dripped with irony.

For decades, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, along with Arab billionaires in Gulf Arab states, have financed the breeding grounds of Islamic extremism in the tens of thousands of madrassas spread around the world, from Philippines to Philadelphia.

Take the case of the al-Shabab leader Ahmed Abdi Godane, whose death President Barack Obama boasted about at the Wales NATO summit as an example of America’s approach to dismantling al-Qaida-affiliated groups.

What Obama failed to mention was the fact Godane became a jihadi terrorist only after obtaining a Saudi scholarship to study radical Islam at madrassas in Sudan and later Pakistan.

Assuming the objective of the American/Arab coalition was to fight the misogynist murderers of ISIS, it was also ironic not a single woman sat at the table. Not even a female State Department staffer or assistant.

This was not a coalition that will defeat ISIS; it is a coalition that will end up re-enforcing Islamic State as the one true answer to the crimes being committed on the Arab people by their own leaders.

Islamic State is being formed exactly the way Saudi Arabia was formed when thousands of bloodthirsty jihadis rose from the Sultanate of Nejd and invaded the Kingdom of Hejaz, slaughtering the country’s citizens into submission in 1925.

Remember, Saudi Arabia is a kingdom where the king had his own daughters held hostage to force their mom, his runaway wife, to return.

Then we have Turkey as a NATO ally sitting in on secret meetings where the West bungles its way trying to figure out the difference between “strategy” and “tactic”.

As the New York Times disclosed today “one of the biggest source of (ISIS) recruits is neighboring Turkey, a NATO member.”

The challenge posed by ISIS will not be resolved with the American airstrikes or by British Prime Minister David Cameron’s declaration echoing George Bush’s cliched chant that, “Islam is a religion of peace”.

This will merely strengthen the jihadis’ resolve and make more Muslims turn to ISIS.

Here is a five-point plan that will make ISIS weak from within:

• Recognize Iraqi Kurdistan as an independent country, a UN member state with a security pact with NATO.
• Recognize the Kurdish Workers Party in Turkey (PKK) as an ally, not a terrorist group.
• Recognize the exiled Iranian Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) as an ally, not a terrorist group.
• Recognize the Balochistan struggle for independence from Pakistan and Iran as a legitimate national liberation struggle, similar to those of the Baltic Republics, Kosovo, East Timor and Eritrea
• Expel Turkey from NATO as it is an ally of the Muslim Brotherhood and represents a threat to the West.

As for Islamic leaders in North America and Europe, they should stop their exercise in “Muslim patriotism” and for once speak the truth.

Listening to the rhetoric from some leaders of my Muslim community reminds me of car company executives who, instead of addressing the problems with their cars, are more concerned with protecting the reputation of their brand.​