Batsmen? They broke the mould!

Prem Panicker

With all due respect to Pakistan skipper Ramiz Raja, I was apalled at his comments about the Sinhalese Sports Club wicket, on which Pakistan, on Sunday, crumbled to 30/5 before a combination of bad light and rain caused the crucial India versus Pakistan tie to be abandoned.

Dubbing it a "sh** wicket", Raja said he was apalled that the curator, despite having seven days to prepare the track, had come up with an underprepared wicket.

More, he wanted a change in venue. He said he had spoken to Sachin Tendulkar about it, that if the venue was not changed then "tomorrow, it will be the same story, weather permitting. And everything hinges on the toss".

"What concerns me is not the narrow interests of the spectators and the Asia Cup tournament organisers, what is of paramount importance is the question of national pride," the Pakistan skipper says.

First up, I need to make one thing clear -- this is not a Pakistan-bashing exercise. And my thoughts have nothing to do with this particular game, except insofar as it indicates a trend in contemporary cricket I, frankly, find deplorable. This is why:

First -- why was the wicket characterised as "sh**"? Because from ball one, there was swing and seam movement, both into the batsman and away. Again, why? Because there was grass on the wicket, there was a very high humidity level, and a heavy cloud cover to boot, and because of the rains, there was sub-surface moisture. And anyone with the most basic knowledge of cricket will tell you that in those conditions, a bowler who can swing the ball will need watchful handling -- you can't go there twirling your bat like a club and slog everything out of sight.

Okay. Point one. In the Independence Cup held in India recently, there were two, three games were scores in excess of 575, 600 were posted in course of a single day's play. Are those "good" wickets? Obviously, because Raja for one played on those tracks and did not have a single adverse comment to make.

So what are we saying, here? We are saying that if 10, 12, sometimes even more bowlers are hit around to the tune of 600 runs plus in around 100 overs, that is a wonderful wicket. But if two bowlers dismiss five batsmen for 30, that becomes a "sh**" wicket. Funny.

It doesn't seem to matter, any more, that top quality fast bowlers, bowling on dead wickets, are slogged out of the park by jumped up tailenders pretending to be pinch hitters in the first few overs of the day. It doesn't seem to matter that the pitches prepared these days for ODIs are increasingly such as to produce inflated scorelines, and increasingly meaningless "records". As long as the batsmen can slog the ball around to their heart's content, everyone is happy -- never mind the fate of the poor bowlers, master practitioners of spin and pace, who find all their abilities negated not by the batsman's ability but by the unresponsiveness of the wicket.

But let these same batsmen, for once, find themselves in adverse conditions. Let them for once face a situation where the ball moves, in the air and off the seam. Or turns, off or leg. Let them loose in conditions that test their technique, their temperament. And what happens?

They yell bloody murder, is what happens!

Five wickets fell on Sunday. Yet, one instance is enough to underline my point -- and that instance relates to the dismissal of Ramiz Raja himself. Venkatesh Prasad, finding the conditions to his liking, swung the ball both ways, he seamed the ball away late, he alternated the one going away with the one coming in, he kept the batsmen tentative, unsure of what was coming next. It was top quality medium pace bowling in helpful conditions. Meanwhile, Abey Kuruvilla, as in the first match against Sri Lanka, looked a shade out of sorts. He bowled his first over off his full run, then promptly throttled back to a truncated run-up of about six paces and concentrated on length and line, making no effort whatsoever to move the ball.

Raja in one particular over of Prasad's faced two balls that rocked his confidence. One pitching just on off stump and short of a length, drawing him forward and then leaving him outside off -- a delivery that has got Prasad the bulk of his wickets in international cricket. The next pitched just outside off, and hurried back in off the seam to rap Raja smartly in the midriff as the batsman played for the one going away. End of the over.

Next over, Kuruvilla bowling, and off the first ball, a leg bye brings Raja back on strike. Ball two is on the stumps, and pushed straight back to the bowler. Ball three is about half a foot outside off, and just a shade short. On the kind of batsman-oriented featherbed we saw recently in Bombay and Madras, Raja would have glided his left foot across and lashed it through point for four. Here, though Kuruvilla was not moving the ball at all, Raja was tentative. Standing where he was, he pushed at the ball, not quite clear whether it would go straight, cut in, or leave him. Result, he touched it to Azhar at second slip.

What was to blame here -- the pitch, or the batsman's own hesitancy, his lack of confidence in his own ability to judge a ball and play it on its merit?

You tell me.

Again, let me repeat -- and this reiteration is cued by the fact that increasingly, cricket matches especially those involving Pakistan and India are not games so much as proxy wars, more so for the fans than the cricketers themselves -- that the intention here is not to trash the Pakistan team, or even its captain. Because Raja, in this instance, is merely an exemplar of a global malaise.

Check out the Indian team on the Barbados track, during the recent West Indies tour. 120 runs to win. An entire day -- 90 overs -- to get them in. 10 wickets in hand. A wicket offering bounce and movement - not much swing, mind you, because the conditions were very clear, merely seam both ways. And what happened? India crumbled to defeat -- because not one batsman out of 11 had the guts, the gumption, and the technique to stand there, judge each ball, wait for the opportunity to get the runs. On that kind of wicket, they couldn't go out there and slash through point or hit inside out over extra cover -- so they tumbled in a heap. And yes, said the wicket was an atrocity.

Australia, one-off Test versus India, Ferozeshah Kotla. South Africa, versus India, Ahmedabad. Wickets affording turn (in the latter instance, funnily enough, it was Javagal Srinath who blasted the South Africans out, and Srinath is by no stretch of the imagination a spinner). The result? Cries of foul, this ain't a wicket worth sh**.

Sure, Barbados was a testing wicket, not a featherbed. As was the Kotla. And Ahmedabad. And this one at the SSC.

But international batsmen, these days, are more reluctant to go out and play on a testing wicket than I, in my schooldays, was to go into an exam hall and take a maths paper.

Why? Because these last few years, a good 99 out of 100 ODIs are played on wickets where the batsman is in two minds only when he is unsure whether to slog a ball to off, or on.

In Bangalore recently, when the coaching camp for the Asia Cup probables was on, I was sitting behind the nets, watching the Indian stars practise. First, it would be Sachin Tendulkar and Saurav Ganguly, one each in the two nets that had been put up. Next, Rahul Dravid and Mohammad Azharuddin. And so on. And what did they do? They padded up, took guard, and then proceeded, for the half hour that their stint at the crease lasted, to try and hit the ball further and further away - beginning with the very first ball they faced. No attempt to practise their defence, no attempt to brush up on technique - just slam, bam, thanks a tonne maan! And if one heave missed, heck, so what, this was net practise after all.

Thing is, "batsmen" are a dying species today -- with the rare, and honourable, exceptions of a Steve Waugh here and there. "Batsmen", here, being defined as all weather, all conditions men who can hit when the ball is in the slot, but defend when the wicket is a testing track, when the bowlers are attacking well.

Increasingly, we have the sloggers. The run a ball men. Who, if they find themselves on good wickets, lash everything that is thrown at them to all parts of the field. And when they find themselves on a track where they can't despatch every delivery to perdition, yell foul.

This, because the administrators of the game assume that the spectators come only to see fours and sixes -- which, to my mind, is rather insulting to said spectators, as it assumes that they are incapable of appreciating the nuances of a duel between a good batsman and a good bowler on a track that is not the nearest thing to a corpse this side of the city morgue.

Cricket was originally devised as a game that pits bat against ball. Unfortunately, of late, it has degenerated into a contest between bat and another bat -- and the devil take the bowler!

Tailpiece: In the recent past, I have had occasion to question, even criticise some of Sachin Tendulkar's decisions as captain. On Sunday, after the match was called off, he gave me an opportunity to get up on my hind legs and applaud heartily.

When Ramiz Raja made his stirring speech about national pride and asked Sachin to join him in pressing for a change of venue, the Indian skipper said no. The SSC, he said, is good enough -- maybe even better, because if it rains at the SSC it is pretty certain to rain at the Premadasa Stadium as well, both stadia being a mere five, six kms apart. And the drainage at the SSC, Sachin pointed out, is streets ahead of the Premadasa.

Sachin was running the same risk as Raja was. After all, if play were possible on Monday, India could have lost the toss, been inserted, and found itself batting in the same conditions that Pakistan faced the day before. Yet, Sachin did not join his counterpart in asking for a change of venue and that, to my mind, merits applause.

In passing, one thought: if, on Sunday, Pakistan had won the toss and inserted India and it was the latter that was on 30/5, would there have been criticism of the wicket?