ICYMI: India Team’s Quantum Shift In Attitude

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“Are you watching the India-Bangladesh game?”

No.

“Do yourself a favour — watch. This is one for the gods.”

Seriously? Across the first three days of a Test ruined by a combination of rain and abysmal ground maintenance, 35 overs had been bowled out of a possible 270, and a mere three wickets had fallen in the first innings. Given a choice, I’d rather watch paint dry on a picket fence.

I tuned in, though, because the friend who called to give me the heads-up is not given to hyperbole. And though I was traveling at the time, in the midst of much, I found I could not look away — at one point I was driving, in Chennai’s peak-hour traffic, with the live feed on my phone attached to the dashboard.

Anyone who follows cricket knows what happened on day four of the Kanpur Test, the second of a two-Test series against the visiting Bangladesh team. After Bangladesh had used up 39 of a possible 100 overs, the Indian batsmen scored 285 for 9 declared in just 34.4 overs at a run rate of 8.22 — phenomenal if it was a one-day international, scarcely credible when you consider that it was a Test.

In the process, the team broke records for the fastest 50, the fastest 100, the fastest 150, the fastest 200 and the fastest 250 ever recorded in Test history. It felt like watching a T-20 highlights reel; how I managed to steer the car home without causing a monumental pileup on Chennai’s arterial road is a mystery.

And yet it wasn’t the frenetic batting that captured my imagination, nor the shattered records that will remain in my memory — what lingers in the mind is the attitude. 

In theory, there was no way to make a game of this — too many overs had been lost, and too few remained to accommodate the four innings that make up a Test match. In such games, you can go two ways — treat what remains of play as an extended net session, or risk it all in a bid to make something happen. Nine times out of ten, teams will go with the first option; India chose the second.

“Risk” is the operative word. The kind of breakneck batting India showcased could have just as easily ended in disaster — the difference between hitting a ball clean off the middle of the bat and edging into the close cordon is about an inch and a half. The Indian team, in this game, embraced that risk— and that, rather than the eventual outcome, is what will remain etched in the collective memory.

The irony is that this quantum shift in attitude is being powered by a set of players in their sunset years. While it was Yashaswi Jaiswal, the left-handed opener, who outscored his more storied teammates in both innings, it was Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli, KL Rahul, Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja who institutionalised this very un-Indian attitude, and made it pay off. The odds are high that by this time next year, most if not all of those five players will not be part of the Indian Test set-up. These are players who can see their use-by date writ large on their cricket kits — and they have consciously chosen, as their final act, to radically change how the team thinks, and plays.

Lasting legacies are made of these.

I BECAME a sportswriter by accident. It was 1996. Rediff.com was in its infancy. An ODI World Cup loomed, and we couldn’t get any established cricket writers to join what was then an experimental internet operation. I happened to be among the first few employees, and I got the job of covering Indian cricket by default.

For five years I covered, live, every single game the team played. I wrote match reports, analysis, even investigative pieces about the shenanigans of the Board of Control for Cricket in India.

And then I fell out of love with the game. As a character in Ernest Hemingway’s first novel The Sun Also Rises said about how he went bankrupt, it happened first gradually, then suddenly.

It started with the realisation that the Board of Control for Cricket in India, having discovered a promising cash cow, was determined to milk it for all it was worth by organising cricket matches and tours that were devoid of context, of narrative, of backstory. Test cricket was given short shrift; one day hit-abouts were slotted into every available space in the calendar. Every day, every game, felt like every other day, every other game — and it became progressively more difficult to summon up the enthusiasm and the focus to write.

Then came the implosion. In 2000, match-fixing — or more accurately, spot fixing — hit the headlines with seismic impact. I covered the developments, as did pretty much every single sportswriter — and then, once the dust settled somewhat, I gave up writing about cricket altogether.

As a writer, you watch closely the ebbs and flows of the game; you analyse what you observe through the lens of cricketing logic, and you try to write an honest report of the proceedings, both the good and the bad. Thus, if for instance a captain makes a sudden bowling change that ends up relieving the pressure on the batting side, you call it for what it is — an error of judgment that proved costly.

But once spot-fixing became an integral part of the cricket lexicon, that changed. Now, when you saw a captain make such a change, you couldn’t be sure whether it was an error of judgment in the heat of the moment, or a deliberate act fueled by money and favors that had changed hands behind the scenes. Suddenly, I as a writer was no longer sure of what I was seeing – so what was the point of all that close observation, those thousands of words of suddenly pointed prose?

It wasn’t all bad, though. Once I stopped writing, I realised I could get back to following cricket as a fan — watching those games that seemed to have meaning, and context, and a larger narrative, and ignoring the pointless fixtures shoveled into the calendar for the sake of TV revenues. And, two, I found myself with time on my hands to follow other sports I love, and for which I had no time to spare during my tenure as a cricket reporter.

Bonus: I got to reset my attitude to sports writing. The scoreboard became incidental — sport became, for me, about the narrative, about the internal life of the sportsperson, the unseen pulls and pressures playing on her psyche. I can’t quite explain it, but then I don’t have to: Gary Smith, one of the greatest sportswriters of all time, said what I am trying to find words for with trademark eloquence when, in the preface to a collection of his best writing, he wrote:

“Sport comes to us in boxes — the perimeters of our TV screens or the boundary lines of fields and courts. As much as I enjoy what goes on inside those boxes, I’ve always had the urge to bust out of them. I’ve always had the feeling that the most compelling and significant story was the one occurring beyond the game — before it, after it, above it or under it, deep in the furnace of the psyche.”

That is the mission statement for this newsletter: to look past the scoreboard, and to look at what happens before the game and after it, above it or under it, and to try and understand what it all means.

I’ll be doing two long newsletter editions each month along those lines. And at periodic intervals in-between, I’ll do the odd short piece pegged to some contemporary, newsworthy event from the wider world of sport and sports administration.

Postscript: Writing is two things in one. On the one hand, it is a solitary exercise. Right now, there is me in front of an open Word document, with blues — specifically, a September 2023 Madison Square Garden concert by the Tedeschi-Trucks Band — playing in the background.

But writing is also an ongoing dialogue between writer and reader — and that is why we have a feedback email ([email protected]) and a reply feature to this email : for you to contribute thoughts, criticism, and even ideas about things you think are worth writing about.

I look forward to this dialogue.

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