News: Depressing and encouraging

One of the problems with the whole match-fixing affair is that it has hogged all the newspaper space and left too little for the interesting snippets that can sometimes reveal much more about the health of Indian cricket. Big, ugly things can do that to small, useful things; like big buildings to the view, big egos to humility…..

Pottering around the sports pages, I picked up a few; some disheartening, one very encouraging. They deserve attention so, here they are.

Easily the most depressing was the scorecard at the end of the first day of the Board President’s XI game against Zimbabwe. Some of the young Indian batsmen had made runs and that was good but at the top of the order, alongside the name of Ravneet Ricky was the name of Vijay Dahiya. I know we are looking at Dahiya to keep wickets for India but I did not know that we are considering him as a potential Test match opening batsman.

If there is one thing Indian cricket needs more than anything else, it is a pair of high quality opening batsmen; and two others who can keep them on their toes and get into the national side if required. The selectors have decided that Sadagoppan Ramesh and Shiv Sunder Das will be the first two and with Sridharan Sriram having got runs for the Academy side against Zimbabwe, he could be a third option. But we need to cast our net wide for a few more and matches against touring sides are the best way of doing so. Such is our shortage of good openers that really, anybody could have been tried out. Experienced openers like Wasim Jaffer or Ashu Dani, or even the likes of Amit Pagnis or Akash Chopra or Anshu Jain or Nikhil Doru or Mithun Beerala or Connor Williams or indeed anybody who can present an option.

Instead we went back to the oldest short-term measure in the game. We asked the wicket-keeper to open the batting. I suspect there was also a mischievous motive behind it because at number seven, the President’s XI played Abhijit Kale. Now Kale is a good player, and a nice young man, but he has been around for a while and if, as a pure batsman, he is going to bat at number seven it is very unlikely that he will be in anybody’s short list for a Test place. I fear, and I hope I am wrong, that Kale had to be accommodated and so an opener went out.

Sadly then, the question needs asking. Who is thinking about Indian cricket, or the needs of the Indian cricket team? When the selection process comes down to a battle of egos and zones, so much so that even a respected person like Chandu Borde gets drawn in, the only casualty is the national side. Shivlal Yadav who was a selector till recently, told Makarand Waingankar in the Asian Age that the quota system is not only rampant, but flourishing. Now here is a statement from an insider and surely it should be taken seriously. But I don’t think it will, because Shivlal’s successor is T.A.Sekhar who works with MRF and who has a corporate, and therefore personal, interest in boys from his academy playing for India !!

Contrast this with a quote I read from the latest ABC book where Adam Gilchrist is quoted as saying: "India is a real highlight. It is an amazing place. You can easily get sick or grumpy but that's all part of the challenge.... To win there will be a big achievement for our team. I can't wait... "

I was in Australia in August and they are already planning for the side that will come to India to try and win the only series that they haven't for a very long time. We cannot win that series unless we have a pair of solid openers and we cannot find them if we continue fooling around like this.

Tucked away in a corner of the Times of India was news of the defeat of the Mumbai Under 19 team to Gujarat, traditionally one of the weakest teams in India. That is staggering news and a symptom of a major illness. And I think it was symbolic that the news came alongside another which said that Sharad Pawar was being persuaded to contest for the post of the president of the Mumbai Cricket Association. For several years now, the head of the MCA has been a politician who has had no time to attend meetings. So you could say that replacing him with another politician who will have no time to attend meetings will not really change anything.

It is when you read this that you realise why Mumbai cricket is on a huge downward spiral. That they are current holders of the Ranji Trophy is due entirely to the fact that Sachin Tendulkar played the key games for them. In the decade of the nineties, apart from Vinod Kambli who had two very good years and Ajit Agarkar who had one, they did not produce a single top cricketer. And I am not sure they will either because there is simply no space to play cricket anymore in Mumbai. The best talent spends more time in buses and trains than on cricket grounds and that this should be the case is a major problem, not just for Mumbai but for India as well. But the solution is not to look for another politician but for a qualified person who can work full time.

Can Indian cricket not look beyond businessmen and politicians?

So then, what was the encouraging snippet I saw? The first thing that India’s new coach, John Wright, did was to go to Bangalore to look for some software. Computers and their applications do not produce cricketers but they can make good cricketers better. And they certainly cannot make things worse ! Indian cricket needs to become modern, it needs to shake off the vestiges of medieval thinking and if this is any indicator, then maybe we are on the right path with John Wright.

Harsha Bhogle

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