Sportsman Show Madras Or

Virender's Surrender: The Fall of Sehwag

But let us not speculate here as to why Sehwag threw the kitchen sink at a king pair-avoiding length delivery off the world’s second-best swing bowler in murky light on a new-ball deck. No, let us wait a couple of paragraphs before spewing forth our ill-informed conjecture, at least until some facts (well, perceptions masquerading as facts) have been considered.

First up, there’s the Asia-to-Blighty Respect-for-Conditions quotient – a drum banged so long and hard by Geoffrey Boycott on TMS during the Edgbaston Test, you’d have thought he’d marched straight in from the Shankill Road. The line of thinking, a corridor of hyper-certainty, goes thus: ‘e in to England, has a jazz game in Northampton (essentially still Nagpur; the ground’s name even sounds like an Indian tennis umpire at the Empire Builder’s Grand Slam Final between Hernán Cortés, a clay-courter, and ol’ Cecil: “Ad-Wantage Road”), a game in which he makes a scratchy 8 against the second-string attack of a second-rate team, then goes straight in to the Test side. Cue apoplexy from Boycs, a man who likes his preparation. Indeed, for the bigger series, he advocates a minimum of seven three-day warm-up matches (ideally running parallel to another series in which he’s already playing, thus allowing him to bat for 14 hours a day. Plus nets). But Geoffrey, to come straight off an injury and make a score (as was definitively proven by my post-broken elbow 40-ball half-century against Ottis Gibson in 1999).

Anyway, this is not about first principles: Thou Shalt Get Used to Nibble (coincidentally, also what the team nutritionist is advising him). No, the main thing was the manner of the pair. More than anything else, the dismissals smacked of mental sluggishness. Or end-of-Empire decadence.

In the first innings, you’ll recall, he dropped his hands too tardily to avoid a shortish (but not viciously climbing) ball from Stuart Broad, gloving to the ‘keeper. He then stood around – – for a couple of days while India’s ‘bowlers’ ‘toiled’ to ‘contain’ England, occasionally venturing off his shooting stick to console a fellow ‘fielder’ for a drop or a misfield. He didn’t even bowl his handy part-time twirlers, Dhoni instead utilising Suresh ‘Would you be so kind as to pitch it up to me, old chap?’ Raina’s penguin off-breaks*. Finally, he strapped ‘em on and, well, you know the rest… As he trudged off – I were both sombre and reserved in their assessment, although the oneindia website offered this Sidhuian synopsis of the “Nizam of Najafgarh”: “With caution thrown so irresponsibly and one would daresay [sic] insanely, to the wind, Sehwag had bitten into the bait wholeheartedly… India were 3/1 at that stage… and [there was] no hint of gritty counter-offence to look forward to, just another slip downward into the swamp of humiliation”.

Transparency drive welcome, time BCCI stopped being Holy Cow ...

As a money-minting machine BCCI has done admirably well. That it wields tremendous power and influence in the cricketing world and has made cricket a viable career option at the domestic level without much support from the government is a tribute to its spirit of enterprise. The men handling the world’s richest cricketing body are no ordinary businessmen looking to cash in on a popular passion. They stand apart since they seem to be guided by a vision.

But BCCI is also a secretive body with little transparency in it operations and virtually no accountability. It is a hub of cronyism with little scope for outsiders to have a say. The Lalit Modi episode has already exposed that the best-run cricket body has too many the skeletons in its cupboard. What, God forbid, if some of the decisions went on to inflict irreparable damage to Indian cricket?

Yes, BCCI, a private autonomous body with billions of rupees at its command, needs to be less opaque and more accountable. The 4-0 loss to England in the recently concluded Test series is a warning signal that not everything is alright with Indian cricket and its thinktank needs to be overhauled. If the government’s proposed National Sports Act manages to achieve that, it’s acceptable and advisable.

Where do politicians fit in here? To be fair to BCCI, it has leveraged well the influence of its politician-office-bearers to further its cause. But in the general narrative of Indian sport it could be an exception. Almost all associations are headed by politicians or their henchmen, who have little understanding of the sport they are supposed to be in charge of and promoting. It shows in India’s performance in major sporting events.

“We have some politicians and office-bearers who don’t know anything about sports but still heading federations, so the fact that these sportspersons have achieved so much despite being within such a poor system is remarkable,” said Ajay Maken, Union Sports Minister recently. That has been the usual refrain in the circle of sportspersons and people interested in development of sport in the country.

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