Wisden India Almanack 2017

Images)

Wisden India Honours

WISDEN INDIA HALL OF FAME

We honour sportspersons in various ways; by naming streets, roundabouts and stadiums after them, by instituting trophies in their memory, by turning them into adjectives (‘Bradmansque’), by arguing, generation after generation, over the relative merits of our heroes. The most enduring and dignified method in recent years has been to induct the best into the Hall of Fame. It is the concept – often a virtual ‘hall’ – that is the honour, not the bricks-and-mortar building.

In its fifth year, Wisden India is happy to announce the names of two players inducted into the Wisden India Hall of Fame:

Vinoo Mankad (Page 119)

Sourav Ganguly (Page 124)

-

This, along with the Six Cricketers of the Year (see below) is a Wisden India annual feature.

SIX CRICKETERS OF THE YEAR

Wisden’s Cricketers of the Year – a tradition dating back to 1899 in the original Almanack – is given a subcontinental flavour in Wisden India Almanack. The six cricketers are picked by the editor, the selection based on the players’ positive impact on the season under review. It is necessary to highlight the distinction since in recent years, some players who have made an impact have done so for the wrong reasons. Negative impact does not count.

This year the list includes two Indians, and one player each from Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. The sixth player is from outside the subcontinent.

Virat Kohli (page 140)

Shreyas Iyer (page 143)

Yasir Shah (page 146)

Kusal Mendis (page 150)

Mustafizur Rahman (page 154)

David Warner (page 157)

BEYOND THE BOUNDARY

Rajendra Mal Lodha (page 161)

WISDEN INDIA BOOK OF THE YEAR

Stroke of Genius: Victor Trumper and the Shot that Changed Cricket

by Gideon Haigh (page 756)

Notes by the Editor

In recent years, the men who have had the greatest impact on Indian cricket have not been players but judges of the country’s top courts. What the Board of Control for Cricket in India should have done but didn’t was left to two men of integrity and wit: Justice Mukul Mudgal and Justice Rajendra Mal Lodha. Together they might have changed the face of Indian cricket by dragging the feudalistic BCCI kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

First, Justice Mudgal established that there had been spot-fixing in the IPL, and affixed responsibility. As suspected, two team owners had bet on matches. Then Justice Lodha spelt out the punishments, including bans for the owners and a two-year suspension of the two teams involved, Rajasthan Royals and Chennai Super Kings. He tempered justice with mercy, however, by not scratching the teams altogether. Two years ago, the Supreme Court had asked: Why can’t the Chennai Super Kings be disqualified?

By the time the Supreme Court, tired of the BCCI’s intransigent ways, its delaying tactics and woolly responses, asked Justice Lodha to put in place systems that would guarantee transparency and accountability, the BCCI had painted itself into a corner.

The climax of that saga has not played out yet. Perhaps by the time you read this there will be clarity. The BCCI, upset about the cooling off period recommended by Justice Lodha’s committee (the recommendations were given the force of rulings by the Supreme Court), upset about the age-limit of 70 years for office-bearers and upset about a dozen other matters, chose the path of hubris rather than humility by kicking its heels in and doing nothing.

All this while the team moved steadily towards the No. 1 ranking in Tests, a feat achieved briefly in the West Indies and for a longer period during the home series against New Zealand.

Amazingly, these two major events unfolded on parallel tracks without the one affecting the other, although when the lines sometimes almost met, there was the threat of everything blowing up in the face of Indian cricket. At least the BCCI strove to give that impression, speaking of the New Zealand tour being in jeopardy, there being no money to run domestic cricket and so on.

The new BCCI, post-Narayanaswami Srinivasan, post-Shashank Manohar, steadily became indistinguishable from the old, as it ignored the Supreme Court deadlines with an arrant disregard for propriety or legality. There was a hint that the BCCI was merely part of a larger battle between the executive and the judiciary of the land. Arun Jaitley, senior minister of the government and president of the scandal-hit Delhi and Districts Cricket Association (DDCA) had said in another context that the judiciary was destroying the edifice of India’s legislature step by step, brick by brick.

By getting into the nuts of bolts of administration, the Supreme Court, however, did lay itself open to charges of judicial overreach. On the other hand, without its involvement, the extent of corruption in some of the state associations – Delhi, Jammu & Kashmir, Goa and Hyderabad to name some – might not have been exposed. Nor might the public perception have begun to change from these things happen to they can’t get away. Corruption is an end in itself as well as a path to garnering votes and support.

However, whatever the merits of a three-man selection committee, the matter is best left to the governing body. The 15-day break after the IPL meant that the Champions Trophy in England this year might suffer. That is a call the BCCI should make in consultation with the players’ association. While the focus on Northeast cricket is welcome, justice must be tempered with pragmatism. It is too early for individual states that lack proper systems to play in the Ranji Trophy. A solution might be to have a combined Northeast team initially.

It is useful to remember, though, that the BCCI had actually invited the Supreme Court in to spring clean. It had begun in 2013 with the spot-fixing case in the IPL, and the court had given the cricket body enough time to regulate itself. But the then president, Srinivasan, was more keen on protecting his son-in-law Gurunathan Meiyappan, accused of betting on IPL matches, and decided to brazen it out, a tactic laden with peril.

The BCCI had abdicated its responsibility even before the Supreme Court came into the picture.

With Anurag Thakur, the incumbent president, following Srinivasan’s tactics of delay and distraction, the reforms when Manohar took over after Srinivasan was forced to leave seemed like an aberration. Manohar quit to take over as chairman of the International Cricket Council, leaving a new generation to sort out the problems created by his own and others before them. In his brief period in charge, Manohar revealed a remarkable to-do list, considering the BCCI’s traditional allergy to reform. His decisions to appoint an ombudsman to handle conflict-of-interest cases, to place the BCCI’s balance sheet online and call for financial accountability from the state associations were nothing short of revolutionary.

Sometimes, when you merely do what should have been done, it can appear revolutionary. The BCCI, rich, arrogant, opaque, feudalistic, known as an international bully, operating with a remarkable lack of accountability over the years, is still the best run and most efficient sports body in the country. Which means that the rulings affecting it have the force to change the face of Indian sport itself.

Justice Lodha and his team had clearly listened to the cricketing fraternity and read the enormous amount of writing available on the matter of reforming the BCCI. Aspects of the National Sports Development Bill were seen in the report, as were elements of the ICC’s Woolf report that was summarily rejected by India. Lord Woolf had said then, The ICC acts as though it is primarily a members club. Its interest in enhancing the development of the global game is secondary.

Replace global with national and the criticism held good for the BCCI too as social clubs with little interest in cricket voted in office-bearers at state associations. Lodha did away with the proxy votes that kept the undeserving in power for decades in some associations; a clear distinction was made between the cricketing and social aspects of clubs.

The formation of a players’ association, the three-member selection committee, the registration of players’ agents, separate bodies for the BCCI and the IPL, the manner of dealing with conflicts of interest, bringing in the RTI Act had all been progressive ideas in the air for a long time. Had the BCCI been so inclined, it could have plucked any or all and implemented them. It didn’t, and the Supreme Court had to make things clear when it said, Fall in line, or else we will make you fall in line.

At the time of writing, the BCCI has been given more time to fall in line. If it doesn’t – perhaps as part of a larger battle – the parallel tracks are in danger of meeting. And not at infinity, as our school geometry taught us, but somewhere just around the corner.

Preparing for the night

The Duleep Trophy, played under lights, may have been only a qualified success, but night Test cricket will arrive in India soon. It has made its debut in Australia already; in August this year, England take on West Indies in a day-night Test at Edgbaston.

The nay-sayers at the Duleep had a grocery list of complaints: the durability of the ball, the difficulty of seeing the seam, the artificiality of the turf which had to be ‘doctored’ to reduce the wear and tear on the ball, the late finish every day and more. Abhinav Mukund, a centurion in the inaugural match, said when the ball was scuffed up its colour went from pink to grey. Cheteshwar Pujara, who made 256 in the final, said he had difficulty with the seam and couldn’t pick the googly.

These are genuine problems, but in waiting for perfect conditions, cricket has often lost out. Day-night Tests add an extra degree of difficulty to the sport. As Dale Steyn has said, You want to test your skills against all that, meaning the unfamiliar conditions: the ball, the pitch, the atmosphere.

Yet something that the managing director of Kookaburra, the ball manufacturers, said in an interview to Cricinfo must give us pause. The biggest challenge is the variation of pitch and playing conditions around the world. And not just from one country to the next, but even so much as one ground to the next. The implication is that the pink ball will work best around the world when pitch and ground conditions are identical. This is inimical to the idea of competition where conditions differ from Barbados to Chennai to Lord’s to MCG. Homogeneity is anathema to the game, a forced one even more so. Administrators should not exchange one set of problems for another.

But if the ball is the biggest problem, surely the manufacturers can improve its quality and strength. Sometimes cricket is excessively conservative, and prefers the status quo. Familiarity breeds contempt for the new.

The game has evolved continually. Nearly every change was met with resistance; then the wheel turned again, and yet another generation resisted changes in the mistaken notion that they were protecting the integrity of the game. Night cricket, coloured clothing, the third umpire, use of technology, code of conduct, the match referee, placement of advertisement on the ground, electronic boundary hoardings, Danny Morrison – any one of these we recognise as part of the game today might have caused earlier generations apoplexy.

In India, there will be other challenges – the dew, for one. It may not be all good initially, but things will settle down, making the transition interesting. Uncertainty is the basis of competitive sport. Cricket has adapted before.

Duleep deserves better

The occasional IPL-isation of first-class cricket in the country is disturbing. When you play a national tournament for teams named after the colours of the rainbow – as those contesting the Duleep Trophy did – then it is a sign that the authorities are converting a team sport into an individual one. It is difficult to retain loyalty to entities like red and green, which is why players decided to place themselves above the team. After all, no one will remember which colour won, so centuries and double-centuries alone matter. Officially sanctioned selfishness is now part of our domestic policy.

A tournament named after Duleepsinhji deserves better. Duleep, nephew of the more famous Ranji, did not play for India, but he did represent the country, as the High Commissioner to Australia. The original concept was a tournament involving five zones; it was a stepping stone to Test cricket. Now it is played merely to test out how the pink ball behaves. Last season it was called off because it was World T20 year, and the focus was on the shortest format.

DRS is here

India’s cautious welcome to the Decision Review System is significant, and ensures uniformity in the one area of the game where it is called for – in decision-making. Increasingly, it has become evident over the years that India’s reluctance following the 2008 series in Sri Lanka was justified. Skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni alone gave a reason, but it wasn’t the right or the logical one. He wanted the system to be 100% perfect, which, given the physics of projectiles, is impossible. The BCCI didn’t explain its stand.

Yet, in hindsight, the BCCI was right to stick to it. Had India relented early, there might not have been the need or the urgency to research further. The ICC finally had DRS tested by an independent body at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Paul Hawkins, who developed Hawk-Eye, once made a startling statement. What cricket hasn’t done, he said, is test anything. By then the ball-tracking system had been in use in international cricket for five years!

An inclusive World Cup

The World T20 in India succeeded in converting many traditionalists and T20 cynics. It was a marvellous tournament, full of character and characters, none more so than Virat Kohli, who showed that runs could be made and victories launched without having to attempt big sixes all the time. With remarkable awareness, he knew precisely where the fielders were, and thus importantly, where they were not. He was master of the unoccupied areas.

On the other hand, West Indies’ Carlos Brathwaite showed why six-hitting was so important, his four big ones in the final over of the tournament deciding the destination of the trophy. In trying to build a bridge between these two extremes will lie much of T20 cricket’s charm and excitement in the near future.

This was a most inclusive World Cup, with enough in it for all age groups as well as for fans across formats.

West Indies were the first great team in one-day internationals, winning the World Cup twice (1975, 1979). Now they are the first great team in T20 cricket. Their cricket board might be in a shambles, but West Indies won the women’s tournament at the T20 as well as the Under-19 World Cup to raise hopes for the future whatever their current status.

But spare a thought for Ben Stokes, who bowled that last over demonstrating once again that cricket is a game of centimetres. The difference between a run-choking yorker and an invitation to send the ball into the crowd is almost negligible. Almost, but not quite. In the end, Stokes sat clutching his face, his aspect that of a man who had accidentally blown up the bridge carrying his mates across a river. It wasn’t just disappointment, there was horror.

One team, Afghanistan, beat the champions. And for many, the story of the tournament is the story of Afghanistan, whose entry into the main draw had all the romance and fantasy connected with sport. A collection of enthusiastic amateurs had earned the right to sup at the high table with the best in the world. No team celebrated with greater abandon, not even West Indies, no team could have inspired their beaten rivals to join them in celebrations as they did. T20 suddenly seemed to be the upholder of the spirit of cricket.

It was the English poet George Herbert who said the best revenge is living well. For Darren Sammy and his men, the best revenge was playing well, and winning the Cup.

Ashwin makes a point

Not since Erapalli Prasanna in the 1960s has an off-spinner been the spearhead of India’s bowling attack, a role played with enthusiasm and intelligence by Ravichandran Ashwin. He became the quickest bowler to 200 Test wickets in 80 years, and has kept the craft alive despite regular obituaries written about it in recent years, most involving the quality of bats and T20 cricket.

Leg-spin is sexy in a manner off-spin is not. It is difficult, those who succeed at it are always seen as special. Left-arm spin is somehow associated with either grace (Bishan Bedi) or cussedness (Ashley Giles). But off-spin is seen as the journeyman’s specialty; throw a ball to a non-bowler, ask him to bowl, and chances are that he will send down an off-break. Yet, in its very commonness lies the clue to its challenges. Batsmen are more likely to swing to leg, which means the offie’s stock ball is in constant danger of landing up among the crowd at midwicket or long on.

There is an argument, therefore, for elevating off-spin to higher reaches of the degree-of-difficulty chart. If it is easy to bowl and easy to hit, then the bowler who is successful at it must be extra special.

Ashwin’s four successive Man of the Series awards, his haul of 151 wickets in 21 Test wins, his average while claiming 110 top-five wickets (30.51) are all records. Add to that his four Test centuries and the hint of VVS Laxman in his batting, and the Tamil Nadu player can be seen as very very special too.

In a home season with 13 Tests (to be reviewed in Wisden India Almanack 2018), India’s fortunes depend heavily on Ashwin exploiting the conditions. In recent years, the moral dilemma (if there was one) over preparing home wickets having dissipated, Indian spinners welcome teams with an understandable smacking of the lips and twinkle in the eyes.

Good news

As women’s cricket enters its fifth decade in India (the first national championship was held in 1973), there is good news all around. Despite the initial scepticism after the BCCI takeover of the administration, there has been a casual switch to the kind of professionalism that raises the standard of competitive sport. The BCCI’s decision to award central contracts to the players, with those in the ‘A’ grade receiving Rs15 lakh per year is aimed at providing security and establishing a base for regular rise in pay in future. The decision to allow the women to participate in leagues abroad should see a jump in standards.

Harmanpreet Kaur and Smriti Mandhana have signed up for Sydney Thunder and Brisbane Heat respectively in the Women’s Big Bash League in Australia, the first Indians – men or women – to be involved in a foreign T20 league. India had beaten England in a one-off Test in Wormsley in 2014; then last season they beat world champions Australia 2-1 in a T20 series to stake a claim to being spoken of in the same breath as the best teams in the world. As Shantha Rangaswamy, one of the first superstars of the game says in these pages, Things can only improve.

From Don to David

I was once allowed to handle a bat used by Don Bradman. I was amazed at its flimsiness. Nearly as flat as a pancake and with a thin handle to boot, it was a museum piece – indeed, it was at a museum that I found it! Using that bat and others like it, Bradman made his double and triple centuries (and even a quadruple). It is frightening to imagine how many runs he would have scored with today’s bats.

For, to compare that bat with the ones used by the likes of David Warner would be to understand the difference between a match stick and a baseball bat. The modern batsman is fitter, stronger and supremely confident that the extended ‘sweet spot’ on his weapon will often carry the ball over the boundary ropes. And that’s the problem.

It is an issue that is exercising the game’s law-makers. The balance between bat and ball is heavily tilted in favour of the former. The bat’s length and weight are defined by law, but not the areas that cause the maximum damage to bowlers (and fielders) today: the depth and the size of the edge.

The depth has increased from an average of 18mm to around 80mm today; the edges have ballooned to 55mm. One of the recommendations of the MCC Laws sub-committee is that the former be reduced to between 60 and 65mm and the latter 35 and 40mm. To use big bats that are light seems unfair to the bowler, as Ricky Ponting, among others, has pointed out.

There is also talk of a gauge through which the bat must pass for it to be deemed legal. These are some of the changes to the Code of Laws that are being contemplated before they are introduced in October this year. Fraser Stewart, the MCC Laws Manager at Lord’s, has given us in this edition a flavour of the areas of the game that are under consideration, from player behaviour to how a non-striker backing up can be run out. There was some discussion on introducing yellow and red cards, but it was felt that it is inappropriate for cricket at this time. The key phrase there is at this time, so a relook is possible.

Let’s keep the cards out, then. I suspect that the sporting gesture – recalling a batsman, not bowling bouncers to tailenders, pointing out that a catch hasn’t been taken cleanly – is in decline. But that does not mean that the opposite is on the rise. No international captain is likely to recall a batsman the way Gundappa Viswanath did during the Mumbai Test of 1980. But no captain is likely to suggest that his opposite number take him on in a wrestling bout to decide which team bats first either. That happened more than a century ago. Times change.

My country, right or left

Garry Sobers was batting on 364, the then world record of Len Hutton’s, when the occasional off-spinner bowling to him, the batsman Hanif Mohammad, switched to left-arm spin. It was the third ball of the over. Hanif, not a bowler of note, Sobers is quoted as saying in Osman Samiuddin’s The Unquiet Ones, asked the umpire if he could bowl left handed as I needed just one run for the record. I said it was all right and he could bowl with both hands if he wished.

Sobers pushed to cover and ran the single for the highest individual score in a Test innings – a record that stood for 36 years before Brian Lara broke it.

At the turn of the century, John Buchanan, coach of the Australian team, said the next big thing would be the bowler who could deliver off either hand. In a first-class match in 1982, Sussex opening batsman Charles Rowe bowled Geoff Arnold with off-spin, then switched to left-arm spin next ball and dismissed the No. 11 off a rank long hop.

In India, Vidarbha’s Akshay Karnewar, Kerala’s Mohammed Sanuth, and Gujarat’s Pradip Champawat have all been known to bowl off either hand. Most coaches would advise such bowlers to focus on the style they are more comfortable with. There are too many adjustments that a bowler has to make – from getting his feet, his trunk, head, eyes in alignment – to suddenly be able to do all that with the other side of the body. Most people have a stronger eye, a stronger shoulder and a stronger side; bowling at the highest level off either hand will require both sides of the body to be of equal strength.

But with cricket – especially the shorter variety – constantly searching for the all-rounder (in various senses of the term), might not a combination of nature and nurture work in the favour of the ‘freak’? The thought is exciting. After all, who believed that the reverse swing or the doosra were possible till someone actually bowled these deliveries?

Rain rules

There are few things more frustrating in cricket than to have no play while the ground is bathed in sunshine. Test cricket must ensure that an already diminishing audience is not further diminished because of administrative apathy. The ICC must carry out periodic checks to ensure that grounds are equipped to handle international matches, handing the hosts a detailed ‘mustdo’ list before the start of a series. If matches do not take place owing to human agency, then such hosts bring the game into disrepute, and ought to be pulled up.

But there’s another side to it. Umpires and players look for perfect conditions before an interrupted game can resume. The balance ought to be weighted in favour of play in less-than-perfect conditions so long as there is no physical danger to the players. I think the benefit of the doubt should go to the spectator.

Modern cricketers make too much fuss. The elements are cricket’s presiding geniuses, wrote Cardus. Players who conquer the elements dine at the high table, admired for their technique and all-round ability. Cardus worked for the print media, not television.

Wittgenstein and cricket

Ah had no confidence in Maister Stood, sur, is a quote that immediately evokes The Oval Test of 1882 and the start of the Ashes legend. CT Studd (Stood) was the batsman expected to take England to a win, but he could only watch from the non-striker’s end as Ted Peate swung and missed and was bowled, handing Australia an improbable victory. Peate’s excuse for doing so was laid out in that startling sentence.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent, is the most famous statement by another philosopher, the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein.

What does a 19th century Yorkshire wit have in common with 20th century’s greatest philosopher?

Well, nothing actually. But there is a link with the unbeaten batsman in these pages, discovered by Ray Monk, the philosopher and biographer of Wittgenstein. In his Cambridge days, Wittgenstein was a great fan of cricket, goes the legend. Ahem…, says Monk here, explaining how that misunderstanding arose. The Studd story is more fascinating.

Fantasy cricket

Everybody has his fantasy match. Jim Laker’s involves Bishan Bedi and Ray Lindwall bowling at Lord’s. More recently, Scyld Berry has written, Let Michael Holding and Ted McDonald measure out their run-ups to bowl against Saeed Anwar and Wally Hammond. My own – at the moment; these things change – has Victor Trumper and David Gower taking on Dennis Lillee and Bhagwat Chandrasekhar.

A remarkable journey

HARSHA BHOGLE

Starry eyed, uncertain and, I suspect, a bit in awe of the land they were travelling to, a group of cricketers got on a boat bound for England in 1932. I have often tried to imagine being one of them; tried to travel back and live the situation. India wasn’t yet independent but here was the opportunity to become ‘India’s’ first Test cricketers. It must have been wonderful, uplifting.

Eighty-four years later, in a world beset by greater danger and uncertainty, India play 13 home Tests. It is an aberration and an examination. Can the format that is so part of us, so witness to deeds both stirring and capable of producing despair, which has produced literature and broadcasts worthy of the performances on the field, survive our era? The celebration of a landmark at the First Test against New Zealand in Kanpur was also a reminder that in a world of short attention spans, of 400-word match reports, of 140-character news sources, a five-day sporting encounter is so amazingly anachronistic.

From being one of the homes of Test cricket, where crowds snaked around stadiums and where a ticket was a trophy, India is one of the outposts. Nobody calls to ask for passes, schoolchildren are let in free to help create some ‘atmosphere’ and, while people still follow the Test and know what is happening, viewership, the new index of success, has recently plummeted. Yet, encouragingly, the new cricketers are happy to say that Test cricket remains the ultimate form of the game for them and still believe that respect, if not necessarily box-office value, comes from being a successful Test cricketer.

Eighty-four years and 500 Tests have been quite a journey. England remained the destination either side of the war, with Australia allowing a solitary visit soon after Partition when a land enfeebled by violence and separation sent as many players as it could to try and match Bradman’s team. But cricket had long since taken root in India and players of the calibre of Vijay Merchant, Vijay Hazare, Vinoo Mankad, Polly Umrigar and Subhash Gupte had begun arriving. There were wins at home in 1952 and 1959, a world-record opening partnership arrived in 1956 and an away series win in New Zealand in 1967-68 (after a tour to Australia, only the second and 20 years after the first!). But 1971 remains a turning point for it coincided with the arrival of the first genuine great in Sunil Gavaskar and series wins, hitherto considered impossible, in the West Indies and, rather stunningly so, in England.

Badges of history: 1932 Lord’s, 1971 The Oval and 2001 Eden Gardens. – Getty Images

And so, I attempted to put together a team that would capture the essence of Indian cricket pre-1971. While it is beset with the inadequacies of such an effort, this is what I came up with: Merchant, Mankad, Hazare, Umrigar, Vijay Manjrekar, MAK Pataudi, Farokh Engineer, Dattu Phadkar, Erapalli Prasanna, Gupte and Mohammad Nissar, with an allowance for the great Bishan Singh Bedi somewhere and room for argument for the likes of Chandu Borde, Dilip Sardesai, BS Chandrasekhar and Salim Durrani.

Till Gavaskar came along, only two batsmen of sufficient longevity, Hazare and Umrigar, had averages in excess of 40. Only Borde, Manjrekar and Umrigar had more than 3000 runs. Gavaskar averaged 51 and made more than 10,000. He was a pioneer and seven years after him, another would arrive.

Before Kapil Dev, India’s leading wicket-taker among those bowling the new ball (and often that didn’t mean being a ‘fast’ bowler) was Ramakant Desai with 74 wickets. Phadkar had 62 and Syed Abid Ali had 47. Kapil got 434 and showed how an Indian could become among the best in his business. After him, India produced Javagal Srinath, Zaheer Khan, Irfan Pathan and Ishant Sharma in the 100-wicket club and while that isn’t earth shattering, it is indicative of change. Kapil broke many stereotypes and Indian cricket has much to thank him for.

As Kapil started to wane towards the late eighties, he passed the baton to the brightest star Indian cricket has produced. The arrival of Sachin Tendulkar in 1989 coincided with an extraordinary collection of talents. In the next ten years arrived Rahul Dravid (13,265 runs), VVS Laxman (8781 runs) and Sourav Ganguly (7212 runs). Virender Sehwag with 8503 was round the corner. A year after the landmark Tendulkar debut, a young man from Bangalore carried on a tradition of engineering graduates-turned-spin bowlers (one that R Ashwin continues). Anil Kumble took 619 wickets, but the decade also saw the arrival of Harbhajan Singh with 417 and Srinath with 236. Zaheer with 311 was already in the wings. Even as one-day cricket struck roots and flowered and, indeed, bore fruit, India was to have its most fertile phase of Test cricketers.

The expression ‘Golden Era’ is often bandied about to speak of a time that none of us has seen. But I dare say, in years to come, this will be seen as just that. It was also an era of extraordinary gentlemen and it was their integrity and personality, as much as their glittering cricket, that saw India through a phase that was deeply painful to its devoted followers. Ganguly’s Indian team erased the wounds of match-fixing quickly and brought joy back to the fans, who, by now, had become the greatest asset world cricket had.

The presence of the Fab Four allowed for the unique talents of Sehwag to burst forth. He batted like no Indian had in Test cricket and the bastion of orthodoxy, as symbolised by the batting cultures of Mumbai and the south, was revolutionised by his blazing style. Sehwag’s style seemed fraught with danger, his footwork occasionally non-existent, but his approach, a perfect extension of his personality, was breathtaking, and a player who seemed to play too many shots has the three highest scores by an Indian in Test cricket.

There were some great Test matches in this phase and maybe it was befitting that so many of those came in Chennai, a land where Test cricket had firm roots. In 1998, 1999, 2001 and 2008 we got four fabulous games and India won three of those. But there were matching games and none as dramatic as the landmark Test at Eden Gardens in 2001, by any yardstick the greatest in India’s history (with Laxman’s 281 the finest innings played by an Indian). But much joy came in Leeds in 2002, Adelaide in 2003, Multan and Rawalpindi in 2004, Johannesburg in 2006, Nottingham in 2007 and Perth in 2008. And, you could argue, in the West Indies in 2006 and in Durban and Mohali in 2010.

There were unforgettable bowling moments. In 2001, a very young Harbhajan took 32 wickets in three Tests, a number lent greater significance by the fact that the next highest Indian wicket-taker had three! Harbhajan drew much strength from the enormous character of Kumble, who, only two years earlier, had taken all ten against Pakistan in Delhi.

But as the decade wound to an end, twin challenges appeared for Test cricket in India. First Ganguly and Kumble left, then Dravid and Laxman. Sehwag and Harbhajan faced decline and in November 2013, Tendulkar had India spellbound and teary-eyed with a moving farewell speech. Off the field, in 2008, the Indian Premier League made its debut and in captivating a generation, emerged as a rival, within the game, to the venerable but increasingly threatened Test match.

I find a lot of people looking down at T20 cricket, but they do so because they look at it through the eyes of Test cricket and miss, within it, the setting up of a batsman, the rhythm of Test cricket and the many challenges it imposes on its players; the front foot seems to go away from the pitch of the ball rather than towards it and wagon-wheels increasingly show the ‘V’ between third man and fine leg rather than between cover and midwicket. It is like searching for a cut of a suit in an off-the-rack T-shirt. For the future of Test cricket, we must acquire different sets of eyes for different forms of the game.

Sometimes it seems so much has changed. Fitness standards, the contours of cricket bats and, maybe in the near future, the colour of the ball. Big bats are affecting technique and defence is getting more porous. We live in an era where patience, tenacity and resilience are lower down the pecking order to style, flair and living for the day. And so, not just India, but every nation is struggling to play Test cricket in even slightly adverse conditions.

As 500 ticks over, we are lucky that the pillars of Test cricket in India, Virat Kohli, Ajinkya Rahane and Ashwin are thoughtful people. They need to play all forms but they respect Test cricket. Hopefully, they can continue to hold people’s interest in the format and hand over a good product to the next generation.

I hope India plays a 1000th Test. I don’t know if anyone reading this would be around. And I certainly don’t know whether articles like this one would still be written. But what I do know is that if a generation emerges that doesn’t know what Test cricket is, they will have missed a lot.

Harsha Bhogle (@bhogleharsha) is a cricket journalist and commentator.

Peaks and landmarks: A win over New Zealand in India’s 502nd Test in Indore took the Virat Kohli-led side to the top of the ICC Test rankings. – BCCI

They don’t get it

SIMON BARNES

What is the principal duty of an adult human being? Is it to make money at the expense of all else? To dedicate every aspect of mind, body and soul to the pursuit of riches? Or are there also duties of love? Is there also a requirement to seek beauty, truth and wisdom? Should you seek to do good? Or only to do well?

Let’s look at that another way. Say you were running a sport. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you were running cricket. Is it your job to see that the sport makes as much money as possible? Or are there other considerations?

Take the chief executive’s wicket. This is a recently coined term for a Test match wicket designed to last for a good five days. The idea is to maximise income: the more days, the more dollars. So you have a match in which 600 runs plays 550 runs by the fourth day, the bowlers run themselves into the ground and the batsmen score cheap centuries.

Such wickets are designed to produce bad cricket. They keep getting made because they make more money. In the short term anyway – but if you keep supplying a shoddy product then people tend to stop buying. And people are buying Test cricket less and less.

Or another relatively small point: electronic advertising boards. Here are devices specially designed to distract spectators from what they’re watching. They clamour for attention in direct competition with the action. They have been deliberately introduced to decrease the enjoyment of spectators. But they make money, so they have become part of the fixtures of international cricket.

No one asks the question: Is it good for cricket? They ask instead: Will we make money from it? In other words, cricket is a business: neither more nor less. And by the harsh principles that govern such things, if it makes money it’s good and survives; if it doesn’t, it gets killed off.

It seems to have been agreed that the most exciting thing in cricket is the six-hit. A six was considered a special thing because it was very difficult and therefore very rare. So to make cricket more popular and therefore a bigger earner, the game has done everything it can to encourage sixes. The grounds are made smaller by means of boundary ropes covered by a sponsored daft-excluder. In the shorter formats, you aren’t allowed to have fielders protecting the boundary, or not very many, anyway. Wickets have become roads on which bowlers can only tee it up for the sloggers. Bat technology has leapt ahead, so that mishits routinely go for six. Ball technology is static, or even retrograde: they use two white balls in 50-over cricket to keep the advantage with the batsman.

Hopes and heroes: Cricket is about the maidan and the village green. It’s about caring far too much about something that doesn’t really matter at all. – Getty Images

The result is that sixes have become routine. No longer worth getting excited about: Oh look, here comes another. That’s the sort of thing that happens when you look at cricket entirely as a business. Goals are the most exciting things in football, but if we doubled the size of the goals, would football become instantly twice as exciting, twice as wealthy?

I am not an opponent of T20, or the IPL. Nor am I saying that we need to return to colonial values; they were also profoundly flawed in sporting as well as in other ways. That’s not the argument here.

The heart of the matter is that cricket isn’t an entertainment or a brand or a commodity. It’s not Coca-Cola or McDonald’s; for that matter it’s not Krug or Beluga. The point is that cricket has a meaning that has nothing to do with profit and loss.

Oh look, here comes another: To make cricket more popular and therefore a bigger earner, the game has done everything to encourage sixes. – Getty Images

You know that, I know that, the players know that. It seems that the only people who don’t know that are those who actually run the game. And that is the most terrible thing.

Cricket is about the maidan and the village green. It’s about hopes and heroes. It’s about caring far too much about something that doesn’t really matter at all. It’s about what Albert Camus, when talking of football, described as the stupid desire to cry on evenings when we had lost.

It’s about impossible deeds and impossible results. It’s about the way cricket is a dialogue between bowler and batsman, parent and child, stranger and stranger, friend and friend. It’s about discussing reverse swing in a bar, or borrowing an orange to demonstrate the doosra.

It’s about the place you belong to and the places you travel to. It’s a little bit about being the sort of person you happen to be. It’s a licensed craziness; it’s a glorious way of feeling quite dreadful about a triviality. It’s a way of experiencing love, truth, beauty, wisdom, hope, despair, dismay, hilarity, joy.

But you can’t explain that to the people who run cricket because they don’t get it. They just see us all as customers.

Why this blindness? It comes about because people in positions of serious power tend to put power first and everything else a rather distant second. And it’s a fact of life that the more money you control the more power you have.

People who run cricket don’t necessarily want the money for themselves. They want the power it gives. They want to control things, make decisions, have people do what they say, and, as a bonus, revel in the cosmetic side of power: the private jets and presidential suites and unsolicited gifts and the fawning of one and all.

And so cricket is being run in order to maximise the power of those who run it – rather than to make cricket a better game.

Here’s a question: What do you need for good sport? Answer: A good contest with good contestants. In other words, every leading cricket nation has a vested interest in the rude health of all the other nations.

If Coca-Cola put every other soft drink company out of business, then so much the better for them. If Manchester United put every other Premier League team out of business, they would cease to exist themselves. That’s because sport is not the same thing as business.

But the governing bodies of cricket in India have allied with those of England and Australia to take control of the game and to squeeze the rest. Cricket would be a much lesser thing without West Indies or poor homeless Pakistan. The ICC should be doing everything possible to help them. Instead, the policy of the ICC seems to be to nudge them gently towards extinction.

Sport is also about the pursuit of excellence. At the Olympic Games you see many sports that are not, on the face of it, entertaining, certainly not in the manner of the IPL. In the rowing events six crews row along a lake 2000 metres long and, er, that’s it. It’s short on cheap thrills, but it’s a superb exhibition of trained-in excellence. The International Olympic Committee is not trying to drop rowing in case people with short attention spans fail to cope with its demands. It’s part of the Olympic programme.

Most cricketers agree that Test match cricket is the ultimate form of the game: the one on which excellence most profoundly resides. The one that counts. The shorter forms are great, sure, but they lack the epic resonance of Test match cricket.

A sporting body’s duty, then, is to do all it can to promote sporting excellence. It’s not a matter of what fills the coffers and what people with short attention spans like best. A sporting administrator has a duty to excellence before finance. But that duty is not being fulfilled. In fact, they are not even trying. Test match cricket is dying before our eyes because business has triumphed over excellence – over sport itself – in a manner that is not so much a victory as a rout.

You can see the same sort of thing happen with charities. There comes a point in the life of a charity when you can make a jump into a bigger league, generally by making an alliance with a commercial partner with its own agenda. You can become more important, employ more people and wield more power. All you lose is your original mission.

You can kid yourself that it’s a mature compromise from which everybody benefits – or you can say no, damn it, what matters here is the integrity of our original mission.

What matters in cricket is balance. It starts with the balance between bat and ball – and these days that’s grotesquely skewed towards the batters. It continues with the balance between one cricketing country and another. After that you must strike a balance between the pursuit of money and the pursuit of excellence.

It’s all about soul. We follow cricket because the game has a soul. Sell it to the corporates and you will end up with no soul and no game and no opponents and no spectators and no one raiding the fruit-bowl to bowl a doosra and the maidans and the village greens will become luxury housing developments – because that’s the way to make money and money is after all the only thing in life that maters, is it not?

Unless you happen to have a soul.

Simon Barnes (@simonbarneswild) has written about cricket and wildlife in a career that has spanned over three decades.

The toughest job

JOHN WRIGHT

A few days after his appointment as India coach, when I read that Anil Kumble brought my name up when talking about how he would go about the job, I thought maybe something all those years ago had rubbed off, but I knew he would do it his way.

Maximum impact: Someone like Anil Kumble, who has played at the highest level, can bring with him a rare but precious trait: empathy. – BCCI

From a distance, it appeared that the Indian team had come full circle; the cycle that began with the appointment of its first foreign coach in 2000 had ended with one of the strongest cricketers and tacticians I have worked with in charge of a team with an ambitious captain and exciting players. For this young Indian team, it appeared a very good fit. Anil would be like he was as a cricketer, quietly going about his business: minimum fuss, maximum impact.

Many years after I left the India job, Anil and I were to work again with Mumbai Indians. He was mentor and called me in to be head coach and it was an easy and enjoyable partnership. To experience and succeed in the tough IPL environment was very satisfying. At work in the dugout, Anil was impressive, his analysis of batting opposition outstanding and meticulous; but then he had been doing that for years. It’s not like we talked about coaching; he’s seen enough coaches over the years, is a good observer and has a fair idea of what works and what doesn’t.

It has been a long time, more than ten years, since my stint with the Indian team – a lifetime really – and I can only try to imagine what doing the job would be like today. Much has changed and more than birds now twitter. In 2000, being an outsider and the first foreign coach for the Indian team had its advantages. I carried no baggage whatsoever and had no idea whom I was kicking out of the changing room. It is the reason, I’m told, I don’t get too many gilt-edged Christmas cards. Being a foreign coach in India was not expected to work and that perhaps was my single biggest motivation.

Coaching, if you can last, is similar to most professions. The more you do it the more you learn about the job and yourself. In tough situations experience can be an asset. Prior to the Indian job I had the advantage of a four-year coaching stint with Kent on the county circuit. Invaluable. You learn from your experiences and it is funny some of the things you remember. George Sharp, the ex-Northamptonshire wicketkeeper who later went on to become a top umpire, offered this when I began working in county cricket: If you can keep them happy, you’ll beat half of them.

In the county set-up, that’s not far from the truth.

And as a player I have never forgotten my old Derbyshire scorer who pulled me into line over a pint of bitter when I chose to wax lyrical about my innings of the day. The old man said, Aye, lad, you did play well. But if you die tonight, we’ll manage. Or the groundsman to whom I cribbed about a wicket being particularly green, to which he abruptly replied, Grass is always bloody green.

Undoubtedly, one or two in India unhappy with the decision to appoint a foreign coach would have definitely managed without me. What I was to learn in coaching and in India was this: You have to have the confidence and strength of mind to be yourself while respecting others and their opinions. From there the group has to decide what is best for the team and move on with it. If everyone can put everything else aside – theories, notions, assumptions, egos – and answer the question of what is best for the team, it’s a good start. You fix the things you can fix – fitness, punctuality, the right support staff – and the cricket in the cricketers will take over.

In a coach’s early days, like with me, one of the most important factors is whether the players stand up for you and your efforts. Players are not silly, they have to believe the person or the systems in place are actually helping them as individuals and as a team. Then differences in language, culture and approach are duly respected and quickly fade into the background. All the greats have a strong sense of self-awareness and the boys I worked with did. I was fortunate to coach an outstanding group of players, exceptionally gifted, who wanted to learn and above all else to perform, particularly outside India.

Anil was part of that original engine room, and we were able to make things move. Over the next decade, from 2000 to 2011, with different set-ups and personnel, I was pleased to see the group I’d first worked with and the next generation that came though – Bhajji, Viru, Yuvi, Zak, Ash Nehra, Kaif – make the Indian team stamp their mark on the world game. In that first decade, they began winning Tests overseas, reached the No. 1 ranking in all forms of the game and were part of World Cup-winning teams in two formats. Their generation will always be counted among the great Indian teams, remembered with pride by Indian fans. As a fighting team, which I always said the fans deserved. It was a simpler message in simpler times.

Some parts of the India job were unforgiving, others tested me to my limit. The job never felt particularly secure, it hinged on results. Just before the team left for the 2003 World Cup, Jagmohan Dalmiya, then BCCI president, a demanding but fair boss, had me over to his office for a chat. He wished me well and said, If you don’t come first or second, we might not be meeting again.

In hindsight, at the highest level, it is only fair everyone should be on their toes, including the coach. Ever since then, I have never bought into the jargon of team rebuilding, etc. It is what it is – not cathedral construction, but winning matches.

Anil’s familiarity with the environment and his stature among the players meant he could get directly to the heart of the business. A successful coach doesn’t have to necessarily have played at the highest level. In some cases, not being a player from the top can allow a more objective assessment, but only if the coach does not think of himself as the man in charge of reinventing the wheel. On the other hand, a coach who has played at the highest level can bring with him a rare but precious trait: empathy. His own playing career would have taught him the hard lessons of failure, how to pick himself up, the reasons for action and tactics – if a second slip is worth having then perhaps a first is as well – and how to identify and tackle doubt weighing down a player.

John Wright: ‘Parts of the India job were unforgiving, others tested me to my limit.’ – Getty Images

To get things to work inside a team, a deep knowledge of the game is helpful, an understanding of who is responsible for what is necessary, and being able to trust each other is critical. As head coach, I favoured a small tight support group because sometimes getting out of the way is more important than getting involved. A busload of helpers becomes problematic.

Besides, a modern-day coach must work over three formats. While basics of the game remain the same, there are subtleties in tactics and approach and the coach must switch between them, deal with a wider turnover of players and handle a varying range of skill levels.

Coaches often look at players and go: Wow, this kid could really be something! Then their job begins. To help shortcut the development of that player so he doesn’t repeat the mistakes you have seen or even made yourself. You can’t do their bowling or batting for them, but you can help individual players mature. You need to let the player arrive at the point where he knows what works for him and who he is as a player. You can save him some time in getting there or lead him in the direction of fellow players whose messages and conversations are often more contemporary or powerful than from the coaching staff. In that sense, for a long time, alongside my work, Anil was also coaching the younger members of the Indian team, as were other senior peers.

Anil implicitly understands his environment. As a captain, he was known as a man of utter fairness; senior, junior, superstar, debutant makes no difference to him and he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Having effectively been appointed by his ex-playing peers, he understands that he will be judged by them, the media and the fans. It is also a lonely job, as it means a lot of time away from family. He invited on himself again the kind of pressure that he went through as a player.

That’s what made it a big and a brave call, for an ex-cricketer to put himself up to coach his national team. Ravi Shastri also did that for a short period and while Anil and he are very different personalities, they are both passionate and care about Indian cricket. Anil could have stood back and taken the easy option, not had a go at coaching India. That means sitting back and making blanket judgements from a safe distance.

It is only wise to tap into the knowledge of outstanding home players. When I look back at the group that I worked with and, in a sense belonged to, it had some outstanding people and cricket minds. Along with Anil there were Sourav, Rahul, Sachin, Laxman, Srinath, Viru and Zak and it is good to see them involved in some capacity, which is healthy for Indian cricket. In some countries, the game has been hijacked by administrators who like to keep ex-players at arm’s length and that is a great waste of knowledge. Fortunately, India have gone down a different road. I couldn’t be happier.

From an old Indian coach to a new one, I say only this: Enjoy the job, I certainly did. Life was never dull.

A former New Zealand captain, John Wright coached India to success between 2000 and 2005.

Cricket’s burden of diplomacy

SHASHI THAROOR

Consider the evidence. In Mumbai, the powerful Shiv Sena party says it will object to any bilateral cricketing engagement with Pakistan, and it trashes the offices of the Board of Control for Cricket in India when the Pakistani cricket board chief is visiting his counterpart there. A T20 match has to be shifted from the Himachal Pradesh town of Dharamsala because the chief minister there felt the families of Indian soldiers from his state would not welcome a game with the enemy. And when rumours float in the media of a possible resumption of Test series, a ruling party legislator, himself a former home secretary, rises to condemn the very thought of playing cricket with a country whose terrorists continue to attack India with impunity.

What are the prospects for normal cricketing relations with Pakistan in these circumstances? Since the horrors of the attack on Mumbai in November 2008 (known to many as 26/11), India and Pakistan have not played a bilateral Test series against each other, though they have clashed in one-day and T20 tournaments, including three World Cups. There was a three-match bilateral one-day series in India in 2011, but that turned out to be an aberration: resistance to bilateral cricketing contact remains high in India.

The irony is that there is a good argument to be made for the healing capabilities of sport, and the United Nations has made it. Cricket, like all international sport, embodies the values of co-existence transcending political differences – a key United Nations principle, which is why the UN, since Kofi Annan’s time, has promoted Sports for Development and Peace. Cricket, as a global game, features people with different ethnicities, colours, religions and creeds striving towards the same goals. Cricket is also dedicated to the notion of ‘playing by the rules’; strict adherence to the laws of cricket includes honouring the spirit of those laws, so that, for instance, the mildest show of dissent against an umpiring decision is severely sanctioned. The phrase it’s not cricket has come to be used whenever any conduct is palpably unfair, or – to recall a deplorably sexist but irreplaceable word – ungentlemanly. With all of these elements, cricket can arguably be a valuable force for the promotion of the values and principles of peace and co-existence between any two countries – India and Pakistan surely not excepted.