The consensus on India’s batting failures runs like this: They are clearly past their prime and need to go, but thanks for the memories. There are vocal minorities that push the harder view — Tendulkar isn’t all that; Laxman needs to be dropped immediately and can’t move his feet; Dravid can’t sight the ball (Ganguly even had the nerve to question his technique, which I found rather surprising). The overall narrative: These are aged players, they are in decline, India needs to be rejuvenated.
Let me propose an alternative story: While some claim these last eight Tests have exposed the Big Three, what if these men — through their sheer talent (and fortuitous grouping) actually masked the structural weaknesses in Indian cricket for the duration of their careers? What if these men, fighting an unresponsive and politician-riddled system, managed to take an always mediocre team and make them — for a brief year or two — unbeatable? What has been exposed isn’t Dravid’s technique or Laxman’s legs, but the fact that other than a few diamonds, there’s a lot of dust in Indian cricket. The dam, in other words, has burst, and our excessive reliance on these men — and our classically Indian tendency to worship — deserves more criticism than anything else.
There are many holes in this narrative, I admit: a) It’s possible these men, thanks to their deservedly thick reputations, managed to delay change and reform (much the way Ganguly resisted changing the ODI team under Chappell); b) Old teams, like old firms, are slow to adapt and move; it was common in Dhoni’s early ODI tenure to shift batsmen around and force everyone to be flexible; by contrast, no one dared suggest switching up the Test side because the “record on paper” seemed too good to mess with; c) The problem with my counter-narrative is that it doesn’t address the main issue — India’s bowling is the problem, not the batting (see Kartikeya Date for more on this); d) Why blame the system at all? Didn’t these guys come from it? Hasn’t it amply rewarded them?
All good points. For the sake of generosity, though, I prefer my interpretation of history. We had two of the most prolific batsmen in the history of cricket play at the same time, with a capable back-up squad that included Sehwag, Laxman and Ganguly — and all we got was…what? West Indies? Australia? So, no, I don’t feel all that disturbed by the collective slump — I just think we should be talking more about Indian cricket as a whole now and whether these guys carried its burdens for too long, not “When are these guys going to retire already and let Kohli take their place?”
On Virat Kohli’s Anger
Sharda Ugra and Satadru Sen both have very good essays on Virat Kohli’s displays of anger over the Australian tour. Since I’ve long been a supporter of the spirit-of-cricket meme, I too have a problem with players flipping the middle finger at crowds and mouthing sister-fucker as part of a debut century celebration.
But I want to add a cautious dissent: analysts and commentators often offer tributes to hyper-rational players who, possessed of a “cricketing brain,” are able to astutely judge a match situation without allowing it to overwhelm them. What is conjured up is a homo economicus figure straight out of the Enlightenment (and maybe the Victorian era): cool, calm, without emotion.
This model, however, has been under attack in the social sciences, particularly in the field of behavioral economics, for about two or three decades now. We know that the human mind relies extensively on emotions in decision-making and that particular situations often dictate how a brain operates. It’s not that we are all irrational, only that we are predictably irrational in many ways (for e.g., we tend to worry much more about potential losses than we’re happy about potential gains). It’s not a battle between emotion and rationality, but perhaps choosing between the right emotions (anger could lead to a Kohli century, or, as we all know, to the dark side).
Which is all to say that I don’t particularly mind it when players draw upon emotions — in this case, anger — to power their on-field behavior. We’ve seen it time and time again — I wrote about Yuvraj Singh’s anger after being sledged by Andrew Flintoff in the 2007 World Cup, when he hit six sixes off Stuart Broad. There’s also Zaheer Khan, who began his comeback on an England tour after having jellies thrown on the pitch by a mischievous Alistair Cook. I clearly haven’t thought through my take on how emotions work, but I know at least some of the time, they do. So let anger, pride, sorrow, fear work its way into our understanding of cricket.