Ducking Beamers: A Cricket Blog

In economic circles, a major debate concerns the nature of the Great Recession. One school holds that the downturn is just another ride down the familiar cycle of boom and bust, while the other argues that it reflects instead structural issues that are unlikely to go away soon (like, say, a workforce ill-adapted for the tech age). It occurs to me that such language — if not the rigorous tools of economics — might also be useful to discuss Indian cricket’s current malaise. (By now, I think it should be fairly well-accepted that there is a problem in Indian cricket; the English did as much as they could to settle the matter last month.)

The Cyclical Case: I fear that the Indian selectors largely hold true to the business cycle model; how else to explain their obsessive loyalty to Sehwag, Gambhir and Co., after so many defeats? Their argument goes something like this: the batsmen are out of form, yes, but all they need is time to recuperate, stay in the middle, and come back. It’s that saying — “One innings away from good form” — that rules the thinking.

The Structural Case: Structuralists have been grumbling for at least a year or two now, and their argument has gathered steam after the Test losses. Their argument does not enjoy widespread acclaim in part because it is so depressing, and in part because it has stayed the same for decades. To wit:

a) India’s domestic cricket scene has suffered and fails to produce enough cricketers worthy of the international level;

b) India’s docile pitches spoil our batsmen, who are incapable abroad, and these pitches (along with an upper-class bias against activity) also deprive the country of genuinely quick bowlers to succeed Zaheer Khan;

c) The IPL, now past its infancy, has started to skew incentives — youngsters chase the quick buck and learn to slog; as a result, the Test format suffers.

What is so alarming about the structuralist argument is that it posits that post-Dravid/Laxman/Tendulkar/Ganguly, India will not be able to replace them and instead face a steady decline in quality unless the above factors are addressed. The problem, of course, is how to explain the Golden Four: if the same system produced them, why couldn’t it produce more?

I’ve been mostly disappointed by the discussion about Tendulkar’s retirement. One problem is that we don’t have an appropriate baseline for comparison — after all, once you’ve declared man to be God, it’s hard to find the yardstick to measure immortality. So, some people say: Is Current Tendulkar not as good as Old Tendulkar? Others say, Is Tendulkar better than the alternative (i.e., a young, inexperienced player, but one with promise)? Still others say, Is Tendulkar better than Kallis or Ponting?

Part of the issue here is that we can’t compare Tendulkar to the merely good. Once we start to think that Tendulkar is as capable as, say, Gautam Gambhir or Andrew Strauss — both extremely competent players, but not likely to be part the pantheon — then we might as well admit that all is lost. It’s a strange and demanding dynamic. A Cricinfo writer whose name I forget argues that we should let Tendulkar play on because it would be more exciting to see him “struggle.” This is cruel — like that last scene in Gladiator where Russell Crowe’s character has to fight with a stab wound in his back. Besides, Tendulkar hasn’t been completely godly since at least 2006, when Wankhede booed him after another period of wretched form. We’ve seen the man cope ably with age, but we’ve seen him fall plenty in the past five years.

For what it’s worth, my test is: Is current Tendulkar good enough to play in the team? I try to borrow the blindfolds from Lady Justice and ask, “If this were another player — Player X — and I were handed his file as a selector, would I say, Let’s keep him going?” And looking at his record — no centuries in almost two years, an appalling 2012 average — I don’t see any reason to keep Player X in the team.

One thing, though: To see Ponting get his send-off reminded me of all that was wrong about the way Dravid and Laxman left. I’d hate to see another Indian retirement emanate from a news conference. Do it on the field, and do it right. We owe that much to you, and you owe it to us. Deal?