Fame and Recognition

The Indian cricket team is in the news for sometime now and unusually, it is not for the wrong reasons. Speechless many were when they pulled off the first ever World Twenty20 championships, as it was the last thing everyone expected them to do. This victory sent millions of fans of the game across the nation to an unprecedented frenzy. Tremors of celebration erupted in every nook and corner of the country as the unrelenting Indian team thrashed opponents such as England, South Africa, Australia and Pakistan on its way to the pinnacle. After all it’s been a couple of decades and more since a world championship made way to the Indian soil. But a minuscule fraction of our population is unable to tolerate such joy expressed by the fans and the accolades bestowed upon the players who have done their nation proud.

These mongers who project themselves as supporters of ‘other sports’ prefer to lie low most of the time but makes it a point to come out of the box whenever our cricket team hogs the much deserved limelight and rewards for their performance. Narrow minded to the core so as to refrain from appreciating the victorious national side and jealous of the adulation going the cricketers’ way, these quintessential opportunists thrive to get into the frame by castigating the game of cricket and the national team. This time around they have found solace in attacking different state governments for the latter’s showering of monetary rewards on the cricketers. In an attempt to satisfy their primal objective of nullifying the efforts of our cricketing heroes, these schmucks got vocal about ‘other sports’ not being paid any dues.

What sports are they talking about anyway? Is it about the national game that hardly evokes any sense of nationalism these days? Or is it about the popular game of Europe and Latin America, whose supporters in India cannot even dream about claiming at least one-tenth of the popularity that cricket enjoys in this billion strong nation? Big deal, if the hockey and the soccer teams won championships playing at home at around the same time. Not only did the Twenty20 team clinch the title the hard way, with an aura of fearlessness and aggression omnipresent around them, they did it in South African soil fighting against teams with more exposure to the comparatively newer format of the game. Majority of the players in this champion side hail from small towns and modest circumstances unlike many of their predecessors and they rightly deserve all the recognition and the money.

The supporters of the so called other sports are probably combating severe mental trauma if they believe that the popularity of any sport can be altered overnight. Even with the kind of financial support that these nincompoops demand, it's almost impossible to gain the fame, adulation and recognition that our cricketers have earned by their merit rather than force unlike those who are into 'other sports'.

Drives and Scoops

If I were as uninitiated as anyone could be about the game of cricket while watching the first ever twenty20 world championship, I would have been gullible enough to believe if anyone told me that ‘footwork’ is all about batsmen walking across the stumps before they attempt to scoop the ball over fine leg. Fortunately, that’s not the case and my observation of the game for the past few years reminds me that this over-use of feet has nothing to do with footwork and that the number of players opting for such a shot is proliferating with every match, especially, of the twenty20 variety.

It’s not only that the display of such a shot is displeasing to the viewer who is aesthetically inclined; it leaves batsmen with much higher chance of them losing their wickets. There is little time to pick up the length and play such a shot against the fast bowlers and therefore on almost all occasions when the shot is played, it is pre-meditated. Sometimes batsmen tend to walk across to the outside of the off stump even before the ball leaves the bowler’s arm thereby allowing the bowler an ample amount of time to direct the delivery at the stumps. In such a case there is a higher probability of the ball hitting the stumps or the pads of the batsman directly in front of the stumps if he were unable to connect his bat with the speedy ball. Then there is the risk of getting caught at short fine leg even if the batsman manages to scoop the ball up in an attempt to send it sailing over fine leg. A classic example of which is the Pakistani batsman Mizbah-ul-Haq's offering of the Twenty20 world championship to Team India despite all his efforts to save the final day of the tournament.

True that twenty20 offers zero tolerance for dot balls and the batsmen are subjected to immense pressure to score runs off every delivery, preferably in boundaries and sixes. Improvisation is a term that is being used more and more by commentators and columnists to refer to the scoop shot and others of that nature incorporated by batsmen to put more runs on board. Of course, one has to devise methods to find runs when the going gets tough and, ultimately, the number of runs scored is what that matters than the way it was scored. But is it necessary for batsmen to play such cheeky shots (another term popularized by the media) most of the times at the cost of their wicket? Shouldn’t they stick with what they were taught in school and hold the bat straight while playing a ball pitched outside the off stump?

Maybe it's the number of runs scored and wickets taken is what matters at the end of the day, but there are some things beyond the plethora of statistics that circumscribe the game and good cricketing shots are some of those that remain in the minds of the viewer forever.