A Gem of a Game
Things I like about cricket the most.
Cricket is said to be a gentleman’s game. It is also a thinking man’s game. The ratio of the time spent on thinking versus the time spent on action in cricket is way more that other sports like Football, Hockey and even Tennis.
Mind games are very much important in cricket. I don’t enjoy watching just the highlights in cricket. How can you appreciate the leg cutter that bowled the batsman, until you have observed the previous two balls moving away from him? The case in point is the third test in Perth in the recent Australian tour, when Ishant Sharma got Ricky Ponting to nick into Dravid’s hands. That wicket was a product of the nine over spell.
Many times spinners literally buy the wicket of a priced scalp by giving away easy runs earlier and then luring him into the habit. You have to observe the subtlety of Anil Kumble, the deception of Shane Warne, and the relentless discipline of Glenn McGrath to understand their greatness.
Cricket also has this ability to generate various formats of game. T20 is so different from Test and still we call them cricket. T20 is unpredictable because it is short. It’s hard to imagine that a team would have a run of 16 consecutive wins in T20. But we have such examples in Test and even ODIs.
Imagine you have two dices. One dice ‘A’ is numbered 1-6 on its sides while the other dice ‘B’ is numbered 3-8. If you throw them together, you would expect the dice B to show up a larger number. But once in a while A will show 5 while B will show 3. Now, instead of declaring the winner in every throw, record what the two dices show for 15 throws. Sum up the numbers for each individual dice. I bet you would spend years and still not find the dice ‘A’ having the larger sum
Similarly, a test match has 15 sessions. A stronger team looses may be two or three of them if you look at them in isolation, but wins more number of sessions to emerge victorious. In T20, you kind of have just one session and this is what prompts the risky behavior and hence the thrill. Isn’t it common sense to have a score of 180/9 rather than 145/3?
Coming back to cricket vs. other sports, I also believe that it is a much fairer game, if you discount the pitch conditions. A game in my view is an idea. In football, a player might have a fantastic run and he still might just hit the pole or is blocked somewhere in midfield. Unless a goal is scored, it doesn’t matter whether the football went outside the area after a very good play of last five minutes. But in cricket, if a batsman has played well even for 15 balls, he would have scored some runs which get counted in the score. You earn as you go.
Of course there are nuances and psychological advantages of a good goal-less play in football, but cricket too has them and then it keeps on counting each effort too. You would find many times in football that a team which had more possession still lost, because the rules of the game stress a lot on concentrating the intensity on one particular event: the Goal.
Cricket also has a much richer currency. You have 1,2,3,4,5 & 6. You can score these in various ways and in different directions. Then there are so many ways of getting a batsman out. The equations this game throw up to a thinking man are overwhelming. And when you account for the human factors, you know that this is one of the biggest treat that you can offer to your brain.
A batsman need not take a single even when it is easily available to shield his partner. The opposition captain notices this after an over or two and then expands the field to prevent the batsman from running a couple, thereby forcing him to take risks for getting the boundaries. I just love these battles.
A wily captain can achieve so much more for his team. Shane Warne is a case in point with the Rajasthan Royals team. Even in IPL 2009, I think they have overachieved if you do man-to-man comparisons with other teams. This had been possible because Shane is so good at using the right person for the job at the right time. He is a master at reading situations.
A look at RCB’s revival in IPL 2009 after Kumble took over as a captain, signals a strong disposition to read the game and act accordingly. Once you couple that with a strong team of versatile players, RCB becomes force to reckon with.
This is my last post before the audition. At the end, I really hope that RCB wins and I am looking forward to good intelligent cricket in the next few weeks.
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