The hits the spot with its feature writing, but the reporting of the major events of the year on and off the field is a mixed bag
Jayaditya Gupta19-Apr-2015The last time my bookshelf acquired a was back in 1979; its primary task, in the pre-internet era, was to inform me of how my West Indian heroes were doing (never better, of course, than in those days), give me a snapshot of world cricket, and along with Playfair’s football annual, cater to my fascination with facts and figures. In the three decades since, I haven’t missed the yellow brick that much; all information is now literally at my fingertips, the game is no longer Anglocentric, and there is far too much cricket writing anyway.So the question uppermost in my mind, on reading the , is one of relevance – who, in the internet era, would read a 950-page reference book in tiny type size, whose freshest content is six-odd months old?The trick, though, is to read the for the features and the quirks, the oddities that give cricket – and – its character.First up, however, the weighty issues of the day. And the weightiest of them all – the ICC’s devolution of powers to the Big Three of India, England and Australia – is dealt with in masterly fashion by Osman Samiuddin. His piece reads like a political thriller, a with N Srinivasan starring as Frank Underwood, using brawn and brain to consolidate his power base. The script, taut and pulling no punches, focuses on the January 2014 meeting at which the “Small Seven” were told of their fate. “They [CA, ECB, BCCI] came at the dissenters with a combination of greed, threats and lies.” Riveting, though it makes for gloomy reading when you know there’s little chance of a redeeming season finale.Srinivasan’s increasing, and eventually complete, control over the ICC was in contrast to the diminishing of his domestic powers by India’s Supreme Court. Through several orders of the increasingly exasperated court he was first rapped on the knuckles before being asked unambiguously to stay away from the BCCI. It’s a situation one could scarcely have countenanced when the year began, yet ‘s retelling of the story pales in comparison to the ICC saga. There is barely a mention of it in the Editor’s Notes, and R Mohan’s profile of Srinivasan, “My Way or the Highway”, is far too verbose to have any punch. Sample this sentence:
“Even so, the one argument that trumps everything else is the fact that cricket lost its innocence ages ago when it crossed the line from sport to business, a phenomenon that has grown only one way after being impelled by the Indian Premier League, the ultimate money-making machine for the players, even if it is not so for the team owners paying for the privilege of reflected glory of the game’s greats fawning over them.”
For justice, turn to Shamya Dasgupta’s piece, “Hitting Pay Dirt”, which looks at the much-maligned IPL from the perspective of the lesser-known stars, and at how it has affected them. Dasgupta, who has examined this in greater detail in his book , weighs up the balance between playing “respectable” first-class cricket and succumbing to the lure of the IPL. There’s this telling quote from Vikramjeet Malik, of Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan Royals: “The financial situation of my family has improved since the IPL. We have repaid all our debts, and we have our farm and some buffaloes. We also have money in the bank.” The writer’s conclusion? If more cricketers feel “four overs, two crores” (Erapalli Prasanna’s pithy summation of an IPL bowler’s job description) makes most sense, “who is to convince them otherwise – when is so very iffy?”‘s celebration of domestic cricket is well-intentioned but shows up more than anything else how dated it appears. The cover avoids international clichés and goes for the all-conquering Karnataka team, which won the domestic treble of Irani, Ranji and Vijay Hazare in 2014; their exploits are recorded inside, but by the time of the ‘s publication, Karnataka had repeated that feat for a historic double treble. And so the analysis is already a season old. It almost ceases to matter that the domestic review is disappointing – the season is treated in a relatively pedantic fashion with little analysis. Insight comes by way of team batting coach J Arunkumar’s piece on the 2013 season, including the anecdote of team-bonding sessions over beer and hookahs.
The nagging feeling, though, is that the is a Test match in the T20 era; you can string it out over five days but you can get a cracking match in four hours
What does best are the nuggets, whether entire pieces or factoids, and they will keep the alive when the age of match reports and Editor’s Notes is over. They span the various sections, and pop up when you least expect them. Amol Rajan’s is in the “heavy section” front of the book, but his explanation of why spin works in T20 cricket – against conventional wisdom – is written with a lightness of touch that makes it immediately accessible.Ruchir Joshi’s “The Greener Grass”, an essay on India’s backyard cricket, reflects on a childhood that, while privileged in a literal sense, will strike a chord with everyone who grew up playing the game in urban spaces. Elsewhere there’s a profile of Ajinkya Rahane by Sandeep Dwivedi, the best chronicler of quirk in Indian sports writing. Among other bits is the story of how having his helmet broken when barely into his teens helped prepare Rahane for battles to come.The “Language of Cricket”, a collection of essays on cricket writing in Indian languages, reveals the largely hidden depths of this country’s cricket culture. Far away from the well-publicised Oxbridge and upper-class milieu, cricket had a thriving vernacular subculture, whether in the press, on the air or in literature. The importance of admitting the vernacular into the Anglophone world of top-level cricket discourse has recently been mooted by my colleague Sharda Ugra, and these essays underline the richness of the cricket vocabulary – including the famous Mumbaikar (grit) – in regional languages. Pulakesh Mukhopadhyay, though, highlights the flip side of a strong regional media, noting the Sourav Ganguly albatross sitting heavy on the shoulders of the Kolkata press. Ganguly’s captaincy became a personal mission for some journalists (as, indeed, did Greg Chappell’s position for those on the other side), and the many books on Ganguly written at the time offered little other than hagiography.Dig to the end of the book and you come upon the Obituaries, the section most reminiscent of (and perhaps borrowed from) the English original. Here’s where you find Nelson Mandela and Peter O’Toole (who, while on set, taught the basics of the game to Omar Sharif and Katharine Hepburn) rubbing shoulders with PD Nimal, long-serving baggage handler to the Sri Lankan team. Here’s where you learn that the statistician Anandji Dossa was a wicketkeeper-batsman who was denied a shot at first-class cricket only because he was a contemporary to Madhav Mantri – whose obituary also occupies these pages. And that Sri Lanka’s medium pacer Lantra Fernando collapsed while having a post-jog health drink. The discovery of such totally random and largely irrelevant information brought memories of my youth rushing back, and for that alone reading was worth it.There’s plenty more (including, regrettably, typos and less pardonable errors involving names) to interest the lover of cricket. The nagging feeling, though, is that the is a Test match in the T20 era; you can string it out over five days but you can get a cracking match in four hours.Wisden India Almanack 2015
Edited by Suresh Menon
Bloomsbury India
Pages 950, £22.50/Rs 699