Calculus, pongal, daddojanam and moru milagai behind Ashwin’s success

Posted: November 26, 2011 by The CouchExpert in Fiction
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Goutham Chakravarthi

Barely a fornight has passed since his wedding, R Ashwin, was widely expected to credit his recent success to his newly wed wife. The lanky Chennai offie who ‘edged’ his way to his maiden hundred on Friday credited his mother’s daddojanam (curd rice) for his success. He said, “Mom’s daddojanam is my favourite. Often it lulls me to sleep. I often end up yawning my way to some unexpected success like this afternoon. Credit to Mom.”

Chairman of selectors, K Srikkanth said, “I have known Ashwin for long, from the time he was a kid. Though a staunch Iyer, it is simply marvelous to know that he still manages to do trikala sandhyavandanam amid national duties. And he always has daddojanam with moru milagai (dried chillies) to spice himself up for the battle.”

Daddojanam, mathematics and pongal key to his success. © The Hindu

Srikkanth also pointed out to the fact that Ashwin was an opener in his school days before he became a bowler. Ashwin’s wife, Preethi, said that the credit of Ashwin becoming a bowler should be given to Kabaleeswarar temple in Mylapore. She said, “Like most Indian boys, Ashwin was a batsman. When he took a fancy to me he would follow me to Kabaleeswarar temple every day. There he would sit opposite me in the temple and when hot pongal (rice porridge) was served to the devotees on bare hands, Ashwin would toss it from one hand to the other and roll it into a ball so as to not let the heat burn a hole in his hand, all the while sheepishly looking at me. He would roll pongal from right to left and left to right to left and thereby sowing the seeds for his offie and his carom ball.”

His childhood friend and schoolmate at PSBB (Padma Seshadri Bala Bavan), Senthilnathan, claims credit for his batting prowess. He says, “As a youngster, Ashwin was a poor batsman. He middled every delivery and played very straight and hit the gaps. It was so old fashioned. It was like watching a proper batsman and since we wanted some tail enders in the side, we had to teach him to inside edge a few and swing across the line every-now-and-then. He became a specialist no.11 for us who could nick when he wanted. He could nick it to slips or nick it on to the stumps as he wished. Now he is so good that he can inside edge it past the off-stump, leg-stump, over the middle stump and so on like you saw on Friday. He is the true pupil who has mastered the art. Barry Richards would be proud of his game.”

His father insisted that it was his IIT-JEE tuitions that proved the difference. “He could solve quadratic equations as a 5 year old. He could calculate 18339.678 times the 10th root of 0.43 in less than 4 seconds. His grammar was sound and was poised to pursue education in America or England or both. He was a bright child. But one day, when he was about 12, he was tossing an orange from one hand to the other when I observed the rotations he imparted on the orange were so many it was more impressive than his calculus skills. When I asked him to arrive at the rotations per minute of the spin he imparted, he managed to write a quick C program on the computer to arrive at the figure of 1200 rpm. I asked him to spin the table fan and each of his spins would keep it going for 10 to 15 minutes and in summer, he spun the fans for all in the colony when the power was out. Then I knew that my son would not only be an engineer but a very fine spinner. He’s not let us down.”

Elsewhere, the Tamil film industry is fascinated with Ashwin’s rise to fame. The industry’s most versatile hero Kamal Haasan is all set to make a movie on Ashwin’s life. Rumour is rife that he is preparing himself to portray the roles of a 5 year old Ashwin, 14 year old Ashwin, 17 year old Ashwin and a 24 year old Ashwin. He will also play the characters of his mom, dad, grandfather, his lady love and his best friend. The movie is to be called Aayiram Avathaaram (Thousand Incarnations).

The Wankhede pitch is a disgrace to the game and the nation

Posted: November 24, 2011 by The CouchExpert in Cricket, Opinion
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Goutham Chakravarthi

“Just learnt from a player that it is a very good batting pitch at Wankhede for last test…u know why right? : )” tweeted Sanjay Manjrekar ahead of the Mumbai Test. But how good is this wicket? No one says it is a good bowling wicket when wickets tumble? If anything the two Tests in South Africa had more Indians glued to it than the three Tests in India have. Good cricket is universally loved. And invariably they happen on wickets where ball battles bat on equal terms. But Wankhede is a disgrace.

It is but blatantly obvious that a flat track is prepared in anticipation of that 100th hundred. ©Associated Press

Cricket should have no tolerance for vested interests. It is a shame that a wicket is prepared for the obvious. It holds the game and the fans to ransom. It is no less cheating than insider trading. It shows scant respect for the game, and in this case, to Tendulkar himself. He is his country’s greatest champion and doesn’t need freebees. The man’s boyhood and adolescence was Test cricket. He is under pressure to perform. Always. His failures are magnified and studied and speculated. In his time, a country limp on wickets abroad learnt it could stand on equal terms with the opposition and even dominate. As a boy he conquered Australia. A generation followed in his footsteps and it counts among the most respected teams going around today. It is not a coincidence that India’s strongest sides have coincided with his times. And now a tailored wicket to help him get to that hundred? That’s the biggest insult his home board has heaped on him yet.

From the times when French women bunted wooden objects with a log of wood 800 years ago, batsman have been in the ascendancy. Restrictive rules: under-arm, round-arm, field restrictions and so on have limited the bowlers. But, always, they have come through with a solution. If not for those ingenious minds that propelled cricket we would still be playing under-arm cricket. Bless John Willes and Edgar Wellsher for daring to bowl over-arm and change the game for ever. Googlies, swing and reverse-swing ensued. So have doosras, but still bowlers are not given their due. Bigger bats, restrictive field placements and dodgy laws impede bowlers. A bent arm is cheating and an extra bouncer unbecoming of the gentleman. There are more restrictions than American immigration checks. And now these dead wickets.

It is difficult to imagine a more batsman-friendly era than this: protective gear, ordinary bowling, flat wickets, big bats and small boundaries. Perhaps only the 1940s can count to be its equal with an insane amount of runs being scored. Routinely 600s would be replied with 700s resulting in run feasts, dull draws, inflated records and poor cricket. It is often the case today barring the results.

The quality of the bowlers coming through is a case for concern for the health of the game. Hardly a corrective measure is taken to address it on a global scale. Wickets to suit home teams are as old as the game itself, but it serves little purpose. The game is more important. It is meant to be a battle of equals – of bowlers bluffing batsmen with spin, dip, guile and scary pace and batsmen responding with restraint, judgment, courage and great skill. Alas, it is often not the case.

State cricket associations in India prepare wickets to their fancy and their hour of need: weaker oppositions are welcomed with under prepared tracks in the hope of full points and stronger teams with flat decks to rule out a result. The system is as corrupt as some of the others in the country. Cruelly, must-win-games for home sides finish in less than three days. And no one cries foul or is there an honest body to prevent this. Happily the body that runs cricket in India is more worried about television rights and even television production. All they want from its state associations are their votes. The game can cop all it wants, but it is only worried about its commercial interests. No empire stands the test of time. Neither will the BCCI.

Wankhede is a disgrace. They have sold cricket and nation short. And disrespected Tendulkar.

Kallis is a colossal giant

Posted: November 20, 2011 by The CouchExpert in Cricket, Opinion
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Goutham Chakravarthi

Greatness in sport is a strange thing. It has no cut out definition. But it can come from anywhere – from the streets of Karachi or the hills of Kandy. Nor is it predictable to a pattern.

As a kid growing up Javed Miandad was a man who I believed to be the all conquering god of batting. He had smashed Chetan Sharma for a six on the last ball to win a one-dayer for Pakistan and ever since, he was one player all budding Indian batsmen secretly admired and hated. I was no different. He was the epitome of a scrapper and street fighter. A cagey man and an astonishing batsman, he was a great batsman. Perhaps a shade less than Viv among his contemporaries. Viv imposed his pride and will on the game like no one since.

Kallis is the best all round cricketer since Sobers

Not always is greatness bestowed on a cricketer very early. It is not a mere test of ability, but of character, endurance, will and the know how to seize a moment. Champions are recognized for the long haul. Every champion has holes: more so with batsmen as they are measured often against one failure each time. Occasions such as world cups and tests against arch rivals often determine their fate. A Lara is remembered for his immortal unbeaten 153 against Australia in Barbados whereas a Gatting for getting out playing a reverse-sweep in a world cup final. Often, that is the lasting legacy of cricketers: what they do in the critical hour. Every one has a highest peak. For some the highest peak of failure outweighs their highest peak of success.

In that regard, some are not given the due they deserve. Like Rahul Dravid, Kallis doesn’t get his due. Like Dravid, Kallis never got the coverage he deserved when he got to 12,000 Test runs. It is a shame.

Make no mistake, he is a colossus. As a batsman alone he counts among the best five batsmen to have played the game in the last 20 years. As an all rounder, he is the best since Sobers.

Some keen observers point out that Kallis likes to look after himself: a clever way of saying that he plays for averages. Often he is criticized for that in the one-day games. The entire South African team ignored him at breakfast following the world cup defeat against Australia in 2007. His numbers are staggering in all formats and in all levels. His longevity and consistency are startling considering his work load as a bowler, a very skillful one at that in his pomp.

A man of strong basics, he has built his game on sound technique. Australians tried exposing holes in his drive, which, in turn was an examination of his mind and not of his game. Unnerved and solid, he has passed the test. As he has all around the world scoring runs on dry wickets and on the wet ones, against swing and seam, and against spinners on dust bowls. Not to mention seeing his team through in tough situations. Yes, there will be eternal argument in not seeing his teams through in world cups, but to pin the failures of a generation of South Africans on one man is preposterous.

I often believe the many struggles all cricketers go through are in the hope of achieving something substantial and special – as players and as a team. Long after they are done playing the game, it is moments of collective peaks that bring them a sense of satisfaction. And Kallis has often been at the center of many of the brightest moments of South Africa’s cricketing success. Perhaps he is comfortable now than before. He seems a lot more willing to impose himself on the opposition. He even lets out an occasional smile and shares a light moment with the opposition.

It is hard to imagine anyone as good as him who has got lesser recognition. He has won more games for South Africa than any other (most Man of the Match awards in Test history). Yet his calm is mistaken for insecurity and weakness. He knows his game and knows what it takes to succeed. If anything, his last few years have been better than ever before. Perhaps a lesser bowling load and a shift down the batting order have helped. Age and form will eventually catch up, but at current evidence, they seem many summers away.

When he is done playing the game, the game will remember him as among its very best.

Roebuck and I

Posted: November 19, 2011 by The CouchExpert in Cricket, Opinion
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Goutham Chakravarthi

Like most, I woke up to the beep on my mobile on Sunday to learn of his death. I was devastated. I sank to the floor on my bathroom and ran cold water over my burning cheeks. I was crying. I never knew he mattered so much.

By far my most favourite cricket book

Over the week, I have learnt to make peace with the reality of his loss. He invoked more thought and debate in me than any other writer could. Not even people I knew in life managed to have me on tenterhooks like he did. I read his work always. Sometimes, I felt he was a liar and I quickly realized it was my nationalistic feelings blinding my vision. It didn’t matter what he said, it was always going to take many readings and enough thinking and re-thinking and re-reading for me to fully comprehend what he wrote. It amused me initially that he thought matters like marriage and children could affect great cricketers and their game. To me, a cover drive was a cover drive. Married, widowed or gay had nothing to do with it. He thought differently. Society, background and mentoring, or the lack of it, mattered to him. He saw cricket through the eyes of a historian, analyst, fan, player, politics, society. Perhaps more. Definitely more. I was never clever to see through all of them.

As a child growing up in a small village in southern India in the 90s meant access to television and cable tv was a non option. The Sportstar was the only thing I read. Not even school books, but The Sportstar, yes, many times over each week. But I cannot recall reading Peter Roebuck before 1998. The Aussies had been humbled in the first Test at Chennai following a Tendulkar master class. Two weeks later, I read his column on The Sportstar. He bespoke of India as a nation and gave insights into Kumble and Srinath. It might have been about them being engineers, but I do not recall exactly. Yet I can recall that it left an impression on me. I was hooked. From then on, I have not missed an opportunity to read any of his work.

Like all, I would not agree with some of his opinions. Some of them were seriously above me. His pet hates included Mugabe and Zimbabwe. Perhaps I was too young to understand. Many years later, I still cannot correlate many things he had to say on Zimbabwean cricket and the many reforms he sought from them. Politics never interested me like it did to him. But the black arm-band incident in the 2003 world cup woke me up to some of the realities of Zimbabwe. And since, I have caught up enough to make sense of some of his writings on Zimbabwe and Africa.

Like with all sport and sportsmen, there are intangibles that go beyond the numbers they have to show for the efforts. I learnt how to look for those in my analysis of players as I read and re-read some of his works. I treasure his It Takes All Sorts and often fall back on it to learn about cricketers and cultures and minds. I tried reading the game and the cricketers as I saw them. Yet, his would be the first article I would read the following morning to see if he saw it any differently. He invariably did. And he was often right. And I would go back and read the book again!

Amateur writers like me do not have to worry about deadlines or toe the sensitive lines of the employer. But the freedom that comes with it also bestows the responsibility of trying to write to the best and honest ability of self. Often the style mattered to me though I never got round to figuring out what it was! Words were re-juggled and phrases re-written. Over time, I tried to build my works on my opinions. Unlike he, it was difficult for me to be bluntly honest or be as vocal every time I wrote my opinion pieces. I hid behind the comforting blanket of diplomacy. Perhaps it reflected my insecurity and self doubts. Even fear. What if I’m seen to be a fool, I would think. And I have hated myself for not choosing to be more forthright on those occasions.

He often mesmerized me with his conviction in his opinion and the cleverly and rationally thought-out supporting arguments in proving his cause. Not to mention his ability with words and metaphor. I have often tried imitating and always fallen flat. It didn’t matter if my opinion differed from his, I started to try presenting my honest opinion and build my argument around it. Needless to say, he was the inspiration and the standard I liked comparing myself to. Not that we were equals, but, hey, he was the best and it rarely hurt to compare yourself with him. I knew the answer to that and I tried inching my way closer but the chasm would never narrow. Like I really had a chance!

I never liked him on television when he would appear on cricket shows. His arguments were better in print than it was on television. Perhaps I was more captivated by his writing and I preferred reading him. May be he wrote exactly what he said on radio or television in the newspapers, but they were always impeccable and captivating in print. May be it was also a case of not wanting to find out your favourite uncle was indeed not the all-knowing superman you always thought he was.

Like many intangibles in life, Roebuck was one for me. It never mattered what he did or where he was, but it mattered what he said. I never exchanged an email or saw him in person. He mesmerized with his words and thought. His correlation of cricket to life and vice-versa made him the best analyst of his time. His prose was magic. Or it was infatuation. I don’t care. He remained the most honest of writers who wrote what he saw, unafraid and unbiased. It is a trait I hope to imbibe to my writing. It is the best tribute I can hope pay to him.

Can Ponting do a Waugh?

Posted: November 17, 2011 by The CouchExpert in Cricket, Opinion
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Goutham Chakravarthi

Steve Waugh found greatness when fighting with his back to the wall. He relished a fight and often got the best out of himself when he reduced a battle to that: individual fight with the opposition bowler. He thrived on it and often came out on top. He saved his career with that hundred against England. It gave him another year in the top flight cricket (he averaged 80 plus) and went out with a two month send off against the Indians the following Australian summer.

Now even Chappell and Benaud are calling for his head.

Now Ponting finds himself in a similar corner. Like Waugh, his greatness is not in question. His greatness is in front running and doing it like few others before him. Perhaps only Lara surpassed him among his contemporaries in doing it better.

A man of dazzling feet movement befitting the best of dancers, his gift was also in great shot selection. His ability to reduce the game to a fight and his immense desire to win made him a stand out. Few can claim to have dominated the best attacks of their time like Ponting has. Over the years, invariably, he has fallen, learnt, succeeded and failed like the rest of us. Very few can achieve the maximum of their abilities. Ponting did, and touched greatness. Of that, there is little doubt.

Not many would fault Ponting’s qualities as a batsman, but as a person he divides public opinion: considered short tempered, arrogant, loud mouthed by some, and as responsible, sharp man who understood his shortcomings and overcame them. Captaining Australia isn’t given to just any larrikin. It is a profile that is constantly scrutinized: by the public, media and even the prime minister. Shane Warne would count it among his top regrets not to captain Australia. Ponting did. His public acceptance to drinking problems as a young man and his switch to light beer showed him as man willing to learn and understand his position as an ambassador of his country. Soon, he was to become Australia’s finest batsman since Bradman and also its most successful captain.

Not that he has always been right. For that matter, no one is. He would lose temper on occasions and his ugly side would show up, not least in the Sydney test of 2008 against India. In a fiasco that defied belief, he would end up ruffling a full media contingent that questioned his team’s behavior and integrity. Not that the Indians were innocent in that Test either. That the incident propelled a huge fallout of the Australian team with the rest of the world did shake him up and his teammates to take a deep look at themselves.

Ponting’s attempts over the years of wanting to leave the game in a better shape than when he started playing is genuine. While gamesmanship may not be one of those, he feels strongly about over rates and substitutes. It has landed him in a quandary on a few occasions, especially in India where he has chosen the moral high ground over the push for a Test victory on more than one occasion . It didn’t go down well with many of his countrymen and former cricketers. That his lows as captain and as Test batsman should have come in India might be a personal regret. His successes far outweigh the inevitable failures.

Like with all great players, ability doesn’t last forever. What’s accumulated in the mind of a master batsman like him cannot be discounted for the waning of the physique. But the acceptance of falling from greatness has to come from within. Often, that is the hardest to accept. After all, Viv Richards didn’t wear a helmet just because his reflexes slowed down as he was reaching his end. He dusted it off as a dip in form and not of eroding ability. Some live in denial. Viv’s last three years had no Test hundreds. Kapil Dev’s last few years were a folly and so were Jayasuriya’s last many.

Now, Ponting is in danger of falling in that category. He has been found wanting playing the short ball over the last few seasons, yet he continues to play it. A signature shot, one that will always be associated with him, is suddenly a weakness. Falling over to straight deliveries and ending up in a walk to length deliveries are old problems now back to haunt him. Even stout Ponting supporters like Chappell and Benaud are calling for his head.

Ponting is still a mighty fine batsman. Perhaps he is hoping that there is a second wind for him like there was for Tendulkar and Dravid. Perhaps, being a good batsman is not enough for him. Once dipped and draped in greatness, it must be difficult to accept routine and the ordinary. Perhaps Wanderers will be his secret attempt at redemption; at greatness. A big innings would be most welcome for this struggling batsman and his tattered team. The end seems nearer than ever before, but may be, he can do a Waugh.

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