Addressing the home advantage in tests

When the English fast bowler Harold Larwood passed away in 1995, an articled had appeared about the bodyline series in the Marathi language newspaper called Maharashtra Times. It was a beautiful account published over multiple days, and read like a novel. The newspaper was published in Mumbai, and my town being ~400 kilometers south, would arrive at my home around 3pm. I couldn’t wait to get back home from school to read what happened next in the bodyline. Test cricket had hit me before adolescence did and I have been in love with it ever since.

Indian test cricket abroad used to be ordinary in those mid-90s. As I have grown up, so have Indian away performances, barring the torrid 2011-2012 season. But at 2-0 down with a greentop waiting at the Wanderers, the current South Africa tour seems very mid-90s. India have taken all possible 40 wickets, the basic need to win tests and can claim to have bettered most, if not all, previous touring parties. But if your best is likely to achieve this scoreline, it is disheartening. Looking at most series these days, not least the just concluded Ashes, it’s quite obvious that winning abroad consistently is a thing of the Aussies around the turn of the century or the Windies of the Babylon fame. South Africa have been consistent abroad, and Pakistan have had their flashes of brilliance. But these are all exceptions than norms. And there lies the biggest threat to tests. So instead of cribbing about it, I am going to suggest some tinkering that might give it an adrenaline shot. Buckle up folks.

1.  Addressing home advantage: Given how much overhead and soil conditions affect a test pitch, I don’t think we can get standardized set of people preparing all test pitches. Besides, we want to see pitches that have their traditional nature and offer home advantage. A foreign pitch expert may just destroy a test match if they don’t know how to prepare a pitch in certain conditions. However there is 1 thing that does affect the game and is easily adjustable as per the away team’s demands, the ball. How about we let the away team pick the balls for the test match? Indian and English bowlers complain that the kookaburra does nothing for them when they tour. How about India continuing its contract with SG, but rather than using it for the home tests, they get to use it for their away test matches? Australia could come to India and play with the Kookaburra. In short, the away team gets to choose the balls for the test match.

2.  Addressing toss advantage: Cricket might be the only sport where the team winning the toss gets a choice and the team losing the toss gets nothing. In many other sports, both teams get a choice (e.g. in tennis, the toss-winner chooses whether to serve or receive, or the side of the court to start from and the other player gets the other choice). Here are a few ideas to neutralize the toss advantage.
  a. If you are playing a multi-test series, you toss only in alternate games. If team A wins the toss in the 1^st game, team B automatically wins the toss for the 2^nd game. If there are odd number of games, the away team wins the toss in the last game.
  b. One team chooses whether to bat or ball and the other team can choose to make 1 change to their XI after the first innings of both teams. So if you were forced to bowl first on a batting paradise and fell behind because of that, you could use your substitution in the 2^nd innings. Note that this maintains the sanctity of the allrounder, unlike the dreaded super-sub rule from ODIs. You are still using the same XI for both batting and bowling in the 1^st innings. It’s just that you treat the 2^nd innings (of both teams) as a separate entity and can make 1 change to the XI. This advantage might be powerful enough that a captain winning the toss may choose to actually have this option, and may defer the bat first/bowl first decision to the other captain.
  c. One team chooses whether to bat or ball and the other team controls when to take the new ball. The new ball should become available in the 70^th over. And till the 90^thover, the captain who didn’t get to make the bat/bowl decision, gets to control when to take the new ball for both teams. After 90 overs, the bowling captain gets the choice, like today.   

3. Maximizing your XI: We could let teams name their XI after they know whether they are batting or bowling first, instead of before the toss. We could even allow both teams to change their XI after the first innings of both teams (like option 2b above) to get the best players performing for the conditions.

From that bodyline piece, I remember one particular episode. After missing the SCG test, in the first innings of the MCG test, Bradman tried to hit his way through the offside to counter the leg theory. But was clean bowled for a golden duck by Billy Bowes. He made amends with a century in the 2^nd innings and helped Australia level the series at 1-1. Immediately after the win, he took up the issue of bodyline bowling with Australian board, as he didn’t want to complain about it after a defeat and appear a sour loser. I started writing this piece after Newlands and have finished it after the Centurion debacle. The timing is unfortunate, and I am going to be labeled a disgruntled Indian fan for suggesting this on the back of yet another series loss away from home. I hope that Johannesburg turns it around for India. Or at least Sri Lanka puts one past Bangladesh at Chittagong in early Feb to raise the flag for the away teams.

Note: This was submitted as an entry to espncricinfo stands, and hence condensed to 1000 words.

A dream, a past, a confusion!

I like to believe that I am immune to the Tendulkar fandom. My reason for it is stupid, it's simply because everyone else is a devotee. It's weird, I regularly fail to like movies that have gone on to become big hits, often preferring an obscure film that I discovered somewhere on youtube. The point is that the feelings of exclusivity and elitism are essential. But yesterday was a little different.

I went to bed at midnight, just as WI subsided close to tea. I woke up sometime to check the score. I remember the last update of India being 113 for 2 with SRT on 14 not out. I decided not to watch, just to make sure I don't jinx it. I haven't believed in the j-word since about 1996 (Gosh, 1996, he was an established batsman even then, teenage was barely in for me :)). I remember waking up a couple more times. And these 2 times I didn't even check the score to avoid the jinx. Then I heard Ravi Shastri and the whole crowd go berserk, as Tendulkar was walking back after being out on 88 off 82 balls, a blinder of a test innings that hasn't been in a long long time. While I was hearing this applause, I seriously doubted whether it was reality or just my subconscious. And when I finally woke up, I had the recollection of that 14 not out, waking up 2 times and a rampant Ravi Shastri responding to that 88 off 82 balls, utterly confused as to which one actually happened.

Immunity can only be retained for so long.

A grey hair? Seriously?

I owe my love for cricket to my Dad. There are many things that I remember from my childhood that he probably doesn't. When Aquib Javed took the hat-trick at Sharjah, he explained to me outswingers and inswingers, how Aquib is a natural outswing bowler, and how he fooled 3 batsmen who were expecting the ball to go away and were done by the straight ball (it might have been incutters, but calling it straight ones helped him illustrate it better). The point is, my recollection of things learned in life coincides with my recollection of starting to watch cricket, right around 1989, when Tendulkar smashed Abdul Qadir in that practice game (believe it or not, I watched it live).

For the first few years, I believed that we were unlucky in not winning more than we did. I now comprehend that we had a fairly poor team. The last time I got teary eyed over cricket was in 1996, along with Kambli, after we lost the semi final at Eden Garden. What I now understand, is that we did a miraculous job of getting there, with only 2 players performing consistently. It was after that world cup that we started to become a decent team. And the entry of two of India's best cricketers that year wasn't a coincidence.

Ganguly is rightly credited to be the best Indian captain. He taught us something that we did not know, how to win. We knew how to play the game, we knew how to analyze it, but we did not know how to win it. He had the perfect deputy in Dravid. That India reached the world cup finals in 2003, owed as much to Dravid's wicketkeeping creating an extra player's slot, as it did to some of Tendulkar's fine innings.

There isn't much point in talking about Dravid's contribution to India's test match success. But three occasions deserve a mention. The first was THAT day at Eden Gardens. March 14th, 2001, I was hiding in my room near PICT college in Pune. It was Rangapanchami day, something that I don't particularly enjoy and the whole PICT hostel was out looking for people to color up. I was stuck to a radio (believe it or not, there was not a lot of internet around and we didn't have a TV in our room) following Laxman and Dravid's exploits. That was the day when India did not lose a single wicket and the rest is history. I went out at about 5pm and voluntarily participated in holi. That was the last time I did that.

Then there was Headingly, where I watched some part of Tendulkar's and Ganguly's hundreds, but was intrigued by Dravid's and Bangar's exploits on first day. To this day I rue not having watched the first day. Adelaide was monumental, more for Sir Aggy's (an endearing term coined by one of my friends for the legendary Ajit Agarkar) unexpected burst than Dravid's herculean effort, for we had started expecting such feats from him by then. But his truest masterclass came at Kingston, Jamaica, when, albeit against a weaker side, India won in West Indies for the first time in 35 years.

And then there was the disappointment of the 2007 world cup under Dravid's captainship. But my memory is of Pakistan's exit from that tournament than of India's. Mainly because Woolmer died during that time. I came back to my hotel room after interviewing with Amazon, and read on cricinfo that a murder case was registered at his hotel in Jamaica. It was spooky staying in a hotel room that day.

From there we went to England and won there, after which, against the run of play, Dravid resigned from captainship. I agreed with his "armchair fans" comment for not pushing for victory in the third test at the Oval. On the contrary, I have never agreed with Dhoni's explanation since then for not pushing for a test win after the series is won. I have found it as a missed opportunity to cultivate aggression. Tells you more about me than Dhoni or Dravid.

With 2 back to back away whitewashes, everyone expected some veterans to retire. Given the amount of time it takes to drag a bewildered Laxman from the crease after he gets bowled, one can only guess how much of an effort it will be for him to retire from test cricket. And with Tendulkar, there is no scope for an objective discussion. I am one of those who have watched test cricket over the last 2 decades in the hope that he scores more runs and centuries than Lara and Ponting and averages more than Kallis and Sanga. But if I was captaining a test team, I would write down Lara and Dravid on my batting sheet, before I would write Tendulkar. The point is, anything less than a countrywide festival would be deemed inappropriate as a sendoff to Tendulkar. And he would have to be inhumanly strong to deny that to his fans. So whether you are his fan or critic, there is no scope left for objectivity in analyzing him. I had expected Dravid to retire, retire on the back of a year, where he was as good as any in test cricket, retire without any fuss, something only he can pull off.

Coming back to my dad, I hated him when Tendulkar got out slashing at a wide one or flicking Fannie de Villiers to midwicket (getting bowled off Abdul Razzaq was ok, since it was deemed as being beaten by a good ball, and that phase came later, when he had agreed to spare him as a legend). For it allowed him to comment that Tendulkar did not care as much about his team as the legendary Gavaskar did. I saw it as a personal attack on my generation and always felt the need to defend the stroke. And I failed to understand for a long time why Gavaskar was on such a pedestal for that generation. I appreciate it much more now, for Gavaskar was probably Dravid's reliability and Ganguly's feistiness combined into one. They say romantics grow up to be tragics. Seeing Gavaskar's commentary box antics, it seems true. I know that I have been a romantic about the golden generation of Indian cricket. I have to watch myself from hereon.

And here is yet another true story. I woke up and read the news on cricinfo of Dravid's retirement. I started getting ready for work and as I was looking in the mirror, I noticed the first grey one of whatever is left of my hair. And I thought to myself that this surely cannot be a coincidence.

Choker... who?

Grabbing the headlines

Winning via Quitting

VVS and Headlines