The Blame Game

(Image courtesy: New Indian Express)

L Suresh writes to the Indian Coach telling him exactly why he has missed the bus.

Dear Mr. Chappell,

It is obvious that the South Africans haven’t read the rules of an African Safari well – though it clearly says that hunting is not allowed, the Indian tigers are ruthlessly being slaughtered match after match. Even as they are looking for a good hiding place, the Proteas seem to think that any place is good enough to give them a solid hiding. The morale in the team is so low that when the players check into the fifth floor of their hotel, their confidence hovers around the basement car park. And while the youngsters are looking up to the seniors for inspiration, the seniors are looking for light at the end of the tunnel, with every rising delivery making the sun set faster on them.

After years of whacking knee-high deliveries that don’t swing, seam, dart or cut, the batsmen are suddenly finding themselves stranded on the 401 (one wishes that was a cricket score, but unfortunately we are talking about the world’s busiest highway) with traffic zipping all around them. We could go on in this vein, but the point is that there are more important things we need to discuss. That’s because the unmentionable has hit the ceiling. And it's time we take stock of all that's happening.

Mr. Chappell, the basic problem is that you haven't understood us one bit. Instead of placing a finger on the pulse of the nation or pointing a finger at the mistakes made by the players, you chose to give the finger to a bunch of cricket fans. We have already been tormented by Bucknor’s ‘slow death’ finger, Bowden’s crooked finger and Hair’s ‘accusing finger’, so we just have no choice but to give yours the thumbs down.

There are a few things that you are yet to learn about us. As a cricket-fanatic nation, we rate accountability very high – we always hold others accountable for everything that happens or doesn't. Since our young cricketers are already reeling under the huge responsibility placed on their young shoulders - they have to sell bikes, endorse televisions, advertise for apparel and launch new products – they can’t be blamed for this debacle. Give them a break – when they have sales pitches on their mind, how can you expect them to tackle bouncy pitches as well? So by a process of elimination, we have only you to hold responsible for the team’s terrible performance.

In the past, you have tried, albeit successfully, to get Sourav out of the team. We would like to inform you that while we may play cricket badly, we play the blame game pretty well. When India did badly for a whole season last year, we blamed it all on Sourav Ganguly. We burnt effigies, opened hate clubs, launched anti-Ganguly websites, booed him every time he walked back to the pavilion and in short, did everything to make his life miserable. But Mr. Chappell, please understand that we don't encourage outsiders to take part in this. It is entirely our prerogative to ask for Dada to be dropped, blacken the walls of Kaif's house, break the glass panes of Yuvraj's car and hold morchas outside Sehwag's house. But we don't wish to share our little joys with outsiders.

You might try to apply lofty Australian standards and use Ricky Ponting’s performance as a benchmark to determine form, but to us, a score of 40 and three wickets are enough. Never mind if Dada has been severely criticized for his shortcomings against the short-pitched delivery that have often resulted in short stints at the crease - we are very flexible when it comes to assessing him. He can be in as a bowler instead of Zaheer Khan, he can be in as an allrounder instead of Irfan Pathan and when we choose to, he can be in Kolkata when the rest of the team tours.

Let me now list out a few other issues that we have with you. Just because our batsmen collapse like a deck of cards, you didn’t have to shuffle them. So what if Mike Hussey opens in first-class matches, comes at no. 5 in Tests and at no. 7 in one-dayers? So what if a middle-order batsman like Shane Watson is successfully tried out as an opener? In India, we have regular batting slots for all our batsmen and they are entitled to it until retirement or injury, whichever comes first.

The second issue is that you have plotted the ouster of senior players and have tried to bring in youth. Look at your country’s team - more than half of them are almost 35. Okay, the difference is that they still perform, but have a heart, Mr. Chappell. If you throw middle-aged players out, they will lose their place in the team and consequently all their endorsements. If that happens, how will they survive? Unemployment is a huge problem in our country, unlike in yours and we don't want an outsider like you to add to it.

One of the key charges that have been leveled against you is that you have been instrumental in ruining a few careers. Irfan Pathan was a world-class bowler, but by showing him that he was capable of batting and by sending him up the order, you have confused him so much that he aims for the boundary when he bowls and plays stump to stump when he bats. Just because batsmen like Chris Gayle bowl and bowlers like Daniel Vettori bat, you can't expect Irfan to do the same. Besides, if Irfan bats, bowls and fields, what will the rest do?

There's another reason why we don't want you, Mr. Chappell. Please understand that it's nothing personal - it's just that we don't want a foreigner as a coach. For years, we have lost to Pakistan in Sharjah, have been tormented by the Lankans in their backyards, have been dominated by the West Indies in the one-dayers and have been battered by Australia everywhere - and we didn't need a foreign coach for that. You see, it's a drain on our foreign exchange and we'd rather an Indian coach was at the helm - at least the money stays within.

There’s also a charge that you have your own favourites like Raina and Sehwag who have been played repeatedly despite so many failures. We find this terribly frustrating - only when you drop them can we go on the rampage and raise a public outcry. But if you shoehorn them into the team match after match, we can never take to our feet and protest that our star players have been unfairly booted out.

On the flip side, key players like Irfan Pathan and Kaif are constantly being dropped because they are not in form. Unlike other countries, Mr. Chappell, our international stars don't go back to domestic cricket when they lose form. They continue playing at the highest level - however long it takes - until they regain form. If you keep dropping them, how will they gain form? And if they don't get back to form, how will we win? So it's entirely your fault that we are losing matches.

The current situation might present you with a sense of déjà vu – we are finally back to where it all started, to the time when we stopped being a winning team and became a loss-making unit. Was that in Sri Lanka? Or Zimbabwe? It doesn’t matter because we don't like to dwell on the past. Only our players are allowed to do so, especially when they remind the public, media and selectors of their past records. So Mr. Chappell, despite your best efforts, we have brought back Ganguly, Laxman, Kumble and Zaheer Khan. And if we feel we need more experience, we will not hesitate to bring in Sunil Gavaskar, Ravi Shastri, Arun Lal and Maninder Singh as well - even they have tremendous past records to speak of. (Besides, they are already in South Africa and the BCCI doesn’t have to spend more money than it already has on airfare.)

Please remember that Indian cricket is a place where the big guns will always be firmly entrenched, where being out of form will not matter much because our coaching manual begins with the immortal lines that saves every cricketer’s backside when he doesn’t contribute - form is temporary, class is permanent. So 10,000 runs, 35 hundreds and centuries against Namibia and Kenya in the 2003 World Cup are dearer to us than a few series losses. We hate to see our stars fade, Mr. Chappell. When our ageing movie stars don a wig, wear paunch-concealing jackets and beat up 20 henchmen twice their size, why can’t our star cricketers do the same?

For these above reasons, we feel that it is best that you go back to your land down under and focus on the Australian team. We are happy the way we are. In India, we have an old proverb which says that everything in life is a cycle - at the end of the day, you get on one and ride into the sunset.

With best wishes

(Appeared in the New Indian Express Sunday Supplement on 10 December, 2006)

Facing the music

(Image courtesy: New Indian Express)

L Suresh guides the uninitiated through the intricacies of the Chennai music season.

December – that wonderful month in Chennai when the heavens open up and flood the city with rains, music concerts and NRIs. That amazing time of the year when the streets have no name (because the name boards are all submerged under water), the concert halls have no empty seats and those with NRI relatives have no respite.

If you’ve never been through a music season before, here’s your chance to find out what it’s all about. It may not be of much help, but at least you’ll know that I told you so.

December is when Chennai is divided into two - the haves (those who have passes for the music season) and the have-nots (no such luck). It is also normal to come across have-beens (those who have been to concerts before) and has-beens (has been to concerts before, but sigh, they are no longer as good as they used to be in the good old days).

One of the most important things to do when you gear up for the music season is to brush up on your driving skills. Practice driving in the rain during peak evening traffic because the more you are looking forward to a concert, the greater are the chances of it raining that evening (Murphy’s Law of Musical Dissonance). Have frequent trial runs driving at insane hours of the night to the airport and back - all those NRI cousins, uncles and aunts who refused to acknowledge your presence thus far will stage a grand home-coming (to your home, that is) with a box of Ferrer Rocher chocolates just picked up from duty free. Most importantly, be adept at beating the crowds to the sabha (concert hall) and finding a parking slot.

The next thing you need to prepare for is living in different time zones where you can work by day, attend concerts by evening and then take your newly acquired NRI family out in the night for their capers until they come to terms with their jetlag - a masala dosa at two in the night, a shopping spree in T Nagar for silk saris, dhotis and kurtas, or a drive to the beach after dinner that stretches to ‘let's watch sunrise’ and ends in 'let's go to Woodlands for filter coffee'.

Done? It's now time to figure out which concerts you want to attend. Newspaper supplements and pullouts offer simple, easy-to-follow schedules – so stay away from them. Since you are most likely to be surrounded by people with varied opinions, the thumb rule is – if you can’t convince, confuse. So create a complicated spreadsheet with various rows and columns on who's performing, where, when and what's on the canteen menu. Of these, the first and the last mentioned occupy prime importance, so start by choosing the artists carefully. The next thumb rule for such occasions is - don’t let them know that you don’t know. Just recall all the names that you have heard before in a Harris Jayaraj or an A R Rahman album - Unni Krishnan, Bombay Jayashree, Prasanna, Kadri Gopalnath and others. Whether you understand the music or not, you are sure to see stars.

By the time you have chosen the artistes and have planned your itinerary, you would have realized that most of them clash, what with the heavyweights performing at the same time in different sabhas. That’s where the canteen menus can be of great help. Putting an ear to the canteen table helps in catching the buzz around. It may also give you a worm’s eye view of all the grime that has escaped the waiter’s rag, but on the positive side, you might catch a whiff of what’s on the menu the coming day or week - if you’re lucky, it could be Andhra pesarattu, keeravadai, rava dosa and molaga bajji. Remember, finding a parking place, fighting the traffic, braving the rains, handling the crowds and wet-nursing the NRI family is always a battle and as the cliché goes, battles were never won on an empty stomach.

Just as you think you are getting the hang of things, the unexpected will happen as the weekend swings by. That is when the NRI family will decide to take you sabha hopping. Since concerts typically begin at around 9.00 on a Sunday morning, you will probably have to factor in an hour for the ladies to match their silk saris perfectly with their jewelry and other accessories, another hour for breakfast at Saravana Bhavan and half an hour for some manic driving – that means you’re out by 6.30 in the morning. (Working backwards further will help you figure out when you need to get out of bed.)

The Mylapore Fine Arts Club at 9, Krishna Gana Sabha at 10.45, Narada Gana Sabha at 12.30, Brahma Gana Sabha at 2.30, Bharat Kalachar at 4, Vani Mahal at 6 and the day culminates grandly at The Music Academy at 7.30 pm. By then, life’s a blur and the mind resorts to playing word-building games - making little words like ‘bed’, ‘save’ and ‘pity’ out of complex ones like Begada, Sarvashree and Prataapadhanyaasi. You’ve covered so many concerts, listened to so many artists and crisscrossed the city so many times that you don’t even realize that the car’s stereo is playing “Fear of music” by the Talking Heads. The head spins, the wheat halwa is having a jugalbandi with the Mysore bonda and you are at a loss as to which to hit first, the sack or the loo.

The weekdays are slightly better because you have only the 7 pm concert to catch. But weekdays bring with them a completely different set of issues, like the seating problem. It’s not so much about getting a vantage view of the action on stage as it is about getting away from the vintage crowd that’s there for the networking. The taalams, aksharams and druthams are drowned in a sales pitch of MLMs (multi level marketing). So when you hear conversation punctuated with “I have this exciting business opportunity for you” or “Let me give you my business card” or “Why don’t I call you next week”, make sure you sneeze loudly or get your mobile to beep non-stop. A few glares in your direction will hopefully put an end to the conversation.

Another thing you need to watch out for would be the horoscopes flying around. There are the universal donors, the ones who are trying to get all the unmarried ones in the family hitched. Then there are the universal recipients who liaison on behalf of friends, neighbours, colleagues and sundry. The contest between the two typically goes on and if you’re trying to figure out when it would end, look towards the stage for the answer because it has been said that it is never over until the fat lady sings.

Happy listening.

(Appeared in the New Indian Express Sunday Supplement on 26 November, 2006)

The Trojan URN

(Image courtesy: New Indian Express)

It’s going to take something special for England to retain the Ashes. L Suresh reports.

(Image courtesy: New Indian Express)

It’s going to take something special for England to retain the Ashes. L Suresh reports.

The last time a man named Joyce stepped out of Dublin, he created history with Ulysses, a take on the hero of the epics Iliad and Odyssey who was known for his ingenuity and strategies at battle. Decades later, another Joyce – born in Dublin – has embarked on a journey to the land down under, to fight the oldest cricketing war between two countries. One does not know if there is a Trojan horse strategy that Ed Joyce will unleash, but one fact that will be etched in his mind is that there is an urn to defend.

In the days of yore, the vanquished general had to part with his steed to the victorious general as a token of surrender. The Greeks used this ploy to their advantage when they entered the stronghold of the Trojans and massacred them. Could we be in for something similar? Suddenly mental disintegration seems to be a thing of the past. Both teams have become members of a mutual admiration society, with the English side suddenly getting a lot of respect from the most unexpected quarters – from old warriors like Shane Warne (despite McGrath predicting yet another 5-0). Both line-ups have been loudly advertising the injury list to their sides, hoping to lull their opponents into a sense of complacency by displaying obvious chinks in their armour. Could there be a hidden agenda somewhere in this passing-the-urn game?

There's something about English cricketers that makes them look like they were made on a late Saturday evening, just as God was ready to down the shutters and take his Sunday off. Bend and they pull a muscle, run and they damage a tissue, dive and they break a bone – the latest is that in the English camp, ‘catch’ is no longer a form of getting the batman out, but a symptom for getting a fielder into the hospital bed. Hamstrings, ligaments, backs, shoulders, elbows, fingers, knees - the surgeon's scalpel has judiciously followed the Heineken principle, reaching parts that other instruments could never reach. With Trescothick gone 10 days before the first test and Harmison nursing a side strain, one wonders how long the queue outside the sick bay will turn out to be.

Until the series blazes to its fiery end, it will not be known whether Trescothick's exit will make a difference to England’s fortunes, but as an opener with loads of attitude who could take on the Aussie quicks, his shoes will be hard to fill. Cook will be fondly recalling his blazing 214 against the pace quartet of Lee, Gillespie, Kasprowicz and Tait in Australia’s warm up game against Essex in 2005. At least two of the four are still in the test circuit and Cook will be hoping that his form stays as good as it has been in the warm-up matches. His is a strange tale of being the world's most sought-after replacement batsman - he spent a good half-year last season flying in and out of Pakistan and India as a replacement for Trescothick, Strauss and Vaughan. So it doesn’t come as a surprise that the only way he could have earned his spurs as an opener in the Ashes was as a replacement. Three hundreds and three fifties in nine matches are great stats - for a replacement player, they are amazing.

But in Tresothick's absence, the treadmill starts as the rest of the slots open out and the arduous task of filling them will be a worry to Fletcher and Flintoff, right through this series. While middle order trios like Dravid, Sachin and Laxman, Inzy, Younis Khan and Mohammad Yousuf, and Sangakkara, Jayawardene and Attapattu represent the best blend of solidity, class and style in the Asian countries, Pietersen, Flintoff and Collingwood represent firepower and scrapping prowess - the kind that Miandad would watch from his living room with moist eyes.

But it's the English four-wheel drive pace machine that has become the think-tank’s biggest headache. Ever since Simon Jones suffered an injury in the fourth Ashes test in 2005, things have never been the same again. Half a dozen pace bowlers have been tried out and to say that none have impressed would be euphemistic. Harmison's wides and injuries, and Flintoff's comeback after a lengthy layoff are too serious to be ignored and without any backup bowling, this English team can get stranded at flag-off point should a wheel come off again.

That's where Australia is the strongest, with enough bench strength to provide pace power to every cricket-playing country in the world. McGrath, Lee, Clark, Tait and Johnson have already lined up and the likes of Bracken, Gillespie and Kasprowicz await their turn with little hope of making it to the squad. They can however look to Stuart MacGill for solace and a helpful shoulder to cry on, for he has been the boy wonder who turned 35 waiting in the wings for his turn, which came once a year when Warne was busy sms-ing insults or nursing injuries.

Surprisingly, England has a happy dilemma on the spin front, with Giles and Panesar vying for what could be the sole spot in the team. One, a veteran with a taste of what it takes to be inside a pressure cooker and the other seeking psychological help even before the series began. One, a useful bat at No. 8 and the other a 'can't bat, can't field' bloke who leaves the spectators rolling in the aisles with his unintended antics – while Fletcher has made his choice pretty clear, it will be interesting to see who becomes England’s No. 1 spinner.

All eyes would also be on Flintoff to see how he handles his various responsibilities - that of a bowler, batsman, captain and part of the team's think-tank. His own batting form must be a concern to him as a weakness against hostile short-pitched bowling has been sighted in recent times. The bowling is still being cranked up and nowhere near the magical form that he was in during the last Ashes. There's far too much at stake for him to fail on any of his capacities – more so because in his case, an individual failure could mean the collapse of the whole team.

There is always the promise of Vaughan joining the team before the third test, but for a man who hasn't played any form of competitive cricket in almost a year, the Ashes could be a searing experience. A class act like Attapattu - the man with six double hundreds - showed what being out of touch can do, as he fumbled his way through the Champion's Trophy, being a pale shadow of himself.

Despite all this talk about self-belief, it's actually tough to imagine that this Australian team can be beaten. Botham's advice to his team can possibly come as the only glimmer of hope as he pointed out that the Australian team was now a year older and hence that much easier to beat. Age is probably the only thing that the Aussies do not have on their side, with Langer, Gilchrist, Hayden, McGrath and Warne crossing the 35-mark and Ponting, Stuart Clark, Hussey and Lee going past their 30s. That's nine out of 13 who are past 30, though the Aussies have never let minor things like age affect their performance. Compare this to the English side that has just three players who have touched 30, with Giles being the grand old man at 33.

If you are a hardnosed cricket follower, chances are, this Ashes may not hold anything spectacular for you. The Aussies are back on their pedestal, surrounded by seven other mediocre teams that make them look even better than they actually are. Without a weak link in the team, with in-form players and with their stars fully fit, they look all set to walk all over a debilitated English team that finds itself desperately reaching out for a lifeboat that it can use to get back to the safety of the shores that, not too long ago, were alive with celebrations when a little urn came back home after 16 years.

However, if you are an incurable romantic, you will probably look for those little things that made the Ashes 2005 series so dramatic. Who ever would have thought that England would use only 12 men for the five-test series, as compared to 17 in 2002-03 (with Gough and Flintoff ruled out of the whole series) and 19 in 2001? Who would have thought that the great metronome McGrath would step on a cricket ball and miss two matches - THE two matches that Australia would go on to lose? Or that an inconsequential fringe player like Gary Pratt would usher in the beginning of the end, as he ran out Ponting whose outburst signified that for the Aussies, this series was a lost cause?

These are reasons enough to hope (against hope) for something drastic to happen this series – something like a minor miracle that will hold England in good stead as it battles the world’s best team in its backyard. Perhaps the urn that they have carried with them into their enemy camp has a little Trojan strategy that will change the fate of this war.

(Appeared in the New Indian Express Sunday Supplement on 26 November, 2006)

Pawar Play

(Image Courtesy: New Indian Express)

L Suresh unearths a daring tale of how the Aussies took revenge on the English – on Indian soil.

The twilight reduced the two weary men to mere silhouettes against the evening sky as they rested on the jerry cans that they had been lugging all day. “Coach, it’s almost a year since we lost the Ashes,” grunted the man they called Punter.

The Coach responded with thunderous silence. His long years of experience had taught him that the best thing to do when one was completely clueless was to keep shut - it would always be mistaken for deep contemplation. After he made sure that he had given a long enough pause, he spoke. “We will get the Ashes back!” Suddenly realizing that it wasn’t said with feeling, he broke into a whoop. “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, oy, oy, oy!” he chanted, hoping that it would inspire Shane Warne, who was somewhere in the vicinity, cursing freely and pushing a car uphill.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” said Punter mirthlessly. “It’s still not enough. How do we get one up on these Poms?” “Whaddya mean?” asked the Coach. “Well, we’ve done it all before. We’ve won the Ashes, we’ve won the World Cup – we need to do something that we haven’t done before.”

The Coach went back to his air-conditioned tent and his laptop. In half an hour, he rushed out, horrified. ‘Crikey, how did we miss that one?’ he thought. ‘Got to speak to Punter about this!’

The light from the bonfire stretched the two excited men to elongated shadows against their tents. “Punter, I think I got it,” whispered the Coach excitedly. “So did I,” grumbled Punter. “Should ask Warney to stop forwarding such lewd stuff.” “No, not that. I figured a way by which we can get even with the Poms!” “I’m listening,” muttered Punter, wondering why men around a bonfire always spoke in whispers.

“One thing that England did was to sweep the Indians out of the World Cup in 1987. We have clobbered the men in blue, pummeled them into submission, bludgeoned them, but never got to sweep them out. This is our chance to do that at the Champion’s Trophy finals.” “Sure, we can do that, so what’s the big deal?” Punter asked.

“Get a load of this – 5^th November was when the Indians lost to England in the ‘87 World Cup semi-finals and it was held in Mumbai (then Bombay). Guess when the finals of the Champion’s Trophy will be held?” “5^th November 2006!” came the excited reply. “And it’s going to be held in…” “Mumbai!” “Precisely!” “Okay, we’re on!”

The dying embers of the bonfire witnessed a master plan being hatched. Damien Martyn was secretly trained in a three-step maneuver of prod-grab-push. And he would get into the act when he was given the signal.

Days passed. The Champions Trophy began. As expected, the Australian juggernaut rolled on right to the finals in Mumbai, mauling the West Indies and winning the match with a few overs and many wickets to spare.

Then came the time for the prize giving ceremony. Punter went on stage and was all set to collect the trophy when he spotted a lone figure stomping on his cap and simulating a sweep shot time and again. Why was the Coach acting so strange? It suddenly dawned on him. In his excitement, he had forgotten all about the English revenge. India hadn’t reached the finals either. ‘Oh no,’ he thought frantically, ‘what do I do now?’ He caught the Coach’s eye.

The Coach was clueless as always and went into contemplation mode. Punter cursed. “Boy, am I glad we are getting rid of him after the World Cup!” He looked around furtively. So what if the Indian team wasn’t there to be pushed out of the tournament? There was still a lone Indian out there on stage. In a flash he knew what he needed to do. He whispered to Damien Martyn. “Get the boys on stage,” he hissed and beckoned with his index finger.

“Punter, why are you rolling your finger over?” asked Martyn. “That’s the beginning of Pawar Play!” Punter hissed.

The rest, as they say, is history.

(Appeared in the New Indian Express Sunday Supplement on 19 November, 2006)

The Nandroloners Club

(Image courtesy: New Indian Express)

L Suresh profiles a unique club where a blood sample and a positive test is all it takes to make it big.

What’s common to Petr Korda, Greg Rusedski, Christophe Dugarry, Latasha Jenkins, Linford Christie, Merlene Ottey, Mark Richardson and Dougie Walker? Nandrolone – an anabolic steroid that aids recovery from injury and increases muscle size. The smarter ones got away of course, (Rusedski for instance blamed it on contaminated supplements that might have done him in) but the rest ended up like the drugs they took – celebrated but useless – and began to be referred to as dopes.

Cricket too has had its share of dopes who have tried the strangest things, like coloured clothing, aluminum bats, power plays and super subs. In course of time, their acts came to be known as doping. These include trying out a diuretic with the hope of looking better for a press interview, being hauled up for nandrolone and trying to get away by faking a case of asthma, and celebrating wins or beating boredom by bringing together the three Cs - cricket, cocaine and cannabis.

Since dopes never learn from other’s mistakes and continue to get caught somewhere between Sample A and Sample B, here’s some help for cricketers who never manage to beat the microscope - the Dope Test for Dummies, a self-help guide that provides them with ten ways to prove their innocence or at least escape punishment after they are caught.

Beefing it up
Attribute the high levels of nandrolone to a diet of beef or similar food items rich in protein. Well, bobsleigh racer Lenny Paul got away with it. He tested positive for nandrolone and attributed it to a dish he ate that contained beef from cattle that had been fed steroids – he was cleared of the charge. (The very fact that he could think up such creative explanations should have raised suspicion, but then, the sporting body didn’t think of that.) Hear your legal counsel go to town with “a particular combination of food items that could have induced the production of the banned substance and cause it to exceed the acceptable level” – and you know it’s time for you to go home.

Caught smoking bowled asthma
If you’re ever caught smoking or snorting, blame it on asthma – as Shoaib has. (People will be left wondering if the wheezes were mistaken for deep drags or vice versa.) And if you are Shane Warne, you could even attribute it to a ‘looking good, feeling great’ drug, Moduretic, prescribed by Mommy that would dehydrate you, take inches off your waistline overnight and keep you in great shape - for a press conference. If the cricketing world could buy the one-tablet-to-help-you improve-your-appearance reason, they sure will believe you when you claim that all your inhalations were of the ayurvedic kind.

The red herring prospects
You can take a ‘quick recovery’ drug and then mask its telltale effects by another drug specially designed to negate the presence of the banned substances in the blood. And as they say, the proof of the phenethylamine is in the eating, but you don’t have to look beyond our stars for this. While it was never proved, it was strongly rumoured that the diuretic taken by Shane Warne was to mask the effects of steroids – administered for a dislocated shoulder to heal quickly. Needless to say, he bounced back from injury in less than a month and thereby raised questions, eyebrows and his wickets tally. Paul Smith, Warwickshire’s allrounder was another case in point who openly admitted to have taken ‘blockers’ to conceal the effects of the drugs he took regularly.

Ignorance is bliss
You could claim insufficient knowledge of a) medicine b) English c) what drugs do because you have never taken them d) all of the above. If Inzi could have communication problems with his coach, manager and umpire during the Lords Test, lesser mortals could surely use that as an excuse. Besides, the educational DVD meant to be released by the FICA (Federation of International Players’ Associations) and the ICC has been delayed and since it is unlikely that you can even manage a pirated print, you can use that to defend yourself. It sure must be an irritating feeling to fail in all your tests at school, switch to cricket and then start getting positive results in your tests, but as they say, such is life.

Docs of war
You can attribute this fiasco to a clash between doctors – ‘yours, mine and ours’. Shoaib, in his typical maverick mode, chose to consult his personal doctor, despite the Board providing him with one. As is the norm, no two doctors can concur on the diagnosis and the medication given, so the surgical knives will be out for a while. With Dr. Tauseef Razzak being Shoaib’s personal doctor and trainer, and with Dr. Waqar Ahmed being on the tribunal, it will be a case of ‘my needle is sharper than yours’ as they take jabs at each other. While Dr. Razzak has been asked to furnish details of all the drugs that Shoaib has been prescribed over the year, he has deftly ducked under the bouncer, claiming that the nandrolone could have figured in some herbal medicine that the bowler was taking.

The psychedelic colours of racism
Since Asians are the targets for most fines, censures and bans, you can play the racism card successfully. While players from other countries are ‘sent home’, ‘banned’ and ‘disgraced’, a white player can ‘volunteer to leave the team’. While the minimum ban for a cricketer found guilty of taking drugs is two years, it is mysteriously reduced to 12 months in the case of Warne. While he continued to be a hero even after the ban, Shoaib and Asif have been pronounced guilty even before Sample B has been tested. Arjuna Ranatunga, Sri Lanka’s ex-captain, always felt that things would have been very different "if Warne was an Asian”. So dump your lawyer and make a beeline for Mr. Ranatunga’s residence.

Cannabis or wanna-be
Categories like stimulants, corticosteroids, narcotic analgesics, anabolic agents, diuretics, beta blockers and cognitive enhancers. Star drugs like restondione, ritalin, nandrolone, modafinil and moduretic. It’s not surprising that even adrenalin has begun to sound like a drug. If there are so many banned products, how can you know them all? To add to the confusion, there’s a whole new book of jargon thrown at the players - PED (performance enhancing drugs), WADA (world anti doping agency), TUE (Therapeutic Use Exemption), ADP (Anti-Doping Policy). One really can’t blame you for thinking that bulk drugs referred to drugs that were meant to bulk up. At the end of it all, you can leave the officials with their heads spinning – and insinuate an overdose of you-know-what.

Divide and (over)rule
Every camp has its infighting. Every Board has its share of confusion. So the most convenient thing to do is to cry foul and stir up a heady concoction of a controversy, a tale of vendetta and a frame-and-fix saga that involves the Board, its chairman, the selectors - and a few ex-cricketers if possible. And raise pertinent questions whenever you can. For instance, if Shaharyar Khan suspected that Shoaib was into drugs, why did he not take action earlier? If Bob Woolmer had initiated this test, did someone use his shoulder to aim and fire?

The blame game is also an interesting device. Check this out - Javed Miandad blames the PCB for not enforcing discipline amongst players. Tauseef Razzak, Akthar’s doctor claims Shoaib’s drink could have been spiked with a banned steroid. Imran Khan says that the PCB should have done the tests before announcing the squad. Rameez Raja urges the PCB to impose stern penalties on Shoaib and Asif, but Inzamam-ul-Haq expects the duo to be cleared of doping charges. Meanwhile, Shaharyar Khan claims that Akthar always had issues with appearing for tests. With this kind of action, you can be sure that the end of the tunnel will never be reached, even years after you retire.

High on fun
It’s not your fault that cricket is laden with innuendos that reek of drugs. If you’re batting second, you’re chasing. If the ball kicks in at an awkward height, it’s a snorter. If a match is pre-decided by the bookies, it’s a fix. And the problem with over-the-hill cricketers who become officials is that they just don’t get it. Besides, so many cricketers (non-Asians, of course) have gotten away with it lightly. Dermott Reeve, Phil Tufnell, David Murray, Ian Botham, Stephen Fleming, Dion Nash, Matthew Hart, Roger Telemachus, Andre Nel, Paul Adams, Justin Kemp, Herschelle Gibbs – so why can’t you?

Why be the first?
If you are a Pakistani, this could be your biggest crib. (Just because we were the first to get into ball tampering and match fixing, why should we take the lead in dope tests as well?) Apparently, while random testing during a series is on, but pre-tournament screening is not. And drug tests were going to be administered only on two players from each side. So why did the PCB have to jump the gun and nominate two fall guys from their side even before the matches started? (Did they think they were nominating candidates for ICC’s annual awards?)

Besides, look at India. The BCCI obviously felt that there was hardly any time to test the players – not that they showed any signs of playing under the effects of drugs, considering the way they performed in the DLF Cup. Why can’t we follow them?

And for those who have managed to get away using one of these defenses, there’s another elite club dying to offer you membership – the Nandroloners Anonymous, where you can share your experiences on how celebrities first become loners after they test positive and finally end up becoming completely anonymous.

(Appeared in the New Indian Express Sunday Supplement on 29 October, 2006)

Boys will be boys

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What does Greg Chappell do when regular training methods aren’t good enough for Team India? L Suresh finds out...

It all began with Coach Greg using his lateral thinking techniques and deciding to put the team through a wringer of a programme that would get the best out of them. The reason? While the Australian team was conditioning itself for the Ashes, the Indian team was unconditionally surrendering itself to its opponents, whoever they may be.

But Greg couldn’t put his millionaire boys through boot camp. If the likes of Anil Ambani, Kumaramangalam Birla or Rajiv Bajaj don’t crawl through trenches, push cars uphill or haul gallons of water in dry heat, why would Sachin, Rahul or Viru do it? So Guru Greg, after much thought, took out his six thinking hats and flipped them around until he got a brainwave. How would you condition a team that was playing like school boys? With a ‘Back to school’ camp, of course!

So the team was divided into four houses – Blue, Green, Red and Yellow. The players from Team India who were feeling the blues were drafted into Blue House. Those who were performing well, but were being kept out of the Indian team and were hence seeing red were part of Red House. The team that was going green with envy on seeing the men in blue rake in the big bucks and bigger endorsements despite some serious non-performances, was in Green House. And since Greg Chappell, John Gloster and Ian Frazer were all from Australia and since Australia always played in yellow, they took the all-important Yellow House.

Obviously, children being children, no one was happy with their allotted colours or houses. To start with, everyone wanted to belong to Blue House. A few aging non-performers wanted to shift to Yellow House and enjoy the perks of retirement. And looking at the way Team India was playing, some of the members from Yellow House wanted to get into Blue House and play for Team India. Meanwhile, the selectors- after getting to know that the BCCI is targeting a billion dollars this year – began gunning for the Green House, especially after someone told them that back in the US, dollars are referred to as greenbacks.

Soon, it degenerated into a serious case of indiscipline where everyone was questioning their current colours and challenging each other for the all-important Team India slots. So Greg decided to turn yet another negative into a positive – and that was how the Challenger Series was born.

And as the series progressed, Greg figured that the ‘Back to School’ camp would have include English classes as well, for two reasons – one, so that the players could understand that when running between the wickets, yes does not mean no and vice-versa. And two, those trying to get in to the team had to quickly understand that ‘making a comeback’ was not about coming back quickly to the dressing room, but had more to do with getting back into the habit of scoring runs, taking wickets and all those things that were expected of a cricketer.

In the end, Greg was in a quandary as to how he was going to find a place in the team for the fringe players who were performing. To add to the confusion, there were two ‘add to favourites’ lists that were floating around – one belonging to the previous panel of selectors and the other, to the new entrants. So who would get capped for the World Cup? Greg came up with yet another ingenious solution.

In his own words, “Those who are already part of Team India can retain their caps. And those who couldn’t make it can have my six thinking caps. Obviously, I won’t need them when I coach the Australian team after the World Cup!”

(Appeared in the New Indian Express Sunday Supplement on 08 October, 2006)

A billion blues

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L Suresh runs through the Champions Trophy line-up to reach a dead end that worries a billion Indians.

It is believed that Thomas Alva Edison made almost 10,000 failed attempts in his storage battery experiments. But luckily for him, he had enough success behind him to famously proclaim that he had never failed, but had simply ‘found 10,000 ways that won’t work’. After the DLF Cup debacle, Greg Chappell would be hoping that people would understand if he claimed that he hadn’t failed in his experiments, but had just found 100 gameplans that didn’t work for the Indian team.

The recent flip-flop performances of most teams have muddied the tranquil waters that had until recently, reflected a clear picture of the front-runners and the also-rans for the Champions Trophy. Going by current form, the playing conditions and recent results, the teams have succeeded in inverting the pyramid – with the result that while the top is crowded, the bottom is plain confused.

At the top

Australia
If there was one noticeable fact in Australia’s win in the DLF Cup – yet another final, yet another cold-blooded slaughter - it was that the winning performances came predominantly from the fringe players and not from the likes of Ponting or McGrath. By Australian standards, this must have been a nightmarish tournament for both, with Ponting averaging 20.75 in four innings and McGrath picking up just one wicket in four matches.

But what makes the Champions Trophy so interesting for the men from down under is the fact that they have never won it. They are also aware that the rest of the world will probably want to record to continue, if only to be reminded of the fact that the Aussies are human after all. If Bjorn Borg could never win the US Open, if Ivan Lendl could never win the Wimbledon, if John McEnroe could never win the French Open, it is clearly a sign of divine justice, of someone up there wanting to ensure that there is still hope for lesser mortals.

Pakistan
Undoubtedly the most talented team in the tournament, with the longest batting line-up, the most number of bowling options, the strongest middle-order seen in recent times and most explosive pinch-hitters, Pakistan lack just one thing - a good opening pair, with Mohammad Hafeez and Shoaib Malik not in the best of form. But as Younis Khan once said, a game against India is the best way for an international player to come back to form, so things may well change for them during the course of the tournament.

Sri Lanka
They have been the perfect anti-thesis of India, racing uphill even as we have been spiraling downwards. A few months back, they were languishing at the bottom of the table after a 1-6 debacle against India, with just West Indies, Bangladesh and Zimbabwe below them. But all that changed in a matter of months after the 5-0 English whitewash. The blossoming of Tharanga as an opener, the entry of Malinga Bandara to bolster Sri Lanka's spin attack, a strong middle order with Attapattu, Jayawardene and Sangakkara and the momentum gathered from their recent wins gives the men from the emerald isle great chances of grabbing the trophy.

West Indies
When a team has the audacity to play just one fulltime bowler in a match, it shows the options that there are in the bowling department, besides a mile-long batting line-up. Ironically, it is this line-up that remains Lara's biggest headache – in the DLF Cup, Runako Morton, Wavell Hinds, Marlon Samuels, Bravo and Dwayne Smith played match after match without troubling either the bowler or the scorer. On paper, the batting looks to be as strong as that of Pakistan, but the problem is identical too - lack of consistency. How can one lose 9 wickets for just 29 runs? How can an opener play 31 balls without scoring a run? This team has the answers.

Next in line

England
The goods news is that Flintoff is back in the squad. The bad news is that Trecothick is out of form and out of the team, the bowling is out of depth and the Ashes heroes still out of action. Ever since half the team went missing because of injuries to the body, mind and soul, England has been testing its bench strength and unearthing mediocre talent that looks completely out of place in the international arena. While every other country is desperately eyeing the Champions Trophy, eleven men are standing on their toes and trying to look beyond, hoping to see an urn that they will be playing for in November. There are two things they will be doing until then - watching their step to make sure they don’t get injured, and watching footage of their match against the Aussies during the Champions Trophy 2004, when Vaughan, Trescothick and Strauss pounded McGrath and Brett Lee into submission.

New Zealand
When New Zealand won the Champions Trophy in 2000, the ‘Chris Twins’ were pretty much in action – Cairns and Harris. A lot has changed since. The team is still filled with allrounders, but their effectiveness on Indian pitches will always come under the scanner. But there is only one question that the other teams will be interested in – is Shane Bond fit?

South Africa
They have a pace attack comprising Pollock, Ntini, Nel and Kallis that ranks alongside Australia and Pakistan as one of the best in the tournament, but South Africa lack what the other two teams have in the slow bowling department - options. Will Gibbs rekindle memories of March 12, 2006 when the team chased 434 and won with a ball to spare? Or will Boucher repeat his recent 147 off 68 balls against Zimbabwe as South Africa got past the 400 mark for the second time in six months? Nine other teams will hope not.

Lower deck

Every big tournament has to have some small players who will be fodder to the big guns before the stage is set for primetime action. Bangladesh and Zimbabwe will be looking at their sparsely populated trophy shelves and savouring their past glory. While Bangladesh will recall its wins against Pakistan in the 1999 World Cup and against India and Australia at home, Zimbabwe will recall its first ever one-day victory – when it beat Australia in the 1983 World Cup. But today, memories mean little when it comes to doing well in the Champions Trophy - what they need is a miracle.

The lone ranger

India
They put their heads down to do some serious experimentation, tried out role plays, assigned multiple tasks to different players and did everything to add flexibility to the line-up, only to find half the team woefully out of form when it came to the last lap. Pathan’s bowling figures in the DLF Cup read 1/54 off six overs – it’s hard to believe that he was once India’s strike bowler. Sehwag has been woefully out of form, averaging seven in four matches. And with his decline and subsequent descent down the order, Dravid has had to promote himself and as a result, has averaged 10.3 runs in the last eight games, of which six were as an opener. In the DLF Cup, his average has been an abysmal 9.75 and clearly the single biggest reason for India's downfall in recent times - the wall suddenly resembled the ruins of the colosseum.

Another shocker has been Yuvraj's form that hit a low after the one day series against the West Indies. An average of 17.33 in the subsequent test series was an indicator of things to come. In the DLF Cup, Yuvi failed to open his innings in the two matches he played in and ended a miserable tournament with zero plastered across every column of his series statistics. Meanwhile, another hero was going through similar problems. Friendly pitches and some ordinary bowling had made Dhoni's honeymoon period in the team sweet as sin. But on slow pitches and against accurate bowling, he could do little to redeem his reputation as India's answer to Gilchrist. Today, he stands a long way behind the stumps – with Sangakkara, Brad Haddin and Boucher in the queue before him as they make their presence felt, both with the bat and the gloves.

If there’s one thing that Greg Chappell has failed to realize, it is that no one likes experiments – people are jealous of the ones that succeed and pounce on the failures to absolve themselves of the guilt that they never tried to think different. Chappell will now face the flak for all the little differences he tried to bring into the team, with every recent failure undoing all the preparations made so far. The call for Ganguly to be reinstated will get louder now, never mind that he hasn't had a decent score in recent times. The omission of Kumble will be talked about more often. The choice of persisting with Sehwag, the decision to send Dravid opening, the gamble of playing five bowlers and hence one batsman less - every little decision now will be questioned.

In short, Chappell's World Cup dream is slowly turning into a nightmare as the nucleus of the team is falling apart. With the Champions Trophy round the corner, there's no time for another 'confidential' email. But it’s certainly time to dispel the darkness that surrounds his team. However, unlike Edison, he won’t have the luxury of 10,000 attempts to find light.

(Appeared in the New Indian Express Sunday Supplement on 01 October, 2006)

All wired up

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25 years of the PC. 15 years of the World Wide Web. And one day in the life of man. L Suresh reports.

"A man has been arrested in New York for attempting to extort funds from ignorant and superstitious people by exhibiting a device which he says will convey the human voice any distance over metallic wires so that it will be heard by the listener at the other end. He calls this instrument a telephone. Well-informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the human voice over wires."

This was a news item published in a New York newspaper, way back in 1868, when Alexander Graham Bell was trying to promote his pet invention. Ever since, well-informed people have been busy eating their words, and yet, have had enough left over to spend hours talking over the telephone. And over the years, one thing remained unchanged - man’s cynicism towards new-found technology.

Thomas J Watson predicted a world market for five computers, in 1943. Thirty-four years later, Ken Olson, President, Chairman and Founder of Digital Equipment Corporation would wonder why anyone would want a computer in their home. And in 1981, Bill Gates, who hadn’t yet thought of the road ahead, succumbed to the foot-in-mouth syndrome that had gripped his predecessors with the immortal words - ‘640 k ought to be enough for anybody’.

And life went on till 1991, when the next big wave hit the shores of technology and Walcott, Weekes and Worrell were displaced by another set of 3Ws that would be infinitely more popular - the World Wide Web. But more importantly, 25 years of the PC and 15 years of the World Wide Web have given us ten things that we just couldn’t have done without.

Dot Com Boom shake the room
50 lakh salaries, cars for 23 year olds, parties at the drop of a hat, three pay hikes in a year and – get a load of this – male strippers for a woman’s day party. As Charles Dickens put it, ‘those were the best of times, those were the worst of times’.

Indiaworld.com was bought from Rajesh Jain by Sify for a whopping Rs. 499 crores. Hometrade.com splurged Rs. 24 crores on an advertising blitzkrieg with Sachin, Shah Rukh and Hrithik. Indya.com got The Times of India to do what no other brand had done before – vacate its front page for a full-page ad. That was some life - until the lights at the end of the tunnel were switched off.

Portals shut down, retrenchments were the order of the day, pink slip parties followed. Go.com, Pets.com Flooz.com, eToys, Furniture.com – all the big names defied the laws of gravity on their way up, but faithfully conformed to the law of physics which said that everything that went up must come down.

A prêt line? I’ve lent my name to a virus!
Having a star in the Hollywood walk of fame was old hat. Having a virus named after you became the mark of celebrity status. Avril Lavigne, Anna Kournikova and Angelina Jolie – the biggest stars found themselves playing godmother to baby viruses that were unleashed across the network.

Kamasutra, Michelangelo, Melissa, I Love You, Code Red, SQL Slammer worm, MyDoom - the speed of attack, the reach and the aftermath increased with every passing generation of virus.

And of course, each virus not only spawned more of its kind, but also brought forth numerous spoofs – like the Bobbit virus, that would remove a vital part of the hard disk and then re-attach it, the Arnold Schwarzenegger virus that would terminate and stay resident (I’ll be back), the Star Trek virus that would invade the system in places where no virus had gone before, the Titanic virus that would make the whole computer go down and the Mike Tyson virus, that would quit after one byte.

Blame it on technology
As technology was increasingly being used to increase office productivity, it also had the opposite effect, with computer breakdown, hard disk crashes, UPS shutdown, network problems, lost files and all these leading to a 404 situation - employee not found.

Also, it gave the savvy employee ample opportunities to dodge a job coming his way. Reasons for delay could involve hot-swapping a bad disk from a UNIX box while building a file system on the newly inserted drive. Or an email database that was completely damaged when the mail template was accidentally replaced with a calendar template as 900 user systems were being replaced and their data migrated in a span of 25 days. (Of course, one could add to the complications by citing the fact that the main hub had to be accessed from some place north of Gautemala).

The result – the geeks were kept on their toes while the ‘it’s all greek to me’ kind took to their heels.

Hope you understand what I’m saying – I don’t
Another major advantage of the technology boom was that when all else failed, one could resort to jargon. Bandwidth, offline, network, real estate, stakeholder, eyeball, landing site – the 3Ws that led to the dot com era brought in new words that had multifarious meanings. Of course, leading the pack were three syllables that would thrill, chill and tide the world over a thousand years in the space of a night – Y2K.

And then, there were acronyms that caught everyone’s fancy – like PCMCIA (People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms), ISDN (It Still Does Nothing) and SCSI (System Can't See It).

I mailed to five people and got a Merc
Ever got cash from Microsoft, free merchandise from Nike or free cell phones from Nokia? Ever enjoyed a bit of good fortune, thanks to the Hawaiian Good Luck Totem or the Tweetie Bird Chain? Ever helped Bill Gates test a particular software or did your bit so that a dying girl could get into the Guinness Book of World Records? No?

Well, terrible things are likely to happen to you. Firstly, you haven’t complied with the request of flooding your friends’ inboxes. More importantly, you have broken the all-important chain, so not only will you bear a curse for life, but will also lose out on the opportunity to win a Merc or a thousand dollars from Bill Gates.

The Indian versions of junk mail tread on dangerous territory - names of Gods, religious heads, sacred chants and old age superstitions - that make it difficult for the recipient to ignore them. Of course, goodness comes in slabs, as your good fortune is directly proportional to the number of people you forward the mail to.

It’s okay Mom, I won’t disturb the net nanny
While most other technology-related industries were struggling with bandwidth, faster downloads and file sizes, the porn industry surged ahead, pushing the frontiers even as they managed high resolution images, video clips, payment gateways, member forums, streaming media, live webcam shows and above all, blazing download speeds.

While child lock programs like Cyber Patrol, Net Nanny, Bess, WebSENSE and SmartFilter tried their hands at restricting visitors to these sites, porn sites became the forbidden fruit of www.gardenofeden.com as kids who had mastered the art of hiding comic books inside their textbooks found no problems in circumventing the barriers and boldly going where no child was meant to go.

Hi, I’m Ted. Will you marry me?
Why mail someone when you could message them? This thought bubble popped up on screen as an instant messaging window and resulted in the first free to download instant messaging service in 1996 - ICQ. Others followed, like MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Skype, Google Talk and the Indian Rediff Bol.

The next step was networking – social networking, business networking, dating, meeting people, making friends and being part of larger forums. Community sites like Orkut, Ryze, Fropper, Gaia, Friendster and MySpace got into top gear.

But the Indian youth seemed to have very noble intentions, for after dating sites, matrimonial sites became a colossal hit. Shaadi.com and Bharatmatrimony.com found many takers with Jeevansathi.com coming a close third.

It says XL or XML. Which shall I buy?
It could have begun as cadabra.com, but instead became amazon.com and began operations in 1995, selling books. A year later, eBay came into existence. Suddenly the shopping cart had shrunk to the size of a tiny stamp while the shopping mall stretched right across cyberspace.

And as if to prove that life could be lived web hopping, Mitch Maddox hatched a plot that could be straight out of a tech Hollywood movie. On January 1, 2000 he changed his name to Dot Com Guy, moved into a bare house with nothing but a laptop and a net connection and stayed there for a whole year without any contact with the outside world.

It wasn’t just buying that caught one’s fancy – it was selling as well. Elise Harp from Georgia auctioned her pregnant belly as real estate for advertising. Amber Rainey followed suit and sported 'Golden Palace.com' on her pregnant stomach. Yet another woman, Angel Brammer from Scotland sold her bosom space for $4,050 for a fortnight. Meanwhile, Andrew Fischer of Omaha sold his forehead to a snoring remedy, SnoreStop for a month and netted $37,375. Kari Smith did the same and tattooed GoldenPalace.com on her forehead for $ 10,000.

It was not just people – even places got into the act. Halfway, a tiny town in the US changed its name to Halfway.com for a year and made $73,000 in the bargain.

Wait for the launch or download it now
Why wait for an album to release and buy the CD for an obscene amount when it can be downloaded in minutes from the net? Seven years ago, Shawn Fanning thought along similar lines as he made the latest hits available in mp3 formats and facilitated easy downloads and free exchange through napster.com. Of course, it was too good to last as a year later, Napster was sued for copyright violation and was forced to change to a pay site.

With audio sharing and downloading, video and mpeg clips followed with sites like Sideloading, Youtube and Google video becoming popular by the download. Apple bit into a huge chunk of the music industry with the iPod in 2001. In a year, the company sold over a million units of the music device. iTunes was launched a year later in 2003. By 2005, broadcast and webcast merged to result in podcast and if you weren’t following what was going on, you could well huddle in front of your radio and wait for the valves to get heated up before you tuned into Binaca geetmala.

My deep dark secrets I can’t tell a soul about
While the first blog started in 1994, it wasn’t until 1997 that the term weblog began to gain recognition. Two years later, in an attempt to break the term into two, weblog became we blog and eventually blog – the most endearing term to a billion writers around the world. By 2004, a new blog was being created almost every 7.5 seconds.

The blog by Chinese starlet Xu Jinglei on sina.com tops the list as the world's most popular blog, with over 50 million clicks and still counting. And Boing Boing is the most read group-written blog, enjoying over 68 million hits.

Back home, while most blogs are about personalized expressions, there are some others that serve as personal black books, containing the deepest, darkest secrets – about lusting after the neighbour’s wife, having a crush on the boss, voyeuristic exploits and erotic fantasies. They have one other thing in common – they are all maintained by brave souls who hide behind evocative aliases like Devoured Petals, Little Johnny and Been Stalked.

The time has now come to take the next leap into what one think will be the future of technology. 30 years ago, one thought that the PC wouldn’t find a place in the life of common man. And one seems to think that the PC will not find a place in the life of common man in the future as well, with mobile technology, wap, bluetooth and the www ganging up and putting the PC out of work. Of course, like everything else in life, that could well be misquotes on technology coming a full circle.

(Appeared in the New Indian Express Sunday Supplement on 24 September, 2006)

Tamper Proof

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L Suresh follows the trail of ball tampering controversies left behind by Pakistan.

If Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had based his crime fiction series on ball tampering instead of commonplace crime, he would have been aghast at the knowledge that he had created the Pink Panther Jacques Clouseau instead of the true-blue detective Sherlock Holmes. For several decades, goof ups and cover ups reigned supreme as the wise men tried to figure out if there was something in the pitch that the cricket ball was allergic to.

The ball was increasingly being noticed in the presence of raucous company - bottle caps, sand, vaseline, sugar-coated lozenges, human nails, zippers and many other objects that hung around in the cricket field, acting as surrogate steroids and enhancing the performance of the ball, making it do things no ball had ever done before. And with this, a new member was introduced to the anti-establishment group, to join the hallowed company of anti-matter, alternative music and women’s lib – reverse swing.

Interestingly, just as cricket has strong similarities with baseball, ‘doing’ the ball seems to have a well-bred lineage emerging from the baseball diamonds where spitballs, knuckleballs and forkballs were the order of the day. While everything from petroleum jelly to peanut butter was tried out to soften up one side of the ball, nail files, emery boards and sandpaper were the choice of match-hardened pitchers who desired the opposite effect. But since those were the days of prohibition, Al Capone and rigged boxing matches and since crime had not yet been declared illegal, the authorities decided to keep pace with the times and exempted some players – who would otherwise be out of a job without the nuances of cheating - from the ban on ball tampering.

Like all popular trends from the West, ball tampering too found its way to other parts of the globe and finally found its calling in cricket as willing bowlers waiting for redemption from the likes of Bradman and the three Ws embraced it with open arms and extra–long nails. And like all outbreaks, the epidemic raged on, but the vaccine was yet to be found. The world was curiously watching the ball get jiggy with it after the first session of play and was yet to make something of it. The ICC and the guardians of fairplay meanwhile were taking to the new issue the way most teams reacted to powerplays – they just didn’t know what to do with it.

Interestingly, India’s brush with ball tampering came along with a brand window as the country was exposed to the multifarious uses of Vaseline, appropriately endorsed by a bowler named John Lever. It was the mid-70s and India, thriving on the fiery medium pace of Karsan Ghavri and Mohinder Amarnath, was yet to see Kapil’s outswing, leave alone reverse swing. Vaseline was found on a ball that creamed the Indian top order as India lost the Delhi test by an innings and 25 runs. Lever ended with 10 for 70 and the officials ended with a ball that looked all set for a cold Delhi winter, slathered with Vaseline. In the end, what should have been the first big ball tampering incident ended up being called an accident.

However, on the other side of the border, cherry-red missiles were learning to swing the wrong way with alarming regularity. The chronicled reports begin with the early 90s during a one-dayer at the Lords, between England and Pakistan - old friends who took out their nail files and emery paper at the very sight of each other. As the series unfolded, Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis and Aaqib Javed were suspected of having done things to the ball that made it reverse though it was not enough to reverse the outcome of the one day series. England won, cried foul and went home brooding about how the diabolical action (a term that, to this day, remains Darrell Hair’s literary contribution to cricket) of the ball could be adapted to county cricket. The officials couldn’t prove a thing, but the fast bowlers of the world didn’t need further proof that wickets were there for the taking – the ball had just passed its first big ‘scratch and sniff’ test.

A couple of years later, Pakistan was at it again. This time round, ball tampering came hunting in pairs with another phenomenon that had an incurable effect on the game – match fixing. On one hand, the ball was doing crazy things that batsmen weren’t able to come to terms with and on the other, the English team was doing crazy things, like winning a one day series against Pakistan’s express fast bowlers. With one side rumoured to have gone after quick bucks and the other after victory, the match-fixing scandal ensured that neither team ended on the losing side. Of course, the ICC played the role of duty bound cops to the hilt – it took them two years to arrive at the heart of the matter after a shocking disclosure by Javed Burki, a former Chairman of the PCB.

A pattern was emerging - with ball tampering fast becoming the force majeure that resulted in reverse swing, and with reverse swing having its origins in Pakistan, one didn’t have to put two and two to end up with a scuffed ball. Meanwhile, ex-players like Imran Khan, Sarfraz Nawaz and Abdul Qadir began trooping into the confession box and narrating the secrets of their success, all of which could only be taken as incriminating evidence against the whole team.

It took the turn of the millennium for the ICC to finally take a stand on ball tampering and pronounce a sentence that had the word guilty in it. The Singer triangular series in Sri Lanka saw Waqar Younis and Azhar Mahmood take on South Africa with a tampered ball. South Africa won the match and Waqar, besides losing half his match fee, became the first player to sit out for a match for doing the unmentionable to a ball. Rumour has it that Waqar thought of appealing against the sentence because he thought he was being unfairly targeted – how else could one explain the fact that when everyone else was into ball tampering, he alone was caught by the cameras for the second time in two weeks?

The Pakistani nomenclature of naming their fast bowlers after express trains did have a telling effect on its leading pacers as they seemed to be suffering from a one-track mind. After Wasim, Waqar and Aaqib Javed, it was Shoaib Akhtar’s turn to turn psychopath with the ball against Zimbabwe, an opposition that was already wilting against express pace. One does not know if he was inspired by the fact that early scorers kept track of runs by making notches on a piece of wood and decided to mark his tally of wickets on the ball, but had the match referee not intervened in time, the ball would have needed stitches in places other than the seam. Shoaib was hauled up, given a dressing down and strictly told to mark his tally of scalps in his personal scrapbook henceforth.

But every epic saga has a bad sequel – and the terminator returned to terrorise the seam of the ball and leave it in a mess in a match against New Zealand. The tri-series played in Sri Lanka was ultimately won by the Kiwis, but the man who was grounded for two matches was Shoaib Akhtar.

Finally, what began at the Lords came full circle at the Oval, when the Pakistan team was accused of ball tampering by Darrell Hair. From the moment Hair removed the bails, it was a foregone conclusion that the matter would take racial undertones. An Australian umpire, a South African match referee and an Asian team have just about the same effect as ammonium nitrate, sulphuric acid and hydrogen peroxide mixed together in midair. But this incident had a lot more than inter-continental strife. Changing the condition of the ball, match forfeiture, bringing disrepute to the game, a 500,000 dollar ransom note, a call to legalise ball tampering, rumours of resignation – it was already being dubbed the biggest scandal to rock cricket since Bodyline.

What was most surprising was that despite being surrounded by men who have all had a brush with cricketing laws during their times, Inzamam did not get the right kind of advice from any quarter. It is during times of crisis that one wishes to be in the company of experienced men who could come to one’s rescue. But when it includes a coach who has seen enough ball tampering controversies during his stint with South Africa, a manager who had come close to forfeiting a match as a captain when he led Pakistan off the field in a match against India, a bowling coach who was the world’s first player to be penalized for ball tampering, a board chairman who didn’t quite understand what was going on, but felt it important to drag national honour and religion into the fracas and a young wicketkeeper who decided that it was the opportune moment to relax and while the controversy was spreading like wildfire, was seen in the balcony of his dressing room, calmly reading a newspaper - Inzamam would have preferred solitude.

But as with all crime thrillers, there had to be a twist in the tale. Out came an e-mail with Darrell Hair’s vow of complete silence in exchange for $500,000 – a shocker that has turned the controversy on its head, transforming the hunter into the hunted and the accused into a martyr who forfeited a match for his country. It suddenly looked like a jailbreak where the prisoners were digging a tunnel from one end and the warden from the other. During his days, Holmes would have found it easy to crack this case because once he had eliminated the impossible, whatever remained, however improbable, was the truth. But there was one contingency that he didn’t have to take into account – what if anything’s possible?

(Appeared in the New Indian Express Sunday Supplement on 03 September, 2006)

Commentator's Curse

(Image courtesy: New Indian Express)

The Dean Jones controversy inspires L Suresh to do a commentary on the men behind the microphone.

A little over 5000 years ago, an 18-day war that could have well been a historical prelude to the Ashes was described live by a charioteer to his king. Every gory detail was vivified, every strategy debated and every session discussed in great detail even as the one-man audience progressively sank into acute depression with the news of his side fighting a losing cause. The war ended with the more popular side winning, but more importantly, what began was a new trend that infused the ‘it’s all happening there’ excitement into sport - live commentary.

Cricket certainly benefited from this revolution as the golden voices of Rex Alston, Brian Johnston, John Arlott and Trevor Bailey brought alive the most exciting moments of the game on BBC - the big daddy of radio commentary. Television was soon to follow as Kerry Packer made two of his biggest contributions to cricket followers – World Series Cricket and Richie Benaud in the commentator’s box. Add Bill Lawry, Ian Chappell and Tony Greig to the list and cricket had found its fantastic four.

But commoditization of the game had its impact on commentary as well, with multiple channels, numerous commentary teams and most importantly, various ex-players who were given a new lease of life. Those who didn’t want to toil under the sun as a coach or an umpire, those who didn't do enough to pen their memoirs and those who were not politically savvy enough to become selectors finally had something to do. The trouble began when some of these just-turned commentators began to look at their new job as an extension of all the sledging they indulged in during their playing days. And ever since, commentators have been the scourge of television fans worldwide. Too loud, too brash, too self-conscious, too jingoistic and - in rare cases like that of Richie Benaud – too good to be true.

In an attempt to create unique images for themselves, most commentators ended up taking on spoofy personas – from Henry Blofeld’s earring fetish to Sidhuisms, to Wasim Akram and Ravi Shastri’s ‘maiden’ ventures, to Professor Deano’s dose of fundamentals. The Jekyll and Hyde combination reared its ugly head as the universally-liked Professor Deano transformed into the sinister Professor Moriarty behind a mike that he thought was switched off.

If Dean Jones lost his job because he called Amla a terrorist, Boycott went one step ahead and is reported to have terrorized his former lover, Margaret Moore – an act that cost him his job as a commentator with the BBC. Another commentator who had his own take on the topic of love was Tony Greig - at his racist worst when the microphone caught him making a derogatory remark about a woman of Asian origin just as she was getting married. Meanwhile, closer home, a four-letter word that had nothing to do with ball, bail, spin or pace came from Sidhu during the Bangladesh-South Africa match in Dhaka and the last four-letter word that he heard when he was shown the way out was ‘door’.

The sign of the times was evident when a snort from a commentator during a match was no longer a reaction to the quality of cricket, but a deep inhalation of quality cocaine. Dermott Reeve, a former English player, obviously found the proceedings during the England-New Zealand Lord's Test in 2004 a bit too boring and decided that match-fixing or not, he needed his fix during the match. He eventually admitted to have commentated under the influence of the drug and decided that of the two, doing commentary was the easier habit to kick. Another player-commentator who spiced up life with his performances off the field was Shane Warne, who was finally fired from the Channel Nine commentary team after he managed to hog more headline space than Kerry Packer, obviously for all the wrong reasons.

While the Aussies were left complaining about the falling standards of commentating in their continent, with Ian Chappell’s aggression, Tony Greig’s belligerence, Bill Lawry’s over the hill remarks and the ‘giving lip from the slip’ trio – Shane Warne, Mark Taylor and Mark Waugh being rejected by a majority of discerning viewers, India had to put up with a lot less – in terms of quality. A stream of ex-cricketers from the 80s and the 90s trooped in and out of the commentary box, trying their hand behind the mike and before the camera. Hits and misses, the glaring absence of technique, awkward fends, frequent moments of being caught in two minds – the parody looked like a procession of tailenders going out to bat.

Back in the 70s, India’s fledgling attempts in live cricket coverage saw commentators like Anupam Ghulati, Narottam Puri, Ravi Chaturvedi, M L Jaisimha, Sushil Doshi, Akash Laal and Kishor Bhimani juxtaposing radio commentary to television relay in their attempt to fill in for the lackluster two-camera relay. By the late 90s, ESPN–Star Sports had formed a commentary team with Gavaskar, Shastri, Sidhu, Boycott, Alan Wilkins and Harsha Bhogle, and Indian fans were just beginning to form opinions about good commentary. But programmes like Fourth Umpire, Extraaa Innings and Straight Drive managed a straight dive to the abyss, as former cricketers settled down to do one thing to viewers that they never managed to with the opposition – batter them into submission. But the turning point – the moment of truth when we actually realized how bad our commentators were – came when India got its first taste of the great Indian comedy show, with the World Cup 2003.

If there was one thing more painful than watching India being trounced mercilessly by Australia two times out of two, it was watching the commentary team make a spectacle of itself, with several innovations that left world audiences speechless. The glamour quotient infused by Mandira Bedi and her noodle-straps (that failed to provide adequate cover to her lack of knowledge of the game), the entertainment sections (as if cricket wasn’t entertaining by itself), interviews with movie stars who reminisced their gully cricket experiences, Sandhya Mridul, Maria Goretti and co who made it fashionable to be ignorant about the game – obviously some genius had decided that the only way to popularize cricket in India would be to bring together the three Cs – cricket, cinema and celebrities. And of course, to decipher what exactly SET Max had in store for the hapless viewer, a tarot card reader - Maa Prem Ritambhara.

While the women in the studio were just as successful as the supersub rule and the graphite bat, the men who were handpicked for the job weren’t too far behind. With Charu Sharma at the helm, the big bosses rounded up a motley crew of ex-cricketers - Kapil Dev, Arun Lal, Krishnamachari Srikkanth, L Sivaramakrishnan, Robin Singh, Sanjay Manjrekar, Anshuman Gaekwad, Mohinder Amaranth and Atul Wassan - who were dusted and aired in a hurry to bombard millions of households with their fumbles, mumbles and exhaustive list of clichés. From a compulsive urge to fill up screen time with non-stop drivel (which included reading out the most puerile posters verbatim) to tongue-tied minutes of deafening silence when the match would be at its intense best, India’s rookie commentators stuttered and muttered as the matter was left to the likes of Dean Jones and Tony Greig to salvage a dismal show, thereby reinforcing the maxim that in the Indian subcontinent, if all else fails, try an accent.

The Asian fraternity, unfortunately, has constantly had to put up with sporadic brilliance on the field and consistent mediocrity in the box. While Waqar Younis, Aamir Sohail, Rameez Raja and Wasim Akram do a remarkable impersonation of fence sitters who have barbed wire cutting into their backsides, their Lankan counterparts Ranjit Fernando, Roshan Mahanama, Ranil Abeynaike, Arjuna Ranatunga and Aravinda de Silva are normally as bright and cheerful as the weather in the recently aborted tri-series. In South Africa, the white man was still a superior being to some, as was evident from the comments of Tony Greig, Pat Symcox and Alan Wilkins (probably the result of a bad reaction as English blood mixed with South African experience).

In the midst of such destruction and devastation, four pros stand tall with the command they exert over the medium. Richie Benaud, aptly nicknamed ‘Bradman of the box’, Michael Holding, who has managed to extend his Rolls Royce epithet to his commentary as well, Harsha Bhogle whose stint in ABC Radio saw him being placed on par with the best down under and Donna Symonds – a delightful aberration to the bimbette norm that is currently gripping the commentary box.

Of course, if you’re the kind that enjoys commentators who never shy away from from a juicy scrap, you may not have to wait long. Shane Warne, Lara, McGrath and a whole lot of ‘35 and ready to say bye’ cricketers are waiting in the wings. And as for the rest of the mumbling lot that is unfortunately here to stay, let us just console ourselves in the knowledge that while the old king had to listen to 18 days of live commentary, we are blessed with a mute button in our remote.

(Appeared in the New Indian Express Sunday Supplement on 27 August, 2006)

Who dares spins

(Image courtesy: New Indian Express)

L Suresh wonders if there ever will be a twist in the tale when Sri Lanka plays at home.

The ‘don’t even think about it’ list is getting longer by the day in cricket as teams are getting reconciled to the fact that that there are some things that are never destined to be. There will never be another Jim Laker’s 19 for 90 performance. Nor is Bradman’s 99.94 in any danger of being broken. Australia will never be beaten in the finals of a tri-series. And as India has been finding out in recent times, winning a one day tournament in Sri Lanka seems just as impossible. And until someone seeks inspiration from Australia’s ice vests and invents warm shoes as a possible remedy for cold feet, India will find it difficult to break the routine of reaching the finals and running out of steam.

While India has lost count of the number of tournament finals it has played and lost, Sri Lanka has no such problems – such instances have been few and far between, at least at home. The last time Sri Lanka lost a tri-series at home was in 1998 when India rode on the back of a 252-run opening partnership between Sachin and Sourav and took away the Singer Akai Nidahas Cup. In recent years, since the two rain-affected, no-result finals of the ICC Champions Trophy in 2002, India has played Sri Lanka six times - in the Asia Cup and the Indian Oil Cup - out of which five matches went in Sri Lanka's favour. And this time, looking at Sri Lanka's ominous form, it looks like there will be no deviation from the script.

That’s perhaps the reason why the Sri Lankans are unable to hide their grins. They’re playing at home, it’s a tri-series and the icing on the cake is that the Indians are coming. There are rumours that like his fellow southpaws - Hayden and Andy Flower - Jayasuriya has begun going to bed with his pads on, that Attapattu has rushed through the convalescing process, desperate to make it to the team even if it as the 11th player and that Murali walks around with his hands in his pockets to stop twirling that imaginary ball.

Things sure have changed since the times when India whipped the Lankans 6-1 at home. While the majestic lions roared and completed what would perhaps be the first whitewash of England in their backyard by an Asian team (dubbed as England’s worst series in 13 years and Sri Lanka’s best since they began playing at the international level), the Indian tigers whimpered and sniveled as they found themselves snared in a deep hole that progressively got deeper each time they attempted to crawl out of it.

Every time the Indian team departs for Sri Lanka, one can’t help but make odious comparisons to the English team of the 90s that used to be led to the sacrificial altar for that macabre ritual called the Ashes when they would be pounded test after test at home and would then have more of it as they toured Down Under. Like B-grade horror flicks that have mindless sequels churned out, India-Sri Lanka encounters in the emerald isle have become tired rehashes of one another. Each match is annoyingly played to the same script – the audacity of Murali and Jayasuriya bowling the 49th and 50th overs, the horror of the ball taking so long to reach the batsmen that the umpires are tempted to warn it for time-wasting tactics, a posse of spinners and part-timers weaving a treacherous web around the Indian stroke makers who manage to find the fielders with irritating regularity and the explosive hitters suddenly finding themselves out of gunpowder (Dhoni averages 9.66 in Sri Lanka and Sehwag has just one 50 in 12 matches).

Not to be left behind, a slow middle order dawdles even further after a quick top-order collapse. 64.45, 52.72, 51.35 and 47.30 are figures that one would ideally attribute to the averages of the batting stars in a team. During the 2005 Indian Oil Cup, these were the strike rates of Dravid, Laxman, Venugopala Rao and Sourav. Interestingly the tail had a different story to say of the pitch – L Balaji (100), Harbhajan (92.30), Zaheer Khan (166.66), Ashish Nehra (122.22) and Pathan (90.62) had strike rates that showed a tail wagging in a lost cause. Typically success has come in the form of a painful 50 off 100-odd balls – the kind that neither wins a match nor salvages pride for us. The story however picks up pace after intermission as Jayasuriya - with or without his hand strapped in bandages - and his bunch of merry pinch-hitters plunder and pillage and put us out of contention before the first Powerplay is up. It is only to be expected that such predictable fare runs to packed stadiums in Colombo!

While India and Sri Lanka focus on the big names in their batting line-up, South Africa seems to have its own gameplan. Inexperienced batsmen, an array of fast bowlers and an army of bits and pieces players – the team looks more set to play a series in New Zealand than in Sri Lanka. Though the test series has made the lot wiser, one wonders if the thought of spinners crawling from every crack in the pitch and slithering all over them match after match is any more comforting than it was a month ago. Besides, the men for the moment – Smith and Kallis – are missing in action and since it looks unlikely that any of the pitches will let Gibbs repeat his incredible Wanderers’ act of 175, it is left to seniors Boucher and Pollock to steer their team home.

But back home, it will take us a while to look at the other two teams – there’s too much happening here for us to be thinking of others. Sachin is back and surprise, so is Dinesh Mongia. And so are the regular questions that do the rounds – if Mongia is in, what about Venugopala Rao? If county experience counts for getting into the team, what about Zaheer Khan? If a 29-year old can be selected despite this manic focus on youth, what about Kumble? And then there are the secret getaways, the innovative training stints, the army experience… whether these will help the Indian team do what has never been done in recent times – win a tri-series in Sri Lanka – remains to be seen, but credit has to be given to the fact that there’s been no stone left unturned in priming this team up for better times ahead.

Of course, rain would be another crucial factor that India will have to taken into account as their aversion for Twenty20 clearly shows how their chances slide downhill as the game gets shorter. To find out what rain can do to a team, one doesn’t have to go past the 1998 Singer Akai Nidahas Cup tri-series when the Kiwis found the skies in perfect colour coordination with their uniforms and moods, as they spent more time in their dressing rooms than in the middle. Eleven little Johnnies desperately wished for the rains to go away so that they could get out there and play. The series ended with all three matches between India and New Zealand being abandoned. In all, four of their six preliminary matches were washed out, of which two matches were cancelled without a ball being bowled.

But it’s important that India exorcises the ghosts of the past – pretty much the way England took on Australia during the 2005 Ashes series. The first thing they need to keep in mind is the fact that it will be a bowler’s game, a fact that’s in sharp contrast to all those dream games – six against Sri Lanka, two against South Africa, four against Pakistan and five against England – won in recent times. While these run fests saw Dravid’s solidity, Yuvraj’s consistency and Dhoni’s explosive hitting take India up the one day rankings, this will be a series where team totals will behave pretty much like the pitch and will generally stay low.

If there’s anything that the Indians can look back upon, it would be the ICC Champion’s Trophy played in Sri Lanka in 2002, when the three teams in focus found themselves in spin city. Sri Lanka proved yet again – after their 1996 World Cup win - that while Australia might be the masters of the universe, they were still in control in Asian conditions. The Champion's Trophy, slow tracks and Muralitharan continued to be three bete noirs of the Aussies, as they struggled to make 161. Sri Lanka showed them how to, in just 40 overs. Meanwhile India had a brush with the Proteas who played the most inexplicable 15 overs of the tournament when, from a winning position of 187 for 1 off 35 overs, they found it difficult to score 75 off the last 15 overs with 9 wickets in hand. They were left stranded 10 runs short of the target, with four wickets and a list of if’s that would have made Rudyard Kipling proud. If only Gibbs hadn’t retired hurt. If only Kallis had been faster in scoring his runs. If only Klusener had found his magic of lusty hitting.

On the face of it, all three teams seem to be evenly matched, both in their strengths and weaknesses, with home conditions giving Sri Lanka an obvious edge over the other two. In the end, it would probably be India’s batting versus South Africa’s bowling that will decide who will be the other team in the finals. Sri Lanka will be secretly hoping it would be India. A 5-0 win against England doesn’t quite avenge a 1-6 humiliation. It’s payback time.

(Appeared in the New Indian Express Sunday Supplement on 13 August, 2006)