Green channel

When memorable cricket writing comes from Australia, it is usually a product of Gideon Haigh. But on occasion, when he isn’t being smart or snarky in his daily columns, Roebuck comes up with a snorter. Today’s piece in Cricinfo is outstanding for this section alone:

“All batsmen are praised twice in their careers. The first comes after a fellow has stroked a couple of boundaries as a teenager, whereupon he is proclaimed a genius. The second comes 20 years later, when a player long since consigned by even the gentlest critic to the rubbish dump manages to rouse himself sufficiently to push the ball around for an hour. The attraction of both periods is that it is not necessary actually to score any runs, just to look like one might.”

At his best, Roebuck is magical. I remember an instance a few years ago, when Wisden Asia Cricket was around, and it was late. At the time I was editing magazine copy - which I was enthusiastic about because it was like an advance screening - and one night, up came a Roebuck piece on McGrath. The deadlines could wait because this was fabulous writing through and through. It was the piece on McGrath. Rarely do you get stories like that. Funnily enough, a source of entertaining writing was Kamran Abbasi (Bless him for making many production nights merry). And apart from him, Sambit, Bhattacharya, and S Rajesh’s tight match reports, there was nothing else to write about. Pity it had to shut down. I think it was probably the most well-written mag in this country.

“In what appears to be a softening of an earlier stance, Malcolm Speed, the ICC’s chief executive, says that an annual window in cricket’s increasingly over-packed calendar could be found for the Indian Premier League (IPL).”

I had written about the possibility of an opening in the calendar at the end of January.

The idea to reserve 100 crore for Commenwealth games athletes came from Sharad Pawar, the Times of India said today. Was Mr. Pawar’s decision because of this? And this? Whatever Thackeray and the commies’ intentions, they’ve now got the BCCI bothered. This is unlikely to die down soon, and it will probably take a lot more gift-giving by the cricket board to make them stop. And if it doesn’t stop before the league’s first matches start in April, well, the oiled pitches technique has been a favourite. 

The NYT Magazine has a very readable article by Elizabeth Rubin on the US army’s outpost in the Korengal Valley. Here are some other post-9/11 stories I’ve enjoyed. Here’s one by George Packer, on Iraqi’s who felt betrayed. And this one is by Lawrence Wright, on his time in Saudi Arabia. These people write articles the size of books.

From my interview with Lalit Modi from two years ago.

Why is the BCCI averse to Twenty20?

Why not 25-25? Why not 30-30. The issue right now is that the countries advocating it are only England and Australia. They have a drop in stadium levels so they are advocating it. We fill our stadiums. We have enough crowds coming in. We’re just getting into the game now. First they want to play a world cup of 20-20. They’re not even talking about going and promoting twenty-20 in countries first, play it for five-ten years, build the basis of 20-20.They’re saying lets go straight to the world cup!

But if the ICC says that, would you be interested in playing Twenty20?

They are saying that. We’re not interested in playing Twenty20. If the ICC mandates us to do it, and we’re the only people left, I think we’ll have no choice [Italics mine]. But in my view, I think we must have a domestic calendar for it first. It’s a totally new game. It’s a batsman’s game…

And that’s why the Indian public will warm to it…

That may be so but we need to do it at the domestic level first! I’m not saying no. I’m saying we have to do it at the domestic level first.

If the ICC could take back its big decision of June 26, 2000, it probably would.

The ICC’s cricket telecast rights were on sale. Zee bid $625 million, a bigger sum than anyone else. But they weren’t given the rights. These were instead awarded to WSG-Nimbus, who put up $550 million. Zee felt aggrieved, and swore racism.

David Richards, the ICC’s chief executive, said the claim was “ridiculous”. “The decision taken by the group was, I say, on commercial grounds and it was in the best interests of the long term development of international cricket in all parts of the world.”

Best interests of the long term development of international cricket? What could he possibly mean? Perhaps Nimbus, that bastion of corporate ethics (do read this list), would further the game’s development (They did, in a way. Nimbus, which didn’t have a channel of its own, sold the rights to Sony, which did. So that’s what the ICC meant.).

Anyone with half a brain can read through this bull. The money a board gets for its rights is put to developmental use. And even if a broadcaster has limited reach – which Zee did not – rights can be tossed off to other channels in Australia, Japan, the US, wherever, for a price. Instead the rights went to a marketing agent for $75 million lower than the highest bid.

Then, in 2004, the BCCI invited bids for television rights, which Zee won again. Except that it didn’t. ESPN-Star matched Zee’s highest offer, and were awarded the rights. The matter went to court for a year. Meanwhile, fresh bids were announced. Nimbus, after assisting Zee on the bid, went out and bid on its own – to Zee’s horror – and acquired the rights. Zee, who had the next highest bid, was left hanging. The reason for the impasse in 2004 was because Zee apparently had no experience in cricket production. Anyone, absolutely anyone in broadcasting will tell you that’s just a dumb excuse. To put together a live sports event is a no-brainer. Producers are contracted – heck, you can put together a team within two days just on the phone – and at the end of the series, they leave, as do the cameramen and support staff, to work on another event. So why were the rights given to ESPN-Star?

Rebuffed twice, so is it any wonder that Zee would be mad as hell? Subhash Chandra wanted cricket in some form. Incidentally, thoughts of mutiny had first occurred to him when the ICC gave him a miss. This time it took the form of the ICL.

It’s unlikely that the IPL would have moved beyond its conceptual stage so quickly had it not been for Chandra’s ICL. In 2006, shortly after coming to power, Modi mentioned to me in an interview that he had envisioned cricket played between cities (Disclaimer: I adored Modi then). But then he said he’d do a lot of things, including building a cricket museum.

And now, thanks to the IPL, we’re seeing the start of a clash for the international calendar. It isn’t looking good for the ICC. But they only have themselves to blame for what’s coming their way.

“There were times when I had to ask whether we had a good one.” - Preity Zinta.

Bal Thackeray laments the corruption of cricket in an open letter to Sharad Pawar:

“Cricketers are being purchased as a result this their concentration will not be in the game and the sport will decline in this country,” he warned.

“If this is how industrialists wield their money then a day will come when there will be no need of government because it will be the industrialists who will call the shots and run the country,” Thackeray said.

That’ll be the day, Mr Thackeray.

Bill James can be credited with popularising sabermetrics - the study of numbers in baseball. I’ve put up an interview of his with Surowiecki here after a back and forth in the comments with Srivaths. Will numbers grow to reveal more in cricket than they do now? If effectiveness is a team’s goal, then yes.

Here’s a Q&A that caught me:

Surowiecki: Finally, do you think most baseball teams will eventually adapt, and incorporate sabermetrics into the way they work on a day-to-day basis? Or will there always be a Pope to the sabermetrician’s Galileo?

James: There will always be people who are ahead of the curve, and people who are behind the curve. But knowledge moves the curve.

Spot on. In-depth knowledge of a player’s worth takes the whole enterprise forward. This is so true for the IPL. Do read the whole interview.

Update: Also check out Cricinfo’s new numbers blog, It Figures. Corny name aside, the analysis is interesting.

Was thinking about the composition of teams. Perhaps these teams aren’t going to be too effective in the near future. I guess if you’re a company where image is everything, and you could well face a backlash if you tried dropping Tendulkar, why would you do it? So whether he goes through poor form is irrelevant, because you’re expecting something other than just performance from him.