Krishna Kumar

Are we losing our love for Test cricket?

T20 has dulled our senses to the more subtle charms of the long format, as is evident from watching youngsters react to the game

Krishna Kumar

05-Jun-2015

I only got to watch small passages of play of the recent Lord's Test. Watching gripping Test cricket after a surfeit of T20 was great fun, and at some point during the post-tea session on the first day, I realised one of the things I had missed during the IPL was the sun. Something about the golden slant of the late-afternoon light enhances the aesthetics of watching cricket and accentuates a sense of background pause.

Cover drives seem to unfurl a second slower, outswing hangs in the air a little more. The pause allows for a bit of reflection, conferring on every piece of cricketing action a singular value, without interrupting the flow of match play. Every ball, and its associated batting and fielding move, seems suspended on its own thread, persistent in memory, while adding to the overall narrative of the game.

Apart from its obvious bias in favour of batsmen, a relative lack of cricketing continuity, and its corollary, a Teflon-like quality when it comes to memories (very rarely does anything about a T20 stick to your mind, even through the duration of an over), both admittedly subjective parameters, are what I find jarring about T20. The only thing I seem to remember from eight seasons of the IPL is AB de Villiers v Dale Steyn from last year, and an Ishant Sharma spell in Kochi from 2011.

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The freakish delight that is AB de Villiers

When he displays his outlandish repertoire of manufactured strokes, dumbfounded bowlers and captains are left questioning their own skills

Krishna Kumar

01-Apr-2015

Cricket is a game within a game. Two individuals trying to outwit each other, in the context of a team game. Or so we were told. And so we told others.

When AB de Villiers is batting, the game within a game part is somewhat moot. Mostly, de Villiers is playing de Villiers. Well, okay, de Villiers is playing the ball. The bowler seems irrelevant to the context, other than to supply de Villiers with a ball to be hit. The fielders seem similarly inconsequential, other than to fetch the ball from beyond the boundary. In the background, the crowd is swaying, swooning. And breaking into fits of laughter. De Villiers is playing like he is running a high fever. Everyone and everything is swinging in rich delirium.

Old-timers used to say this of another cricketing freak, the Indian legspinner Bhagwath Chandrasekhar, that he often didn't know what he was about to bowl. What chance, then, the poor batsmen, they chuckled. Often, it's as if de Villiers doesn't know what shot he is about to play. What chance, then, the bowlers and fielders? It's often stated that a batsman plays best when he simply reacts to the ball. The assumption is that the reaction is based on conditioning built up during practice. With de Villiers it all seems all so spontaneously conceived. If this is what the man does on the field, it makes you wonder what he does in the nets.

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India need to be flexible with their bowling

Opening with a spinner and rotating the slower bowlers against specific teams could be a sensible ploy for an attack that is struggling for consistency

Krishna Kumar

19-Feb-2015

Despite the strong showing against Pakistan in Adelaide, India cannot afford to be conventional in this World Cup. They need to approach this tournament, especially the quarters and beyond, with the cricketing equivalent of a guerrilla mindset, at least when bowling.

Ambush has to be the watchword, as India do not have wicket-taking penetration, in the conventional sense. Use current form as your selection barometer, and do not go by past performance. Not-so-ideal team selection and poor bowling form leading up to the tournament have left MS Dhoni with almost no alternative strategy.

At first glance, you might wonder how the same team, essentially, won the Champions Trophy so confidently. The difference was that India were just coming off a nice, big home-series win against Australia. And the opening batsmen and opening bowlers were in good nick. Bhuvneshwar Kumar was regularly getting the early breakthroughs and looked penetrative. But with his fitness and form on the downswing - and it's tough to tell which one slid first - India have a serious problem taking wickets. Without early wickets, R Ashwin and his spin colleagues don't look nearly as effective.

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The effect a team's bowling has on its batting

A penetrative bowling attack puts their batsmen in a freer state of mind, which only does the team's match-winning abilities good

Krishna Kumar

08-Jan-2015

India's reliance on their batting in overseas Tests should in theory be well understood. Outside of Trent Bridge 2007, Perth 2008, Kingsmead 2010 and Sreesanth's Test at the Wanderers, India's wins and draws outside the subcontinent in the last two decades have been based on batting the opposition out of the game or at least turning in a serious batting performance that left the game on an even footing. And even in these relatively bowler-dominated wins, the batting efforts were commendably solid.

Generally, though, a lot of blame is laid at the batsmen's door and theories abound about Indian batsmen not being able to adjust to conditions that are foreign to them, because often in the losses there is a collapse or two. Quite often, a lack of courage in facing up to the short, fast ball and technical ineptitude against such bowling are highlighted as the reason for India's poor overseas record. It is only very recently that bowling weaknesses have more explicitly come under the scanner. Still, the sort of multiplier effect that bowling has on a team's batting abilities continues to be mostly ignored. Generally bowling and batting continue to be analysed in isolation.

Barring a particularly barren period in the early-to-mid '90s, Indian batting has done reasonably well against pace. Even in the salad years of Clive Lloyd's West Indies, India's batsmen did no worse than everyone else, and often better. Indians generally didn't hook or pull, but you can't exactly accuse Sunil Gavaskar, Gundappa Vishwanath, Mohinder Amarnath, Sandeep Patil, Yashpal Sharma, Dilip Vengsarkar, Kapil Dev or even Chetan Chauhan of backing away against extreme pace.

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Have India buried the pace hoodoo?

Dravid, Tendulkar and Co set the template, and their successors seem to have been emboldened by their example

Krishna Kumar

27-Dec-2013

Watching India's young batsmen acquit themselves almost like veterans at the Wanderers, the thought struck me that there seems to be a crucial aspect of their mental approach to the construction of an innings that is potentially worth highlighting. A few Tests don't constitute a reasonable sample set to base conclusions on, but part of the fun of cricket analysis is to occasionally extrapolate, and extrapolate in a positive sense.

There has seemed to be a healthy dose of pragmatism in the way the new Indian batting order has gone about playing what is, most would agree, the world's best bowling attack, in conditions that have suited their bowling. Though they have left the ball commendably for long periods, India's batsmen have never gone completely into their shell. They have been alert to the loose ball, have consistently looked for the quick single, and have not seemed unduly perturbed at getting beaten, sometimes in close succession.

There is a long-held view that India's batsmen will get out if you dry up the boundaries, and that this is easier to do on fast, bowler-friendly surfaces. Apart from outstanding individual innings, this theory was frequently borne out by fact, in regard to how India performed as a batting group till the late '90s. Apart from the obvious problem of having to adjust to the greater bounce after having played all your cricket on pitches that afford a good deal less, the old firm of Sehwag, Dravid, Tendulkar, Laxman and Ganguly had to deal with the popular perception that Indians as a group just weren't capable of playing well on pitches in England, Australia and South Africa. As a direct effect of this perception, it seemed at times that Indian batsmen grew up in an environment where you were made constantly aware of the fact that a lot of batsmen from the subcontinent had deficiencies in footwork on bouncy, seaming pitches. Techniques came under severe scrutiny from pundits in India and abroad; mostly a kind of admonishment based on a facile formulation that highlighted lazy footwork and a lack of bottle against the fast, bouncing ball.

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All hail India's new order

The likes of Dhawan, Kohli and Pujara are a study in contrasts and similarities to the men they hope to replace in India's Test line-up

Krishna Kumar

02-Dec-2013

India is fortunate they have managed to rebuild their batting order so quickly. While it's too early to predict how the new order will do in conditions that favour fast bowling, the rapidity with which a new set of good batsmen - who have at the very least shown the hunger to bat for long - has been found is remarkable.

In a way, this desire to bat long is the biggest tribute to the men who have stepped aside. Batting was always India's strong suit, but the magnificence of the band of five, especially outside India, has ensured their deeds will be a wellspring of inspiration for years to come. The ability to pass the baton is not India's strength as a society, and Indian cricket must consider itself a lucky exception to be witness to a fairly seamless transition.

The greatness of Sehwag, Dravid, Tendulkar, Laxman and Ganguly was that they built large and crucial partnerships, and the first four loved making big hundreds. Giving us an appreciation of the value and impact of the match-turning big hundred in a large partnership is their lasting legacy, and it seems to have made an early impact on Murali Vijay, Shikhar Dhawan, Cheteshwar Pujara, Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma. I believe there is another sort of effect that this batting order has had and will have on India's current and future batsmen. And I've come around to the topic at hand.

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Outsource the tampering

There has been enough talk about looking kindly on tampering, but what if it was done off the field?

Krishna Kumar

07-Nov-2013

There's a fair amount of recent discussion that centres on encouraging ball-tampering so long as it doesn't involve external sources. The premise on which this argument rests states that this is finally something that levels the playing ground for bowlers. I'm not bothered by the difficulties of deciding what exactly constitutes an external source, although that is a long-winded matter in itself. What bothers me is: Did tampering start off solely as a reaction to the game being loaded in favour of batsmen? Or was it done with the specific, albeit unadvertised, intent to bend the rules? I'm fairly sure it wasn't the former. It's done in club games, for goodness' sake, and in conditions that are not biased in favour of batsmen by any stretch. The age-old vaseline shine is used quite a bit in club cricket. Ball-tampering has been happening for a long time, way before bats became sturdier and before pitches became more batsman-oriented. So perhaps we shouldn't get contexts mixed.

Apart from the original motivation, I've a basic question. If some teams are better at taking care of the ball, even using perfectly legitimate means, should this fetch them benefits in terms of performance? Need this knowledge of old ball maintenance be important for performance? There is innuendo after most series that one of the teams wasn't able to coax reverse swing out of the ball while the other was. The bowling of reverse swing is a skill that requires a natural full length, allied with genuine pace and loads of hard work to be effective, and hence deserves the recognition it has got. It could most certainly do without insinuations about the methods used to get the ball in suitable shape that cast aspersions on its practitioners.

So, what's the way out? A solution that suggests itself, if you go by this line of reasoning, is to get the tampering done off the field. If there is active discussion about taking the players out of the DRS process and giving it to the umpires, why can't a far more important aspect of the game be handed over to those off the field?

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A yorker state of mind

Your early cricketing experience hugely influences your ability to consistently pitch it in the blockhole as an adult

Krishna Kumar

29-Oct-2013

I'm tempted to say the ability to bowl a yorker is something you are born with. But that would be stretching things a bit. There was a point when, like everyone else I knew, I used to tear my hair out in frustration at the lack of yorkers from Indian bowlers. In the post-Kapil era, there was the odd Zaheer yorker, and that Irfan yorker to Gilchrist, but from a consistency point of view, things looked bleak on the Indian yorker scene.

After some thought I concluded that it perhaps had a lot to do with how they bowled when they were young and how they were coached. The ease with which you bowl a yorker is, I think, rooted largely in your early cricketing experience. You can polish your skills and become better with practice, but I believe there is a fundamental element that is difficult to master if you haven't bowled enough yorkers in your early cricketing years. Unless, that is, you are a bowling freak like Lasith Malinga, who says he didn't know how to bowl a yorker until he met Champaka Ramanayake and Rumesh Ratnayake, after he got into the Sri Lankan team.

Confidence plays a huge role. And this confidence stems from having successfully bowled yorkers at an early age. Many, if not most, of today's bowlers find it difficult to bowl yorkers consistently. Some of it is down to bats becoming better and stronger, and because of the bowlers' general fear of being flogged, as they are in T20s and the slog overs in one-dayers. But a lot of it is due to a kind of regimented early cricket, and bowling in the infernal "right areas". Nothing like tennis-ball cricket, then, to help you learn the art of bowling yorkers.

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The art of air cricket

Is there a cricket fan alive who hasn't paid tribute to his heroes without bat or ball in hand?

Krishna Kumar

10-Oct-2013

The signs are many when you are in the company of a cricket obsessive. As a rule, the obsessive, especially one who has played the game a fair bit, finds it difficult to stand still. His hands move about, he shifts his weight from one foot to the other. Just watch Wasim Akram talk on air. You can see he'd rather be on a field, zipping through that blur of a final stride, wrist behind ball, fingers and wrist coaxing every bit of swing from it. A studio mike in comparison is exceedingly staid. The cricket obsessive and Akram have the same problem, the game and its habits are almost impossible to outgrow.

The obsessive has further identifying characteristics, all clubbed under one unifying rubric: air cricket. Anything that resembles a ball excites him. Seated at the dinner table, he regards the oranges and apples in the fruit basket with a kindly cricketing eye. He might get a few minutes into a conversation without a lot of activity of the physical sort, but give him more than a quarter of an hour and he's guaranteed to pick up a fruit and twirl it from hand to hand in an abbreviated impersonation of Shane Warne in the first stride of his shuffle in. A paperweight, an eraser, anything at all that can serve as a ball will serve as a ball. A pen, a pencil, a television remote will all double as a bat.

At his determined best to not exhibit any mannerism that might mark him out as an obsessive, he might just about avoid yielding to the temptation of the toss of the orange or the apple, or balk at the wristy flourish of the pen. But sooner than later his signature air cricket will force its way through and be a dead giveaway.

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The Atlas who doesn't shrug

From a thrill-a-minute swashbuckler to a captain whose trademark is his calm, Dhoni has come a long way

Krishna Kumar

19-Sep-2013

In the beginning, everything was glitter, burst and crackle. And celebration.

There was a time when I thought Dhoni kept more for the fun of running after the ball. You got the feeling he was waiting for it to go past him, say, to short third man, so that he could take off after it, cap slipping off, coloured hair flying all over, him sliding, all flourish, turning with the slide, head thrown back, hair everywhere again, and then the final hurl of the ball. It was a lot like Rene Higuita; it was not the goalkeeping Higuita was really after, it was the dribble past a couple of forwards, dreadlocks flying.

Dhoni's batting was an unending fireworks display. Sparks flew all around, especially in the direction of midwicket. Dhoni walked out in Visakhapatnam against Pakistan in 2005 with the strongest strut I've seen on a cricket field - with the exception of perhaps Matthew Hayden. Hayden's bounding run announced a sort of gladiatorial intent. Dhoni's rapid, muscular walk is purely intended to get him to the crease as quickly as possible. He says it never struck him that he was coming in to bat and returning to the pavilion at that speed. He is absolutely naturally and completely focused on the main event.

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