What a journey it has been for cricket, I told myself last week as two headlines hit the screens: the men’s T20 World Cup tournament getting into gear and Jammu & Kashmir winning the Ranji Trophy for the first time. Though the two fields were far apart, they both amplified a new face of the game—one playing across the world and the other at home.
Reverse Swing, this column’s title, derives its name from a particular form of pace bowling unheard of until the 1970s, when Pakistani fast bowlers perfected the technique to move an old cricket ball towards the rougher side more than the usual shinier one. It’s a metaphor for many things including the journey of cricket itself.
As surprises and near-upsets at the World Cup showed, with Australia not even entering the semi-finals, cricket retains its old descriptor as a game of glorious uncertainties. But much else has changed. The game once famous for five-day Tests in which patient bowling and safe batting were de rigueur has now given way to three-hour T20 games that abound in risky hits out of the park.
In the 1960s and 70s, a few elderly Indians tut-tutted over five-day matches as a waste of time, pointing to Japan, the era’s emerging economy that did not indulge in such leisure. The rise of one-day games in the 1970s—initially of 60 overs for each side—with the arrival of the World Cup changed that. The eventual adoption of the T20 format put cricketing bouts closer to football matches in duration.
There was a time when batters, in the best spirit of the gentleman’s game, would ‘walk’ without waiting for the umpire’s decision because they knew in their conscience that they were out. Or they simply obeyed a decision even if that appeared wrong because ‘the umpire is always right’. Look how technology has changed that! In the India vs South Africa game at the T20 World Cup, the ground umpire asked for the third umpire’s technology-aided review to rule a batsman out even though the fielding team had not appealed.
Technology has changed much—from enabling day-night matches, to shorter formats suited for TV audiences, to software apps that analyse and display strokes and deliveries in every conceivable manner. White flannels were replaced by colourful uniforms once disparaged as ‘pajama’ outfits.
Perhaps the most tectonic shift has been the game’s pivot from England-Australia prominence to the subcontinent, especially India, as money followed eyeballs and South Asian nations started beating the rest of the world and entrepreneurial zeal took the sport to new corners of the subcontinent.
Administrators Jagmohan Dalmiya and Inderjit Singh Bindra dramatically changed the sport’s fortunes and focus. Bindra built the Mohali stadium in Chandigarh, while Dalmiya, who honed his sports administration skills at the Eden Gardens, grew the International Cricket Council’s coffers by about 14 times during his three-year tenure as the first Asian and first non-cricketer to head the sport’s global governing body in the late 1990s.
Under Asian stewardship, cricket reached new shores far beyond its English routes, justifying sociologist Ashis Nandy’s quip: “Cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British.”
The ongoing World Cup shows that cricket is no longer just a sport of former British colonies. Italy, Nepal, Oman, the Netherlands and the United Arab Emirates were among the 20 teams in the fray. More importantly, the Dutch, Afghan and American cricketers displayed talent and spirit that placed them in the sport’s mainstream.
I recall a lazy morning at Mumbai’s Brabourne Stadium talking to commentary veteran A F S ‘Bobby’ Talyarkhan, who remarked that cricket was supposed to be a game of the maidan, to be enjoyed in a leisurely manner. Well, there is nothing really laid-back about it now with its mix of cheerleaders, in-stadium music, booking announcements and frenetic camerawork.
In a way, T20 is nothing but a remix of baseball that owes its origin to cricket, though crafted circa 2003 in England. It may be less known that cricket was once popular in the US—for about a century since its independence, a preference that changed only after the Civil War of the 1860s. Baseball, codified in 1845, was derived from an early form of cricket called rounders.
In India, British colonial rulers applied their divide-and-rule policy to cricket as well. The Bombay Pentangular tournament played from 1892 to 1946 featured teams called Europeans, Parsees, Hindus, Muslims and ‘The Rest’. However, in independent India, cricket has emerged as a unifier in which every region aspires to win domestic tournaments and players of modest backgrounds rise to prominence through excellence in the sport. Writer Anil Saari described cricket as India’s ‘fifth estate’ and cinema as ‘the sixth’ in a reflection of how they wielded influence on the country’s social ladder.
The Ranji victory of Jammu & Kashmir, long wracked by separatism and social alienation, is thus a cultural milestone too. J&K won the trophy 44 years after winning its first match and 67 years after it entered the championship. The last international match was played in Kashmir in 1986, after which political turmoil blocked fixtures. Hopefully, the Ranji triumph will change the region’s fortunes.
It could be said that both cricket and the railways have strengthened India’s economy and social fabric, though not in ways the British would have intended.
Madhavan Narayanan | REVERSE SWING | Senior journalist
(Views are personal)
(On X @madversity)