The Trick to Enjoy Test Cricket - Enjoy Chewing the Cud
I
was a pre-teen in the mid 1960s. My paternal grandmother’s younger brother used
to tease me on Indian cricket, and how.
In
those days, M. L. Jaisimha, Chandu Borde, Dilip Sardesai, Farokh Engineer, B K
Kunderan were the openers / 1 down. This grand uncle (is that the formal way to
designate this relationship?), when we visited him, not let me in the house,
sitting as he always was in the roofed veranda, enjoying retired life.
Those
were the days. I too am retired but I do not get to enjoy this phase of my
life. Please do feel sorry for me.
If
a cricket match is being played anywhere in the world, he would catch me and
ask me a few questions, mostly arithmetic; like, if a team is at 269 for 8
wickets, at what score would they complete their innings. I had to do the
required mental gymnastics (no electronic calculators then), and say, 340. His
response? No, 336 (he, like many others of that time, had many tricks up his
sleeve for arithmetic calculations; read Richard P. Feynman’s Surely you are
joking, Mr. Feynman). I would hang my head in shame.
Well
it is another matter that the innings score hardly ever came close to the
predictions of either of us. I am sure my grand uncle knew this and perhaps
this was his way of teaching the limits of proportionality, or of arithmetic in
general. This was precisely when I was learning the usual “water tank filling
and emptying” problems. I got to question what I was taught only in the twelfth
year of my schooling (ironically in college, during my Pre-University Course
studies) when I was introduced to elements of calculus.
Coming
back to M. L. Jaisimha et al., the score in the Indian innings roamed around twenty
for two or some such low scores, one opener with the one-down batsman, or both
the openers back in the pavilion (no dugouts in those times). I used to be very
satisfied if the innings score breached what I had predicted using proportionality
calculations, that is, reaching three digits!
Now,
it appears that the powers that be in IPL statistics group have not matured
beyond my 3rd or 4th class competency in arithmetic. How else can you explain, at the end of the
12th over in a IPL contest, the chyron on the TV screen reads, “At 9
runs an over, the predicted score is ...; at 10 runs an over, ...; at 11 runs
an over ...”? Worse still in the middle of the 16th over, “At 9 runs
...” etc.
My
question to whoever chooses to run these statistics on the screen: What is the
probability that the score at the end of the innings (perhaps 20 overs [six
balls an over] or a few balls less) will give a per over average that is an
integer? I bet my life they cannot answer. The, why use statistics at all? Just
say that, “At this venue, at this time of the day, with overcast skies, in
matches between these two teams at this stage of the innings, the batting team
has averaged approximately eight runs an over.”
Read
the above sentence again, to realize that there really cannot be an average as
very few matches would have been played under all the conditions listed!
A
T20I or even an ODI are insanely focused on statistics when that measure
carries no meaning. However, in Test Cricket, you have time to chew the cud, and
enjoy uncertainty. Yes, there is nail-biting excitement in extended uncertainty.
But, when shortened, the excitement may be intensified but would be ephemeral.
Yes,
at the end of the fourth day of the fifth test between India and Australia in
Australia, I was excited to imagine that the Indian cricket team would defeat that
of Australia (it is not a nation defeating another nation, you see). Of course,
that imagination went as well as a cigarette puff, into thin air soon after the
Australians went in to bat for their second innings.
Yet,
I enjoyed it when it existed. To have such a well-nigh impossible chance is,
well, well-nigh impossible in ODI or T20I.
To
be excited about Test Cricket matches, one has to become a cow, and chew the
cud. I have been ready ever since my grand uncle led me down that path.
Raghuram
Ekambaram
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