/ 17 November 2006

Underachievers in for a hiding — again

The more complicated contests that lie deeper into the summer may be more keenly fought affairs, but as a fortnight of limited-overs spectacle dawns this weekend, one can’t help watching the newly arrived Indians with the grim, respectful pity usually displayed by onlookers in that part of the film where the dapper young engineer has drawn the short straw and must now leave his fiancée to fly into space where a comet and nuclear bomb have his name on them.

Of course, we know the script: something goes wrong, and the young engineer ends up as a bluish asteroid with a faintly surprised expression. Which is precisely why one can predict with such certainty that India’s one-day hopes are doomed from the outset.

Like the young asteroid, who got engaged and bought a puppy just before the mission, everything is stacked against India. Their record in South Africa is appalling: if they win two out of the five games it will be their best showing to date in this country. An embarrassing exit from the Champions Trophy has stung Indian fans and media alike (there’s nothing like defeat to start blurring the lines between those two lobbies), while Sachin Tendulkar continues to be harrowed by mortal batting form and Yuvraj Singh’s knee plays hard-to-get.

It seemed somehow cruelly fitting that the team’s apparel, which included the cherished national blazers, failed to be delivered in time for their departure; a bungle reflecting a board that is being increasingly criticised at home for having mastered the art of wringing every last penny out of the sport while being simultaneously clueless about how to support players.

To listen to the pundits, both professional and vocational, it would seem that Indian cricket is being hobbled by a host of diverse conspirators. Coach Greg Chappell is too autocratic. Virender Sehwag isn’t committed enough. Irfan Pathan has become a liability. Anil Kumble’s merits were being wilfully ignored. And so on, and so on, for many hundreds of column inches.

South Africans wouldn’t be so easily convinced. If Springbok rugby has taught us anything, it is that rotten administrators can turn even the most gifted players and clear-thinking coaches into addle-pated goons almost overnight. Naturally one can’t always pass the back upwards, but the suits have become almost entirely untouchable in modern sport, and with that invulnerability has come rampant incompetence, invariably reflected and deflected downwards.

This, then, is why India are about to be gutted. It isn’t because South Africa are on a gentle upward trajectory and they are on a declining one. It isn’t because they, with the exception of Rahul Dravid and Tendulkar, have never got their minds and techniques around South African pitches. It isn’t even because their bowlers rarely fire at the same time as their batters. It is because Indian cricket — probably the most influential powerbroker in the sport and certainly the richest one — is a miserable, snivelling 90-pound weakling of an underachiever.

It’s a simple issue of demographics, but this simplicity is entirely obscured by the curious belief that seems to infest the game to this day: that all major teams come to an international match as very rough equals. It is an assumption that tries to insist that all 22 men on the field are more or less equally talented, have more or less the same upbringing, and all think more or less in the same manner.

Why this ludicrous assumption should be present is a mystery. Perhaps it’s an unconscious throwback to the middle of the last century, when the sports power blocs were being established, and when it was reasonable for the gents at Lords to assume that a few million white Australians and Englishmen and South Africans would always play a few million (unpoliticised) black West Indians and (upper-class) Indians.

But cricket has changed with perceptions, and today it is illogical not to look at the bigger pictures and numbers. It is no longer a case of 10-million versus 10-million. These are myths that need to be exploded; and the fastest way to do this is to look at the talent pools available to the various cricketing nations.

For instance, England manages to produce a solid international team out of a pool of roughly 8,5-million young men. Australia does it better, drawing on just 3,5-million. And yet surely the accolades should be reserved for New Zealand, hanging in there in the middle of rankings despite having just 750 000 young men to draw on? Logically and statistically one has to suggest that the Kiwis are better at producing cricketers than even the mighty Australians.

So what is a ”good” rate of production for international cricketers? New Zealand produces one for every 68 000 youngsters, while undeveloped Pakistan goes through 3,3-million lads before it unearths a gem. South Africa’s two economies produce two results, but perhaps it’s best to consider Makhaya Ntini, Mfuneko Ngam, Monde Zondeki, Loots Bosman and Thami Tsolekile, five genuine top-flight players plucked from a pool of roughly 10-million young black men. Is one out of two-million a fair number for an impoverished community, and one not traditionally very interested in cricket? Perhaps.

Let us assume, then, that an acceptable rate is somewhere between Pakistan’s one in 3,3-million, and New Zealand’s one in 68 000. Let’s be generous and say that a cricketing country is managing to unearth talent at a fairly reasonable rate if it manages to produce one international player for every two-million young men.

Going at that rate, India should have, at any one time, not 11 just international-quality players. It should have 88. Given that gigantic squad, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that an Indian First XI should comprise four Dravids, two Glenn McGraths, and two Shane Warnes, with the remaining places filled by mortals. That it doesn’t, and that they have sent only one Dravid to South Africa, is an indictment of a system utterly failing to develop talent.

If cricket is a religion in India as the popular myth insists, it is one whose priests have become closet atheists.