Published: Sep 13, 2016, 02:31 PM (IST)
Edited: Oct 07, 2016, 06:23 PM (IST)
While the cricket fan generally responds to analytical arguments with ‘numbers do not mean anything/everything’, we also come across some curious logic of the zealot trying rigorous logic. In this series, S Chuzzlewit takes you through some of the most hilarious ones.
Gundappa Viswanath, god bless his soul, was one of the finest batsmen produced by India. And one of the gentlest souls in the cricketing world.
Not unsurprisingly, his being a gentleman, his being a brilliant batsman, and his being a good soul combine in the psyche of the fan into one composite whole.
Hence the platitudes flow.
Vishy never played for himself. He was a team-man. Hence, he has only 14 Test hundreds. He could have scored a lot more. Just that he was not selfish enough to play for hundreds.
And then the other platitude.
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He was a player who always came good in a crisis. If he scored a hundred India would not lose. You could be sure of that. India never lost a Test when he scored a hundred.
The perfect gentleman with steel in his mental makeup is the ideal of many an Indian fan.
However, what does that tell us?
We ignore the fact that often scoring a hundred when the rest of the batting collapses in a defeat is a more difficult task, one that Brian Lara has performed way too many times and he is not a lesser batsman because of that.
Let us see where the two platitudes lead us.
1. He did not score a lot of hundreds because he was not selfish.
2. When he scored hundreds India would not lose.
Hence, he scored less hundreds because of his selflessness, and therefore prevented condition (2) from taking place.
Thereby, the loss of India was not taken out of the equation because he did not score as many hundreds as he could have.
So, one can conclude that India would have been safer and perhaps lost less Tests had he been a bit more selfish.
Well, there you go. No one can reason like the cricket fan.
This article is about the cricket fan and his arguments and not about the cricketer.
(S Chuzzlewit is a chronicler who sees the world of cricket through a sometimes light-hearted and often brutal lens)
