Sunil Gavaskar makes contradictory statements about IPL and T20!
Sunil Gavaskar, a member of the IPL’s Governing Council in the past, bowls a googly with conflicting statements © Getty Images
After the recent One-Day International against Australia at Adelaide, Sunil Gavaskar went on record saying that T20 cricket was affecting the technique of batsmen. This is in direct contradiction to what he had said less than a month back, after India had lost their third straight Test match against Australia at Perth. Arunabha Sengupta analyses the wrong ‘un bowled by the former batting great.
The wrong ‘un is one of the most scintillating deliveries of cricket. The ball hangs tantalisingly in the air, moving in a wicked, enticing arc. When it pitches, most of the eyes dart in anticipation of the break in one direction, and confounding everyone, sometimes the best of batsmen, it spins the other way.
Sadly, with the retirement of the masterly exponents of the ball, Anil Kumble and Mushtaq Ahmed, more googlies seem to be bowled off the field nowadays than on it.
It is nothing new for administrators, media and fans to pitch their arguments in the same spot and give it diametrically different spins after every infinitesimal moment that constitutes public memory. However, it does make one look askance at the state of the game if great cricketers themselves stoop to twists and turns of opinions.
When the master mistimed his comments
Often, best of batsmen are made to look pretty silly when they misread the googly. But, when the accepted master of the straight bat bowls one of them himself, that too verbally, it is indeed disheartening.
Sunil Gavaskar still reigns in many a nostalgic heart as the greatest of batsmen. His powers of concentration are a part of cricketing folklore, and his technical perfection is perhaps unmatched even 24 years after his retirement.
Hence, when he says that Twenty20 cricket is affecting the Indian batsmen, it is natural to accept this as the logical conclusion of a veritable expert. As a master who was known to put a staggering price on his wicket, his soul is bound to cringe on seeing batsmen throwing their wickets away with profligacy of the millionaires that the Indian Premier League (IPL) has made some of them.
However, what jars in grating, discordant notes is that the statement comes less than a month after his assertion that the IPL cannot be blamed for poor technique of the batsmen.
Indeed, when one sees the amount of talent that drips from the youngsters – as was evident in Rohit Sharma’s tremendous pull that landed well into the stands and Virat Kohli’s cross-batted whip off the front foot that streaked to the mid-wicket fence – and when the very next moment one sees them play atrociously loose shots to throw their wickets away, such a reaction is obvious.
After all, there is every reason to believe that a gradual mental conditioning to maintain the tempo and to take adventurous risks, that comes with the gluttonous diet of T20s, does actually peep out of the restraints in 50 over games or even Test matches and manifests itself at the most inopportune moments.
Gavaskar is very much aware of this trend. He himself had confessed in the mid-eighties that the dreadful habit – by his technical standards, that is – of opening the face of the bat and running the ball down to third man had crept into his batting from an overdose of one-day cricket.
A lot of former cricketers tend to agree about the detrimental effects of the T20 game. Bishan Singh Bedi has gone on record saying that T20 is nonsense. Again, this makes perfect sense coming from one whose flight and loop created the illusion of his manoeuvring the ball on a string. When spinners are increasingly keen on earning their million and a bit by pushing twenty four balls through the air, flat and fast, the legendary spinner has the right to feel aggrieved.
Imran Khan, too, was emphatic that the IPL has hurt Indian cricket and denounced T20 as a format which will never produce Test cricketers. He categorically blamed the emphasis on this form of the game being the primary cause of India’s overseas woes in England and Australia.
However, after India lost the third straight Test Down Under, Gavaskar had been extremely prompt to rise to the defence of the IPL, saying that the tournament cannot be blamed for the technical ineptness on display.
The overused Warner card
Given that IPL is T20 injected with heavy financial steroids, it does unfortunately seem that the legend has suddenly applied for membership in the dubious club of cricket’s tricky turncoats.
His arguments on David Warner’s success as a Test batsman also ring hollow. The Australian southpaw is the exception rather than the rule; and there have been too many commentators, scribes and experts, propelled by debatable interests, who have desperately piggybacked on his runs in their single-minded race for championing the shortest format of the game.
While the devoted followers of the game are used to pseudo-expert tongues that wag in either direction with nonchalant bravado, and pretentious pens that overwrite their own words over and over again till the offerings resemble nonsensical graffiti, they still retain some expectation from someone of Gavaskar’s eminence and authority. If genuine experts are thus twisted into knots by the peripheral entrapments of cricket, it will take quite an effort to untangle the mess that conflicting interests have got cricket into.
(Arunabha Sengupta is trained from Indian Statistical Institute as Statistician. He works as a Process Consultant, but purifies the soul through writing and cricket, often mixing the two into a cleansing cocktail. The author of three novels, he currently resides in the incredibly beautiful, but sadly cricket-ignorant, country of Switzerland. You can know more about him from his author site, his cricket blogs and by following him on Twitter)