Outside The Line

So This Texan Billionaire Walks Into A Talent Agent's Office...

I know I really should be focused on the 3rd Test in Delhi, and I should probably be seeking answers to some of the many important questions it has posed -- from "Just how bad is Jason Krejza as a spinner that he can't knock Cam White off the position?" to "Is there a single fielder in this Indian team who knows which end to throw to, let alone how to score a direct hit?" -- but my mind has been distracted by something else.

No, not the American presidential election. (I think they lost me somewhere between the celebrification of "Joe the Plumber" and that of "Tito the Builder".)

No, not the start of the NBA season. (The prospect of the Houston Rockets' Rafer Alston as the primary point guard in my fantasy squad is causing to wake up in shivers.)

No, not the Super Series in Antigua. (A mediocre English squad playing a depleted West Indian squad on a bunch of half-baked pitches is hardly a recipe for fireworks.)

Instead, it's the English media's reaction to the Stanford-WAG controversy, and to the Super Series as a whole. For anyone who hasn't caught up with frenzy, the here's The Surfer rounding-up the week's coverage.

If you only read the coverage, you'd think the Jumbotron at the Antigua ground had shown footage of Allen Stanford blowing a load straight into the Ashes urn and forcing Emily Pryor to drink the contents, as Kevin Pietersen and Giles Clarke watched in the background and burned 50-pound notes just for shits and giggles. (Or something equally Aristocrats-worthy.)

It's like there's a competition to see who can come up with the most alarmist and hyperbolic conceit for their article. I can only imagine what the special weekend editions of the papers will bring us.

On A Long Enough Timeline, The Survival Rate For Every Game Drops To Zero

Last week, I got some comment section flak for daring to suggest that the empty stands at Bangalore might reflect the fact that Indians don't give much of a shit about Test cricket these days. Now, here is Stephen Brinkley making much the same point -- only in a clearer, better researched, more sober manner -- for none less than the Wisden Cricketer.

The interesting thing is that no matter which opinion he considers, which avenue his mind wanders through, the future looks grim for Test cricket. There seems to be no silver lining, no guarded hope, no "and yet there's always the chance that..." In every direction you look, the prospects are dim.

(The only thing we might have left to hold on to is the fact that since cricket is so conservative and slow to evolve, the death of Tests will probably take decades, rather than just years.)

Sleepy Growls At The Easy Swoon

You ever seen a bear coming out of hibernation in the spring? It looks sprightly, and eager, and wicked skinny, with flaps of loose skin hanging down like old labia from his every quarters.

I was hoping to come out like that at the end of the winter -- yet another miserable, blustery one for the Kiwi books -- fresh and ready for new sights and new adventures; a springtime of body and mind. I didn't feel like being bothered before that. Sometimes, though, noises outside the den rock your sleep and force you to begrudgingly get up and check out the commotion.

Noises like this Guest Column on cricinfo, after the conclusion of South Africa's Test series against England...

I suppose I could count as a fierce Smith critic, since I have attacked him numerous times for his many sins. So is Houwing right? Is this the end of the road? Is there nothing left to do than kneel at the Capt'n's feet and repentantly accept his highly load?

Um, how about... no?

I understand that journalists, commentators, and those in the loop all love Graeme Smith. They can barely hide their chubbies under their pants half the time. And it makes sense. He's jovial and gregarious. He jokes with them.  Gives them good quote. Makes them feel like they belong. (He's even got the hot blonde girlfriend with no reservation about parading her hotness around in public). I get all that. If you wanted to have a cricketer over for a barbeque, Smith'll probably be the one.

But what exactly am I supposed to "salute" the guy for? For his team winning a series against a mediocre, has-been English squad? His 2nd-ranked team (which apparently also houses a better all-rounder than Garry Sobers) beating the 5th-ranked team, a team whose spearhead for the series was James Anderson, and who at one stage shared the new ball with Darren fuckin' Pattinson?! Get serious.

Oh that's right, it's because South Africa's first victory in hallowed English soil 43 years, right? That's why it's such an event. Brave King Graeme, conquering territory uncharted since 1965...

Well, not quite. Twenty-five of those years were covered by apartheid, so it doesn't seem fair to include them as part of the "legacy of loss" which Smith apparently inherited. (By that logic, we could also claim that South Africa went undefeated for a quarter of a century, and have suffered one of the most vicious continued declines, comparable to that of the West Indies, for almost two decades since.)

Even after readmission in 1992, though, it's not as if South Africa have performed that badly while touring England. They drew twice (in 1994 and 2003), and lost only once (1998) by a one game margin. Are these unbearable crosses to bear? Hardly. If Smith wants to impress, he can try beating the Aussies or the Sri Lankans on their turf. Then I'll listen.

But okay, fine, I guess England is somehow relevant in the grand scheme of things because, um... it's old. (And that oldness tradition, after being unabatedly pumped into cricketers' heads since childhood, can start to screw with their minds, cause them to feel an added level of pressure and make them a tad more likely to fail when playing against said old foe.)

So basically Smith & co. managed to not lose a series they should've been favoured to win from the start. Congratulations, boys, you didn't choke for once. Want a parade?

As for Smith himself, I'll credit him for his innings at Edgbaston. I have no problem with that.  To score an unbeaten century in the fourth innings while chasing 280 is an impressive feat under any conditions, and I'll be glad to applaud anyone for their batting prowess in a situation like that. Great knock.

But that's a mere batting feat, and the credit it deserves is purely on terms of batsmanship, of the same kind as Ashwell Prince's two very Chanderpaulesque centuries and Neil McKenzie's 500-ball extravaganza to guarantee the draw at Lord's. It doesn't deserve any greater praise because it comes from Smith, or from whoever happens to be the captain.

[N.B. The idea of a "captain's innings", incidentally, is another one of those cricket clichés that is hollow to the point of meaninglessness. Isn't every innings played by a captain, by definition, a "captain's knock"? If it isn't, then what quality does it possess that differentiates it from a regular good knock? Is there a certain kind of good innings played by a captain that does not qualify for "captain's innings" status? Why does a quality innings that just so happens to be played by a captain apply to a rarefied level of achievement?]

When The Going Gets Weird, The Pros Turn Hack

In 1970, Greil Marcus started his review of Bob Dylan's Self-Portrait album for Rolling Stone with a line that has become a classic in the history of rock criticism...

"What is this shit?"

In four simple words, Marcus managed to capture every listener's instant visceral reaction upon first hearing Self-Portrait -- a clear and deliberate Fuck You from Dylan to his entire fanbase, in the form of a double-LP collection of bad pop covers and uninspired, atonal romps -- one which is magnified when the album is placed in its proper historical context, as the follow-up to a stunning half-decade of vital gems like Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, and even The Basement Tapes.

I couldn't help but be reminded of Marcus' sentiment last week, this time upon first reading cricinfo's account, written by Jamie Alter, of the ICC's decision to implement a new referral system.

Seriously... what was this shit?

In bygone days, I might've called it a laughable piece of lily-livered yellow journalism. Today, I'll call it what it is: a truly hacktastic outpour of journalistic sewage delivered directly to my screen. In other words, a piece of shit.

First, there's the headline... this is how it appeared on the front page of cricinfo at the time:

Notice how there's no actual news conveyed by the headline? The real headline is stated in the first subhead: "Referrals to be trialled." All the above head does is express an alleged consequence of the news item itself, and treating it as if it were news. It's a little like basing ongoing news coverage of a nightclub bombing on the headline: "Downtown explosion irritates sleep apnea sufferers in nearby suburb." For this, I won't blame Alter, since headlines are usually editorial decisions.

However, the title of the actual piece was "A leap of faith in technology", which is also the lede sentence in Alter's piece. Later in the first paragraph, we also get our first instance of "the umpire's word is no longer final" statement. It soon becomes clear, from both the tone and content of the piece, how apt those headlines really are given the nature of Alter's words.

"A leap of faith in technology"? Seriously? Could Alter sound any more like a deranged flat-earther? (Be suspicious whenever "technology" is used as a catch-all term to represent anything that isn't human). I've got news for you... cricket is a leap of faith in technology. Bats, balls, pads, helmets, armguards, boxes -- especially boxes -- are massive innovations in technology whose efficacy we take for granted when we step on the pitch.

But there there is no real "real of faith" , since the new technology is being introduced not out of blind faith, but because its results have been analysed, and tested, and they happen to work. It's no more of a leap of faith than expecting the sun to rise from the East tomorrow, or an object to fall to the ground when dropped (whether David Hume is right and inductive reasoning as a whole is unjustified is a different question).

Then there's "the umpire's word if no longer final." This statement is wrapped in such massive layers of bullshit that I could chose at least two different retorts to it: a) I could say: yes it is final, only the definition of "umpire" has changed slightly; or b) I could say: no, it was never final.

The "umpire" is basically a heuristic construct we design to make sure the rules of the game are being followed by all concerned. Nothing more. Its existence is seemingly embodied by the one man in the middle to whom all the players appeal, but it in fact involves a combination of factors working together as joint arbiters and interpretors of the laws.

So, working in tandem, we have the main umpire, the square leg umpire, the third umpire, the cameras and video system that the third umpire uses, the boundary rope, the crease lines, etc. All the new referral system does is add a few extra components to that construct, in order to increase its accuracy (as well to diminish the grounds for dissent... see: Hair fiasco). If it turns out that it doesn't increase it, then it should probably be scrapped and a simpler system should be adopted.

I could go on and on with this, and parse away to my blackening heart's content, but I'm sure you get the gist of it.

I'm not sure what Alter's deal is. Maybe he was just having a bad day; maybe his plane was delayed, or he was stuck at customs for 3 hours, or that growing hemorrhoid he's been ignoring for weeks finally popped (or, hey, it could be that he really does in fact reason in such crotchety, reactionary ways)... but that column was a disgrace. And that's one thing cricinfo shouldn't be allowed to get away with these days.

Like it or not, they are now the "paper of record" as far as day-to-day cricket action goes, and they can't afford to treat their cricket coverage like Murdoch's Fox News does its news material... a little bit of infotainment, a handful of vague on-the-hour soundbytes, theatric bits of he said/she said confrontation posing as debate, all delivered in a nice package of firm tits and high cheekbones.

I have no problem at all with the content Alter's opinion. In fact, it's valid and eminently defensible. But this was supposed to be a news report, not an op-ed. As a piece of commentary or polemic, I'd consider it weak but balanced. As news, it's worthless. The mere tone of it and its emphasis already makes me doubt the writer's accuracy from the first paragraph.

If cricinfo wants to go all Gonzo on our ass and deliberately blur the line between reporting and opinion, they're well within their rights to do so. But they can't expect their readers to keep treating them like the Holy Grail of cricket news and the Oracle of objectivity all at once if they continue to do so.

Guyana's Nadia Doing The Forty-Seven Ronin To Grandmaster Flash

Mike Holmans, from cricinfo's new Different Strokes blog, writes a little paean of sorts to Outside the Line's very own patron saint, Shiv Chanderpaul. Always nice to see the love spread around.

I have to admit, though, I'm a little tired of people referring to his batting style as ugly, or unseemly, or, as Holmans puts it, "a style best appreciated on the radio." (They make it sound like it's the Elaine dance, or something.)

On the contrary, Shiv's every stay at the crease is an extended display of kinetic beauty... it's like a strange and hypnotic kabuki break dance, all knees and elbows and wrists flailing in every direction, in constant motion, with varying speeds, yet always culminating in the most balanced, technically correct position in the textbook.

Seeing Chanderpaul hit a cover drive, with perfect footwork, off the middle for four is like watching a Comaneci landing after a complex 3 minute gymnastics floor routine. You just gasp, do a double-take, and wonder, how the hell did that just happen?   

(If anyone ever was in need of a tight 5-minute super-slo-mo highight reel set to cool music, it's Old Man Shiv.)

If Only Monty Were A Religious Experience

Last week, The Guardian ran a feature where they got their arts critics and their sports writers to swap roles and do the others' job for a day. So, to cover the horse racing, they sent a dance critic; to write about the opera, they had a rugby analyst, etc.

To cover the cricket they sent Caroline Sullivan, an American rock critic, who attended the first day of the 2nd Test match between England and New Zealand at Old Trafford and came out with the same puzzled, nonplussed feeling that seems to afflict anyone who watches cricket for the first time:

Today's game is considered special because it's umpire Darrell Hair's first match since he controversially accused a Pakistani player of cheating in 2006. I keep an eye on him to see if he does anything interesting, but no -- he just stands a few feet back from the pitch and looks bored.

Ah, but what's this? He's waving an arm, and both teams troop off the pitch. Apparently, the light has become too dim for play to continue, and we're going to have to wait until things brighten up. An hour later -- it's 5pm, and we've been here six hours -- we're still waiting. But instead of throwing bottles, as the crowd would be doing if this were a gig, spectators are placidly reading magazines and drinking tea. And they say English stoicism no longer exists.

Other than her comparison of a long, tedious day at the cricket to a Tindersticks concert, there wasn't too much of note in her review (nor in any of the other ones, for that matter.) In fact, the most interesting thing about the whole exercise was to see how far some of the writers would push their forced analogies just to make a point. (The prize might go to the theatre critic who managed to compare an overweight, 47-year-old darts player's struggles to the peripateia of the doomed heroes in classical tragedies.)

I guess it should be no big surprise that The Guardian's idea turned out to be better in theory than in practice. The job of putting the action on the field into a different context and of bringing new perspectives to the analysis of the game should really belong to the specialist sports writers themselves -- that is, in essence, what they're being paid for. It takes a spectacularly good writer -- and/or an outstanding intellect -- to come in from a different field and cover a sport in a novel and insightful way.

(Like, for instance, David Foster Wallace's brilliant piece on Roger Federer for the New York Times a couple of years ago. I'd give a nut and a couple of inches to write something half as good as that someday.)

Good Thing Cricket Writers Don't Listen To Shock Comics

Earlier tonight, as I waited for my porn to load, I was glancing through the who's who page on cricinfo, and I was surprised to see how many of their staff settled on cricket writing after starting out in marketing, of all things. Is that common? Personally, I couldn't think of a worse fate in life than a career in marketing... but I'm also in serious, crippling debt, so what do I know?

(And if you didn't think that last paragraph was just an excuse for me to post a Bill Hicks clip, well then... you obviously don't know me well enough.)

No Time For Titles, Go Read

Courtesy of Dileep Premachandran, here is by far the most even-headed account and commentary on the IPL so far.

Read it. Absorb it. And come back for Outside the Line's verdict on the league later in the week.

Athwart History, Without Red Lights

                            

In the movie Little Miss Sunshine, Greg Kinnear's character tells us that sarcasm is the refuge of losers. I don't know if that's true (and I don't know how seriously I could take it coming from a guy who was in "Stuck on You") but if it is true, then Gideon Haigh must really be losing it at the moment. What else could explain his latest column, in which he snidely asks "Hey, as long we're bringing in umpiring changes, why don't we just ban appealing too!?" The man is usually a study in Aristotelian temperance and lyrical grace, so it's tough to see him engaging in pissing matches with his commenters, tossing out snarky asides like a cheap Don Rickles clone. (I guess that's one thing about the new writer/reader dynamic in the online world: it may increase interaction, but it sure makes the writers catty.)

It's not hard to understand Haigh's reluctance to embrace Twenty20 and all the new ICC proposals. He is a cricket historian, after all, and anything that downplays the "history" part of cricket and accentuates the sheen and modernity of the new format is anathema to his purpose. One can't blame him for that. To label him a "romantic" because of  that is, however, unwarranted -- he may indeed be one, but that would more likely be due to his temperament, not the content of his views. There are romantics of all kinds, and Twenty20 will find its own soon enough. Romance is not inherent to Test cricket, nor sport, nor any other activity -- it's in our own understanding and appreciation of these activities.

I actually think Mukul Kesavan gets it right this time, when he flat out admits why he and many others have been negative about the Twenty20 revolution: fear. They're just scared Test cricket, as we know it, will not survive all the changes. That's a valid complaint, and one that does need to be addressed... but let's actually address it, in the open, honestly, instead of shielding ourselves from it by disingenuously bashing a league that's barely 5 weeks old.

Any problems that cricket has at this point were not created by the IPL or by Twenty20 -- they were merely brought forth by them, and we should be glad that's the case. How can fix something when you can't tell it's broken?

Fallacies Of Hate

                                       

We're close to reaching the half-way stage of the IPL now, and the verdicts are starting to come in from all directions. Preliminary though they might be, every few days a new “expert” opinion is released, telling us what to make of this crazy little experiment of ours.

We’ve already had more than our share of columns with harsh words to say about the league – there’s the ornery alarmism of Mukul Kesavan, the dewey nostalgia of Gideon Haigh, the shrill polemic of Jayaditya Gupta.

In the other direction, we’ve also had the easily-excitable hyperbole and mixed metaphors of Peter Roebuck, and the measured English-broadsheet approval of Lawrence Booth. (In between all that, there’s Ian Chappell, either telling us something we all already know, or something none of us care to know. As usual with Ian, it’s hard to tell which one is which.)

What are we to make of all this? How do we work out what’s what among all the different views? What can we do?

This is where I come in.

I am now almost four years into a philosophy degree, fifty grand in the hole, and the only thing even resembling a “craft” I have learned in that time is the ability to analyse logical arguments. I may not be able to build a radio transmitter or know how to tie a good sailor’s knot, but at least I can distinguish my modus tollens from my modus ponens. (Ladies… form a line. No pushing.)

And even though this ability to fish for fallacies and logical inconsistencies is (surprisingly) unmarketable, it does come in handy when trying to sift through large amounts of varying opinions all dealing with a single topic. See, regardless of what your position might be on an idea, there are good ways and there are bad ways to argue about it. There are honest criticisms, and there are disingenuous gripes. There are valid points, and there are fallacies.

This is all about the fallacies.

They’re usually not intentional and they can often slide by unnoticed, but most of these IPL-hating columns are rife with fallacies, which can be harmful if they stick. So my goal here is to debunk some of the most pernicious ones, and hope against hope they can be someday be marginalised from the discourse.

(This, by the way, is in no form an attempt at advocating for/against the IPL. We’re not propagandists. At Outside the Line, we said from the start that we’d be watching this first season trying to learn -- figuring stuff out, observing, and resisting the urge to generalise and extrapolate just to have something to say. There will be a time for analysis and reflection, and a time of proscriptions and recommendations. Now is a time to absorb, and we can’t do so with all these damn fallacies in the air!)

The 5 Fallacies of IPL Haters

The "It's Just Not Cricket" Fallacy
This is hugely common one among the haters, and it occurs when the criticism is centred on factors in which Twenty20 could not possibly compete. It's essentially a form of begging the question, the most common type of circular reasoning. What you do is to attach the conclusion you want to reach to the very definition of the premises, essentially forming a self-justifying argument (which is technically valid, but practically useless). In this case, you define "cricket" to be whatever Twenty20 is not, and then proceed to criticize the format on those very grounds.

Critics of the league, for example, will often point out how there can be no extensive drama built through a Twenty20 game, how the action is condensed and edited, how there can be few momentum shifts, etc. Or they might also mention, as Ian Chappell did, how such a high percentage of the scoring comes in sixes, or how players don’t have much a chance to get set and build an innings, or how middle-order batsmen don't get to do much. Well, duh. You might as well criticise the game for not being staged in the Arctic or for not being played on horses. If the things that are required for the format to succeed are those that it, by definition, lacks, then what the hell is the point of even trying to analyse it? It’s always going to come up short.

Lawrence Booth described this well when he noted how it all boils down to critics saying Twenty20 is not 'proper cricket', when "what they really mean to say is this: Twenty20 is not four- or five-day cricket." That last statement is certainly true, but it is tautologically true, and it does not prove anything. It cannot be seen as a net negative in the balance since it tells us nothing new about the matter.

(The "It's Just Not Cricket" fallacy is also present in many of those pastoral, old-timey meditations from guys like Gideon Haigh. In his own piece on Twenty20 -- complete with the mandatory Thomas Hobbes' "Nasty, brutish, and short" reference -- Haigh appeals to the romanticism of his own local cricket club, the South Yarra CC, with its quaint presentation nights and its $583.50 total proceeds in making a case against the IPL. That’s cute and all -- and I always hate to rip on an actual good writer -- but come on! The South Yarra Cricket Club? You're comparing the IPL to that?! How is anyone supposed to respond?)


The "Back in my day..." Fallacy
I suppose you could call this a Counterexample by Straw-man. Or you could just call it bullshit. It can be seen as an extension from the "It's Just Not Cricket" fallacy, since it packs its rhetorical punch from a similar contrast between the Test game and Twenty20 (usually where the stack is heavily loaded in Test cricket's favour.)

However, whereas the "It's Just Not Cricket" fallacy is more of a semantic/analytical loophole than anything else, the “Back in my day…” fallacy often tries to appeal directly to (seemingly) objective, empirical evidence. Twenty20 can hence be criticised for producing so many lopsided games, or not enough tight finishes (something you can easily measure). “Just look at our stats”, they’ll tell you.   

The inference, cleverly left unstated, is that there must be some other form of cricket that does not contain all these lopsided contests. (Otherwise, what would be the point of criticising Twenty20 specifically for the same transgression?)

You look around, though, and you’ll have a hard finding this format anywhere. The Test game? The same Test game where Bangladesh and Zimbabwe are full-fledged competitors and Australia have lost like four times this entire decade? Yeah, right. The ODI game? You must be joking – I was in the West Indies for a month-and-a-half for the World Cup and I could count the number of games with exciting finishes on one hand. So where is this magical version of cricket that guarantees close matches, I wonder? And why aren’t we all watching it right now?

The truth is that there is no such thing. The writer is using a non-existent sport to hark back to a non-existent era. A typical "back in my day" old man’s rant… only there is no actual ‘day’.

The “And Such Small Portions!" Fallacy
This refers to the old Catskills joke, mentioned by Woody Allen in Annie Hall, of the two old ladies at the restaurant, complaining about how terrible the food was: “Yeah, I know… and such small portions!”

Sometimes people just like complaining -- as an exercise, as a challenge, because it’s a habit, because it’s fun, whatever. The actual content of their complaints is incidental to the very act of complaining. So you’ll sometimes find writers using their columns about the IPL to mention one fundamental problem they might have with Twenty20, and then using the occasion to lump it in with every single fucking issue they’ve ever had with, say, limited-overs cricket, with the IPL, with the BCCI, with Lalit Modi, with mixed leagues, with corporate sponsorship, with cheerleaders, with Indian regionalism, with globalisation, etc.

It’s Argument by Kitchen Sink, and you’ll see it clearly in Mukul Kesavan’s column from a few weeks back. In the space of eleven short paragraphs, Kesavan pulls a Michael-Corleone-like hit job on all his enemies -- he attacks everything from film star Akshay Kumar, the BCCI, "Lalit Modi and his Money Men", "freeloading spectators", the "millions of couch potatoes" watching on TV. (Hell, he even manages to attack great innings by high quality batsmen -- he thrashes the hundreds scored by McCullum and Michael Hussey during the first week.) You wouldn't want to ask Kesavan what he thought of ATM fees, daylight savings, or Britney Spears... he might bite your head off attempting to answer.

The "And a Pony" Fallacy
The idea for this one comes to me from Matt Yglesias’s work, but I think the original theory came from a post by Belle Waring, from the political blog Crooked Timber. Waring refers to a discussion she once heard among some hardcore libertarians at a conference, and to the completely tits-gone utopianism and stubborn blindness to reality of the arguments that they used to present their views.

Instead of providing descriptions of the real world or even philosophical foundations for a stable ideology, their arguments would often descend into pure exercises in wishful thinking – e.g. “let’s have freedom for all, with no coercion, and no conflict, no crime, no injustice, emerging systems of spontaneous cooperation, etc” – to which Waring noted that, if that’s the case, as long as we’re all just wishing away… hey, why not just wish for a pony, too? Wishes are free, after all.

This fallacy appears a lot in pieces about the future of Twenty20, and our old friend Ian Chappell is the probably King of the Pony-Wishers. Every column he writes includes at least a handful of wishes, needs, and demands about the future – the game “should not be too commercialised”, it "needs to evolve and become multi-dimensional", we should "find a balance between cricketers and administrators.” Yeah, and we should also teach the world to sing. (In perfect harmony, ideally.)

And, of course, give them a pony.

The "USA, EPL ∴ Mushroom Cloud" Fallacy...
This is not so much a part of an argument, but just a clever bit of primal Pavlovian manipulation. It’s what Dick Cheney and George W. Bush would often use in their speeches, pre-Iraq invasion, to imprint in people’s mind a subconscious connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks. They would start a sentence by invoking 9/11, then deftly maneuveur through the paragraph, mention al-Qaeda and “Islamofascism” a couple of times, add a few extras clauses, some rhetorical flourishes, and eventually end it with a nice Saddam Hussein reference. They would perform this trick regularly and in a fully calculated fashion. It never explicitly states anything -- all it does is form subconscious associations in people’s minds. (Which is often all you need in the build-up to war.)

In IPL terms, the key words are not “Saddam Hussein” and “9/11”, but “English Premier League” and “America.” You see this so often in columns that it barely even registers anymore… writers issuing grim warnings about cricket becoming “like the American sports”, or the IPL following the “tragic route of the EPL”. But they just mention this without ever getting to the actual complaint, as if the mere mention of the name, like Keyser Soze's, was enough to scare us out of demanding evidence for/against it.

I’ve said this once before but, as Jack White tells us, it bears repeating now: there are plenty of areas in which to criticise the US -- hundreds maybe -- but sport isn’t really one of them. Sport is something they actually know how to do. Very well. They are the biggest sporting nation in the world, with the greatest accolades, they have the best infrastructure, the best coaches, they continue to produce the most winning athletes, their events are always flawlessly hosted -- and they do so without having a single instance of on-field or in-uniform advertisement, in any of their 4 major sports.

The English Premier League, on the other hand, is admittedly losing some of its competitive edge (and it just looks dirty -- it virtually oozes Mafia money) but it is not much different from any other comparable big league. Well, except in how it’s a lot more financially successful, it is better marketed, and it has the greatest collection of talent (its only real problem is that it does not have a salary cap -- something which no soccer league has at the moment, or has ever had for as long as I can remember). Beyond that, it seems to be doing all right for itself. Why being compared to it is supposed to be seen as an immediate insult is truly beyond me.

If You Want To Learn Something New About Cricket, Don't Go To A Chappelli Column

                                                      

Only Ian Chappell could go into a titty bar and come out complimenting a juggler.

That's the main thing that I could gather from his latest column for Cricinfo, in which he admonishes the Twenty20 format for being too simplistic and faddish, and advices it to "evolve and become more multi-dimensional". His recipe for how exactly to do that is unclear, but I think it involves removing everything that is not absolutely cricket-related from the stadium. He tells us from the start:

If I want to watch dancing girls, I go to the Moulin Rouge. If I want to drink, I go to a bar. If I want to listen to music, I go to a concert.

This of course raises a couple of important questions: first, what exactly are the Moulin Rouge girls dancing to, if not music?

Second, what kind of concerts does Ian Chappell attend? Did he happen to catch a reunited Rage Against The Machine at the latest Big Day Out by any chance? If he did, he must've been the only person there not drinking, since, you know, drinking is only to be done at bars. Did he mosh? Or is jumping only to be done on trampolines? Apparently, multi-tasking is verboten in a Chappell universe.

Let's just hope that juggler wasn't riding a unicycle as he performed his tricks.