Outside The Line

A Post By Any Other Name...

Straight into my inbox this morning, courtesy of my good comrade LeftyJ:

Wow, so Thushara gets five wickets, and smashes 40 off 29 balls, and they give the M.O.M. award to Raina for his 76. Giving mom awards only to the winners is cricket's version of mvp awards only being given out to NBA players on teams with 50+ wins.

Tools.

And an amen to that.

Unless The Goal Is To Bankrupt Krusty the Klown, Why Bother?

They say the very least you can do is nothing.

A boycott usually achieves even less than that.

In practical terms, nothing is exactly what you do during a boycott, while still presenting yourself and your (in)action as principled and praiseworthy. The act of boycotting then becomes a symbol of status, since only the powerful can afford to boycott. The rest can only compromise and look the other way.

So we won’t say Outside the Line has been boycotting the Olympics (or the India v. Sri Lanka one-day series) because that might give the impression that we are seeking commendation for our actions.

The Olympics were not ignored due to any overriding ideological differences, or great moral convictions. Even though it’s fun to scoff as big, bloated, corporate megaevents, I'm still reminded that as a geeky sports-obsessed kid, I used to love IT every time the Olympics came around. Ideally, it's easy to see the appeal of such an event -- to reward athletic achievements inclusively and comprehensively, expose the viewing public to still frames of an ever changing world and its inhabitants, and to highlight excellence in one of the only facets of life where it can be objectively measured.

Too bad it degenerates into a UN-styled version of a midnight parking lot dick-measuring contest.

This year’s Olympics were billed as China’s coming out party, the belated release of decades of collective humiliation and shame, manifesting itself in the most intricate Opening Ceremony in Olympic history. 

What did they give us? A spectacle, no doubt, but one with distinct mid 20^th-Century overtones to it. Militaristic nationalism rising to inflate the collective ego and threaten competing egos in the vicinity. Triumph of the Will aesthetics and layer upon layer of airbrushed symbolism. (Oh, and a little girl who was not cute enough to protect the "national interest".)

That doesn’t really impress us. In the 21^st century, what the hell does the ability to control and mobilise a vast array of people prove? What, is China planning to invade Mongolia? Russia? (The Party functionaries are probably too busy working out how to stay in power to bother with useless, costly exercises like war.)

You know what would’ve been impressive? If they used the Olympics as an opportunity to embrace technological development and innovation, and shown us a glimpse of a bright, interconnected future, one where China is at the forefront of thought and development.

Imagine if they had set up a state-of-the-art online interface, allied to a great website (launched on 08/08/08) loaded with data, providing access worldwide, with streaming feeds of every event, available to be picked and chosen by the individual anywhere in the globe, with clear guides for times and locations. (These feeds could’ve also been interspersed with tourism ads and short pieces about Chinese history and culture, or something along those lines.)

But no, they’re still too busy trying to censor Wikipedia, so a working model for free access and coverage is just too much to ask at this point. All we get instead is the typical jingoistic coverage of local providers. In New Zealand (thanks to the worthless cockmonkeys at TV One) that meant ignoring every single men’s basketball game (including the US v China group match, arguably the most watched sports event in history) up to the gold medal game, and then only showing 40% of that final, on delay.

And you know what? That's cool. It’s not a dig on New Zealand as such. I know every country does it, every time. And they probably do it because that's what the populace demands. And that, right there, is where the problem lies.

The fact that we’re still treating the nation-state as some irreducible unit of identity. That we still have these pesky, annoying lines drawn on the dirt generations ago serving to define us, and control us, and keep us docile and atomised. (Self-determination may be the rallying cry, but who defines the self?) That conception of the world has little to do with me, or this blog, and anyone involved with. It’s backward looking and willfully ignorant.

I don’t give a shit about how Kiwi athletes do. (Or American athletes, or Chinese athletes, or athletes from Burkina Faso, for that matter. Flags, uniforms and anthems are mere branding tools, no more or less legitimate than the logos and team songs of the New York Yankees, Red Star Belgrade, or the Kolkata Knight Riders.)

I care about great athletes, and terrible athletes, and interesting athletes. Because I'm a sports fan.

I don’t, however, take any pride in their accomplishments -- I wouldn't feel entitled to, having done nothing to assist them -- and I don’t feel like they  represent me in any way.

There is no “we” in sports following. We didn’t come 4^th or 7^th or 89^th in the medal tally. We didn't exceed pre-Games expectations. We didn’t beat the Russians in gymnastics.

We are merely gawkers at the sight of someone else’s excellence.

If we wish to celebrate that excellence, our praises should be targeted at the individuals, at the teams, and at the coaches. Not at ourselves or the symbols of our imagined communities.

[As for the one-day series between India and Sri Lanka, that was ignored for much simpler reasons… it’s a rerun. Those same teams played just last month, in the same format, and Sri Lanka won. Case closed. Much like Gareth Keenan, we don't do sloppy seconds.]

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?]

"Hopkins, Chill Out... How Do You Know They're Booing Yooouu?"

APPLICANT'S NAME:
Outside the Line

TODAY'S DATE:
August 3rd, 2008

APPLICATION FOR THE POSITION OF:
Coach of the New Zealand Cricket Team (Black Caps)

It wouldn't be an Outside the Line entry if it wasn’t slightly too verbose, somewhat beside the point, and delivered on the nick of time, right? Well, we’re here to please. As the fourth- or fifth- most prominent New Zealand-based cricket blog, it feels almost like a duty to present at least a token application for the position. Thanks to JRod for creating the groundswell of support and interest in this nominating process.

So why Outside the Line? It seems like an odd choice, doesn’t it? Even though I’ve lived in New Zealand for the better part of four years now, I don’t think I’ve written more than a handful of posts about NZ cricket in that time. I remember there was one about Stephen Fleming’s retirement, and ode or two to Scott Styris and Brendon McC, some disparaging remarks about the Black Caps’ faceless middle order, but little beyond that.

(I don’t think I’ve even mentioned John Bracewell’s name once. Meanwhile, “Shooter McGavin” comes up at least three times in my searches.)

And that, right there, is precisely what makes OTL supremely qualified for the gig. It’s that understanding of the realities on the ground; the pragmatic air of indifference; and the ultimate acceptance of the utter irrelevance and meaninglessness of the gig itself.

Seriously, what can a new coach possibly do to improve Kiwi cricket? Will a new coach bring Shane Bond back and give him another 2-3 years in his prime? Will a new coach grant Kyle Mills an extra 10 kph of pace? Will a new coach find a way to bend the space-time continuum so that Chris Cairns’ son would be old enough to fill in the allrounder spot solely reserved for members of his family?

Let’s face it: it’s not bad coaching that has kept New Zealand from achieving any great honours in cricket… it’s bad demographics.

Take a look around this little country sometime -- by my count, it seems there are about 67 people in the entire South Island, and I’m sure at least 33 of those are out in the rain this very moment, practicing rugby line-outs on a muddy council pitch.

(A quick Wiki search tells me that New Zealand ranks 122^nd in population and 204^th in population density in the world, nestled somewhere between Ireland and Lebanon in the former rankings and Paraguay and Sudan in the latter.)

There is just no way a country like that can expect to compete with behemoths like India, especially in a sport like cricket that magnifies slight differences in talent and infrastructure. The fact that New Zealand has managed to do so damn well thus far should already be a reason to gasp in awe and celebrate. They are a team full of well-disciplined overachievers who should be encouraged to just keep on doing whatever it is they’ve been doing so far.

                                                                   *** 

So as far as matters of performance on the field, OTL wouldn’t propose any real changes. The only tweaks we could suggest are more conceptual than anything else.

• For instance, more of this is good…
  

  

  In fact, anything that accentuates the rivalry with Australia is a positive, since New Zealand will always come out as the emotional folk favourite. The plucky upstart with the sense of humour and the Pacific Island influence, battling the big, bloodless bully with all the riches from across the Tasman.

• The beige and brown combo of the uniform definitely works for retro comedy purposes, but I think I like the opportunities black provides for forming a team identity. Studies show that teams dressed in black regularly face an unconscious officiating bias in American football and hockey, leading to more fouls and penalties for aggressive behaviour being called against them during the game.
  
  Maybe New Zealand should see that as an opportunity… and come back as a bad-ass, anti-hero team, of the Oakland Raiders in the 1970s mold. Behave badly, break norms, disrupt, get suspended, banned – what’s Jesse Ryder up to these days, anyway? – and, you know, get people on their toes. Do the Haka before taking the field. Roast wild pigs in a hangi pit just outside the boundary ropes. Let the Mongrel Mob handle security at the grounds. Hand out free Chappell brother effigies to burn joyously under the crisp summer night.

• In fact, that might well be priority no. 1…
  
  Make sure no one, EVER, forgets the Underarm Incident. It should be brought up at all possible times, even when it has nothing to do with the conversation. (“Say, what horrible weather we are having today, gentle sir.” “Verily, my good man, but not nearly as black as Greg Chappell’s soul.” “Mmm, quite.”Or something like that… I was never much good at dialogue.)

• Oh, and since it’s worked out pretty well for Zimbabwe so far… guess who else has a vote at the ICC that’s up for sale to the highest bidder? That’s right, New Zealand is ready to be wooed again, and she can prove very, ahem, “accommodating” of the winning bloc of nations at the ICC, if you catch our drift. Will it be the Asian bloc? The white bloc? See, all this talk of blocs is getting her all hot and flustered already…
  
  
• For any further ideas on management, we'll just draw from those who know what they're doing...
  
  

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.

Just A Little Pinprick... There'll Be No More Aaaahhhh!

                                           

It seems that the umbilicals that bind us all to the Matrix continue to expand and multiply, helping to create a lattice-like suprareality where interactions can occur both between forms of communication as well as within them. At the same time, the common divisions that establish our archetypes are being blurred almost in real time, and the privacy we hold so dear in most of our political rationalisations is being shown to be nothing but a mirage. (It won't be long before they come for your thoughts, kid. Shit, they might be there already.)

In other words, Outside the Line has joined Facebook.

I'm not sure why, really. It's not like this site has some old childhood acquaintance sites whom it was trying hard to get away from in adult life, and yet some sister site happen to meet said childhood acquaintance sites on her recent trip back to visit the family, and ended up adding those same acquaintance sites to her Friends list -- which also happens to contain this site -- as a spur-of-the-moment kinda of thing on her last day in town.

No, we just saw a bunch of other bloggers do it, so we copied them.

We should be adding some worthy content in there (youtubes, pics, etc.) in due time, and who knows what else.

So come check it out... absorb, gargle, and spit out its contents, and then spread its message like the very seed of hope. It's the least we can ask of you.


(Tip o' the Hat to Geot, for setting it up, and for all the work to come.)

The Structure Is Set, Ya Never Change It With A Ballot Pull (FINAL Vol.)

Well, what better way to break an unannounced hiatus than by presenting the Final of Outside the Line’s search for the Ultimate Cricket Shot. I know what you're thinking -- Jesus, that thing is still going on?! And I say, hey, we treat our cheap bloggy conceits very seriously here at OTL, and we will ride them to their ultimate resolution, no matter where that may be.

There's a very strong possibility that the last poll was compromised in some way (incidentally -- fuck you, Vizu Poll Widget!). The tally was lower than expected again, and it seems some votes just don't get counted. It beats me as to why that is.

Nevermind that, since the two finalists were far enough ahead of the pack to show a trend, we'll let them move on. After the final, we might rest the poll for a little while. Here were the results for the third heat:

                                                               

Brian Lara's slash had no problems forging ahead (can a slash forge? Or does a slash charge? These are the thing E.B. White never tells you), and gathered votes from all parts of the globe and across every demographic. Well, we assume it did. (Vizu problems, and all that...) 

The second finalist is an old favourite of the site's, and a man who was in the scene for painfully too short a time period. (We can thank our old jokester friend, Emperor Graeme the First for that one.) Nice to see Zulu still dominating all comers, though. Few characters as mythical as his will ever be seen, in any sport.

Michael Vaughan's efforts also deserve credit, but we already have Mark Waugh in the final to represent the cover drive, so we'll try to do without duplicates.

So here we are, at long last, the Final. The options stare at you on the right. How can you deny them? Get votin'.

Who Says OTL Ain't Interactive?

I could say I've been quite busy (which would be true, but mostly irrelevant), or could claim we've experienced technical difficulties (which would also be true, but disingenuous), or just simply admit I'm a lazy prick and I waste too much time (which again be true, but is practically tautological by this point). You take your pick.

Either way, normal coverage will resume next week. (And some big changes are on the way. Watch out for those.)

In the meantime, because it's just that good... a monkey washing a cat.

The Structure Is Set, Ya Never Change It With A Ballot Pull (Vol.8)

This was definitely the 'Ato Boldon heat' of Outside the Line's search for the ultimate cricket shot. Remember how Ato Boldon was near the top of the sprinting world for more than a decade, always competing against the best, always making it to the podium, and yet he never actually won anything?

(From my entire childhood, all I remember vividly about athletics was Bob Beamon's long jump record, Michael Johnson's 19.32 in Atlanta, and Ato Boldon getting either a silver or a bronze. First to Frankie Federicks and Linford Christie, then to Donovan Bailey, then to Maurice Green, then to Tim Montgomery... Ato was always second prettiest at someone else's ball. He's a strange kind of legend -- good enough to remember, but never good enough to be best.)

It seems VVS Laxman will be playing the Ato Boldon role in this competition.

                                                                   

Laxman cruises easily into the final with his gentle clip off the pads, but there's no doubt who was No. 1 here. With half the vote, Sachin Tendulkar's straight drive commandeers ahead decisively, and looks as strong as anyone in the finals (Last week, we had Rahul Dravid's block and Mark Waugh's cover drive moving forward.)

Not much else to cheer beyond the two Indians. Jesus McChesty Matthew Hayden couldn't even a muster a single mercy vote, and goes back to Queensland empty-handed. (I'm sure he could catch a live shark with those bare hands anyway, so he won't remain that way for long.).

Jacques Kallis, however, definitely will not like the disappointing single-figure total for his masterly on-a-length leave. He came into this competition looking to keep his weekly poll average above 15%, yet he's failed to reach it by more than half. A rare lapse in concentration from old Zhaahck.

Last heat this week, and this one should be the tightest one. We need two more finalists. Options, as always, are on the right. Gotta rock the vote, yo.

Feeding The Leech, With Glee

                                           

The Internet is terrible in New Zealand. It is expensive, it is hard to setup, the caps are low, the speeds are laughable, and if you live in a shared house with a pair of computer geeks and a foreign exchanger with an easy schedule, every tiny bit of memory becomes a precious commodity. You don't want to be left with half a month of 16-hour winter nights at compromised dial-up speeds. It's like leaving Jack in a remote hotel to do all work and no play.

So I never watch cricket on the net while I'm here. Not only does it it suck up that precious bandwidth like a leech, the feeds also take an age to find, they're as grainy as Real Player porn from the 1990s, and somehow I'm always missing a plug-in.

Well, this early morning I said fuck all that and, even though my first class of a new semester started in less than 5 hours, I decided to watch live streaming cricket on the net. (Thank you, Crax Tv.)

Why? Because when a sultry Karachi night unveils the new Best Player in the World, you just have to watch. No matter what.

Asia Cup final, 2008.

6 for 13, off 8 overs.

India all out for 173.

Ajantha Mendis...  the world is at your feet.

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.)

The Paradox Of Pakistan Coaching

                                 

In another worthy addition to the Well, duh... Hall of Fame -- you can place it right between "Vladimir Putin having a say in Russian politics even after his 'retirement'" and "Miley Cyrus getting a DUI on Sunset Strip sometime in the 2010s"  -- it seems Geoff Lawson is not the saviour Pakistan cricket has been looking for all this time. (Wow, really, you don't say! Who would've thunk it, huh?)

I'm not sure if Pakistan will lose their game against India and bomb straight out of the Asia Cup. They might eke out a win and get eliminated tomorrow by Sri Lanka. Either way, I'm making the least bold prediction in history and will say that Lawson will not make it through 2008 as coach of Pakistan.

Let's face it, the guy was simply out of his league from the very start. I'm sure he's a nice enough dude, probably a hard worker, but this job is for the big boys. (Hell, the last guy who tried didn't even make it out alive!)

Thanks for coming though, Henry... it was cute for a while. You can go back to commentating Pura Cup matches for ABC radio now. That's more your thing, really.

(The fact that he even tried in the first place was the most shocking thing here. Coaching Pakistan? Why would anyone want to subject themselves to that ordeal? Don't they read the papers? What makes them think they can change anything? I guess the ego can do funny things to people's perception.)

It does bring up a weird incongruity of sorts... and probably the reason why that team is destined to continue in the vicious cycle for years to come. Let's call it The Paradox of Pakistan Coaching:

Anyone who thinks they can change the poisoned culture of Pakistan cricket through their mere presence as coach is probably severely deluded and egomaniacal.

And yet...

Being deluded and egomaniacal makes you the least qualified candidate to coach the Pakistan cricket team in the first place.

How can anyone possibly get out of that logical circle?

The Structure Is Set, Ya Never Change It With A Ballot Pull (Vol.7)

The first heat of Outside the Line's search for the ultimate cricket shot is now over, and we have our first pair of finalists. Here are the results:

                                                                                                              

We didn't prepare seedings beforehand, but if you had asked me who the favourites would've been, I probably would've said Mark Waugh and Rahul Dravid.

I can't say I really expected Dravid to be so utterly dominant, though. I mean, a defensive shot capturing almost half the vote? I think that tells you why Test cricket will never become a mainstream sport -- the joys for the casual fan and those for the geek are just far too different to be reconciled.

It was also surprising to see Pietersen's switch-hit ranking as high as it did... as a shot, it is obviously still in embryonic form and, to my eye at least, looks rather ungainly. Give him another decade or so and a few hundred Twenty20 games to work on it, and things could change. (It must be noted that all the votes KP received came from England.)

Anyway, on to the second heat. Another six classics, another two finalists just waiting for your vote.

Picking Nits Off Weeds

Someone should tell Harbhajan Singh that if his aim is to convince the cricket world that he's truly moved on and learnt from the Slapgate incident, this is not the way to phrase it:

I've learnt a lot from whatever has happened in the last few months, and I can promise that I'll still play with a lot of passion.

I think what he meant to say was that "I've learn a lot from what has happened...". His use of "whatever", though, implies he either a) doesn't know what happened, or b) he doesn't care what happened. And if he doesn't know and/or care, how the hell can he have learnt anything from it?

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.)

The Structure Is Set, Ya Never Change It With A Ballot Pull (Vol.6)

Outside the Line's weekly poll had been put on rest for a little while, partly because the results for the previous one were too close to call, and partly because we never got around to changing it. Voting has now tapered off, so here are the final results:

                                                                                          

So what do these results tell us? For one, that Michael Hussey seems to overachieve in every activity in which he's involved, even lowly online polls. Voters obviously decided he would be as ruthlessly efficient at illegal trafficking as he is at building middle-order innings,  so we can't argue.

Initially, we thought Parthiv's cherubic face would help him rank him higher, but it's clear that the boy is truly growing up. Chin pubes may not win you back a place in the Indian team, but they'll definitely alert customs officials.

We also learned that no matter what he does, Nathan Bracken will never get any love. We thought the fact that he's so often overlooked, while still performing as well as anyone else, would make him an ideal candidate for illicit activity. It turns out he got overlooked even for that.

Finally, we also learned that our readers are racists. (Why else would Russel Arnold end up as the second-highest vote-getter? Has he broken the law before? Has he had a history of indiscipline? Does he have any record of drug use?) Shame on you, people.

On to this week's question. We want to find out what the ultimate individual batting shot is in cricket, and who plays it. There were too many candidates to fit into just one poll, so we've decided to divide it into three different heats, with the top two vote-getters advancing to the final. Vote it up, peoples.

It Just Is... And So Was He, For A Little While

I have to admit, I feel a little bad not mentioning the death of Jane McGrath yesterday -- given that it's (somewhat) cricket-related -- to then come back today and write about another death, this one not even remotely cricket-related. 

George Carlin died of heart failure earlier today, at age 71.

He was a comedy legend, an icon of free speech, and an incalculable influence on my own -- and Outside the Line's -- voice and sensibility.

Carlin came in many incarnations -- all of them different, all of them memorable. To boomers, he was the countercultural hero of the Seven Dirty Words; to Gen Xers, he was Rufus from Bill & Ted's; and to the rest of us, he was just that really funny old guy with the HBO specials and the cameos in Kevin Smith movies.

We've already posted some of his material on the site before, and now I'm not sure what clip to choose to commemorate him. Since this is supposed to be a sports blog of sorts, I guess we could go for his take on sports. Or we could go for his most culturally relevant piece, the infamous Seven Words routine. (Or, because I bet he would've liked us to, any one of his many attacks on religion.)

But I think we'll go with my favourite bit of all: his extended riff on the planet, at the end of his 1992 special, Jammin' In New York.

I think I like it because it's really not that funny, as far as laughs-per-minute go. It's strange to see that in a standup special. Standup comedians, for those who don't know, are spectacularly insecure and needy creatures, constantly demanding approval of some sort; and if they don't receive any applause or laughs every few seconds in their shows, they start getting antsy, pandering to the crowd, leaning on old standards just to get their fix.

Carlin had the patience to go without laugh line for a couple of minutes here, building up his argument slowly, letting it flow organically, and ultimately leading it to a cathartic (and, to my mind, enlightened) conclusion. It just doesn't get any better. RIFP, George.

2008 Season Big Board (IPL Wrap-Up, p. III)

[Lefty J]

Firstly, let me introduce myself. You may have heard of me through some of D.S.'s posts, I'm LeftyJ, the resident stat man at Outside the Line. I'm also a huge fan of fantasy sports (I've dominated D.S. in our NBA fantasy leagues for two years running and the fucker still owes me money), and it's been obvious to me for some time that cricket is in DIRE need of a proper fantasy league. I can't believe it hasn't happened yet, but don't worry, I'm on the case.

As a kind of fake conclusion to this year's IPL fantasy season, I decided to do a final wrap up/Big Board. I've ranked the players in order of their total value in a ten category format (runs, strike rate, batting average, fours, sixes, wickets, bowling average, economy rate, catches and run outs). It wasn't easy to do, but I think you'll find it's quite accurate (feel free to post some comments on where you feel I went wrong), and in the end we found some surprising results.

RANK	PLAYER	TYPE		STOCK
1	SR Watson (RR)	Bat/Bwl/All	Contributed hugely in all 10 categories. The only player to do so. ‘Nuff said.
2	SE Marsh (PXI)	Bat	Top performer in runs (616) and average (68.44), second in fours (59) and sixes (26). An absolute beast.
3	ST Jayasuriya (MI)	Bat/All	Bigtime boundary hitter led the league in sixes (31), and broke even with his bowling.
4	Sohail Tanvir (RR)	Bwl/All	Most wickets (22), best average (12.09) and second lowest economy rate (6.46). Clearly the most effective bowler in the tournament.
5	YK Pathan (RR)	Bat/All	Came out of nowhere, and finished in the top three for strike rate and sixes, and managed 8 wickets with his handy offspin.
6	JA Morkel (CSK)	Bat/Bwl/All	A poor man's Shane Watson, contributed nicely in all categories except economy rate (8.31).
7	G Gambhir (DD)	Bat	Second leading run scorer and leading four hitter (68) just needs to embrace the six (he got a mere 8 of them) to become a complete fantasy batter.
8	SK Raina (CSK)	Bat	Leading catcher (10), with very solid batting numbers.
9	AC Gilchrist (DC)	Bat/WK	Wasn't as explosive as usual, but still a top-10 batter.
10	SK Warne (RR)	Bwl	Would love to see him bat higher up, but still scraped into the top ten with sublime bowling lines and six catches.
11	GC Smith (RR)	Bat	Thankfully didn't bowl, and his fours and average offset a poor strike rate.
12	RG Sharma (DC)	Bat	Faded late, but still contributed across the batting board, and bagged eight catches.
13	MF Maharoof (DD)	Bwl/All	Brilliant allround effort, would have been right up there if he had have been given more game time. Top-5 material for next year.
14	SC Ganguly (KKR)	Bat/All	Sourav kept his inner Kallis at bay and managed the league’s lowest economy rate, as well as a lot of runs and sixes.
15	MS Dhoni (CSK)	Bat/WK	Had a solid tournament with the bat, and got 6 catches.
16	DJ Bravo (MI)	Bwl/All	Multi-category player looked the part in limited time. Should break the top-10 next season.
17	SM Pollock (MI)	Bwl/All	Achieved a little in most categories, but excelled bigtime in economy rate (6.54).
18	PP Chawla (PXI)	Bwl	Struggled to keep the runs down, but was a genuine wicket-taker. Showed urgency with the bat, and held onto 6 catches.
19	IK Pathan (PXI)	Bwl/All	Reversed his previous form, and had a great tournament with the ball (15 wickets, econ rate 6.6), but not with the bat (strike rate 112, only 9 fours).
20	M Gony (CSK)	Bwl	Solid bowling is hard to come by in this format, and Gony bowled tight and and picked up wickets all tournament.

 

It turns out that the quality allrounder is the key to your fantasy team. Five of the top six players are allrounders. However, the most successful allrounders are the ones who could be considered specialists in both fields. It is always a risky pick drafting a bowling alrounder or (especially) a batting allrounder. Sehwag's omission from the top twenty is a perfect example of that. So the Morkel's and Watson's of the world should go very early in next years drafts. If Flintoff can ever get in a team, then watch out.

Five players from the top eleven played for the eventual winners, the Rajasthan Royals. The Bangalore Royal Challengers didn't get a single player in the top 20 (even Deccan Chargers managed two players), partly because they played so poorly, but partly because their players aren't fantasy-ready. And if this Big Board proves anything, it's that there is a correlation between fantasy performance and winning Twenty20 games.

One other thing to note is that batters (5 categories) are more useful than bowlers (3 categories). We wanted to even it up and include maidens (like we did for the World Cup 2007 fantasy system) , but there simply aren't enough of them in Twenty20 to make it a viable stat. Catches and run outs can prove the difference in the end, as SK Raina showed.

Here at Outside The Line, we plan on having a fully functional roto style fantasy league for next years IPL. We know we have some kinks to iron out in our system, but we assure you, it'll be much better than anything cricinfo, or anyone else has to offer. And I will personally provide the big boards, and fantasy relevant news and updates to help you draft, and win your leagues.

Sometimes Life Just Gives You Lemonade

Doesn't it seem like this headline was written just for Outside the Line?

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.)

"Guardians" In Almost The Platonic Sense

Nice to see the MCC showing an open mind and allowing Kevin Pietersen to play his switch-hit lefty circus shots. It didn't require much courage or foresight on their part to see all the possibilities inherent in the new accelerated medium, ... but still, a tip o' the hat to them.

I'm just waiting to see if any critics of the decision come out and publicly denounce Pietersen himself "for forcing the laws to be changed just for him" or something of the sort. I doubt they will, but I remember hearing those same charges often labeled against Muralitharan, back in his peak controversy days.

I do wonder if there will be a double standard there, because their cases are virtually identical -- both players caused officials to amend the laws of the game, not because they were breaking them, but simply because they stood outside them. They showed the law books to be insufficient, incomplete... and they showed us how far the chasm can stretch between what we think we know about the game, and what we actually do know.

Meanwhile, Oceans Away

It may not have been that obvious while the IPL was in full flow, but Outside the Line was also following the action from the rest of the cricket world. (Yes, we don't just ignore everything we don't like, cover our ears, and pretend it doesn't exist. You listening, English blogs?) Here are some random thoughts:

• I can't say I'm ecstatic about another set of interminable, lopsided one-day series, but okay, fine... it's clear that the corporates and the pushers paid they cash in advance and they won't rest until they squeeze every second of available ad time out of their investment. I get it.
     
  But as long as we're just playing out the clock till the FTP is finally over in 2011, why not use the time to experiment a little? Someone has the right idea...

• Congratulations to the English team, by the way, for taking three-and-a-half years and 72 games to realise their best batsman should be batting at no. 3. Well done, guys.

• After having to withstand the likes of Aamer Sohail and Greg Chappell on a daily basis -- and coming close to shoving a lawn dart in my ear a few times just to make them stop -- it's nice to hear proper commentators again, as I found out while checking out some highlights from the Sky telecast of the England v . New Zealand series.
     
  The Sky team have definitely got their flaws, but at least they can get the little things right... you know, like "conjugation" and "subject/verb agreement". You come to miss those after a while.
      
  
• Jumping oceans (and continents), re: the Australia v West Indies Test series, we're now just a few hours away from finding out how badly the Australian empire has crumbled in the year since McWarne retired. The mere fact that the series outcome is still up in the air on the fifth day of the last Test is already an ominous sign .
     
  I haven't had a chance to watch any of the action, but I like what I've read... top-order collapses, dropped catches, opponents brimming with confidence. Very unlike the Evil Empire, and still music to my ears. Even if they eventually come out with another buzz-killing victory, anytime they're forced to mouth the words, "Thank god Simon Katich was at the crease", you know things haven't gone quite as planned.
     
  
• Memo to Dwayne Bravo:
     
  This is it, brother. Your time. You say you're for real? You say you're more than just a fielding allrounder? Well, here's your chance. Prove it.
     
  Champions get centuries, on fifth day pitches, to set fourth-innings chase records. Shiv did it once. Ask him about it sometime. (Maybe as you stroll out to the crease with him?)
     
  Sure, you could keep cruising on those forceful 40s, the 3-wicket hauls, and the killer smile. But we both know you're worth more than that. You're a kinesthetic freak -- anyone who's seen you merely jumping to catch the ball in the field can attest to that. You're practically the reason why super slo-mo was invented.
     
  Time to step it up, D.
  
  

Four Belated, But No Less Relevant, Truths About The New World Order (IPL Wrap-up, p. II)

                            

This is like the morning after the day when the meteorite hits, or the tidal wave crashes, or the alien pods come out of the ground. We don't really know what to do. Smoke rises off the smoldering rubble and everyone has a dazed look on their face. We'll probably keep feeling like that for quite a while.

This is the world post-IPL. Desperate grabs for cash are attempted by interested parties (see: Twenty20 Champions League), mysterious benefactors drop down from helicopters with briefcases full of cash to inject boards with Pietersen bribe money timely stimulus packages, and shifty characters in positions of high power hold their weathered copies of The Prince just a little too tightly for their own good. Interesting times, indeed.

So what have we learned, then? After six weeks of diligent observation, and two weeks of reflection, what does Outside the Line have to say about the league that we expended so much time and energy trying to cover?

We tried to look past the obvious and focus at the big picture: what does the IPL represent for the sport of cricket, on a grand scale, and in the long term?

In the end, we found four larger connected truths that were made very clear in the last couple of months, and which might come to define the future of cricket:

It's Not The Format, It's The League 

This is a crucial factor, and it might be biggest source of misunderstanding in cricket minds at the moment. (In particular, in Daddy Warbucks' Allen Standford's mind.) What they seem to be doing is confusing Twenty20, the nascent cricket format, with the IPL, the nascent cricket league. It's not that people are going crazy for ultra-shortened versions of cricket – they’re going gaga at seeing their favourite players competing against each other, every week, in a veritable “league of stars”.

No one I know is really passionate about Twenty20 in-and-of-itself. They’re passionate about what Twenty20 could represent for the game of cricket as a whole. "Twenty20" is simply a set of rules. You know how Monopoly has a set of rules, usually printed on the back of the lid? Well, cricket also has its back-of-the-lid rules, only it has more than one set – it can be played under any number of equally valid arrangement of laws, regulations, and time limits.

You can have, for instance, long time frames mixed with few playing/fielding restrictions (i.e. Tests), or short time frames combined with more restrictions (i.e. Twenty20), or maybe something in between (i.e. 2-/3-day tour matches, lower grade games).

It should be obvious to most people that Twenty20 is incredibly limited as a form of cricket. Even a die-hard IPL fan should be able to admit that. It allows for little variation or nuance. It is brusque and brute at times – more forced, less fluid. No one denies this. What makes it special, however, and the reason why so many within cricket circles are so fired up about it, is that it is conducive to the creation of a professional league.

This is something cricket has, until now, always lacked – one large-scale, premier professional tournament that pits the best of the best in the sport against each other, on a regular basis, as part of squads of (relative) parity. (Examples abound throughout the world, but just to name a few: the NBA, MLB and NFL in the US; the UEFA Champions League in Europe; the Super 14s Rugby in Oceania and South Africa.)

That type of competition has just never been viable for cricket, given the structure of the game.

The ODI World Cup, to be sure, gathers a collection of the top talent in the world under the one umbrella, but, as was made crystal clear in last year’s edition in the West Indies, that does not guarantee a competitive, entertaining spectacle. It always goes on far too long, only a handful of teams are ever in contention, and Australia beats them all anyway.

(Add to that tired, formulaic nature of the 50-over game now that we're thirty years into the post-Packer era, the inept organisational chops of the ICC, the excessive time frames – a typical ODIs is at least twice as long as the average game in any other major sport – and you’ll soon see what a logistical nightmare every ODI World Cup is bound to become.)

As for Test cricket, forget about it… the list of viable international teams shrinks even further, and the chasm between the winners and the also-runs becomes much greater. In any one year, you’d be lucky if you can count the number of competitive Test series throughout the world on one hand. The only series that are capable of captivating the public imagination are the Ashes, the India v. Australia biseries, and India v Pakistan (although the latter might be losing some of its glean through sheer overexposure). Everything else is left to the tragics, the hyper-partisans, and (alas) the bloggers.

Twenty20 is ideal for a league format – its games are just short enough for the logistics to be right. You can have televised double- and triple-headers in one day, teams can play on consecutive nights, travel won't be a  huge factor, and you can schedule game for times when more than just stoners, housewives, and the unemployed are able to follow them.

The IPL may look gaudy, it may grate on the ear at times, and it may be run by a sociopath, but it's the only thing we have right now. If you can show me another way for Tatenda Taibu to ever lift a trophy, I'll be happy to hear it. Until then...

Not 'Show You The Money, Jerry'...'Show ME The Money!

Many people lampooned Kevin Pietersen’s complaints last month about being left out of the IPL and having to turn down millions of dollars of possible income. (To those of us who follow the NBA, it became reminiscent of the absurd cries of ex-Minnesota Timberwolf Latrell Sprewell, who left the league after vehemently rejecting a 3-year, $21 million dollar contract extension in 2005, claiming he was insulted and he “had a family to feed.”)

Yet, as much as we may hate to admit it, KP does have a point. If players are able to earn more money for playing a dozen or so Twenty20 games over six weeks than they could ever do by being centrally contracted to their national boards and having to play 9-10 months of the year, why shouldn’t they be able to do it? On what grounds are we stopping them from signing exactly?

By claiming that they’re hurting the “spirit of the game”? Or its “integrity”? I’d hate to break anyone’s bubble, but those are cricket writers’ platitudes. I bet most players don’t care three diddly squats, two flying fucks, and a partridge in a pear tree about the "spirit of cricket." What most players would care about is the very act of competing; fighting to be the best in a field of their peers… and they can do that in Test whites, in ODI pajamas, or in the pastel pinks and the bling helmets of the IPL.

As sports fans, we often entertain fantasies that athletes are just like us – big old geeks who live and die through the box scores, who collect all the stats and memorise all the trivia, who invest large swathes of emotional capital on their favourite team's historic performances. We believe our heroes hurt as much as we do, and do it all for the love of the game.

The truth is a lot less romantic. Most of these guys we lionise are just plain old jocks – large über-athletic oddities, often marred with deep competitive issues, who just happened to stumble upon cricket serendipitously at some point in their youth, and, well... it stuck.

Maybe the small country town they grew up in had some nets instead of rugby posts and they could while away long summer afternoons in there; maybe they had a secret crush on the school’s cricket coach during puberty, so they signed up for the squad; maybe (and most likely) they were pushed into it by their fathers. Who knows? Some players may indeed treat the game with awe and reverence… but I bet a lot of them simply see it as a job.

(Besides, we can all denounce players like Pietersen for their selfishness and their greed, but who among us could truly resist those opportunities if they were offered to us? I bet you most of the cricket writers and commentators who criticised Pietersen would probably jump like ravenous dogs at the chance of earning a few thousand more dollars in a year, let alone millions in a month. It’s the natural human reaction… we try not to base our decision on greed, but who out there can say with confidence that they would resist?)

I really don’t think most players out there realise how much leverage they have at this point in time. (For that, we can blame the perennially ineffective Players’ Union. When was the last time you heard anything from them? Exactly.) If they showed some organisation and initiative, they could be holding administrators by the balls right now, demanding a complete remodeling of the system,  with a fairer revenue structure, a substantial cut of the workload, a scrapping of the ridiculous Future Tours Program, etc.

The players have the chance to change all that now, but you can bet that at the hand of such ruthless, cutthroat characters as Lalit Modi, that chance won’t be there for too much longer.

Welcome to the Cricket Meritocracy

Let’s face it, cricket is not a fair game. Being a good player does not guarantee you success. (It doesn’t even guarantee you a chance to compete for success.) No matter how hard they practice, how well they get coached, how selfless they may be on the field, Mashrafe Mortaza and Tatenda Taibu will never see international success. They just won't.

(And let's not even mention Steve Tikolo... he can't even get a game!)

These players will never win a World Cup. Or any major tournament, really. They might sneak in a cheeky series victory against the West Indies or New Zealand in a 2-Test home series sometime in 2013. And it will feel good at the time, but not for too long. Soon enough, they’ll fail again. They will see failure after failure after failure in their professional careers, and there’s nothing they can do to change that.

The sad thing is, we as fans have come to accept that.

The reason why that’s the case is hard to pin down, but I think it has to do with the fact that we treat cricket not so much as a sport but as an exhibition. As we are often told, cricket is defined by the “contest between bat and ball”. You hear that all the time, “contest between bat and ball.” Bat and ball, bat and ball – notice how there are no “players” mentioned in this formulation? That’s because players (not to mention teams, umpires, and results) are dispensable factors in the formula, and will always be so… since the real contest is “between bat and ball.”

This, of course, can make cricket a richer, deeper spectacle for the discerning fan, since even in defeat one can bask in protracted displays of athletic brilliance. As a fan of Sri Lankan cricket, seeing Kumar Sangakkara’s luminous 192 in Hobart last year was probably worth about five series victories, if not more.

Having a competitive league, however, changes all that. No longer are players consigned to competitive mediocrity because of accidents of birth. Now players can actually leave failing squads. They can be traded. They can put themselves out in the market and let their skills define their value on the field.

 This cuts both ways – it provides opportunities for players from smaller nations, but it can also bring into play overlooked first-class wonders from bigger countries. No longer would world-class players like the Hussey brothers and Stuart McGill be destined to wait till their mid-30s for a game... and no longer would the likes of Marlon Samuels and Imran Nazir be guaranteed lucrative careers just because their country's talent cupboards are completely bare.

Cricket can finally become something close to a meritocracy, and anyone who cares about Sport -- with a capital "s", the Platonic idea of Sport as one of the only sources of objective justice left in the world -- should welcome that.

Test Cricket Won't Die, But It's Been Moribund For A While Now

One thing the IPL skeptics and the haters of all kinds seem to be assuming is that if nothing had changed in the last few years -- if Twenty20 had never been invented, and that evil Lalit Modi had never hidden his rap sheet and burst through the scene like Tony Montana-- everything could just keep rolling along. Happily and in harmony. Like it had done for centuries.

That is an illusion. Things weren't nice and rosey. Regardless of the IPL's existence, the equilibrium was already perilously close to unstable and would’ve probably collapsed at some point.

Test cricket has been losing support steadily. The collapse of the West Indies as a world power through the 90s and 00s, Australia’s brutal dominance during that same period, the extended dearth of truly match-winning strike bowlers, and a wider entertainment palette on offer have all made it harder for Test cricket to compete in the modern world.

As far as I can tell, the only country to still have Test cricket on free-to-air TV is Australia, and that could change now that the Warne generation is clearly on its way out. For years now, most Test series around the world have essentially been subsidised by a brutal regimen of one-day internationals imposed on the Indian national team.

There's no way that balance could have remained unchanged. Something had to give.

                                                                * * *

I know, it’s easy to romanticise the Test game. Hell, I do so all the time. (If I had to chose an ideal cricket moment, I'd probably go with something like Shiv Chanderpaul batting on a treacherous 5th day pitch, trying to save a Test against Muralitharan and seven chirping Sri Lankans around the bat, replayed on a grainy feed in some hotel room 8 time zones away, as I lay at night half-lucid, still buzzing from a long flight and a couple of those tiny bottles of ludicrously expensive liquor from the mini-bar. But I'm weird like that.)

Those of us who actually care about Test cricket, however, should start looking at it with an unforgiving eye, and seeing it for what it really is, not what we wish it to be. This in turn will involves accepting many of its inherent flaws, instead of pretending every thing that happens in white uniforms is just peaches and cream on a sunny day.

Yes, Test cricket is capable of producing passages of unmatchable drama and beauty, but the truth is that those are few and far between. (That's partly what makes them so special.) Most matches, to be honest, are predictable, one-sided affairs whose outcome is virtually sealed at the toss. 

Not only that, but even if high-quality passages happen to be played, there's a good chance they'll go to waste in the wrong series. If they occur in some contrived two-match series devoid of any meaningful context, they'll likely be ignored or overlooked.

So, for example, even though New Zealand and Sri Lanka always seem to produce some of the most thrilling, competitive, evenly-matched confrontations, no one really cares about them. Why? Because there's no history between the two teams, because their partisan fanbases are tiny, their international lobbying powers are limited, etc.

(And besides, everyone wants to see the Lakers vs. the Celtics, right? Regardless of the sport.)

But beyond all that, the truth is that Test cricket is really a game of another era. (And those who lament its fall are often decrying the changes societiy has gone through since that era, more than the sport itself.) The very idea of spending 7 hours a day for five consecutive days passively consuming displays of semi-aerobic activity performed by other people just doesn’t ring true with most people’s realities. Who can afford to do this? Must of us have jobs, and long commutes, and errands to run. Let’s not mince words here… cricket watching is really for 'men of leisure.' A true vestige of a dying aristocracy.

However, it can still work in certain packaging. In Australia, for example, the Boxing Day Test at the MCG has now become an annual cultural tradition, one that, along with the chaotic department store sales, have come to embody the holiday period in the Australian psyche. For most Australians, there is no Santa Claus… only Myer and Richie Benaud.

In England, the traditions are even older, and the population is larger, so Test cricket can probably subsist on nostalgia alone for a while longer. It's just hard to say how many new fans the Test game is bringing in over there. Are crowds at Lord's older and on the way out, or are they mixed? Are new, younger generations of fans coming in to replace the old MCC codgers? I certainly hope so.

So what is there to do, in order to make sure Test cricket not only survives, but thrives in the future? That's a question no one can answer with confidence, myself included. (Part of having a background in philosophy involves the tendency to overthink things and never reach proper conclusions. That's when listening to guys like Ranjit Fernando state the bleeding obvious can help.) When I can think of something, though, I'll let you know.

But other voices are already starting to chime in with ideas. I can't say I agree with all of Rob Steen's solutions, but this kind of ambitious, innovative approach is what we need hear about more often. As George Dubya would say, "Bring it on!"

Just Another Little Nug

Now that we're clearly in "Let's Shit on Lalit Modi" Week, here's something else we can add to the pile... he was caught smoking in a public place at one of the IPL games in Mohali. Oh won't someone please think of the children?!

Lalit Modi Is Not The Devil (There's A Criminal Record To Show It)

                                        

 

J Rod asks why we've failed to mention some of the "extra-curricular" activities of IPL chief Lalit Modi so far. (As it turns out, while a student at Duke University, Modi was convicted of drug possession, assault, and kidnapping, and came away with a suspended 2-year sentence. This first became a story in India during the BCCI elections in 2005.)

It might be a sign of a compromised moral sense, or just simple pragmatics, but I believe the thing that bothers me the most about the story is the simple fact that Modi was actually caught. That's not someone I'd want heading a burgeoning cricket empire. I'd prefer someone competent.

As someone whose cousin is in a Spanish prison as we speak, awaiting trial for drug trafficking -- and as someone who remembers playing with said cousin as a little kid and noticing, even back then, what a bumbling, low-wattage dolt the poor guy was -- I can tell you with some confidence: crime ain't for everyone. And good criminals are good because you've never heard of them. They don't fuck up, and they cover their tracks.

Point is: I'm not surprised that a blustering billionaire narcissist who's reached the highest levels of power in his country has done some shady things in the past. I'm surprised that anyone knows about it.

They say the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

Lalit Modi most definitely exists.

Forget About Champions... It's Barely Intertoto

Am I the only one, apart from the usual circle of playa-hatin' traditionalists, who thinks this Champions League idea is pretty idiotic? I guess it was bound to happen -- once the Indian Premier League became a hit, organisers would start believing that the analogy between English football and Twenty20 cricket holds to something beyond the names of the tournaments. Hence the Twenty20 Champions League.

First of all, nothing that lasts 10 days can be called a "league".

Second, the idea behind any kind of tournament pitting champions from different leagues against each other is to maximise the quality of competition and to have the greatest collection of international talent gathered in one place at one time. A cricket Champions League would do just the opposite.

The UEFA Champions League is a viable tournament because there are enough powerful, loaded teams in Europe to warrant a supranational, long-term competition on top of the domestic leagues. It's essentially a way to get Real Madrid and AC Milan to play against Manchester United and Bayern Munich. This format works because all these teams are roughly comparable in terms of talent, richness of history, infrastructure, etc.

Cricket's talent pool, however, is not nearly deep enough to sustain a handful of different domestic leagues, plus a champions league on top of that. The IPL itself was supposed to be the way to concentrate the available talent and put it the one place. That's the league's main attraction -- not the fact that it's in India or that it makes it rain sixes -- but the fact that the best players are all in it. (Or, at least,  will be in it. That's something that kept this first edition of the IPL from being even bigger than it was: the lack of English players and the departure of top-level Aussies, Kiwis and West Indians halfway through.)

I think the motivation behind it all can be found in one particular sentence in the above article:

It was also agreed, verbally, between the boards that foreign players will turn out for their local teams in the tournament. That undertaking was sought by the England and Australia boards at a meeting in Singapore. [Italics mine]

Well, of course it was. Cricket Australia and the ECB, the two other powers with any kind of pull internationally, surely realise that there's no chance in hell they'd be able to compete with the IPL's mafia money and its Bollywood starlet-whore glitz in the long run, so the best way they have to cash in on the Twenty20 explosion is to undermine the league's credentials and push for the creation of a new, "ultimate" league. A "league of champions", where they get as big a say as the BCCI or any other organisation around. (Well, except for those in Sri Lanka, and New Zealand, and Bangladesh, and Pakistan...)

The Velcro/Post-It Note Of The Cricket Blogosphere

Uncle J Rod fills us in on the bedroom habits of Michael Hussey, in what I'm sure will be the first installment of many more to come. It's a conceit so brilliant I almost feel like sending the man a mailbomb and stealing the idea.

Ignorance Is Your Friend (IPL Wrap-Up, p. 1)

From the very start of the IPL, we at Outside the Line decided that the objective of covering the league's first season would be simply to learn. This was a massive venture, of truly unheralded proportions in cricket circles, and we'd try to resist the temptation to reach premature conclusions and make grandiose statements, and just concentrate on observation. There would be plenty of time to collate our notes and announce our findings later.

Well, that time is now. The verdicts are starting to come in from all angles.  Some hit the mark, some miss it somewhat, but they all have a little something to add to the debate. The most important thing now, however, is not to overreach and to start draw conclusions where the evidence is tenuous. The future of every form of cricket for decades to come will probably depend on what happens to the IPL in the next year or so, which means we should tread slowly and gently.

So as Part One of Outside the Line's IPL wrap-up, here are a handful of everyday questions that are still unclear or undecided in our minds, and that no amount of half-lucid, mid-morning cursory observations from a single season of play will be able to resolve. Part Two, still to come, will involve the grander questions about the league and future of the sport in general. But first:

Things We Have NOT Learned From The First Season Of The IPL

What is a par score?

Intuitively, the first response would be to say something like 170. Early on in the tournament, it seemed like it would be a little higher-- later on, as pitches deteriorated somewhat, it was a little lower. But the very idea of a “par score” is itself coloured by what we already know about one-day cricket. In the 50-over game, a par score these days would be around 260 or so. Is 170 supposed to be the exact equivalent of that in Twenty20? Is it supposed to be an average score? Or is it rather the score you must obtain batting first in order for the odds to be even going into the chase?

The teams batting second in the tournament ended up winning 60% of the games. That tells us either (a) teams don’t know how to set a total yet, (b) it’s a lot easier to chase totals in Twenty20, no matter what the opposition sets for you, or (c) a little bit of both a) and b).

At the moment, I would lean towards (c). Eventually, though, we can expect teams to learn how to bat first, and how to maximise the efficiency of their hitting (they are way too conservative at the moment -- they’re using deadweight at the top of the order when they don’t need to, they’re conserving wickets too intensely, they’re treating a normal, acceptable trickle of wickets as a ‘collapse’, etc.). By the time that happens, even if the gap closes, will (b) still hold true?

It may be well do so. Knowing the amount you need to chase is generally a very handy mental tool to help guide your innings, especially when the format is shorter and gives you less overs to deal with, thereby minimising the potential for getting dismissed taking risks. Even after teams learn about the format and learn how to assess the wicket and bat accordingly (let’s not forget, most players have only played a couple dozen Twenty20 games in their life -- it’s still as new and novel for them as it is for us), it could be that the natural advantage of chasing still holds, albeit weakly.

What should a bowling unit comprise?

Given the restrictions afforded by the salary cap, the 4-foreigner rule, the catchment rule, etc., what’s the ideal arrangement of bowlers for an IPL squad? It’s become obvious that, since quality bowlers are rarer in this format probably in any other, at least one strike bowling spot per team should be filled with a quality foreign import. But beyond that, what else can we tell?

The most successful teams early on were those with foreign spearheads… Delhi had Glenn McGrath, Pablo Escobar Mohammad Asif, and Farveez Maharoof, and they often went in with all three in their attack at the same time. (And that's not even counting Daniel Vettori, who was available for only a handful of games.)

Rajasthan had the two Aussie Shanes leading the bowling (of course, one of those Shanes was incredibly more influential on the team’s fortunes than the other, MVP trophy notwithstanding), and they later added another foreign strike bowler, Sohail Tanvir, who by now we must all admit is a complete freak of nature and utterly beyond rational description.

On the other hand, the Kings XI Punjab had what most people would consider to be the ultimate spearhead (Brett Lee) for their first few games. They did okay while he was around, winning two and losing two, but right after he left, they went on a royal rampage, winning 8 out of 10 games going into the semifinal. Those victories were all achieved with a bowling attack full of Indians, with two current internationals (Sreesanth and Irfan Pathan) and one destined to be a mainstay in the Indian team for the next couple of decades (Piyush Chawla). So maybe you don’t need foreign internationals, just internationals of any sort.

Well, not quite. The Chennai Super Kings were runners-up in the end, and their two leading wicket-takers were an uncapped player – Manpreet Gony – and a barely-capped one – Albie Morkel – with 17 wickets apiece. Their two bowling imports (Muttiah Muralitharan and Makhaya Ntini) were a lot less numerically productive (11 and 7 wickets, respectively), but at least they kept their economy rate low, which is probably what kept Chennai alive in so many tight contests. It could be that the pressure they created caused opposing teams to consciously target other – more inexperienced – bowlers in the squad, hence producing more chances for wickets.

As is clear, the evidence here is mixed, and as they teach you in undergraduate psychology, the trick to any sort of analysis is simply to say:

There is evidence for hypothesis A.
There is also evidence for hypothesis not-A.
More research is needed.

(Apply that formula liberally, and you’re well on your way to becoming the next B.F. Skinner, believe me. My buddy Lefty J, for one, got an entire bachelor’s degree in psych without once having to reach a meaningful conclusion in 3-and-a-half years of study. Quite impressive, if you ask me.)


Does home-ground advantage exist in the IPL?

Simply looking at the numbers, the answer seems like a pretty resounding “NO”. Out of 55 games in the league that ended in a result, the home team won 29 times (or 53% of the time) while the visitors won 26. A very slight advantage to the home team there, but a statistically insignificant one.

The question, however, is whether this represents a trend within the IPL, the Twenty20 format as a whole, or whether it’s just too early to tell. I’ve done a quick search for stats on home-ground advantage for other Twenty20 competitions, but there isn’t much data available. All I could gather, from a betting site, was that in the first year of the English T20 domestic competition there was a marked advantage to the home teams in the group stages, but eventually those numbers evened out.

When you think about it, though, why shouldn’t playing at home be an advantage? It is in just about every other team sport – to varying degrees of course – and it’s hard to imagine an atmosphere like the one produced at, say, Eden Gardens not having an effect on the course of play. What exactly that effect would be comprised of is a matter of contention. Many scholarly studies regarding the home advantage phenomenon have been conducted, with varying results. One metastudy (via Matt Yglesias) states:

A number of studies provide strong evidence that home advantage increases with crowd size, until the crowd reaches a certain size or consistency (a more balanced number of home and away supporters), after which a peak in home advantage is observed. Two possible mechanisms were proposed to explain these observations: either (i) the crowd is able to raise the performance of the home competitors relative to the away competitors; or (ii) the crowd is able to influence the officials to subconsciously favour the home team. The literature supports the latter to be the most important and dominant explanation.

That latter explanation would definitely make a lot of sense as far as cricket is concerned, where the fate of batsmen is so often decided on tiny instinctive factors within an umpire’s interpretation. Yet again, as the psych major would say, more research is needed.

Who do we blame for a team’s losses?

Much ink has already been spilled over Vijay Mallya’s sacking as CEO of Bangalore, but the question his failed reign poses will continue to linger in the air… who is in charge of these teams? Who do we hail praise at, and who do we hold accountable? Up until now, professional cricket has had a very wide division of power. The captain controls things on the field, the coach helps him off the field, the selectors get to pick the teams, the board gets to pick the selectors, etc.

As Montesquieu has taught us, divided rule is great for controlling abuses of power, but it also stalls progress, promotes the status quo, and makes accountability harder to define. Given that there’s very little chance of the Kolkata Knight Riders devolving into a tyranny and deciding to invade Bangladesh, maybe abuse of power shouldn’t be our biggest concern. Lack of accountability at top, however, should, and something tells me that the huge amounts of money invested in this little shindig will force the issue to be addressed soon enough.

(Whether this leads to the game of Coach Musical Chairs that we often see in European soccer and NBA basketball is hard to say, but it’s about time cricket was forced to confront one of its more puzzling anachronisms.)

Just how good was Brendon McCullum’s 158*?

This is not necessarily something which we haven’t learned so far, but something which some of us maybe haven’t realised yet. After we all saw that innings in the first game of the tournament, we must’ve assumed we would see those kind of breathtaking knocks all the time. (Or perhaps even greater ones… a double-century, perhaps? Yeah, why not? Gilly can do it, right?)

Now that we’re through – and it’s become quite clear that those kinds of knocks will always be more outlier than norm – it might be time to assess McCullum’s effort again. And as we do so, even if we don’t want it to, it might also lead us to seriously ask ourselves: it is possible that was one of the greatest cricket innings we will ever see?

First, we can look at the numbers. 158 unbeaten runs off 73 deliveries. 10 fours and 13 sixes. Strike rate of 216. (That is almost 2.2 runs per ball. Do you know what that means? If you score one single -- just one -- you pretty much have to score a boundary on the next ball just to catch up on the run rate. Another single, and not even a four is enough.)

Since that first game, no one has scored anything even close to 158. In the 58 games since that inaugural fixture, there were only five other centuries (four of those by Australians), with the highest score being Andrew Symonds’s 117*.

Then, there are those 13 sixes. Since that initial date, only two other players (Jayasuriya and Gilchrist) reached double-figures in a innings, and overall, only five other IPL innings included so much as half that amount of sixes as McCullum’s. Hell, in the entire history of ODIs, no one has hit 13 sixes.

But beyond the stats, there is the subjective appreciation. McCullum's was an intense assault, yet it wasn't mindless or brutish (in other words, it wasn't "Afridiesque"). His footwork was sprightly, his approach was exuberant, and his shot selection was innovative. He played regular shots, off the middle of the bat, adorned with a wristy flourish. He targeted the weak and punished the wayward.   

And then, there is that ultimate intangible -- the sense of The Occasion. True winners have a way of separating themselves from the pack by lifting their game when it matters. (Or at least, when the public perception is that “it matters”.) They excel in knockout matches, in grand finals, in derbies -- when everybody is watching, when everybody’s talking, when everybody will remember. This was the inaugural innings in the league that changed the world. The stage could not get any bigger, or the crowd any more anticipatory. This was the time for the champions – for the Jordans, and Federers, and Warnes of this world – to rise to The Occasion and fulfill the destiny of the narratives we create for them.

Brendon McCullum rose. And how.

Someday, we all might realise it.

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.

The Structure Is Set, Ya Never Change It With A Ballot Pull (Vol.5)

Among all the commotion regarding the end of the IPL, the two current Test series, the NBA Playoffs, and a swad of unrelated errands, it seems that we forgot to update the (not-so-)weekly poll. Here are the results from the last one:

                                                                              


It seems that Andre Nel is overwhelmingly considered the most responsible of the lot, which is intuitively hard to believe, but it does make some kind of sense. Your kids might end up on a deep sugar rush and jumping on the walls after a visit from uncle ‘Dre, but they probably won’t be punching anything/one or starting any fires.

On to this week’s much more timely Q: Which cricketer would you choose to have as a drug mule? Options on the right. Get a-votin’.

Final Plaudits & Gripes (IPL Final: Rajasthan v. Chennai)

Okay, IPL... we're even. I doubted you, I questioned your merits at the crucial parts of the event, I abandoned you a little for a couple of weeks, but yet again, you made things up in the end with a truly gripping final. Thanks. We're cool.

For anyone who wants to know about the action in the final, no need to go any further than the poor man's cricinfo (aka Miriam), and her coverage on Cricket w/ Balls. (Or you could just be all corporate about it, and go to the real cricinfo's coverage.) I don't have much to add regarding the final itself, and we'll be posting different IPL-recap pieces throughout the week, but just a couple of notes:

• Yet again, Makhaya Ntini proves to everyone that he just might be the most underrated and undervalued cricketer going around. He never gets injured, he never complains, he always tries hard, and always comes back with boundless energy and a smile. He sees himself getting taken in and out of the team throughout the season, given no rhythm or sign of confidence from above... and then, just like that, he goes out and wins his team the semifinal with two wickets (one of those Shaun Marsh, only the best batter in the league) and just about put them in the position to repeat the performance in the final, with a tight spell and a brilliant run-out. And still, few people seem to notice.
  
  (Whether he's the most underrated player is, I guess, a matter of debate, but I bet he'd at least head the bowling attack in the Undervalued XI. He'd be right there with Nathan Bracken, Matthew Hoggard, and Anil Kumble.)

• Suprisingly enough, the level of commentating got a little bit better towards the end of the tournament, after the very quiet dumping of that tragic triumvirate of broadcasting incompetence -- Greg Chappell, Aamer Sohail and Ranjit Fernando -- somewhere around the 4-week mark of the season. Damien Fleming may sound like his entire nasal passage is plugged with semen, but he actually tries new things, and he learns as he goes along, and gets excited by the game... that's more than we can say for half of the shattered souls in that commentating booth.
  

• For example, it was good to see the commentators actually mention how slow the over rates were getting towards the end of the tournament, and to what ridiculous length Warne was taking it in the final.  One of the big drawcards to the Twenty20 format is supposed to be its (relative) brevity... no longer would we need to give seven hours of our day to find out who wins a damn cricket match.
  
  Yet most IPL games are still going on for about three-and-a-half hours, and the final went as far went on for more than four, finishing up after 6:30 in the morning in New Zealand. I know the concerns of the live viewership in New Zealand are probably as far from the Indian IPL moguls minds' as the coordinates of the Sandwich Islands, but would it really hurt them to speed things up a little? Who wants to see the sunrise after a cricket match?
  
  

More Plaudits & Gripes (Re: Second IPL Semifinal, Punjab v. Chennai)

Yet another horribly one-sided semifinal with depleted teams... what's going on here? How could it all go so horribly wrong? (Next thing you know, Matthew Hayden will be dropping in and score a hundred in the final  playing on a broken Achilles' heel.) The final better make up for all this bullshit. Here are some more notes on the second semi:

• Seriously, did no one bother planning these final stages of the IPL season? It's work so negligent and sloppy it almost has a touch of George Dubya to it. There is no absolutely no understanding of The Occasion in the planning; no attempt to cultivate the power of The Event in people's minds.
  
  How could they possibly have the two semifinals and the final on three consecutive days? This is supposed to be the most exciting part of the year for the IPL, and the finals of any tournament must always seem special, unique in some way. You have to space them out a little, let the drama build, make the hacks speculate in order to fill column space. Why is the IPL sidling away from view as quickly as possible? We already waited a month-and-a-half to reach this point... make it worth our while, will ya?
  
  
• Leading Contender for Best Name of The IPL... Wilkin Mota. We've already seen some strong nominees during the tournament, with the likes of "Swapnil Asnodkar" and "Yo Mahesh" leading the pack. "Wilkin Mota", however, is just a cool name. It's like the name of a forgotten jazz-age legend, wild and mercurial... the great Wilkin Mota, ladies and gentlemen, sitting in with the Thelonius Monk Quartet, for one night only. (Now if we can just get Wilkin Mota and Willy Saha in the same team, we'd be all set.)
  
  
• The broadcasters chose a strange time, with a couple of games to go, to start plugging the emerging internet presence of the league. All of a sudden, they start talking about interactive polls, live forums, online stats and graphs, completely oblivious to the fact that the IPL will pretty much disappear from the public consciousness in about two days. It just serves to remind you how much this league is still functioning in Beta mode. As long as it doesn't crash, we should all be happy.
  
  

The Spark Of (Bleep)in' Change

For those readers out there who are not NBA fans and don't quite understand the relevance of the 'Sheed Award, take a look at this (via Need4Sheed). From a recent post-match interview with Rasheed Wallace, regarding the officiating and the recent prevalence of soccer-style "flopping" in basketball games:




For those who like their bleeps spelled out, here's the transcript, as it appeared in most news releases:

All that bull[bleep]-ass calls they had out there. With Mike [Callahan] and Kenny [Mauer] -- you've all seen that [bleep]," Wallace said. "You saw them calls. The cats are flopping all over the floor and they're calling that [bleep]. That [bleep] ain't basketball out there. It's all [bleep] entertainment. You all should know that [bleep]. It's all [bleep] entertainment.

Wallace was fined $25,000 by the NBA for his "outburst."

That very same day, however, the league also announced that they would begin to penalise flopping from the start of next season, first with fines and maybe even suspensions for serial offenders. See? Without the 'Sheeds of this world, how would we ever move forward?

Plaudits & Gripes (Re: First IPL Semifinal, Rajasthan v. Delhi)

I was planning to present a more formal, professional wrap-up of the final stages of the tournament, with great formatting, photos, heading and subheadings, tons of awards... but since this season seems to barely be creeping towards the finish line, how can we expect its blog coverage to be any different? We'll save the deep insights for the season post-mortems, and right now leave it at some notes of praise and annoyance, which I managed to jot down in my last lucid moments of the night:

• Is there a rule that says at least one of the semifinals of every knockout tournament has to be a complete blowout? I can't even think back to the last time we had a pair of really exciting, high-quality semifinals, in any sport... every time it seems at least one of the two games must end in total annihilation. In cricket, in recent history, we've had either one blowout and one classic (1999 World Cup), one blowout and one reasonably tight contest (2003 World Cup, 2004 Champions Trophy), or even two blowouts (2007 World Cup).
  
  (If anything, the tightest pair of semis we've seen might've been the one of the Twenty20 World Cup last November, which is a good sign for the future of the format, I suppose.)

• As much as I dig the concept of the IPL -- and as obvious as it is how much world cricket needed the boost from its creation -- I can't help but worry about the damn genie we've uncorked. I mean, if you had told me before the tournament that Shane Watson would be the runaway nominee for MVP, that Graeme Smith would be the leading scorer in the best team of the tournament, that Glenn McGrath would be treated like a demigod by all concerned, and that Australia would unearth another world class batting opener with a bright future, I might have said, "thanks but no thanks" and walked away right then and there. Who needs that in their life?
  
  
• On a similar note, it's a shame that so many top players had to leave right as the league was set to be reaching its more exciting stages. It's just hard to get really excited about a supposed "league of stars" that includes so many mediocre players in its semifinal squads. No offense to them, but a middle order of Dhawan, Tiwary, and Dilshan is not exactly billboard material for the brave new world. I know it'll probably be different next year, but it's a bit of a drag to think about how much better these final stages could have been, if organised properly. (Now we just need to wait another 46 weeks to see if anyone in power realises this.)
  

• Alas, another one is lost to the Dark Side: Farveez Maharoof is already doing the "McGrath Headshake", even after bowling incisive, 3-wicket spell that almost put his team in a commanding position early on. (Papa McG must be so proud.) Maharoof is definitely one of the players who must be wishing the IPL would never end... his stock has risen massively in the past 6 weeks, to the point where, under the right light, he's already looking like one of the top-5 all-rounders in world cricket. (At least in limited overs cricket.)
  
  
• And if Maharoof indeed makes it to the top-5, where would that put Sohail Tanvir? Best bowler in the tournament batting at no.3 in the semifinal -- that is pretty much unprecedented as far as I can tell. Have Pakistan discovered another talent of Abdul Razzaq-like proportions? And, more importantly, does it come free from an Abdul Razzaq-like mentality?
  


• Congratulations to Shane Warne, not only for leading his team to the final and for contributing again in the semifinal with a pair of cheap wickets and some typically strong captaincy, but for perfectly coordinating the timing of his hair plugs to last throughout the tournament. Just as he's starting to show hints of a budding crop circle on top, the league is set to end and he can go safely go back in the lab and can get himself re-planted again. Had the league lasted another few weeks, he could have ended up like George of the Jungle here:
  
  
  

                                                                          

Regular Programming Will Resume Shortly

Apologies for the lack of coverage recently. We've been experiencing some technical, logistical and dispositional difficulties lately (i.e. my internet is capped out, assignments are due, and I'm a lazy procrastinator), plus the NBA Conference Finals have just been way too riveting to look away. I'm sure the world can wait a few more days for our round-up of the IPL, or our opinion on who should be in the Ashes squads in 2009 (seriously, does no else find it disturbing how much Ashes talk is going around right now? Is that the only way most of us can get it up for Test cricket now... by fantasizing about series more than a year away?).

In the meantime, some keys to life, from the funniest guy you've probably never heard of:

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?

An Unexpected 'Sheed

Its namesake may currently be battling Boston's Kevin Garnett in the Eastern Conference Finals for the title of "Most Intense, Inspirational, and Flawed Floor Leader" in the NBA, but at least the good old 'Sheed Award is back!

For those who don't know, the 'Sheed Award goes to anyone in the cricket world who, like Rasheed Wallace in the NBA, manages to go beyond the usual sporting cliches and manages to tell the world truths: uncomfortable truths, unacknowledged truths, interesting truths.

Today's honoree is actually a bit of a surprise. We tend to rag on him a bit (okay, a lot) but sometimes we just have to give Ian Chappell his due. When asked about the whole Baggy Green nonsense in a tour match in Jamaica, Chappelli tells it like it is:

"It is a $5 bit of cloth. I haven't got one, haven't had one since the day I finished. I don't need to look at an Australian cap to remind me of what I did."

Right on, sista! Another worthy winner. Congratulations on your award.

How About We Just Pick Captains Again And Start Over?

So is this what the future holds for international cricket? 30-year-old Australian players who could never get a game for their own country moving to bottom-of-the-table teams just to get internationals? Will we soon see David Hussey anchoring the middle order for Bangladesh, or Matthew Inness opening the bowling for Zimbabwe?

My favourite bit from the interview -- with Brendan Nash, the ex-Queensland batsman now trying to get into the West Indies team -- was his answer to this question:

What are the major differences between Australian and West Indian cricket?
The on-field stuff like the lack of facilities to train or play on. The culture is also a lot more laid-back...

Yeah, you know, that "on-field stuff"... as in, actually having a field on which to play.Yeah, that one might be the biggie. In Australia, they have that. In the West Indies, they don't. Gee, I wonder which of the team has been doing better recently?

And does this mean we are headed for a world where Australia play Australia A and Australia B to see who's best in the world? Ugh. Should I just go back to sleep for a half-decade or so?

(But hey, if it makes the West Indies relevant again, bring on the Aussies, I say! Isn't Shane Warne available again? Shit, where's Allen Stanford and his money when you need them?)

Schooled By The IPL (14% and 4 In My Head Edition) - May 19-20

                                  

Old-timer on an egg-timer... Jacques Kallis (Bangalore Royal Challengers)
Maybe, in order to keep the astronomical theme going, I should've awarded him the Pluto among Planets... award, since it's about time someone demoted Kallis from his rarefied status. Instead, here's a figure:

                                                                     14%

You know what that is? That's the percentage of deliveries that Kallis left in Monday's 25-run innings. Left them. In Twenty20! The very fact that the number is non-zero alone should be damning enough, but anything in double figures is just ridiculous. (And it's not the first time.)

As it stands, the matter here is quite simple -- Jacques Kallis is not good enough to play in the IPL, or any competitive form of Twenty20 at the top level.  Sorry, he's just not. For the season, he averages 18.1, with a strike rate of 106, no centuries or fifties, and two ducks. Perhaps his bowling might save him, you're saying? Think again: in 9 games, he's nabbed only 4 wickets at an average of 69.25, with the highest economy rate (9.55/over) in his team for any player who's bowled more than 4 overs in the season.

At $900,000, he is undoubtedly the bust of the draft, and one of the primary reasons why Bangalore are guarantee to get the inaugural Wooden Spoon in the IPL. And if it's true that Rahul Dravid was the one who chose him for the team, then he himself should be stripped of the captaincy immediately, since his reasoning powers must obviously be slipping in middle-age. Anyone who's ever watched Kallis play knew this was bound to happen.

Uncle J Rod already brought this up a few of days ago, and I wasn't going to mention it again, but Kallis' innings yesterday only reminded me of it, since it made me try to work out what the hell goes on in that cavernous amphitheater mind of his.

For anyone who hasn't read it yet, here's the official Q & A with the man himself. It's a classic. Tomorrow morning, I could receive a recorded audiobook copy of Vladimir Nabokov's lost manuscript, read by J.D. Salinger, hand delivered to my door by Thomas Pynchon, and that Kallis questionnaire would still be the most exciting discovery of the week. It's just that good.

Apart from a bunch of delicious nuggets about the man -- a) he considers "Implement" [sic] one of his strongest morals, b) he considers his Investment Advisor an "item" or c) his Investment Advisor is one of the 5 most important items in his life -- the ultimate find here is the question regarding Kallis' four dream dinner guests. Ready for it? Bill Clinton... Neve Campbell... Denise Richards... and Nelson Mandela.

Now, I know that was probably just some offhand response, with little forethought to it, made hastily to an uninspired webmaster on a deadline. Nothing more to it, right? Well... the thought still came to his head at some point, and thoughts don't come out of nowhere. There's a reason why it came to his head, and I've spent hours now -- almost against my will -- trying to work out why the hell anyone would want those four people sitting at a dinner table together. (Believe me, the last thing I want to with my day is figuring out Jacques Kallis' thinking patterns.)

Seriously, what can he be expecting? Mandela and Clinton to talk, while the two girls are going at it in the background? Is that what dinner parties are like at the Kallises' -- the boys talk while the girls lick each other just within eye's view? Or is it a more serious affair, with Mandela retelling details of his fight for justice and his 27-year prison sentence, leading Campbell to mention how much that reminds her of a plotline in the third season of Party of Five, centred on Bailey's character and his alcoholism? Or are the words "Nelson Mandela" added to every answer that white South Africans give about any topic whatsoever?

So many questions, so much confusion... will someone please get Jacques Kallis out the IPL and out of my head?!!

3 Bullets to the head...

• What the hell has came over David Hussey lately? His form has dipped gravely in the past couple of weeks, and that innings against Rajasthan was one of the worst I've seen from him so far in this tournament, culminating with a truly atrocious shot. He was years too early into the pull and ended up getting bowled by the Royals' 6th best bowler. Is that what sharing a locker room as Ganguly does to a person after a while?
  
  
• Whenever I see his surname and his initial on the scorecard, I keep thinking the name of Kolkata's wicketkeeper is "Willy Saha." I don't know why. His name is actually Wriddhiman Saha, but I think "Willy Saha" is a great name for a keeper. Who wouldn't feel confident knowing trust old Willy Saha is behind the stumps? So can we all just start calling him Willy from now on?
  
  
• I tried my hardest to come up with a segue for this, somehow tying it  to cricket or to the IPL, but I couldn't find anything. So here it is, the history of modern warfare told with food:
  
  

The Structure Is Set, Ya Never Change It With A Ballot Pull (Vol.4)

                                    

Cricinfo is running another poll at the moment ranking the most popular commentators. The results are not what interest me -- we all know the honour will go to Richie Benaud with a typically Stalinesque margin of victory -- but who the nominees are. If you look through the list, you might notice someone's name is missing.

That's right everyone... even Cricinfo thinks Greg Chappell is such a lousy commentator that he doesn't deserve to be mentioned. (When you're getting left out and guys like Waqar Younis are still in the mix, you know you've done something horribly wrong with your life.)

Far be it from us to pile on the man's misery, but this was the orchestrator of the underarm incident, after all... so here are the results of last week's poll! The question was, "If you were given the power to remove someone's voice box from their body till the end of the IPL, whose would it be?" Do I even need to tell you who won? 

                                                     

A valiant effort from the "Well, duh..." twins, Aamer Sohail and Ranjit Fernando, but this one was Chappello's to lose from the very start. Jackman and Siva were there only as decoys... as Verbal Kint tells us, you never put five guilty men in a lineup.

On to this week's Q: "If you needed to find a babysitter a.s.a.p., who would you call first?" Options are on the right.

Waiting For Cricket's Velvet Revolution

[NOTE: In his book "Letters to a Young Contrarian", Christopher Hitchens recounts a strategy used by dissidents in Eastern Europe, like Vaclav Havel, to get through life behind the Iron Curtain. It was dubbed the 'As If' strategy. Havel “realised that ‘resistance’ in its original insurgent and militant sense was impossible in the Central Europe of the day. He therefore proposed living ‘as if’ he were a citizen of a free society, ‘as if’ lying and cowardice were not mandatory patriotic duties, ‘as if’ his government had actually signed the various treaties and agreements that enshrine universal human rights.”

Here at Outside the Line, we embrace that sentiment, and we wish to somehow emulate it. Luckily, we live in a free society, with no StB goons in the adjacent house waiting to break our bones, so our hypothetical ‘as if’ strategy shall be reserved for more trivial matters. Namely, ranking IPL players.

One of the criminally overlooked aspects about the IPL so far has been its fantasy potential. Now that we have an actual functional league, with a uniform number of games, and a colelction of international talent in one place, there is no excuse not to have a proper fantasy infrastructure. Entire armies of sports geeks and office procrastinators have been denied already, and it's just not right! We can’t keep that going any longer.

And, by the way, we don’t mean the usual worthless fantasy games on offer at cricinfo and elsewhere on the net, where everyone gets to pick from the entire pool of players, and then points are given out virtually arbitrarily. We mean proper rotisserie-style fantasy leagues, with drafts, trading, free agents, and players competing only against others chosen to be in their league.

As far as we're aware, no such thing exists out there for cricket. Therefore, until it does (which if we get our shit together, should be by the start of next year's IPL), we will just live 'as if' fantasy cricket exists. So here it is, the inaugural Outside the Line Big Board, assessing the fantasy stock of the leading IPL players. We chose a typical set of roto rules and some predictable categories, just to give everyone an idea of what we're talking about.

I’d also like to use the opportunity to introduce my good friend Joey – Lefty J to the cricket world – who compiled this Big Board and shall be contributing regularly to Outside the Line, mainly with some nifty statistical alchemy and other crazy attempts at finding objective gold. Lefty J was my mentor in all things cricket-related, so any odd prejudices I still hold are probably attributable to him in some way. The man is probably the shrewdest and most annoyingly rational being I’ve ever know, and he doesn’t suffer fools – or time-wasters – gladly. Cross him at your peril. But give him some love. 

-- D.S. Henry]

RULES:

• 6-8 teams per league.

• Each team drafts 11 players before the season.

• Teams must consist of 4 batters, 3 allrounders, 1 keeper and 3 bowlers.

• 10 Categories (runs, batting average, batting strike rate, 4s, 6s, wickets, bowling average, economy rate, catches and runouts/stumpings).

• Total stats are accumulated for every category, and teams in each league are ranked based on their average performance for each of them.

BIG BOARD

                                                                                                                                                                       

Rank	Name	Type	Stock
1	S.   Watson (RR)	Bat/Bwl/All	Ugh. Has overachieved in all ten categories.   The Shawn Marion of the IPL, and should still be good for more. (Trust us, we   wouldn’t be giving this to him if we had any doubts about it.)
2	A.   Gilchrist (KKR)	Bat/Kpr	Batting legend is still in prime form, is the   second leading run getter (308) and the leading six hitter (16)
3	S.   Marsh (PXI)	Bat	Another overachieving Aussie has IPL's highest   batting average (98) and 295 runs in only 5 matches. So far, has got this   league by the balls.
4	V.   Sehwag (DDD)	Bat	Highest strike rate of 200+ run getters (177),   crushing boundaries as he rides on his enemies. His bowling has been weak so   far, though, but look for that to change.
5	D.   Hussey (KKR)	Bat	Fills up the batting stat sheet. A very safe   draft, and a safe pair of Aussie farm hands to boot.
6	G.   McGrath (DDD)	Bwl	Best economy rate in the league (5.7) and has   only faced two balls with the bat so far – and he got out to the second one.
7	I.   Pathan (PXI)	Bwl/All	Statistically the best bowler of the   tournament so far, gets you some handy runs and sixes as well.
8	Y.   Singh (PXI)	Bat	Has equal highest catch per innings ratio   (.777), but poor bowling and big names batting above him take from his   potential top-5 batting stats.
9	M.S.   Dhoni (CSK)	Bat/Kpr	Superb batting stats from Dhoni. Is revelling   now as the key batsman for Chennai.
10	R.   Sharma (DC)	Bat	Third leading run getter looks really   comfortable out there. Only 21 years old, an Indian superstar in the making.
11	S.   Afridi (DC)	Bat/Bwl/All	Woeful batting and 2 DNPs from this year’s   biggest draft bust. Only needs a foot in the door though...
12	S.   Jayasuriya (MI)	Bat/All	Until big hundred, hadn't struck any sort of form in the tournament, but should be good to go from now on. Tight bowling a big bonus.
13	S.   Tanvir (RR)	Bwl	A tough bowler to pick up quickly has had   major success so far - bowling average (15.9) and econ rate (6.6). After 3   early DNPs, should be a lock for the rest of the tourney.
14	K.   Sangakkara (PXI)	Bat/Kpr	Class act has surprised all with his strike   rate (166), but an untimely side strain has stalled his momentum.
15	S.   Warne (RR)	Bwl/All	5 catches and nice bowling stats -- although   his econ rate is a little high (8.27)
16	G.   Gambhir (DD)	Bat	Enjoying life at the top with Sehwag. Leading  run scorer (336) and 4 hitter (43)
17	S.   Raina (CSK)	Bat	Fielding allrounder with the equal highest   catch/innings ratio, and getting to spending some solid time out in the   middle since Hussey and Hayden left.
18	S.   Pollock (MI)	Bwl/Alr	Does everything slightly better than the   average. A nice filler for your team.
19	S.   Ganguly (KKR)	Bat/All	A risky draft pick can 'Kallis it up' with the   best of them, but opening status helps, along with effective bowling (econ   rate 5.78). Is a lock for games and time in the middle.
20	S.   Tendulkar (MI)	Bat	Lengthy wait on sidelines finally comes to an   end.

ON THE BUBBLE

                                                           

Player	Role
M.   Asif (DDD)	Bwl
I.   Sharma (KKR)	Bwl
U. Gul (KKR)	Bwl
P.   Chawla (PXI)	Bwl/All
M.   Boucher (BRC)	Bat/Kpr
S.   Styris (KKR)	Bat/Bwl/All
S.   Sreesanth (PXI)	Bwl
Y.   Pathan (RR)	Bat/All
Z.   Khan (BRC)	Bwl
A.B.   Dinda (KKR)	Bwl
D.   Kulkarni (MI)	Bwl/All
M.   Muralitharan (CSK)	Bwl
A.B.   DeVilliers (DDD)	Bat/Kpr
S.   Akthar (KKR)	Bwl

Schooled By The IPL (Backyard Id And Men With Binoculars Edition) -- May 13

                                              

Star among stars... Shoaib Akthar (Kolkata K'Riders)
One of the keys to being a cricket fan is knowing when to watch. That's something casual fans and non-fans will never understand about us. None of us actually watch 6 straight hours of action, every day. We may only watch an hour or two -- no more than anyone would spend on any other sport -- but we know which hour to watch. We learn from experience to single out certain passages, certain spells, certain batsmen... our ears are pricked and our interest is piqued when we hear about, say, Sachin Tendulkar vs. Shane Warne, or Kevin Pietersen vs. Warne, or Muttiah Muralitharan on a 5th day home pitch, or Glenn McGrath working with the slope at Lord's (or hell, even Brian Lara playing and missing, against any opposition).

And whatever we're doing, regardless of our inclinations, if we know our shit, we know to follow one simple rule --  when Shoaib Akthar is bowling, you watch.

Shoaib is, my most accounts, a bit of a prick. He's selfish, he's immature, he preens, he's a bad teammate, he's a cheater, he has a poor work ethic... and that's kind of what makes him so great to watch.

See, Shoaib is everyone's backyard Id... all sweaty, unfit, and frustrated. You know the feeling -- nothing is going for you, you're tired, and all you feel like doing is bowling a dirty beamer straight between your smug opponent's eyes. (Nevermind the fact that this is usually your best friend.) You've tried being disciplined, and doing things right, as the coaches tell you. But it's not working. All that drives you at the moment is bile, you can barely see straight from anger... yet you know that if you harness all your energy, channel it into every muscle and tendon, all you need is one ball. That's the beauty of cricket. One ball.

Anything can happen in one ball. No matter what has gone on before, or how grim the future looks, there there will always be that pale fire burning in the back of your mind. That hope. The one that never leaves. The same one that drives our survival. The thing with feathers.

Shoaib Akthar represents that. He's the gleam from that distant, fading primeval fire. He is our struggle. He is us. He's unpolished, and a bit of a prick, and he's getting all bloated and losing his hair. It doesn't get any more real than that. (Or any better.)

Thank you again, PCB 3-man appeal board.

3 Bullets to the head...

• This might seem like hyperbole, but the more I think about it, the more I'm starting to believe that that I've never seen a team field as well as Kolkata did during yesterday's chase. As in, EVER. By my count, they hit the stumps directly 6 times, two of those leading to run-outs, they took a couple of great outfield catches, and they made the Delhi batters break apart mentally with their stifling infield pressure. Pretty nifty work for 17.5 overs in the field.
  
  
• Instead of that stupid Fair Play award that no one cares about (off the top of your head, who's ahead on the table right now? No? I didn't think so.) why don't they just set up something we can all get into? How about the Fly Kingfisher "Awkward Moment During An On-Field Interview" Award? We'd have a great candidate from yesterday's interview with Umar Gul, after Ramiz Raja asks him what he thinks of Shoaib's performance, and then tells him that as long as Shoaib is bowling like that, Gul will probably not even get a game for Kolkata. Gul's face was priceless -- he looked like he just found out his mum was a stripper, or something.

• Nothing to do with cricket, but still guaranteed to be the best thing you will see today:
  
  

Every Innings Is Like New Scar Tissue

Was Marlon Samuels once molested by cricket? Not by 'a cricket player', I mean by the sport of cricket itself. Did cricket touch Samuels inappropriately when he was a little boy growing up in Jamaica? Did cricket offer him some Jesus Juice and free candy to get in its van and "play confessional", as the Catholic priests might call it?

I ask this because only the trauma of abuse could possibly make a person prone to self-sabotaging his own career to the extent that Samuels has done. First he gets banned from bowling for regularly bending his arm more than a darts player, now he's been found guilty of giving away pitch information and other match details to an Indian bookmaker is 2007, and is said to be facing a minimum 2-year ban.

So now he's going to have two concurrent bans. Are there any other ways for his subconscious to lash out and get him into more trouble? Has anyone tested his urine yet? I bet you'll find it'd test positive for everything from human growth hormone to asbestos --  it's clear that the guy just wants out, even if he doesn't quite know it. Help him move on from his trauma and get on with his life, will you, ICC? Leniency will only make things worse. Just let him go...

The Structure Is Set, Ya Never Change It With A Ballot Pull (Vol.3)

Last week’s poll was a tricky one. It didn’t just ask “who’s the ugliest cricketer around?”, which I’m sure has been asked before, and would’ve been a little too simplistic in our minds. Instead, the question asked a hypothetical that made you deal with your own psychological expectations about other people: “If you were asked to date one of these cricket players’ sister, having never previously seen or met them before, whose would it be?” Here are the results:
   

                                                                

 
Because the question was kind of complex, interpreting its results is also hard. Sohail Tanvir and Ajit Agarkar got equal top votes, which either makes them the better looking ones of the bunch, or the ones with physical features most conducive to transmute into female beauty. It’s hard to say.

On the other hand, something that is obviously clear is the hideousness of Kamran Akmal, who failed to grab even a sympathy vote. Ouch. I guess there’s not many guys out there looking for girls with monobrows, horse teeth and shrieking nasal voices. Hard to believe.

(How the hell Nantie Hayward got 5.6% of the vote, though, is something I’d be very interested to find out. Maybe that’s our margin of error. Seriously, though, have you seen this guy?)

                                                  

Anyway, he's probably a cool guy, so I'm glad there are people out there who are not as shallow as us, and can overlook the whole "aborted Martian fetus with third-degree burns look" thing. Good on them.
On to this week's question: "If you were given the power to remove someone's voice box from their body till the end of the IPL, whose would it be??" Get to voting.

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.

It's Not Just Hacks, Whingers, And Chappells

Sometimes I'm glad there are still actual journalists around. Via The Surfer, this is an article by Raghunir Srinivasan on the basic financial structure of the IPL. I'm sure there must be some shady dealings and Bollywood mafia money in there somewhere, but this is a good start.

(Incidentally, it says there that the IPL is considering removing its salary cap. Is this true? Say it ain't so!)

Schooled By The IPL (Planetary Walls And Chardonnay Nights Edition) --> May 5-6

                                           

 

Planet among stars… Rahul Dravid (Bangalore Royal Challengers)

The ancient Greeks used to consider the planets “wandering stars” (that’s what the word 'planet' means in Greek), because their trajectory in the night sky was never uniform and circular, like the normal stars. Planets ‘wander’ during the night – they speed up and slow back down, they change trajectories, they end up in different spots from where they started from – or at least they seem to from our earthly perspective. It wasn’t until Kepler and Copernicus came along that we learned that the planets’ motion is in fact uniform, only it goes along an elliptical path, not a circular one, and it is centred around the sun, not the Earth.

This came to my mind as I was watching Rahul Dravid bat in the first innings of Monday’s match, against the Kings XI Punjab. His team’s entire batting performance was defined by Dravid’s 66, with 9 wickets falling around him, 5 of them to ducks, and only one other player in the team getting to double figures. In my pad, I made a note to maybe give Dravid a Star among stars… award later, except that this kind of innings went beyond any typical starry highlight-reel collection. It wasn’t the work of the brightest star in a league full of stars. This was something different, it didn’t behave exactly as predicted, it was like… a wandering star.

Dravid himself was the one wandering… he was wandering through the crease, wandering through every playing moment trying to find his niche in this strange new format. It’s becoming fascinating to watch all the old-school textbook players trying to adapt to the new style of play, and their attempts at survival have become one of the most engrossing sub-plots of the season so far. This phenomenon is obviously more pronounced in a team like Bangalore, with its revolving door crew of aging, Test-ready plodders, and the tension of the team's imbalance inhibits no one player more clearly and transparently than Rahul Dravid.

Dravid has always seemed a player designed for a struggle. Battling alone on an unforgiving pitch; trying to contain a rampant opponent set on enforcing a follow-on; batting out the dying of the light on the fifth day of a Test. (That’s what Walls are for… to keep things out; to protect against external challenges.) He may have soared higher stylistically and/or aesthetically in other innings since, but that forgotten 180 in Kolkata in 2001 was probably the most memorable in my eyes (even though I didn't even get to see it at the time) -- complex, multi-layered, and utterly cathartic for the man and his team. As a spectacle of human emotion, it was without par.

Which is something it’s starting to have in common with Dravid’s recent campaign in the IPL. It may have been because it was so late at night, or it might have been the generous glasses of bottom-shelf Chardonnay I had drunk a little earlier in the evening, but Dravid’s innings against Punjab was one of the most riveting knocks I must have seen in years. A good old-fashioned battle in the middle, wickets tumbling without respite, and a trusty old legend at one end, on full alert during every delivery, trying his hardest to manufacture a few extra radians of space between the fielders with nothing but the unchanging palette of orthodoxy.

In the end, you could see how important an innings like this was for Dravid. He’s not like Jacques Kallis, drifting along on auto-pilot, just counting his cash and the days before he can go back to collecting meaningless hundreds against Bangladesh in front of a few hundred punters in the stands and some disinterested sunbathers on the hill. Dravid is not struggling for a place… he’s fighting for meaning. What does it mean to be a cricketer in this age? What does it mean to be an old-school player in a game for the new, the young, and the unschooled? If you think this league is just a hit-and-giggles little carnival attraction for some petty cash, look at the way Dravid lashed out after getting out, banging the bat wildly against the ground on his way out of the field. Has he ever looked as disappointed about losing his wicket as he did after that one?

I hope Dravid continues in his wanders this season, and I hope it one day leads him to wander straight onto that perfect spot on the balance, where no one can question or doubt him, but simply regale. And then, just then... his work will be done.

2 Bullets to the head...

• Now that Herschelle Gibbs has apparently been cleared from match-mixing in India, could he be about to get in a different kind of trouble with authorities? On a scale of one to Canseco, how "pumped" does Gibbs look at the moment? I'm not implying anything -- it could just be a steady diet and a grueling weights regimen in the off-season -- but he looks about ready to burst through that mustard-coloured Chargers jersey, Bruce Banner-style, any second now. Just saying...
  
  
• Since Robin Uthappa has shaved racing stripes on to the side of his head, are we far away from the establishment of the first IPL gangsta generation? Will there be turf wars? And diss records? I'm positively giddy in anticipation.
  
  

The Structure Is Set, Ya Never Change It With A Ballot Pull (Vol.2)

The results of last week's poll -- asking "Which cricketer would you most like to make cry? -- are in, and while the ultimate winner wasn't terribly surprising, I have to admit that the actual margin of victory was a little unexpected. When almost two-thirds of cricket fans want to see you bawling like a little babe (in a field with both Graeme Smith and Harbhajan Singh), you know you've got an "image problem". (To put it mildly.)


                                                                                                      

 

The interesting thing to note was the extent of geographical variation in Ponting-hate -- he was wildly unpopular in four different continents, even gathering votes from Australia. There were pockets of Ponting-hate from places like the American Midwest, the U.A.E., and the Bahamas. Quite impressive, really, and a great sight to see. We weren't just tilting at windmills at Outside the Line, after all.

On to this week's Q: "If you were forced date one player's sister, having never previously met her or seen what she looks like, whose would it be?" The options are, as always, on the right. We tried to keep it IPL-specific, but there was one Hall-of-Famer we just couldn't leave out of contention.

Things We've Learned From The IPL This Weekend (03-04/05)

                                              

It was bound to happen, really. You can't go around trying to cover a daily tournament lasting six weeks, being played eight time zones behind you, and not expect that pesky old thing called life to get in your way sometimes. I caught glimpses of the cricket over the weekend, arresting passages here and there, but not enough to merit full individual recaps. And I'm glad.

It's only for so long that a lifestyle like that can work -- university student by day/night, IPL blogger by early morning. Those kinds of enforced schisms to the psyche are never healthy.  Before you know it, you could become like one of those creepy Republican senators in the US, touting "family values" at the cameras, while later getting anonymous crank handjobs in airport bathroom stalls. 

(By the way, this is not my "going to rehab", or "need to spend more time with my family" post. Coverage of the league will continue uninterrupted -- only somewhat abbreviated, arranged differently, and  sharpened thematically. The Star..., Old-timer..., and Catch... "awards" will continue, plus some others will be added, but they won't necessarily appear on a daily basis. They will only be awarded to those who show they really deserve the honour. There's no point in my scouring archived Cricinfo commentary trying to find a local player who bowled two consecutive dot-balls to give him a Catchment... award every night.

There will also be a longer column wrapping up the first half of the IPL season later this week, and hopefully a fantasy analysis by a contributor at some point. Until then, here's what we caught through the cracks of the IPL coverage during the weekend....)


Star among stars... Sohail Tanvir (Rajasthan Royals)
Swing bowling's answer to Paul Adams (on top of being everyone's favourite Bond henchman), S. Tanvir, struck early, struck often, and came out with the best figures we will see in Twenty20 for half a decade. (And to think that eleven of his conceded runs came from his last over. Which one would have looked more impressive: 5-3 off 3 overs... or 6-16 off 4?  Opinions may vary. I've got to go for the former.)

Catch from the catchment... the entire fielding unit (Mumbai Indians)
The chances of this team becoming a cult favourite are rising by the day. It may not be Ewing Theory-related, but ever since Harbhajan left, this has been a changed squad. They're bustling with energy, they're alert, they're loose -- yesterday they were fielding like it was a World Cup grand final, not some matinee offering from a weekend double-header in the middle of the season.

And I know I've been a big doubter of his captaincy skills (I still have serious doubts about his tactical acumen), but I can't deny that a big part of that transformation was due to Shaun Pollock's leadership. He's helped foster a fun, scrappy, passionate team, held together by a great atmosphere among the senior players, with Jayasuriya and Bravo playing perfect jack-of-all-trades roles, and even Dominic Thornely adding the the obligatory "overachieving Aussie whom no one particularly seems to like, but whom everyone knows can help them win" to the mix. I almost wish Tendulkar not to be back for a while, since I'd like to see where this Cinderella story can go on it own.

2 Bullets to the head...

• During the 5th over of Sunday's second match, between the Royals and the Super Kings, Chennai's Suresh Raina and S. Badrinath ran the kind of 3 that I've never once seen a pair of Indians take in my life. They had run a good 2, and had absolutely no right to run a 3rd, but they did so anyway, without hesitation. This put all the pressure on the fielder in the deep, who ended up misfiring the throw slightly, allowing the batters to scrape through. It was a pure "we just had Hayden and Hussey in our team for the past 2 weeks" kind of 3... and it could the change the complexion of Indian batting as we know it.
  
  
• Oh, so that's why Graeme Smith was so successful in his rise through the ranks in South African cricket -- he's a funny prick! Now it all makes sense. Being funny and jovial -- while still framing it in a physically imposing, Hulkish exterior -- is the best, most effective way to disarm critics and to make them overlook the top-down dogmatism and intolerance for dissent from a leader with borderline messianic tendencies (like Smith). You could  hear it from the commentators when they talked to him on the field.... they were virtually gushing, like the geeky kids in high school who are on the same bus route as the popular, funny jock, and who get to talk to him and hence feel a little cooler by osmosis.
  
  

Things We've Learned From The IPL Today (02/05)

May 02

Chennai v. Delhi


Star among stars... Virender Sehwag (Delhi D'devils)
As long as Delhi continue to have both their batting openers in form and scoring runs, they are going to be hard to beat in this league. Their pace bowling lineup is strong enough that, even on flat pitches, they can always reduce opposing teams to 15-20 runs below the par score, and then Sehwag can just cut loose and destroy the required run rate early in the chase. All it takes is a couple of overs.

In a format as contracted as Twenty20, anything under 7/over on a good pitch is just about useless for a team trying to defend. By the point Sehwag had sliced the rate to under-7 today, the chase was essentially over. All they had to do, as Happy' Gilmore's pro buddy would say, was take it home. It packed its bags, it had its ticket, all it needed was a ride to the airport

Old-timer on an egg-timer... Stephen Fleming (Chennai SuperKings)
So if you take away the "captain" part of Fleming's character, how much appeal does he lose as a player? On a scale of 1 to 10, measuring overall worth in the cricket field, where a "Captain Fleming" character would rank around a 7.2 (all things considered), how much would his score decrease if you take the captaincy from him? Would he break the 5? Would he be anything more or less than a precisely average player?

Catch from the catchment... Vidyut Sivaramakrishna (Chennai SuperKings)
Is it possible that this entire "league" idea was just one big, elaborate plan by the BCCI designed to improve the quality of the Indian international team? Maybe the haters are indeed correct, and the board is in fact a real cabal full of evil, Monty Burns-type geniuses. (To me they always seemed like any other big bureacracy -- wasteful and mediocre.)

Maybe they thought, instead of wasting time (and money) on irrelevant old residue, like Greg Chappell, for a few sessions of vague comments by the nets, why not just hire the best of existing Australian talent to come in and teach the young guys how to play? Teach them how to structure an innings, how to ride momentum, how to build on confidence, how to win. Australians have won for so long that those functions feel almost innate to them. But they're not -- they're learned behaviours. You learn them by experience, by repetition. By seeing others around you doing them, and imitating what they do until it comes naturally, every time you try.

And the Indian youth is catching on. Watch guys like Dhawan, or Tiwary, or this time, Vidyut (yet another IPL debutant scoring a fifty). These players are coming in on a daily basis and playing irrepressible, confident innings; they're holding catches in the field; they're getting run-outs; they're looking the part.

I'm just saying, I would not like to be the team who has to play India next. (Of course, that all involves the selectors looking beyond the Ganguly's and Jaffer's of this world... a very big ask.)

3 Bullets to the head...

• By far the oddest couple I've seen sitting next to each other in the dugout chatting has to be Chennai's couple in canary, Stephen Fleming and Parthiv Patel. What could they possibly be talking about? Is there any possible world in which those two have anything in common, beyond the tendency to underwhelm at the top the order?
  
  
• The weather in Chennai seemed so hot and humid during this game that every player on the field looked about as greasy as Jermaine Jackson. As Chris Rock says, "when Jermaine is on the TV, you've got to wipe the screen!"

• I don't usually care much about Billy Bowden's desperate cries for attention "quirks", but I think he may be taking his little shtick a little too far during the IPL. At times today, I wasn't sure if Billy was signaling a boundary, guiding taxiing aeroplanes in the fog, or just trying to do The Sprinkler. If he wants to play pantomime, let him join Mummenschanz. Until then, just tell us if it's a FOUR or a SIX, will ya Bill?
  
  (Besides, nothing a mime does ever registers on the population at large, right?)