Outside The Line

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.)

Heraclitus To Hillary, And Everything In Between

There seem to be as many cable news channels as there are sports channels, so in between all the cricket this weekend, I caught some of the coverage on the recent campaigning and debates in the US presidential race. The Republican side, chock-full of belligerent whackos and schmaltzy panderers, is a lot more interesting to watch (for the freakshow factor), but this time I was caught by a theme on which all the Democrat candidates seemed to focus – change. The idea of change, the nature of change, who the most efficient agents of change would be, etc.

It made me think of Heraclitus and his theory of constant flux. Sometimes it seems as if the lack of permanence is all that is real in this world; as if everywhere you look, all you can see is change:

• Brisbane, e.g., has greeted me with an entire week of grey, rainy days -- I don’t know what to do with myself. If it wasn’t for the mosquitoes, the constant traffic on the streets and the creepy procession of shirtless joggers by the river, I’d think I was still in Dunedin.

• Just wondering…when did Rahul Dravid become Aakash Chopra?

• The emergence of Brad Hogg as the new anti-hero of the masses is just about the only positive I could gather from the first couple of Tests. He truly is a repulsive creature. I was a little concerned, after Glenn McGrath’s retirement and the post-World Cup player exodus, that there’d be no truly odious player left in the Australian team -- no one to affect you on a visceral level, keep you glued to the screen and force you to truly hate, with every fibre of your being. The weights-room eunuchs and statistical oddities of the new generation -- the Michael Hussey’s and Stuart Clark’s -- could never do that for you. You need someone special; someone working at a whole different level of repugnance.
  
  Enter GB Hogg. From the tongue, to the puffed-out chest, to the rodent face, to the forced jocularity on the field, to the Left-Arm-Grubber approach to spin bowling, Hogg seems almost designed to make your bile rise and get you screaming abuse at your TV as yet another wicket falls to his name. It’s a shame he’s so old already, because I could see him fueling my hating fantasies for years to come.

• I wasn’t fully aware of this, but it seems that the Australian cricket team is quickly morphing into some sort of talent agency/marketing firm/touring entertainment troupe. Every ad throughout the game’s coverage on TV involved some combination of Australian cricketers looking discomfited and acting wooden, selling everything from mobiles phones and utility trucks to fizzy drinks and chicken sandwiches. I’d call the whole bunch of them cheap whores, but that would be an insult to dedicated sex workers everywhere.
  
  (As far as unintentional comedy goes, however, you can’t go past the ad for Wolf Blass wines, where Stuart McGill, Mike Hussey, and Brad Hodge are standing  inside something that looks like either the set of a ski lodge from a bad 1980s teen movie or the underground lair of the cheapest Bond villain in history. All three of them are wearing tuxedos, and appear to be in somewhat of a festive mood; but there are no girls around, no music, and all they seem to be doing is sipping chardonnay and complimenting each other on particular highlights in their careers. It couldn’t look any gayer if Rufus Wainwright was sitting at a piano in the corner, playing a selection of Broadway showtunes.)

But what cricket this week has also shown us is that, all things considered, Heraclitus and the Democrats were wrong. All is not change, and change is not all. Some things are just bound to stay the same:

• He’s been away from the international scene for about 4 years, but it’s nice to see that Neil McKenzie still looks as awkward, uncomfortable and unreliable at the crease as always. He’s like the anti-Steve Waugh – a man you would NEVER trust to bat for your life. And yet he remains strangely endearing, with that furrowed muppet face of his, and the collection of nervous tics and idiosyncrasies.

• And speaking of idiosyncrasies … when all is said and done, I think there’s a good chance Shiv Chanderpaul might end up as one of the top-5 batsman of the decade. To do what he has done, and continues to do, for a team like the West Indies, is nothing short of spectacular. And he just keeps getting better: since Brian Lara retired last year, Chanderpaul has batted 9 times in Tests, been dismissed only 5 of those, scored 3 centuries and 5 fifties, and averaged 139. In one-dayers during the same period, he averages 129. For the whole of 2007, including the World Cup, he averaged 76 in ODIs, with 4 hundreds and 4 fifties.
  
  
• Another view that’s clear and unchanging: there are few experiences as joyous for a cricket fan as watching a Laxman/Dravid partnership. They have now become a genre in themselves. It doesn’t matter what form they take, what context they are in, who the dominant player is, they seem to go beyond normal categories of the mind. They trigger thoughts, memories, feelings; all unique, and all related only to each other. As the sportswriter’s cliché goes, they are transcendent. They go beyond the normal and the expected. When those two are at the crease, there are no predictions -- they’ve stretched the plausible, so they’ve made everything possible.

• Forget about the talent gap, or the preparation gap, or the psychological gap… the biggest factor assisting the Australian team in their domination at the moment is the Appeal Gap. Simply put: Australia is getting an unfair advantage from the effects of their constant, exaggerated appealing. They are intimidating umpires into ruling in their favour, and forcing them to base decisions on the harmony of choreographed hollering, rather than the merit of deliveries.
  
  Normally, this gives the Australians a one- or two-wicket advantage. This time around, it was closer to four or five, which made it all so much more gut-wrenching. Dravid’s should never have been a wicket, nor should Ganguly’s. Hussey and Symonds both hit balls off the middle of the bat into Dhoni’s gloves, but were given not-out simply because the Indians haven’t quite learned how to scream in unison.
  
  Sadly, it seems as if that’s how cricket is being decided these days: who can yell the best. If that’s the case, count me out -- I’ve got better things to do with my time. And I’m tired of waiting for change, when it’s clear that none is on the way.