The write stuff

People who had never read Neville Cardus were weeping in his memory. Those who wouldn’t spend an afternoon watching an exacting and gripping run crawl in, say, a New Zealand versus England Test, were shedding tears for the “traditions of the great game”. Critical reactions to the Indian Premier League came wrapped in exasperating hypocrisy.

It is important to understand how we play, describe, consume and celebrate cricket today in comparison with, to pick a random noun, the age when Victor Trumper was justifiably hailed as an artiste even if his Test average – a meaningless bauble that – was only 38. These changes are not unique to T20; they have been true for ODIs (F50, if you like) and even modern Test cricket.

What was once a languid, gentle pastime is today a muscular, rapid-fire sport; there is less grace, more punch. It has given us openers like Matthew Hayden, whose batting has all the charm and delicacy of a butcher but who is so brutally and gloriously effective. It has also led to scoring rates in Test matches routinely crossing three or four runs an over, and remarkable athleticism that is, paradoxically, saving about 40 runs per Test batting day.

All this is a far distance from the easy-paced 1950s, from the romanticism of annual fixtures between Gentlemen and Players. It leaves less time for contemplation and pondering the vicissitudes of life while watching a single innings. Like always, cricket is a metaphor for society – the freneticism of the 21st century breeds IPL; Virender Sehwag sends text messages, Peter May probably wrote in longhand.

Cricket is not alone in trimming the frills. In 1994, Brazil took away the World Cup playing dull, defensive football. It won the final on penalties after an eminently forgettable final that had none of the flair and dash of Pele, Garincha or Zico. Likewise, modern hockey has little room for delectable dribbling and wrist-work.

Does this also tell on the way we write about cricket? Admittedly it is difficult to re-read Cardus’ prose and imagine him reporting an IPL game between Chennai Super Kings and Bangalore Royal Challengers. Yet, while Cardus is the Don Bradman of cricket writing, his is not the only prototype. Cardus was evocative, descriptive and sometimes florid. He was a writer of his day; like John Arlott a generation later, he tended to use more words than may have been strictly necessary.

My favourite cricket writer is actually E.W. ‘Jim’ Swanton, Hutton to Cardus’ Bradman (or Laxman to his Tendulkar, suit your analogy), and a crisp, spare writer who would have been a natural in a T20 press box. So it’s not the length of the match that circumscribes the writer but the writer’s inherent skills that re-create the magic of cricket, any type of cricket.

That brings us to point three: why has IPL reportage in Indian newspapers been so uniformly pedestrian and non-memorable? This again is an issue that needs deeper examination. With a few honourable exceptions, cricket writing in Indian newspapers, magazines and websites is sub-standard. As the number of column inches and pages devoted to cricket has increased, the quality of cricket writing has dropped.

There are good political columnists around, fine cultural and film essayists, engaging book reviewers; so why aren’t there a plethora of readable cricket writers? Why do so few cricket writers have a sense of narrative? There is a sinister inverse correlation between volume and quality of cricket coverage. Today, editors and newspapers (and executive producers and news channels) are driven by cricket as celebrity. They need the oxygen of access: for that exclusive bite from this batsman’s mother, that prized photograph of that bowler’s dog.

The casualty is disinterested assessment, acute analysis and well-thought out criticism. IPL didn’t create this monster – India’s cricket media brought it upon itself.