During the last few years, I have not missed reading an article about cricket in news-magazines. These magazines do not have anything to do with cricket and I believe that by reading these magazines, one can get other angles to view the game from. However, most of the time I have found that such articles have a common thread. A partisan attitude is evident (barring some good pieces) and it almost seems that a witch-hunt might be on sometimes. And even the best in the team is not left alone. Not surprisingly, these pieces of criticism have come, not from former cricketers, but from writers whose connection to cricket is not evident, at least to the casual reader.

Here, I have tried to put across a coherent reply to one of the common questions raised by such articles – “Is Sachin, an all time great?” A general feeling around the media and some sections of the Indian public, is that Tendulkar, for the greater part of his career, has failed to deliver for his team when they need him the most. And a number of instances have been quoted where we were near and yet so far. These views go as far as indicating that the tag ‘chokers’ that the Indian team has earned in the last few years is because of one man alone.

The one major fact that these people have always overlooked is that there have been many a knock where he has done his bit (rather, almost the whole thing) and India has failed to win because the other ten failed to do their job. I am not a stud with statistics, but what better example to come up than the Chennai Test against Pakistan in 1998-99. Wasim Akram recently said in a TV program that the Chennai test was one of the best Test matches he had ever played. And this match is quoted by one and all as a prime example to illustrate the ‘fact’ that Sachin is not what he seems to be.

At Chennai, hasing 271, India were at one point 82/5 and then Sachin and Mongia put on a stand that got India close, when Nayan Mongia’s irresponsible hoick put the pressure back on Sachin. With just one half decent batsman to follow and back spasms racking him, he had to hit out and go for the finish rather than exposing the other end to Akram & Co. Prior to his dismissal, Tendulkar scored most of the 37 runs in just 5 overs and was the 7th batsman to get out for a score of 136.

Even though only 17 runs were required at that point (“only” is not the word to use when Saqlain and Akram are bowling, but nevertheless) India lost all the 3 remaining wickets, scoring only 6 runs in the process. A good question to ask at this point would be – What happened to the other 10 ??

Ganguly got a bad decision (bad is a word that does not convey the enormity of that umpiring slight) , but you get the sense that Tendulkar’s innings (even though the finishing was not there) was invaluable when u see the scorecard. We would just not be discussing this match if it were not for the scores of the other batsmen in the team. Only Dravid (10) and Mongia (52) got to double figures.

And surprisingly some (like the author of this article) have compared him with Andy Flower at his best. This reveals another basic flaw. While, on the outset, it is probably fair to dismiss the Zimbabweans as a one-batsman team, the team is full of dangerous floaters (as Douglas Marillier and Travis Friend amply demonstrated last week!) all of whom are capable of 30′s and 40s in any given day. And they do get these runs regularly. So the “exceptional average” of 84.5 % (which he had a couple of months ago) would lose some sheen if you look at the scores of the other batsman. I am sure you would find the above-mentioned 30s and 40s supporting the hundreds made by Flower to the maximum. So it’s unfair to use statistics as a tool to evaluate Tendulkar.

Sidhu might be partly right with his “Statistics are like miniskirts…” statement. But sometimes the hidden stuff makes compulsive reading and convinces us that the open stuff is all hogwash. And maybe the question that has been posed is answered by the usual view that these people put across. “Given his prowess, Sachin does not seem to be able to set up a victory as often as he should”. Where are the other batsmen to sometimes finish what he started?

Cricket is just not a one-man game. If you don’t have another batsman to take guard opposite you, then you cannot even bat. This is not street cricket where sometimes all the players get to bat. I hope every Indian fan realizes this and does not get into any conclusion of this kind. Sachin is just the major piece in the jigsaw puzzle that is the Indian team. Only when all the pieces fall into place, will India win.

Accountability is another factor that the Indian public and more importantly, the team and the selector need to understand. They should understand that “no member is bigger than the team” and that includes Tendulkar too. I think he has realized that. His decision to relinquish the captaincy stems from the realization that he cannot cope up with the kind of hassles that a captain has to face and then perform of the field too. But again this has been held against him too. So what more are we going to hold him responsible for? The Babri masjid issue?

So let’s not blame Tendulkar for not making “match-winning” scores. The difference between winning and losing lies in playing as a team and not as a collection of individuals. And if someone says that Tendulkar is responsible for not the team not winning, even though he has had good stints at the crease, then he cannot be more wrong. If one batsman’s score alone would win a match, I am sure India would be the only unbeaten team around, cause from his first Test to the latest, he has done his bit and would continue to do so until he feels he cannot. Then he will gracefully get off the bandwagon and let India rue the day they asked – “Is Sachin an all-time great?”

However while the introduction to the game started early enough, I don’t have any memories of watching actual games then. While I don’t remember watching the World Cup win of ’83 or the WCC win of ’85, I do remember watching the now famous Audi driven around the MCG with every member of the squad in or on it in the TV news clippings.

My first memories of watching an actual game (on TV) is quite fittingly a gripping test match played in Chennai – The Tied Test. I think the excitement of watching the final day’s play with all its turning points, along with a bunch of rabid and yet intelligent fans from the extended family, cemented my interest in the game. Soon I even started having rather vivid cricket dreams – of playing cricket with the likes of Kapil Dev bowling to me on our apartment terrace, with a crocodile infested nook where the forward short leg would normally be (Don’t ask!).

I started reading about cricket voraciously too. I devoured my cousin’s collection of Sportstars repeatedly every evening. I literally believed every word that was written there about Viv Richards’ murderous 110 at St. Johns during England’s ill-fated ’85-86 tour and got into fights after telling people that 12 runs each were given for at least 2 of the 7 sixes that Richards hit that day. I also found my cousin’s hidden copy of a 1983 English season yearbook (including the World Cup) released by Wills, hidden behind his Sportstars. The book interestingly gave me my first look at a nudie pic – a topless woman waving to the cameras from top of a chimney, from where she was watching a county (or was it a World Cup) game.

Around this time I started watching cricket on TV like a maniac. The West Indies tour of India in 1987-88 and the battering India took from the hands of the likes of Pat Patterson and Ian Bishop is fresh, and the heartbreak that was the ’87 World Cup. After Star TV and Prime Sports entered our house around the same time as the ’92 World Cup, there was an hour to be spent every day watching re-runs of the World Cup games, most of which I had seen on live TV too. In the midst of all this, I never once watched a game live at the stadium, at least not until much much later – the 2001 Chennai Test against the Australia!

Since my initiation, I have grown up to be this guy whose first thought, on seeing open spaces, is to plan where the stumps and the boundaries would be. While she hasn’t verbalized it, my mom probably blames herself for it. All my years in school, barring a few months between my 9^th and the 10^th standards (when I was grudgingly allowed to join a coaching program, she relentlessly made efforts to correct her “mistake”. She tried to put one impediment after the other – taking me to work with her during vacations, arranging for violin lessons thrice a week at home in the evening when the other kids were playing. But in spite of all this, I have stayed in love with the game. Not an hour passes without cricket being on my mind, even if it is a fleeting thought.

As most readers know, digression and verbosity are inbuilt features on this blog, but not today. Lunch beckons now. Nevertheless, while I am gone, you can tell us all how your cricket story began. Comments are open. So, will you?

I realized that I was closing in upon a milestone. By the time this post is online, it will be 5 years since I started blabbering. My first post was posted on Blogger on the 10th of February, 2003. And barring a few months early on and around 100 days in late ’04 and early ’05, I have been posting rather regularly.

Looking at Lekhni’s tag, I realized that she had given me a good chance to take a retrospective look and to reminisce upon these five years gone by. But the problem with my blog is that, as my erstwhile tagline (( I have an ever-changing tagline now, courtesy Twitter?)) goes, it is the record of an egoist’s road trip through life with cricket, music, books, cars and movies for company.

Which means that this blog is about me and me alone. So, as the days go by, it becomes increasingly difficult to remember the odd posts that one has “written” relating to some of the keywords of this tag. Also, the difficulty is compounded by the fact that I took an oath, with myself as witness, that I wouldn’t post anything personal here. So the odd heartbreak has almost never found an outlet here, even if some friends (both online and IRL) have heard me obsess over it.

I have come to a conclusion that wherever I think I won’t be able to fit within the confines of the tag, I will bend the boundaries to my whims and fancies. Hey, this is MY blog and I do what I think is right. Also, my ego prevents me from sticking to the “1 post per keyword” rule of this tag. I will hence go ahead and regurgitate multiple links wherever possible. But let me just make the basic rules clearer to everyone.

The rules of the tag are: Post 5 links to 5 of your previously written posts. The posts have to relate to the 5 key words given (family, friend, yourself, your love, anything you like). Tag 5 other friends to do this meme. Try to tag at least 2 new acquaintances (if not, your current blog buddies will do) so that you get to know them each a little bit better.

Family: As far as family is concerned, my mom offers the single largest (potential) inspiration for posts on this blog, but I haven’t posted much in this regard. Anyways, as much as I denied it then, this post had its genesis in a phone conversation with my mom.

Friends: I think I will use this keyword as a chance to link to a couple of 55 word shorts. This short is about a short lived friendship. Here is another I wrote about what will intrigue some of my vetti friends.

Yourself: The majority of this blog is about me and my overblown ego. I am tempted to link to some of my “infamous” posts here (tulips/volcano, anyone? Or the silly photo meme?). But I have other plans.

Two years ago, I put up an “accomodation wanted post” that the aforementioned vetti friends hijacked and converted into a post that screamed “Looking for a Significant Other” post. Occupied as I was in my worries about finding an apartment and settling into a new job, I edited that post to make it sound less frivolous. But later, seeing where they were coming from and the fact that it did sound like a matrimonial ad, I recovered the post and put it into a private vault, not wanting to lose anything I wrote.

Until today, that is. So here it is – in an unedited, “directors cut” format, my appeal for shared accommodation in the Parsippany / Rockaway area.

Your Love: I don’t know if people realized this. But I started blogging because of cricket and the fact that Rediff and Cricinfo stopped accepting pieces from guest authors. My posts as a guest author/columnist in these portals were perhaps my earliest attempts at putting my thoughts into paper, barring a few emails that I sent to friends from time to time.

So without my ado, here are my earliest Cricinfo contributions to the Writer in You section -

1. About the continued exclusion of Sadagopan Ramesh in March ’02

2. About the test match at Lords in August ’02

3. Thoughts about the first day of India West Indies test match at Bourda in April ’02.

And my contribution to Rediff as a guest author -

1. Musings about the win at Port of Spain in April ’02.

Apart from these, I’m going to link to a pair of long posts about my favorite cricketing pet peeve – The BCCI. These posts (part 1 and part 2), though a couple of years old ring true even now. I also believe that India needs to look at a core competency model for its selection policies, though positive changes seem to have come through in these past couple of years. And lastly this post about playing cricket with a scientific calculator.

Anything I like: I am romantically challenged, but even then I have a soft corner for this post of mine, a what-if tale of romance, from the perspective of a member of the vehiculum futbolus genetrix family. As I do for this one – about PTC/MTC buses in Chennai.

Another interest of mine is movies, so here are a couple – this post about one of my favorite movies, and this one about the general state of Bollywood. I have also pontificated in the past about dancing my heart out – Here and here. Lastly, I dont think this tag will not be complete without this cooking type post.

But before I leave, I have to apparently tag 5 bloggers whose blogs I love to read. Seems like two of them have to be new acquaintaces. Hmmm, let’s see.

In keeping with the trend on this post, I will cheat and tag 7 bloggers instead. I will tag – Smugbug, Arun, Pri, Megha, DoZ, Missus Em and Max Da Vinci.

A couple of these people haven’t posted recently and that’s never good. So I believe this retrospective look will spur them on. Particularly, Megha, whose latest anniversary post was such a cop out! Yo, Can we get a real post now? And DoZ, if you want, I will look away if you include your posts from Stochastica as well.

There, DONE!

Whew, five years is such a long time. But I am not done yet. Keep coming back and please do leave a comment or two everytime. Thanks to Lekhni for this opportunity. Came at the right time and I can’t think of a better way to usher in a new blogging year.A new template would have perhaps been perfect icing to this cake.But thanks to a brain freeze by yours truly, it was not to be. Ah well. Life’s not perfect, either.

And in other news, I seem to have been tagged again. Guruprasad’s tagged me to write about “non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself”. Now that is quite an impossible task because the blog does not have anything else apart from non-important things/habits/quirks about me and 480 odd posts is a large number to wade through.

In fact I think that this blog’s the single biggest reason that I am still single, because so much dirt on me can be got with a simple google search. So I have decided that I won’t muddy the waters any more. Can you excuse me, Sir?

Reliable sources have alleged that the members of the simian world are thinking of complaining to the US Senate (which has recently been perceived as having an edge over Judge Judy and the United Nations, as the premier small claims arbitrator of the world) about the use of “that word” as a racial slur. You, Mike, can help us dismiss this simian charge and bring normalcy back to international simian-human relations.

Recent reports have also suggested that inter-racial couples and couples in aviyal relationships are refraining from using “that word” while referring to their partners affectionately. Your explanation might help to restore normalcy to that part of society too.

Thank you in advance.

Sincerely,

Anantha.

(P.S: I don’t expect either you or those arses Symonds, Ponting and Hayden to know this, but a friend suggested yesterday that a certain bawdy Hindi phrase could rhyme with “that word”. And while the aforementioned Hindi phrase is admittedly offensive, there is nothing racial about it. Brett Lee, who is starting to annoyingly become “more desi than thou”, can be called to give circumstantial evidence to this claim. As you know, Brett Lee is an Aussie. So his words would be more credible than mine, no?)

Every Australian tour is packaged with pitfalls, both for individual and the team itself. The team pitfalls come on the field, via the Aussie juggernaut. But the individual holes are dug by the team management and in some cases, allegedly by the players themselves. Ganguly’s apparent refusal to carry drinks as the 12th man comes immediately to mind.But these individual issues mostly get resolved as time goes by, but the real problems are the ones that are caused by loud mouthed non media savvy administrators of the game who don’t think before their speak. Jayawant Lele’s comment did more for the downfall of the ’99 team than the potent Aussie bowling or the impotency of the Indian top order.

Lalchand Rajput’s case of “foot in mouth” and the subsequent denial is the latest example. The funny thing though is that almost every one of these media missteps happen right before or during an Australian tour. Is the Australian media to blame? Or is the egoistic Indian cricket administrators the cause?I think its more of the latter. Indian cricket has always been ruled by men with scant regard for the rigours and pressures of the game. Or if they have some experience, these same men seem to be afflicted with selective amnesia once they decide that they want to be an administrator.

Early this year, one of the ad hoc managers who went to South Africa, a man from the armed forces, if I am right, seemed to do a good job and the job of a full fledged media manager was pooh poohed by the powers that be. Perhaps it is time to take this job more seriously. For, never before has the case for a media coordinator for the Indian team made so inadvertently and yet so forcefully.

(P.S: I am hyperventilating. No one come to me with smart ass comments. To trump all of you, I have made the most smart ass of posts. Thank you for understanding!)

The thing is, the fact that we ended the day in a strong note does not change my reservations about how we got there. Sure, ends do justify the means, but in my eyes the means are nevertheless impossible. More often than not in the past, we have had not so good results on a day where the first session went the same way.

Our consistency (or the lack there of) has always been in the news and no amount of light hearted banter at the end of the day from Kumble (see below) can mask the fact that he is in fact, more a bowler than a captain. Yes, he did live up to his words.

For all the incisive breakthroughs of the second and the third sessions, what stands out is that first session. It is my firm belief that Australia owned India during that morning session. And the more sessions that a team wins, the better the chances of a victory. India won two today, but if the captaincy is going to as inspid as it was during the first session, it is going to be that much difficult.

Jagadish says that as individuals, India has mostly regressed since the last tour and I agree with that. But there is every chance that the value of this whole team is more than the sum of its individual parts. And the first session of the second day shall show that.

Peter English thinks that India is not capable of getting past the 350 or so that Australia will probably end up with and I dont agree with that at all. Even with his role as makeshift opener, Dravid and the other three are still capable bats and Yuvraj’s addition should prove to be the proverbial shot in the arm. So I don’t forsee any problems with India leading Australia at the end of the first innings.

But before we go ahead and think about India’s batting, it is important to put some emphasis on finishing Australia off. And we have seen tails wag when facing India. Clark and Johnson have put on 25 in quick time and the sooner India finishes them off, the better it will be.

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I think the first sign that I was seeing something familiar came when one of those slashed cuts had Kumble genuflecting at backward point. Then a couple of wayward returns to the keeper followed. Soon Ganguly made a hash of a routine stop in deep midwicket (letting the ball go between his legs) and it was business as usual.

One oft repeated quote from Kumble has been that he is a bowler first and then a captain, but if that was not a quote manufactured by a over imaginative journalist, someone should point out to Kumble that he did contradict himself. Bringing Ganguly second change did not really paint Kumble in glorious shade of crimson and gold. Neither did keeping himself out of the attack till only 20 minutes or so before lunch. And the fields set for Harbhajan left the bowler exasperated, though he did bowl a few horrendous deliveries very very wide outside off stump that Phil Jacques did well to reach and cut. So what was a period of optimistic attacking bowling turned out later to be a familiar story.

Another thing that comes to mind, now that I think of it is that, time and again captains have turned to Ganguly to bowl soon after the opening bowlers have had the opposing batsman hopping. Azhar seemed to do that and Kumble did so today. And most of these instances, Ganguly dibbly dobbly bowling has been tucked into, just like Hayden got into him today.

The bowling changes of this first session reminded me of Kolkota Test of the Asian Test Championship during the 1998-99 session. Srinath and Prasad had Pakistan hopping around and had reduced them to 17 for 6 or something. Then Ganguly comes as first change and after two maidens (which was probably because the Pakistanis gave him undue respect), gave away a boundary each and then the pressure was taken off. Incidentally in that test match, Kumble bowled exactly 1 over (the penultimate) before lunch. *Sigh*

My problem with Ganguly bowling with the batsmen under pressure is that Ganguly is not a front line bowler. It was apparent that when he was captain that he recognized that. One did not see him bring himself on first change (or second change) when he was captain. He let his bowlers do their thing and concentrated on other things.

Well, what’s done is done. Australia is 111 for no loss. The second session is about to begin and there is no Shep to hop around in one leg. May be the triple nelson will undo Australia. But more importantly and hopefully, Kumble and India will do things differently as we go forward in this Test match and this series.

So, the official start of the Australian summer is just a fifteen minutes away and there is some concrete news of the team composition. First, the toss, though! Looks like Dravid will have to wait to put on his pads since as Ponting seems to have won the toss and has chosen to have a bat first.

The Australians have left Tait out and so Hogg will get a look in. As for India, Mark Taylor thinks that India have been brave since they go in with four specialist bowlers with Bhajji coming in as the second spinner to complement Kumble. How brave is that, we shall see.

And I am not sold at all about the whole Dravid experiment. Looks like the old “he comes in at over 10 anyways, so why not push him up” experiment is in the works again. Et tu, Kumble? If only the selectors had the same patience to persist with a specialist opener that they have time and again exhibited with this “push middle order batsman to open” experiment, I am sure we’d have found a stable opening pair by now.

Aaah, the teams are now coming out for the national anthem. It will be Gurmit Singh and Silvie Paladino doing the honors for the two countries. It’s a sunny day in Melbourne with the temprature at a balmy 63F. And the pitch promises to be a good batting track. So I am thinking that Ponting will agree that this was a good toss to begin, given India’s fragile bowling attack. But all that on paper only and anything can happen on the field.

So I am going to sit back now and watch. Wish me (and India) luck…