Thanks to the IPL, Indians and Australians have even shared dressing rooms. Shane Watson’s involvement in Rajasthan, Mike Hussey’s role with Chennai, to mention a few, are greatly appreciated back home. And even Shane Warne likes India now. I really enjoyed playing alongside him at Rajasthan last season and can confidently report to you that he is not eating imported baked beans anymore. In fact, looking at him, it seems he is not eating anything.
It is often said that cricketers are ambassadors for their country; when there’s a match to be won, sometimes we think that is an unreasonable demand. After all, what would career diplomats do if the result of a Test series depended on them, say, walking? But as ties between India and Australia have strengthened and our contests have become more frequent, we realise that as Indian players we stand for a vast, varied, often unfathomable and endlessly fascinating country.
At the moment, to much of the outside world, Indian cricket represents only two things – money and power. Yes, that aspect of Indian cricket is a part of the whole, but it is not the complete picture. As a player, as a proud and privileged member of the Indian cricket team, I want to say that this one-dimensional, often clichéd, image, relentlessly repeated, is not what Indian cricket is really all about.
I cannot take all of you into the towns and villages our players come from and introduce you to their families, teachers, coaches, mentors and team-mates who made them international cricketers. I cannot take all of you here to India to show you the belief, struggle, effort and sacrifice from hundreds of people that runs through our game.
As I stand here today, it is important for me to bring Indian cricket and its own remarkable story to you. I believe it is very necessary that cricketing nations try to find out about each other, try to understand each other and the different role cricket plays in different countries, because ours is, eventually, a very small world.
In India, cricket is a buzzing, humming, living entity going through a most remarkable time, like no other in our cricketing history. In this last decade, the Indian team represents, more than ever before, the country we come from – of people from vastly different cultures, who speak different languages, follow different religions, belong to all classes of society. I went around our dressing room to work out how many languages could be spoken in there and the number I have arrived at is: 15, including Shona and Afrikaans.
Most foreign captains, I think, would baulk at the idea. But when I led India, I enjoyed it. I marvelled at the range of difference and the ability of people from so many different backgrounds to share a dressing room, to accept, accommodate and respect that difference. In a world growing more insular, that is a precious quality to acquire, because it stays for life and helps you understand people better, understand the significance of the other.
Let me tell you one of my favourite stories from my Under-19 days, when the India U-19 team played a match against the New Zealand junior team. We had two bowlers in the team, one from the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh – he spoke only Hindi, which is usually a link language for players from all over India, ahead even of English. It should have been all right, except the other bowler came from Kerala, in the deep south, and he spoke only the state’s regional language, Malayalam. Now even that should have been okay as they were both bowlers and wouldn’t really need to talk to each other much on the field.
Yet in one game they happened to come together at the crease. In the dressing room we were in splits, wondering how they were going to manage the business of a partnership, calling for runs or sharing the strike. Neither man could understand a word of what the other was saying, and they were batting together. This could only happen in Indian cricket. Except that these two guys came up with a 100-run partnership. Their common language was cricket and that worked out just fine.
The everyday richness of Indian cricket lies right there, not in the news you hear about million-dollar deals and television rights. When I look back over the 25 years I’ve spent in cricket, I realise two things. First, rather alarmingly, that I am the oldest man in the team, older to even Sachin, by three months. More importantly, I realise that Indian cricket actually reflects our country’s own growth story during this time. Cricket is so much a part of our national fabric that as India – its economy, society and popular culture – transformed itself, so did our most-loved sport.
As players we are appreciative beneficiaries of the financial strength of Indian cricket, but we are more than just mascots of that economic power. The caricature often made of Indian cricket and its cricketers in the rest of the world is that we are pampered superstars – overpaid, underworked, treated like a cross between royalty and rock stars. Yes, the Indian team has an enormous emotional following, and we do need security when we go around the country as a group. It is also why we make it a point to always try to conduct ourselves with composure and dignity. On tour, I must point out, we don’t attack fans or do drugs or get into drunken theatrics. And at home, despite what some of you may have heard, we don’t live in mansions with swimming pools.
The news about the money may well overpower all else, but along with it, our cricket is full of stories the outside world does not see. Television rights generated around Indian cricket are much talked about. Let me tell you what television has done to our game.
A sport that was largely played and patronised by princes and businessmen in traditional urban centres – cities like Bombay, Bangalore, Chennai, Baroda, Hyderabad, Delhi – has begun to pull in cricketers from everywhere.
As the earnings from Indian cricket have grown in the past two decades, mainly through television, the BCCI has spread revenues to various pockets in the country and improved where we play. The field is now spread wider than it ever has been, the ground covered by Indian cricket has shifted.
Twenty-seven teams compete in our national championship, the Ranji Trophy. Last season Rajasthan, a state best known for its palaces, fortresses and tourism, won the Ranji Trophy title for the first time in its history. The national one-day championship also had a first-time winner in the newly formed state of Jharkhand, where our captain, MS Dhoni, comes from.
The growth and scale of cricket on our televisions was the engine of this population shift. Like Bradman was the boy from Bowral, a stream of Indian cricketers now comes from what you could call India’s outback. Zaheer Khan belongs to the Maharashtra heartland, from a town that didn’t have even one proper turf wicket. He could have been an instrumentation engineer but was drawn to cricket by TV, and modelled his bowling by practising in front of the mirror on his cupboard at home. He first bowled with a proper cricket ball at the age of 17.
One day, out of nowhere, a boy from a village in Gujarat turned up as India’s fastest bowler. After Munaf Patel made his debut for India, the road from the nearest railway station to his village had to be improved because journalists and TV crews from the cities kept landing up there.
We are delighted that Umesh Yadav didn’t become a policeman, like he was planning, and turned to cricket instead. He is the first cricketer from the central Indian first-class team of Vidarbha to play Test cricket.
Virender Sehwag, it shouldn’t surprise you, belongs to the wild west just outside Delhi. He had to be enrolled in a college which had a good cricket programme and travelled 84km every day by bus to get to practice and matches.
Every player in this room wearing an India blazer has a story like this. Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the heart and soul of Indian cricket.
Playing for India completely changes our lives. The game has given us a chance to pay back our debt to all those who gave their time, energy and resources for us to be better cricketers: we can build new homes for our parents, get our siblings married off in style, give our families very comfortable lives.
The Indian cricket team is, in fact, India itself in microcosm. A sport that was played first by princes, then their subordinate
s, then the urban elite, is now played by all of India. Cricket, as my two U-19 team-mates proved, is India’s most widely spoken language. Even Indian cinema has its regional favourites; a movie star in the south may not be popular in the north. But a cricketer? Loved everywhere.
It is also a very tough environment to grow up in – criticism can be severe, responses to victory and defeat extreme. There are invasions of privacy and stones have been thrown at our homes after some defeats. It takes time getting used to – extreme reactions can fill us with anger. But every cricketer realises at some stage of his career that the Indian cricket fan is best understood by remembering the sentiment of the majority, not the actions of a minority.
One of the things that has always lifted me as a player is looking out of the team bus when we travel somewhere in India. When people see the Indian bus going by, see some of us sitting with our curtains drawn back, it always amazes me how much they light up. There is an instantaneous smile, directed not just at the player they see but at the game we play, that, for whatever reason, means something to people’s lives. Win or lose, the man on the street will smile and give you a wave.
After India won the World Cup this year, our players were not congratulated as much as they were thanked by people they ran into. “You have given us everything,” they were told, “all of us have won”. Cricket in India now stands not just for sport but possibility, hope, opportunities.
On our way to the Indian team, we know of so many of our team-mates, some of whom may have been equally or more talented than those sitting here, who missed out. When I started out, for a young Indian, cricket was the ultimate gamble – all or nothing, no safety nets. No second chances for those without an education or a college degree, or second careers. Indian cricket’s wealth now means a wider pool of well-paid cricketers, even at first-class level.
For those of us who make it to the Indian team, cricket is not merely our livelihood, it is a gift we have been given. Without the game, we would just be average people leading average lives. As Indian cricketers, our sport has given us the chance to do something worthwhile with our lives. How many people could say that?
This is the time Indian cricket should be flowering. We are the world champions in the short game, and over the space of the next 12 months should be involved in a tight contest with Australia, South Africa and England to determine which of us is the world’s strongest Test team. Yet I believe this is also a time for introspection within our game, not only in India but all over the world. We have been given some alerts, and responding to them quickly is the smart thing to do.
I was surprised a few months ago to see the lack of crowds in an ODI series featuring India. By that I don’t mean the lack of full houses. I think it was the sight of empty stands I found somewhat alarming.
India played their first one-day international at home in November 1981, when I was nine. Between then and now India have played 227 ODIs at home; the October five-match series against England was the first time that the grounds have not been full for an ODI series featuring the Indian team.
In the summer of 1998 I played in a one-dayer against Kenya in Kolkata and the Eden Gardens was full. Our next game was held in the 48-degree heat of Gwalior and the stands were heaving.
The October series against England was the first one at home after India’s World Cup win. It was called the “revenge” series, meant to wipe away the memory of a forgettable tour of England. India kept winning every game and yet the stands did not fill up. Five days after a 5-0 victory 95,000 turned up to watch India’s first Formula 1 race.
A few weeks later I played in a Test match against West Indies in Kolkata, in front of what was the lowest turnout in Eden Gardens’ history. Yes we still wanted to win and our intensity did not dip, but at the end of the day we are performers, entertainers, and we love an audience. The audience amplifies everything you are doing: the bigger the crowd, the bigger the occasion, its magnitude, its emotion. When I think about the Eden Gardens crowds this year, I wonder what the famous Calcutta Test of 2001 would have felt like with 50,000 people less watching us.
Australia and South Africa played an exciting and thrilling Test series recently, and two great Test matches produced some fantastic performances from players of both teams, but the matches were sadly played in front of sparse crowds.
It is not the numbers that Test players need, it is the atmosphere of a Test that every player wants to revel in and draw energy from. My first reaction to the lack of crowds for cricket was that there had been a lot of cricket and so perhaps a certain amount of spectator fatigue. That is too simplistic a view; it’s the easy thing to say, and it might not be the only thing.
The India v England ODI series had no context, because the two countries had played each other in four Tests and five ODIs just a few weeks before. When India and West Indies played ODIs a month after that, the grounds were full, but this time the matches were played in smaller venues that didn’t host too much international cricket. Maybe our clues are all there and we must remain vigilant.
Unlike in Australia or England, Indian cricket has never had to compete with other sports for a share of revenues, mind space or crowd attendance at international matches. The lack of crowds may not directly impact revenues or how important the sport is to Indians, but we do need to accept that there has definitely been a change in temperature over, I think, the last two years.
Whatever the reasons are – maybe it is too much cricket or too little by way of comfort for spectators – the fan has sent us a message and we must listen. This is not mere sentimentality. Empty stands do not make for good television. Bad television can lead to a fall in ratings. The fall in ratings will be felt by media planners and advertisers looking elsewhere. If that happens, it is hard to see television rights around cricket being as sought-after as they have been in the last 15 years. And where does that leave everyone? I’m not trying to be an economist or doomsday prophet – this is just how I see it.
Let us not be so satisfied with the present, with deals and finances in hand, that we get blindsided. Everything that has given cricket its power and influence in the world of sports has started from that fan in the stadium. They deserve our respect and let us not take them for granted. Disrespecting fans is disrespecting the game. The fans have stood by our game through everything. When we play, we need to think of them. As players, the balance between competitiveness and fairness can be tough but it must be found.
If we stand up for the game’s basic decencies, it will be far easier to tackle the bigger dangers – whether it is finding shortcuts to easy money or being lured by the scourge of spot-fixing and contemplating any involvement with the betting industry.
Cricket’s financial success means it will face threats from outside the game and keep facing them. The last two decades have proved this over and over again. The internet and modern technology may just end up being a step ahead of every anti-corruption regulation in place in the game. As players, the one way we can stay ahead is if we are willing to be monitored and regulated closely.
Even if it means giving up a little bit of freedom of movement and privacy. If it means undergoing dope tests, let us never say no. If it means undergoing lie-detector tests, let us understand the technology, what purpose it serves, and accept it. Now lie detectors are by no means perfect but they could actually help the innocent clear their names. Similarly, we should not object to having our finances scrutinised, if that is what is required.
When the first anti-corruption measures were put into place, we did moan a little bit about being accredited and depositing our cell phones with the manager. But now we must treat it like we do airport security, because we know it is for our own good and our own security. Players should be ready to give up a little personal space and personal comfort for this game which has given us so much. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Other spor
ts have borrowed from cricket’s anti-corruption measures to set up their own ethical governance programmes, and we must take pride in belonging to a sport that is professional and progressive.
One of the biggest challenges that the game must respond to today, I believe, is charting out a clear road map for the three formats. We now realise that the sport’s three formats cannot be played in equal numbers – that will only throw scheduling and the true development of players completely off gear.
There is a place for all three formats, though we are the only sport I can think of which has three versions. Cricket must treasure this originality. These three versions require different skills; skills that have evolved, grown, changed over the last four decades, one impacting on the other.
Test cricket is the gold standard. It is the form the players want to play. The 50-over game is the one that has kept cricket’s revenues alive for more than three decades now. T20 has come upon us and it is the format people, the fans, want to see.
Cricket must find a middle path, it must scale down this mad merry-go-round that teams and players find themselves in: heading off for two-Test tours and seven-match ODI series with a few T20s thrown in.
Test cricket deserves to be protected, it is what the world’s best know they will be judged by. Where I come from, nation versus nation is what got people interested in cricket in the first place. When I hear the news that a country is playing without some of its best players, I always wonder: what do their fans think?
People may not be able to turn up to watch Test cricket, but everyone follows the scores. We may not fill 65,000 capacity stadiums for Test matches, but we must actively fight to get as many as we can in, to create a Test match environment that the players and the fans feed off. Anything but the sight of Tests played on empty grounds. For that, we have got to play Test cricket that people can watch.
Rahul Dravid: Timeless Steel Page 19