The elegiac air over cricket has been ever present. “Cricket will never be same again” is a theme that has been articulated since overarm bowling was finally legalised in 1864. This might have had something to do with the evolution of the pre-modern game during the time of the romantic poets.
The elegiac form, said Coleridge is “most natural to the reflective mind.” The tone came naturally to the poets of the period, and seems to have attached itself to cricket in a manner we take for granted now.
Poets as players
It also helped that the best-known poets then were fans of the game. Byron played in the inaugural Eton v Harrow match when he was 17; Keats was once hit in the eye while playing cricket, and Wordsworth has written at least one sonnet where cricket is evoked. But I digress.
The sentence “the game will never be the same again” is an integral part of cricket’s culture. The 1915 edition of Wisden, published during the first World War pronounced, “It is impossible to take other than a gloomy view with regard to the immediate future of cricket. Never before has the game been in such a plight.”
Writing in the 1940 edition, the cricket historian H.S. Altham said, “Today the horizon is dark, and it is idle to try to look far ahead, but I believe there is a general feeling that the game can and should be kept going wherever possible.”
Game has to go on
Closer to our times, the melancholy prognosis has followed such events as the triumph of India at the 2007 T20 World Cup, the Lodha reforms, the IPL, the retirement of Sachin Tendulkar (Lata Mangeshkar was among those who used the exact phrase we have been discussing here), and the Lahore ambush that injured Sri Lankan cricketers in their bus.
And now, thanks to the coronavirus, we say it once more.
Hopefully, like on every occasion in the past, we will be proved wrong again. Cricket has survived wars, terror attacks, retirements of players from Victor Trumper to Yuvraj Singh, new rules, match-fixing scandals, political bans, serious injuries to players, financial hardships, and somehow emerged more or less in the same form it had taken before such disasters struck.
As Mike Marqusee wrote in his final piece, “As the world’s first and oldest modern spectator sport, cricket is marked by an earlier era whose patterns of leisure and work have long vanished.” The anachronism of the five-day Test is its greatest attraction. Hence the keenness with which India’s tour of Australia slated for later this year is awaited.
Administrators around the world have begun to believe, as they say in show business (and in the manuals of clichés), that the show must go on. There are good financial reasons for this, but the hunger for normalcy is equally strong.
The International Cricket Council’s cricket committee headed by Anil Kumble has made recommendations — interim measures — as the game moves towards this new normal.
Sweat, rather than saliva to polish the ball, home umpires rather than neutral ones to officiate, an additional review per innings are the common sense suggestions that will come up before the ICC board later this month. The objectives are, as the committee pointed out, to retain the essence of the game while keeping everybody safe.
This is important. It means that ball tampering (which is what applying wax or anything else on the ball is) will not be, for the moment at least, legalised.
Once the ICC accepts the committee’s recommendations, it will have to work out how to deal with the rule-breakers. This is far more serious than bowling a no-ball.
Saliva has been the bowler’s friend for so long now that no one remembers when it was first used. Perhaps it was the American bowler Barton King, credited with developing the outswinger who began the trend. It creates an imbalance between two sides of the ball, and that influences the way it is propelled through the air.
Shane Warne has suggested a ball weighted on one side to help the swing bowlers, but how effective will that be? Sachin Tendulkar favours wax or something similar.
Sweat and spit issues
But keeping bowlers from using saliva on the ball — a practice sanctified by generations of use — and monitoring their moves is only a part of the problem.
On the field, sportsmen sweat, they spit, they blow their noses; if sweating is medically safe, there is still the question of the other two hanging in the air, so to speak.
The habit is too deeply ingrained, and sportsmen will have to remind themselves regularly not to spit or blow noses. These are involuntary actions and difficult to keep track of. You can’t have ‘spit cameras’ on the ground either.
Perhaps — in the best case scenario — in a couple of years we will wonder what all the fuss was about.