For over a fortnight we watched our hockey players weave magic at the Oi Hockey Stadium. We let out a collective gasp as P.V. Sindhu smashed the shuttle down at 300 kmph. We rose to applaud the skills and the spirit of our wrestlers and roared along as Neeraj Chopra hurled the javelin to win a historic gold for the country.
And after the Games were over we turned to test cricket as it is called, as if other games are untested. Fresh from being glued to our television sets during the Olympics, this is what we saw.
A bowler runs in and bowls a single delivery to a batsman who’s spent the previous 30 seconds getting into position after a leisurely survey of the field around him. The umpire drops his arm to indicate to the bowler that he may now proceed. The latter starts running. But wait, the batsman has put his hand up and strolled away from his position. Is that a dark speck somewhere in the distance or maybe a glint of sunlight? Disturbs my concentration, old chap!
The offending article is laboriously removed and we start all over again. The game hasn’t moved an inch for the last five minutes. But hey no worries, we have five whole days to do that. This is a marathon you see, not a sprint. Of course, Eliud Kipchoge completed even that gruelling race in Tokyo in a timing of 2 hours, eight minutes, 38 seconds.
Back to the batsman who is now finally ready to face the ball. Straight at him and he pats it back to generous applause from the cognoscenti in the crowd and his comrades in the dressing room. Job done for the moment, he steps away to adjust his clothes, cap and sundry protective gear.
If you are looking for an equivalence, it is a bit like Roger Federer serving to Novak Djokovic who sends back a return and then limbo. Both step away, one still admiring his serve and the other basking in the glory of having negotiated it successfully. Maybe even letting out a cry of delight.
For that’s how we do it in Cricket. On-field action is often punctuated by wild exhortations and violent celebrations from the players. “Well done, yaar”, greets a delivery that did little more than cause the batsman a “spot of bother”. It is just a spot, mind you, for nothing has actually transpired. No wickets have been lost. For those momentous occasions are reserved chest bumps and a volley of expletives at the departing batsman. It is all in the spirit of the game, old chap!
Meanwhile the commentators, poor fellows who are paid to hype and describe a somnambulist in action, ooh and aah. One worthy would often compare a ball that was hit to the boundary some 75 metres away, to a “tracer bullet”. Now I haven’t ever seen a bullet travel, but am informed that they travel more than 2,600 feet per second or about 1,800 miles per hour. More pertinently they travel over twice the speed of sound! Having watched even the crackers unleashed by Sachin Tendulkar speed quite amiably to the boundary, a comparison with a tracer bullet does seem a trifle exaggerated.
But that’s the only way to sell the game which otherwise proceeds at glacial speed. The average football player at the international level runs between 10-12 km in a single game and can end up losing 3-4 kg through sweating. Their cricketing brethren, by contrast, don’t have any such problems. At least no one has bothered to calculate how much energy a typical slips fielder expends over the course of an hour. Even some of the outfielders often spend more time crossing over - basically going from one end of the ground to the other at the end of each over for no apparent sporting reason. That’s what the rules of the game decree, old chap!
No wonder that Andrew Flintoff had a hard time trying to explain cricket to Jennifer Lopez on a Graham Norton show. The superstar didn’t have a clue about the game, confusing it with Croquet. As Flintoff put it candidly: “It is played over five days and we break for food every now and then.”
Let’s face it, test cricket has become an anachronism, a relic of the past preserved precisely because it is a slice of history and needs to be preserved.
Let’s break for tea, old chap!