An expert’s take

Just a couple of days ago did the ICC come up with its new recommendations for one day cricket and left the experts analyzing its after-effects. The Cricket Committee of ICC had suggested many ways to revamp the game, 2 of which were approved by the Chief Executives’ Committee of ICC. One day cricket did need some resurrections, particularly the slam bang stuff that is played in the subcontinent, with scores of 300+ not being secure. I, as a knowledgeable spectator, would have liked to see the battleground between bat and ball more flattened, rather than bowlers left in an open field to get bulleted by batsmen with no place to hide. I would have also liked to see it in a less predictable form, with teams needing to think at all stages of the match, rather than having big burley openers (read Adam Gilchrist) clatter their way through hapless and “boundary protection-less” bowlers (read Zahir Khan, or better Javagal Srinath, still better Venkatesh Prasad) during the 1st 15 overs, then swift runners (read Paul Collingwood) setting it up for the mighty sloggers (read Abdur Razzaq) to put their teeth deep into the flesh of the already bruised fielding side. But where do the new rules lead us?

The ICC has approved a rule for introduction of a substitute during the course of an ODI. Purists have dismissed the case saying it’s not cricket, but soccer. Revolutionists have welcomed it saying ODI cricket needed a change. But what the situation demands is an analysis of its effect on the experts front, while an ability to think dynamically and react to the situation to best exploit the rule on team management front. As I am leading the former, I will try to analyze it.

The rule says that a team can call upon a substitute during any stage of the match and the player substituted cannot take further part in the game. But it hasn’t made clear when the team has to be announced. There needs to be a clear guideline saying when you have to declare the final 12 men and the starting 11. As of now, the final 11 have to be named before the toss. Going by this theory, if a team has to announce their final 12 and starting 11 both before the toss, then the rule leads to nothing but a gamble. With this rule, the most obvious use case is to use an extra batsman while batting and replace him with a bowler while taking the field. But if they have to name their starting 11 before the toss, they will not know whether they are batting 1st or not. So they don’t know whether to include an extra batsman or bowler in the starting lineup. Suppose a team names 6 batsmen, a keeper and 4 bowlers in the starting lineup and has to field 1st, then the 1 bowler left on the bench is rendered ineffective. In case the team replaces the extra batsman with their bowler, to make up for the 5th bowler then the replaced batsman is gone for a toss. If the rule actually allows you to announce your starting 11 after the toss, then it undermines the whole purpose of the rule change that is to reduce the predictability of ODI. In most cases the substitutions will come at obvious stage of the match, the innings break.

The other regulation introduced is a good thing to have, as it will actually help make the game more unpredictable and has a scope for more shrewd tacticians. I don’t quite agree with the increase in number of overs for fielding restrictions from 15 to 20. The game is already loaded in favor of the bat and this probably will add to that. Probably the ICC has increased number of field restriction overs to maintain the effect of the current number. A 15 over fixed restriction will be as helpful to the batting side, as a 20 over restriction with only the 1st 10 being fixed, the other 10 coming at the fielding side’s discretion. 3 slots of 5 overs, with the 1st being mandatory at the start of the innings would have made it more favorable for the poor old bowlers. But then the rule will surely make the teams re-devise their strategies.

What I would have liked to see is a reduction in the effect of toss on the predictability factor. At many venues, particularly those hosting flood lit games with the dew factor coming in late at night and also those hosting it with the morning dew, the result is driven by the toss outcome. I liked a Sanjay Jha solution to this, where he proposed to split the 50 over innings into two 25 over slots. The 1st team bats their 25 overs, followed by the 2nd team’s first 25. Then the 1st team resumes its innings for the remaining 25 and then the 2nd team completes the rest. The idea was to have a single innings per team (not 2 different innings), split in 2 parts. This would have made both sides bat and bowl in all kinds of comparable surrounding conditions.

There is another good step that ICC has taken, that is to ask the MCC to review the restrictions on the size and material of a cricket bat. The last thing we want is heavyweight boxers hitting crafty spinners out of the ground after actually getting beaten in flight, yet using the edges of their mighty bat blades. Some limitations on the willow could do well to preserve the skill and art in batting in the long run.

Looking from the Indian perspective, the substitution rule could be a blessing in disguise. It’s a well known fact, that India’s best ODI all-rounder in the last 10 years has been Ajit Agarkar (if you don’t count Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid with wicket-keeping gloves on), which is a shame in itself. This rule could serve as their filler for an all-rounder, with the ability to use their 5th bowler only for bowling purposes (with the kind of bowling they have in ODIs, they will probably do well to have 391 of them). With a lucid thinker like Greg Chappell at the helm, we can relax a little, that the Indian camp is sound in terms of thinking caps. What we have to hope though that the rule change doesn’t do an Indian Hockey (remember what we got when they moved from grass to mat and then marred the dribbling skills by canceling the offside rule), although it took a K.P.S. Gill to complete that debacle and a Jagmohan Dalmiya is all the more acceptable.

i hate mess

When I first came to Pune for my studies four and a half years ago, all everyone back home was worried about, was my food. I was always very particular about the things that I liked when it came to choosing cuisines. And this set had a limited cardinality. In fact very limited, which is why I could never adjust to a thing called mess. I can bear a mess in just about everything else, but this mess was beyond all tolerance levels. And as I had a roomi who was ever ready to eat outside, the hotels in Pune were browsed one by one. Not that I am the most hefty eater of them all, but a connoisseur for good food for sure. I like quality rather than quantity and the quantity that I eat is always decided by the quality of the food, something very peculiar about my hunger.

I could never last at one single mess for more than a month. And mine was always a good deal for the owner of the mess , as even in that one month I used to needlessly pay him for the 10 odd days that I used to eat outside and not in the mess. The only respectable exception was our college canteen where I lasted for about 1 year (not consecutive of course). This was a tribute not to the quality of the food they served, but to the coupon system that they employed. This system allowed us to buy a fixed number of coupons and use them anytime. So we could consume the coupons whenever we were bored of eating outside in hotels.

Not that all messes were bad. There were some good ones, but I used to get bored a bit too early as the food used to get monotonous (or that was the excuse I used to discontinue from a mess). And probably there was another reason. I disliked a thing called regularity, a quality required to continue with this messy business. You have to always go to the mess on time. Otherwise there is no food left for you. I could hardly ever manage this.

I passed out and joined the industry and nothing much has changed. At the start of each month I pledge that I will join a mess or get a tiffin from somewhere, but that just turns out to be a new month resolution, something that's always pushed to the next month. The hotels here are so enticing and the messes are so dull (or my mindset in this case is so rigid) that I just can't resist the temptation of choosing the former, day after day after day. And there are other advantages as well. For instance it's 11 in the night and I have been browsing and blogging for the last 3 hours with the assurance that there will be hotels waiting for me. If it was a mess, I would have had to follow their timing and could not have posted this mess here.

I found a subject

Start, it's the most difficult thing to do & yet the easiest. It's easy because if it wasn't, I would not have written this. Yet if it was, this post would have been a good one. It happens sometimes that I want to write & don't know what to & how to write. I had decided that I would start blogging. Of course like most other things, I am not the 1st person among those, who I know, already do this. Simply put, this is yet another thing that I felt the urge to do myself because many other people do this. Blogging is like a common man's hobby for me, something that's never immortal, something whose oblivion can always be defended as lack of time. In fact I have had most of my hobbies turn up this way, wherein I am very upbeat about their start & don't realise how they fade away. This number of hobbies is so large that I can safely claim "Making a start" as my hobby & in its defense present a list of things that I have just started & left. So no surprises if I never appear on this site ever again.

I have been thinking the whole evening on where to start. No prizes for guessing that this one has no subject whatsoever. I kept wondering about the field that I could use for this. Thought about writing on cricket, the thing which I believe I surely can write about. But then it also needs a start & there was a dilemma about the event in cricket that I could have a go at. With India pretty much in their shell, the Pakistan fixture not yet fixed, the ashes a long way away & England already returning from South Africa, we only had the pitch-diggers on cricket field & I did not really want to write about them. So cricket could not become the subject of my 1st blog. A 9.30 to 11 (believe it or not, but the 1st figure is am & the 2nd is pm) schedule (including stuffs like blogging) isn't really allowing me to follow the other sport events like the europian soccer leagues or our very own national sports' PHL. My post on them would definitely have been out of date & that's why they could not serve my purpose.

Then I thought about events that I recently attended. I desperately started recollecting what I recently did & hence came a thought about the "Sawai Gandharva Mahotsav". But then most people from Pune are regualars to this & won't find my event reporting capabilities very informative. Writing about social issues has never been my field & I right now have had enough of my software profession to let it peep into this place as well (this is an excuse for my inability to write some real intelligent stuff about softwares, including code).

So as the evening turned into night, the options for the subject went on becoming thin. I finally decided to just write, albeit without a subject. But dilemma is something that always accompanies me. And the apprehension of a start, something that makes it the most difficult thing alongwith being the easiest, quickly came to the fore. I can compare this feeling with the one that I got while writing my 1st check-in mail where I was never sure about any line of code that I had checked in or for that matter, the spelling of any word that was written in the mail. I hate options, they bring a dilemma with them. So choosing a template for the blog was the step that I least enjoyed. I unnecessarily kept feeling that the color of the template that I would choose, would reflect something about my liking, as if somebody was really interested in knowing what I like. I got over that using a random algorithm (which randomly makes a choice) before I encountered another step of choice. This time I had to choose a signature and a URL name. It seemed to dislike all my choices like "wow" and "ow" and "owow". So I had to be very very creative and find something like o@w spelled as oatw. After making it to this point, as always, I got caught in a loop wherein I have already checked a few times if I have mis-spelled anything and not finished yet.

And as I read it one last time, I realised that I probably have a subject for this post hidden somewhere there. I could have written something better if I had known at the beginning that I was going to write about how I started blogging, but then hindsight is a perfect science and life isn't (this sentence has come due to an old greed of getting that extra mark for the essay). Now it's already 11.30 in the night and I have to travel another 9 km before I reach my room. So moral of the story is - be clear about what you want to write. This is a bug that I have to fix in my next releases.