Not quite the entertainment
By Fazeer Mohammed
Story Created: Sep 7, 2014 at 10:51 PM ECT
Express
Sport is entertainment. Full stop. Yes, when you’re hooked—as so many of us are—it’s easy to unquestioningly accept those references to “heroic†performances and “courageous†fightbacks as if, in the grander scheme of things, someone running around in short pants with a ball at his feet or grown men all dressed in whites playing a game over five full days are nothing more than trivial indulgences.
But that’s precisely why what transpired on Saturday afternoon at Arnos Vale is totally and thoroughly unacceptable. For the West Indies pair of Kraigg Brathwaite and Shivnarine Chanderpaul to plod along at less than three runs per over for 56 overs was utterly ridiculous.
It’s not as if they were battling to save this first Test against Bangladesh. It was just day two, and the pair were resuming with the home side already in the comfortable position of 264 for three in the first innings. The pitch was flat, the bowling hardly threatening, yet they crawled to the tea interval and all but came to a dead stop in the 28 overs bowled in the final session.
Okay, so maybe we can say that Brathwaite has yet to develop sufficiently as an international-calibre batsman to emerge confidently and forcefully out of his cocoon of defensiveness. But what about Chanderpaul, a man in his 157th Test (the most by any West Indian) and who has shown many, many times the ability to score almost at will with those efficient nudges and deflection.
This is a man who is second only to Brian Lara for the most runs by a Caribbean player in Test cricket, a batsman who once tore apart the vaunted Australians for a Test hundred off 69 balls at the old Bourda ground in his native Guyana. That may have been a once-in-a-blue-moon situation, but 51 not out off 177 balls at the end of play on Saturday evening? Oh jeezanages man...that is foolishness!
Whether they accept it or not, there is an obligation in any form of cricket for players to entertain. That entertainment doesn’t mean swiping stupidly at anything within reach. It could very well be a gritty duel between a quality batsman and an excellent bowler. It certainly isn’t blocking virtually everything and showing almost no inclination whatsoever to score.
Look, it doesn’t matter if the West Indies eventually win this match with time to spare, as appears likely. That is not the point. This sort of retroactive wisdom makes no sense at all. There has to be some purpose to what you’re doing and clearly, based on Denesh Ramdin’s expressed disappointment that more runs weren’t scored that afternoon, the West Indies captain did not intend for the fourth-wicket pair to go out there and bore the life out of everyone.
It was inevitable that the captain’s declaration, leaving Chanderpaul high and dry on 85, would be seen by some as punishment for not batting positively the day before. Maybe, maybe not. You would think though as a West Indies skipper Ramdin would be more concerned with winning matches than hurting the feelings of senior players. We often lament the dwindling interest in Test cricket, especially here in the Caribbean, but expect people to pay money or even come in free and give up doing other things to watch 56 overs of nothing.
Again, just so it could be understood clearly, this is not about saying that the traditional format of the game must be accelerated to the tempo approaching the limited-over variety. But there has to be a purpose, whether it is all-out attack or an ultra-defensive approach. There was no justification for that painful period of prolonged strokelessness on Saturday.
Think of the children involved in the West Indies Cricket Board Scotiabank Kiddy Cricket programme, who could not participate in their planned on-field display because of the rain earlier in the day, but then had to sit and endure that unedifying spectacle. If any one of them went home afterwards and said they were only interested in T20 cricket from now on you couldn’t blame them.
And speaking of the T20 game, there’s been a lot of reaction to Sir Ian Botham’s condemnation of the Indian Premier League last week, but only because the man making the observation happens to be one of the finest all-rounders in the history of the game.
If any mediocre former player or journalist or member of the public had said the IPL had to be done away with or that players were slaves to it they would have been dismissed out of hand as out of touch with the evolution of the game. But in the same way that a big name blocking senselessly is unacceptable, a big name talking nonsense is just that...a big name talking nonsense.
