Lots to talk about this week: first, the West Indies crowds turn on the game after a questionable umpiring decision, and then, Paul Collingwood turns on the game itself. We’ll cover the first later, because it involves some very complex questions about cricket’s dramatic structure and the role of the audience.

The Collingwood scandal, however, is a bit more simple. Take a video, and the accompanying reactions, for yourself:

Nasser Hussain and his co-commentator are hilariously dramatic and somewhat two-faced: Hussain rightly notes that this moment is hugely costly for the game, while all the while enjoying the added attention the game — and Sky Sports — will receive as a result of the controversy.

And speak of two-faced: watch as Collingwood and company generously walk over to Elliot, making sure that he is not, you know, seriously injured, only to turn around and then refuse to withdraw the appeal. That moment might seem duplicitous, and perhaps it is, but it’s no different I think from the the accepted cricketing convention of bowling 100+ mph balls at another man’s head, all accepted in the spirit of the game even if a few people get hurt in the process.

But this game runs on a fine balance of spirit and antagonism. And here, England should have held back: the batsman was down on the ground thanks to one of its bowlers, who was clearly prancing around where no bowler belongs (that is, the pitch). Even if that weren’t enough, there’s just the gut reaction that everyone — Elliot, the crowd, Ryan Sidebottom himself — feels after the incident. When it comes to decency, lads, your stomach will lead the way.

Nothing about Kevin Pietersen is straightforward: of South African origin, he has become England’s best player (and, before Monty showed up, its much better off-spinner). When he first arrived on the scene, he oozed attack and aggression, which some commentators ascribed to a lack of “post-colonial guilt.” And even now, in his current mellowed, more “mature” phase, he still has the penchant to excite (Celeste or otherwise).

Take the rule-bending, switch-hitting reverse sweep (see below). The shot raised some hackles, even after declared legal. As Michael Holding pointed out, if that was legal, surely bowlers should be allowed to come around or over the wicket as they please, without prior announcement. (Holding, of course, doesn’t understand that cricket is a batsman’s game, after all.)

It turns out, however, that Pietersen has long been enamored of the extreme reverse-sweep (if not the switch-hit). Take a look at this shot off Murali:

And, of course, this one against, I think, the West Indies:

The inspiration apparently came from Paul Nixon, who perfected the shot during his brief career as wicketkeeper. Have a final look at the aged innovator:

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the legendary anti-apartheid leader from South Africa, delivered a moving and perceptive speech this week at Lord’s, as part of the annual Cowdrey Lecture series. So far, Tutu’s address has earned most attention for its call to boycott Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe’s “pariah” regime. That is as it should be, but a listen to the entire lecture yields many interesting points about the game’s “spirit,” and its face and role in society. I want to talk about a few tidbits, but be sure to listen to the full version (and Andrew Strauss’s reaction) here.

I had always found Tutu’s style of delivery too dramatic; he, like Aamir Sohail, a much less respectable figure, suffers from a curious penchant to emphasize every word. Of course, when one talks about such serious topics as repression, apartheid, race, perhaps such intonation is necessary. When Tutu, for instance, breaks down into a whisper, and speaks about the networks of interdependence that defines humanity, it’s difficult not to feel moved. Imagining a young Tutu, sick with tuberculosis and alone only with fellow patients and, of all things, radio Test commentary, makes for compelling imagination as well. This cricket, I tell you: it’s in all places. 

His exuberance, however, is entirely appropriate when he gently makes fun of the stodgy upper-class English society’s reaction to the sport in the 1960s. He praised the West Indians for playing their more spirited version of the game, showing how thrilling this game could be, beyond the dour remarks of “well played” and “proper shot.” When I was younger, I would often feel a tad ashamed to watch Indian crowds in all their manic glory, especially during the late 1990s, when throwing bottles became a fad. Why not sit down, calm yourselves, and clap like those poised English! Now, of course, I’ve overcome my post-colonial blues, and I wouldn’t even mind some more bottle-throwing: I always thought that “pitch invasion” was such a brilliant cricket trope, speaking to the audience wanting to break out onto the field and take back control. 

Moreover, as strident as his point about Zimbabwe may be, Tutu is also making some very complicated observations about sport and its political influence. Tutu expands the much-heard “spirit of cricket” into a telling symbol of linked humanity and respect for decency. He first spends much time praising England’s decision to select Basil D’Oliveria and the ensuing controversy that resulted in South Africa’s sporting isolation, and concludes, “You…drummed into us what the world saw as ‘fair play’ and what is not ‘fair play.’”

That’s such a brilliant moment, and for two reasons: first, Tutu reminds us that “spirit” is much more than silly discussions about “sledging” and irrelevant comments. The stakes are much, much higher, and more symbolic. Secondly, and more importantly, Tutu takes a fairly prominent part of colonial discourse — cricket’s “civilizing mission” — and appropriates it on behalf of democracy. Rather than view cricket’s “spirit” as a colonialist teacher-student, master-slave dichotomy, Tutu appropriates this incident, and cricket’s team-oriented nature, as a tribute to human equality and interdependence. Fair play isn’t just being nice to one another, in other words: it’s a fundamental recognition of decency. Tutu has just “taken back” cricket, and wiped away the colonial cobwebs. 

Stirring stuff, and for non-cricketers, a bit over-wrought. But I think the basic premise behind the speech — that cricket, like all sports, involves politics — cannot be easily dismissed as so much puffery. And that’s why I support, and always have, his call to boycott Zimbabwe: it’s not just a question of bad finances and corrupt mismanagement, and it’s not a silly, trivial question either (as the South Africa isolation showed). It’s about expelling a member from a family that has stopped playing by the rules; it’s about reminding a regime that it doesn’t play fair, and that just because it has players show up in international matches, it can never truly play cricket. 

I’ve long had a deep affection for Andrew Flintoff, who takes turns being a romantic Australia-slayer and an affectionately flawed drunkard. For all his epic feats, he still resonates as a human figure, struggling to break from the pack. He took years to actually pull away and dominate batting line-ups, and since the Ashes, when he finally did, his personality’s complex strands – the fragility of his physical capabilities; his drinking habits; his immeasurable raw talent – have twisted even more. Like I said, it’s fairly compelling stuff.

His free-ranging interview about his recuperation, then, makes for a gripping read, especially when Flintoff admits, I think, to chucking, so as to compensate for that devilish ankle:

“Also in my thinking was the possibility that I just might not get another chance to take part in this kind of tournament again. In the event I was pretty much bowling on one leg, relying on my shoulder and maybe even a bent arm at times and the realisation grew in me that, if this was as good as it was going to get, it wasn’t enough.”

A bent arm? Is it wrong that I feel even more defensive about Flintoff than before? 

The Economist, a British magazine laced with reason, currently has a correspondent reporting from Sri Lanka. Most of the daily updates make for depressing reading — war, death, resigned fates — but the journalist added a little variety with a mention of Muttiah Muralitharan, the bowler extraordinaire, and his local reception.

Have a look at it. In the cricket world, Muralitharan remains a polarizing figure, with the two sides often sadly defined more often than not by skin color and race: Westerners must mention his bowling action (even if only to clear it), while Asians tend to leap to his defense early and often. In Sri Lanka, however, Muralitharan abides chiefly as a unifying figure, bridging the divides between the Singhalese and Tamil sides.

I also didn’t know that he is an “Indian Tamil,” which apparently exists as a distinction in Sri Lanka.

In case you’re still smarting from the YouTube blackout of the IPL (or other cricketing events), head over to cric-online.blogspot.com, which has highlights of the matches (sometimes more than the usual 2-min. packages), as well as Channel Five highlights of the England v. New Zealand Test series. Nothing like Mark Nichols and Simon Hughes coming through your speakers on a crisp summer’s day…

Ahem. Enjoy.

I write from New York, the Empire State, whose governor was recently deposed in a tawdry scandal involving call girls, lies, and tapes. Even in our current state of deep cynicism and apathy, the Eliot Spitzer scandal shocked and stunned; for a few days, it was all you could read in the papers and watch on the TV. Part of the drama arose from Spitzer’s own dominating and ambitious (some said reckless) personality: as he told a legislator, “Listen, I’m a fucking steamroller, and I’ll roll over you and anybody else!” (He probably didn’t say it as musically as James Taylor did, of course.) He had an immensely complimentary view of his own abilities and power, and he thought he could take on larger, structural forces all on his own (with a few cuss words by his side). And it all came down.

I bring up Spitzer only for the most tangential and obscure reason. Simon Hughes, the best cricket analyst out there, credited Michael Vaughan’s decision to use a steamroller before the English 4th innings as a key part in his team’s victory over the uppity Kiwis this week. Hughes explains the dilemma:

Traditionally this would be considered a risk, since the general belief is that such a crushing weight could irreparably damage the cracks and make the surface even more unreliable. Peter Marron, the Old Trafford groundsman, re-iterated this potential danger. There is no hard evidence to back up this theory, however. Applying a pneumatic drill to the pitch would certainly cause it to break up, but a steamroller?

Vaughan was not cheating; the rules explicitly allow for a batting captain to take advantage of the rolling option. But I think this speaks to the inherent difference and charm behind cricket: the game is not always about athletic ability or precision, but the influence of external factors beyond individual control. It’s a humbling exercise, where individual agency is undercut and luck and fortune emphasized. One minute, Daniel Vettori can rip through a timid batting line-up; the next, he serves dollies and innocuously flighted deliveries. Even Vaughan, who had the option of using machinery, did not have complete control: no one exactly knows how the steamroller would have worked, after all. So much for Eliot Spitzer enjoying this game.

Incidentally, this is also why I’m against the recent push to include an umpire referral process. Gideon Haigh has rightly criticized those who push for more technology in cricket’s adjudication, arguing that the romanticism/realism debate provides nothing helpful as frames for the solution. For one thing, he writes, cricketing traditions — like appealing, for e.g. — constitute a huge chunk of the game’s drama; if you were to ban some in the hope of always getting the “right” decision, you’d get a fairer game, but also a much, much duller one. Moreover, it’s often the supposed realists, who argue that one bad decision can sway entire games and ruin careers, who seem to have lost a bit of their level-headed selves.

For me, however, it’s not about tradition v. innovation, or romanticism v. realism. I’m more interested in chance and play, and watching human beings attempt to assert themselves in a difficult and often unpredictable terrain. As I’ve written elsewhere, cricket is the human drama writ small, and that makes it unique among other sports. Think baseball, soccer, American football, basketball…all their games are respectively played under relatively uniform conditions, where humanity rules the roost, and nature lies dominated. It’s different in cricket, where a pitch’s condition can change the entire course of a game, or an umpire can make a “bad” decision.

So, the question we need to ask is this: how much chance are we willing to tolerate in cricket? How much control do we want, as a television spectator replete with instant replays and Snick-o? I say the more the better, and if you disagree, I’d say you might prefer watching as much European soccer and American football as Lalit Modi apparently does.

I know I haven’t blogged of late; fending off Cricket Ahead’s annoyingly insistent requests to link to him had exhausted me. (And even though I finally caved, the guy doesn’t seem to have reciprocated and actually added this blog to his roll. Oh, web etiquette: so complicated to learn.)

But now I’m back. Like many people outside India — hell, maybe those even in India — I follow cricket largely through YouTube (and a few really, really illegal streaming websites). Highlights don’t always do the trick; in Test matches, in fact, they are downright criminal (and not just copyright-wise). But they’re better than most things, and sometimes, they crystallize the most exciting and inexplicably dramatic parts of a match. Actually, with the Twenty20, I think highlights are the perfect and most compatible package: why look at a 100 boundaries in 2 hours, when you can look at the 6 best in 2 minutes? What’s the qualitative difference?

The good people who run the IPL, however, disagree. After 40-odd matches of some scintillating, made-for-YouTube moments, the empire has struck back. Some of my favorite channels are falling like pins, turning up pink with suspension notices. You can keep tabs at YouTomb, a wonderful website that collects videos that don’t end up in heaven, but online limbo.

This isn’t the first time that the brand-crazy IPL has done this. Cricinfo ran a very difficult, and ultimately unsuccessful, campaign to allow websites to have access to photography straight from the matches. (The ensuing news agencies boycott has meant that very few foreign newspapers carry the IPL information.) The ICC didn’t do much better during the World Cup either, when it took the same route, even though ratings were abysmally low and easy online publicity was the best way to get some viewers to tune in. But YouTube is the perfect vehicle to heighten fans’ interest in the game: as more and more fans tune out of the Test cricket, they turn more for the excised versions, which feature only the dramatic moments (the boundaries, or the wickets, or the sledging, or the celebrations).

Again, realize what’s going on: cricket fans are being sidled out again and again, as brand marketers and corporate managers figure out how to monopolize and control the game. Perhaps that’s too much, because most of these YouTube clips were just straight highlights reels. But more than anything, it was YouTube that drew me into the IPL, of which I was initially skeptical. And now, the IPL is gone, and this cricket fan lost.

Now if only someone would post highlights of the New Zealand-England Test series…

The New Yorker’s business columnist, James Surowiecki, recently wrote about the difficulty of regulating the financial sector: too many rules, and innovation and creativity is stifled; too little, and, well, we lose a chunk of the economy in a housing bubble and banking breakdown.

His sports-heavy description of the available regulatory models, however, led me to think about cricket’s own rigid structure. Surowiecki argues that Europeans have tended to prefer a “principles-based” system that does not forbid specific financial practices — say, securitizing mortgages and repackaging them — but instead proposes vague ideas that promote proper fair competition. The difference is akin to the way referees adjudicate American football and real football:

Football, like most American sports, is heavily rule-bound. There’s an elaborate rulebook that sharply limits what players can and can’t do (down to where they have to stand on the field), and its dictates are followed with great care. Soccer is a more principles-based game. There are fewer rules, and the referee is given far more authority than officials in most American sports to interpret them and to shape game play and outcomes.

Ironically, cricket turns out to follow the American model more than the European version, and I think it’s time for a change (if only to be fashionably anti-American). During the Sydney Test scandal, we all became hopelessly mired in rhetorical debates: did “monkey” ever mean more than just a monkey? (And what about “bastard”?) But we had lost the forest for the trees, as our outdoorsy friends would say.

Rather than get bogged down in silly semantics — you say potato, I say racist — umpires and referees should instead evoke only the game’s “spirit” in determining which action to regulate and which to let slide. Perhaps it’s the British bureaucrat in all of us, but we don’t exactly need to define every possible breach specifically; as I argued before, that has only led, paradoxically, to a rule-shaving and nit-picking. We don’t need to say, for instance, that a bowler cannot point to the pavilion after dismissing a batsman. And we certainly don’t need to decide to determine the metrics of “dissent,” that famously slippery concept that has made a mockery of the well-specified rules in the first place .

Take a look at the pros and cons of such a move in Surowiecki’s article. Obviously, vague principles would give referees more freedom, which, in the volatile and passionate world of international cricket, has more potential to inflame than calm. But it’s precisely cricket’s international background that demands flexibility and autonomy. Moreover, rules do not brook exceptions, but in certain cases, I think such things are deserved (as in the Ishant Sharma-Andrew Symonds dispute, which saw the former penalized for merely responding to aggression, in my mind).

So, to vary one American judge’s view of pornography, we know cricket’s spirit when we see it, and that should be enough: forget the burdensome rulebook and the different levels of penalties, and let’s test some boundaries.

Recently, I’ve found it difficult to make even the most basic points to my friends — the importance of empirical evidence in rational debate, for instance — but I want to take on a much complicated topic, involving post-colonialism, sledging, and media coverage. Stay with me.

The Shane Warne/Sourav Ganguly crisis folded just as quickly as it began, with each player handed out the requisite fee and slap on the wrist. The window was open long enough, however, for the 24-hour news channels in India to get their word out. Watch Times Now dissect the “scandal” in clear, India v. Australia terms:

There are a few problems here. First, the “nation” analytical framework doesn’t work in the Indian Premier League. Shane Warne wasn’t representing an Australian side and, from all accounts, his Indian co-players have found his captaincy inspiring. In fact, the IPL’s main attraction — at least for me — is its blurring identities, which produces dilemmas that, while not completely new to cricket, are still just as startling given the brash of national rivalries present in the game (between, e.g., South Africa and Australia; Australia and India; India and Pakistan, and Australia and England). What exactly unites a team when national identity is not at stake? Money? Victory for victory’s sake? Those are more exciting questions, which international cricket doesn’t need to entertain.

That’s not what I want to talk about, however. What’s most troubling in the above video comes at the very end, when the announcer praises Ganguly for getting under the Australians’ skins, and “[beating] them at their own game.” I heard this argument made repeatedly in Indian circles during the Sydney fiasco, and I couldn’t disagree more: rather than proving the emergence of a superior India, this logic only emphasizes the scale of Western influence on our thoughts and actions. I’m not saying that sledging is never justified, but arguing that it is simply because the Australians do it only proves that we aren’t playing a game we want to. We’re just trying to satisfy rules and benchmarks set by other countries and cultures, thereby denying ourselves the chance to set our own path.

I think this line of reasoning helps fans avoid interrogating their own side. With the West as the constant comparison, many Indians never bother to ask themselves if Harbhajan Singh may have gone a tad too far during the Test series, or whether Sreesanth needs to tone down his erratic behavior. Instead, we hear the common refrain: if the West can do it, why can’t we? But while we are beating them at their own game, when exactly do we get to play our own?

This argument doesn’t constrain itself to cricket. When I was in India last, I was appalled to read on the front page of the Times of India a wide-ranging attack on Western demands that India adopt more environmentally sound policies. The same refrain could be heard in this debate: the West didn’t have a cap-and-trade system during the Industrial Revolution, why should we? Or, the West still pollutes more than we do, why should we take the lead?

Now, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with criticizing industrialized countries for the damage their economies have wreaked on the planet. Go ahead. But don’t use their bad behavior as an excuse not to study your own path of action. India may find it difficult to balance economic growth with keener environmentalism, but the debate doesn’t disappear just because the West ignored it.

So, quit playing each India-Australia spat as an international crisis. It isn’t: if anything, it only shows how Australia and the West long ago wont he contest, informing former Asian colonies what behavior should be emulated and held up to regard.