Depression in Cricket

Great BBC discussion on depression in cricket, featuring M. Vaughan and M. Trescothick:

The England cricket team has now seen two players suffer breakdowns on tour in the last five years. Marcus Trescothick and Michael Yardy are the tip of a large iceberg, with depression and stress-related illnesses prevalent across the professional game. There is also a small but significant number who have taken their own lives.

Earlier in the year, I posted about Silence of the Heart, a book that examines this very subject with empirical data:

Cricket has an alarming suicide rate. For 30 years, author David Frith has collected data on this sad subject. This is an account of over 100 cricketers – involving top names over 100 years – who have taken their own lives, with an explanation of factors which led to their premature deaths. Can the shocking rate of self-destruction among cricketers be reduced? Can those who run the game do something to save its participants from this dreadful fate?

Is The LBW Rule Too Tough For Amateurs?

As an addendum to my previous post, I want to know: is it too difficult to enforce the LBW rule in pick-up cricket games? In my on-and-off amateur cricket career (highlights: playing on the college quad; in my Bombay compound; on my high school basketball court), I have never, ever played in a game that allowed LBW appeals. But why? And what does it say about cricket as a game if it can’t be played properly?

A few off-the-cuff answers: 1) LBW rules are simple enough, even though I’ve argued for a more flexible approach. The problem, I suspect, is that in a pick-up game, you can’t create the Hobbesian umpire figure. That’s because the person chosen to umpire often comes from one of the teams, and is thus liable to accusations of bias. So, in this case the umpire may call wides or boundaries and keep score, but he may not make any interpretation of the future path of a ball. 1A) Many pick-up cricket games don’t employ actual stumps. We used oversized garbage cans. It’d be unfair to base any LBW on that.

2) Is it a big deal that cricket’s rules are often ignored/changed/edited at the lowest level? This doesn’t happen with other major sports — not soccer, or basketball, or tennis, right? Cricket is a Roman Catholic game: it has plenty of rules, but they are mostly ignored by its followers. But I think an optimistic spin can be used here. Isn’t there something exciting about the creative adaptation of cricket to local settings? Isn’t that precisely one of the game’s attractions — that West Indians play it differently from Indians who play it differently from some Pacific islanders? Thoughts?

Playing Cricket After Four Years

Somehow, I managed to find an organized group of South Asians who regularly play cricket in New York City. And last week, after much anticipation and delay, I plucked up the courage to join this happy band. A quick review of the experience:

1) I can see why spreading cricket around the world is so difficult. We used garbage cans for stumps; we had at least two uncomfortable conversations with basketball players and picnicking parents (our ‘field’ was a NYC basketball/tennis court); and we had fences for our boundaries (which led to one lost ball).

2) Cricket is also a very, very difficult sport. We are a bunch of amateurs, which means every other delivery was either wide, a no-ball or absolutely horrible. (If I’m being truthful, I have to confess I bowled four wides in one over — an experience that made me empathize with Ishant Sharma.) I appreciate athletes playing at the highest stage more than ever.

3) Feminists talk about the ‘male gaze,’ but for a budding cricketer, there’s little more withering than the ‘fielder’s gaze.’ When you bowl badly, you feel everyone on your team looking at you and thinking, “What are you doing, mate?” Especially if you have, as I did, some over-eager captains who acted as if they were in a World Cup final, setting fields and saying things like, “Come on boys, keep the pressure up!” Er, sure. But it must be truly embarrassing for bowlers who fail to attack according to fields.

4) One last thing: is cricket more fun to watch than to play? This is a tough one, but after Sunday, I think I have to say ‘yes.’ Don’t get me wrong; I had a blast, but: if you’re not batting or bowling, you’re fielding. And fielding sucks — balls often don’t come to you, and when they do, the experience lasts about 30 seconds. And without a big scorecard, it’s not easy to keep the match situation in mind — you have no idea where your team is, what’s the target, etc.

But don’t worry: I’ll be there next Sunday.

IPL Value Statistics: Was The Money Worth It?

I hereby issue a request to more math-inclined cricket bloggers (hint, hint, Deep Backward Point and Kridaya and Russ): can you rigorously compare a player’s IPL performance with his auction price? The simplest method, I imagine, would be to place those two categories side-by-side. E.g.: Gautam Gambhir, $2.4 million, 378 runs (avg.: 34). The broader question is: did the amount the franchises put down make sense?

Now, I can think of at least one major objection: the rules of the IPL auction do not exactly qualify as a free marketplace. There are various restrictions — four foreign players, a certain number of ‘capped’ Indian players, etc. — that inflate the values for particular cricketers. But still: at some level, there must be some method to this madness, surely? (There’s also the second objection — why don’t you do it? Well, I’m busy. And I suck at math.)

Free Shahid Afridi

I don’t like or care much for Shahid Afridi, but I think every person has the right to freely practice his trade. For those not following this latest dispute between the Pakistan Cricket Board and its players, here’s the skinny: the PCB removed Afridi as Pakistan’s ODI captain. Afridi retired in protest. He then criticized the PCB on television. The PCB then canceled Afridi’s central contract and revoked his No-Objection-Certificate (NOC).

Until that last step, I confess I did not care much about this story. But the NOC — a curious subcontinental legal term — determines if Afridi will be able to play for Hampshire or not, making the PCB’s move especially cruel and vindictive. Afridi now has some lawyers on the case, who are arguing for a hearing on the NOC. They say it’s a simple case of natural justice, and I agree — every agency’s decision should be open to appeal or a hearing.

So, here are some questions: 1) How pervasive is the use/revocation of the NOC? It seems like such a bureaucratic hassle, but I could not find definitive information from Google. 2) What is to stop a cricket board from simply revoking the NOC every time it is angry with a particular player? (See here for an excerpt of the ICC’s NOC rules.)

A History Of Cricket’s “Twirlymen”

The Economist reviews a new book on the history of spin bowling. An interesting point to note:

Spin bowlers are the game’s revolutionaries. Even their mysterious lexicon—googlies, Chinamen, flippers, doosras—suggests constant innovation. When the googly was first unleashed at the end of the 19th century, batsmen huffed that it wasn’t in the spirit of the game because they couldn’t tell which way the ball was about to spin.

You see these protests about bowling methods from time to time. In recent history, we have seen controversies over the doosra and reverse-swing fast bowling, debates made all the more intractable and difficult by racial/post-colonial issues (i.e., West v. South Asia). That’s not to say opposition to these deliveries is prima facie racial or motivated by less-than-honorable motives. It just helps explain why we get so touchy when these issues arise.

Sachin Tendulkar As An Actor

Via Poorvi, an excellent story from India Today about Sachin Tendulkar’s scheme to score a tax deduction on revenue earned from his commercials:

Tendulkar had claimed deduction of tax under Section 80RR of the Income Tax Act. The section states that a person can claim tax deduction if he is a playwright, artist, musician, actor or sportsman and the income for which deduction is claimed is derived by him in the exercise of his profession.

When the assessing officer asked Tendulkar to explain the nature of his profession, the master blaster submitted that “he is a popular model who acts in various commercials for endorsing products of various companies”. He further stated that the income derived by him from ‘acting’ had been reflected as income from “business and profession” whereas income from playing cricket was reflected as “income from other sources” since he is a non-professional cricketer. Tendulkar explained that the claimed deduction in tax was from the exercise of his profession as an ‘actor’.

Fascinating stuff. Read the tax officer’s bemused attempts to understand — and ultimately reject — Tendulkar’s argument. (Key quote: “If Tendulkar isn’t a cricketer, who is?”) This little bit of dishonesty on Tendulkar’s part raises some important points, namely:

1) I don’t know enough about India’s tax code, but while I think it’s laudable to include a tax break for artists and playwrights, I also know more loopholes mean more problems. A tax code’s complexity is positively correlated with incidents like these, where people try to fit their lives to the legal language to save some bucks.

2) On another note: in an earlier post, I argued that Test cricket allowed for more intriguing narratives and characters:

[J]ust as in a long novel, where authors foreshadow major events with strategically planted seeds, Test cricket has its own dramatic devices. Take Ishant Sharma’s burst on Day 1, which many commentators said partially explained the collapse that later occurred in the post-Tea session. Or take the marks left on a pitch as bowlers complete their run-up. Those habits of routine become potentially explosive on Day 5, when balls land in their place and explode.

So perhaps Tendulkar’s fault lies not in arguing that he is an actor, but rather, that commercials were his primary stage. Test cricketers have to play a number of different roles in their team — batsmen, for instance, have to “play to the situation” (unless they’re Sehwag). One minute, they must be the ‘consolidator,’ or the ‘anchor’; the next, they’re given license to go wild and score like a maniac.

Or take Dhoni. At the start of his career, Dhoni “played” one character — the big shot. Over time, he has changed, and now wears a more responsible persona. The challenge for cricketers is to embrace different roles as they go through their career. Some are better than others; I’d say Tendulkar is among the best. Shakespeare couldn’t have scripted him better, really.

The Best Cricket Board Website

I’m doing some web design work in my current job (don’t ask), and the task nudged me to do some Internet ‘research.’ Like, which cricket board has the best website? Surprisingly, the results weren’t bad on average (except the Pakistani one, which looks like it was developed in the 1990s).

But I give my award to the ECB, which seizes the future and a) offers to sell English cricket kits and gear and jersey online; b) includes interactive links to encourage fan participation (like, podcasts and other Internet thingies). But too many of these websites advertise the wrong things — the latest game fixtures and results, or news from the national team. I doubt many fans go to cricket board websites for this sort of stuff. And why not include information on where to learn cricket, and where to play the game, and where to hire a coach, and how to get tickets at venues if you don’t have a personal connection to a VIP? The good ol’ Kiwis have some of the answers.

Anyway, you decide: England, India, South Africa, Australia, West Indies, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, New Zealand