To the top, logically

For cricket’s hardcore devotees, the purists who insist that Test cricket is the real form of the game, September 24, 2007, was no day for celebration.

It was the day Mahendra Singh Dhoni led a team short of full strength — a squad for which top batsmen such as Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly had made themselves unavailable — to victory in the ICC World Twenty20 in Johannesburg. The game that we knew, relatively gentle, moderately fashionable and acceptably paced, took on another dimension.

It was not as though fans suddenly woke up to the joys of big hitting to the detriment of all else —after all, the subcontinent has been serving up flat decks in one-day internationals (ODIs) for some time now. It was just that India’s administrators, who till then considered Twenty20 cricket a creation of marketing men in England, wholeheartedly adopted the shortest version.

If sociologist Ashish Nandy’s assertion that cricket was “an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British” was a bit of an exaggeration, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) strove to make this a reality with T20s. The hurried establishment of the Indian Premier League ushered in the era where T20 is king.

One-day cricket became popular in India after the country won the World Cup in 1983. T20 got wide acceptance in 2007. Now it is to be seen whether India rising to top position in Test cricket leads to revival in interest in this variety of the game.

When India beat Sri Lanka 2-0 to become the No. 1 Test team in the world, the men counting the coins in the BCCI’s vault discovered there were things that didn’t figure in a balance sheet but they mattered a lot to the game’s stakeholders.

Suddenly, being the best in the world, rather than briefly occupying top spot thanks to a quirk in the rankings system, became the goal. Reaching the top has forced the board to request the visiting South Africans to convert February’s five-ODI series into one comprising two Tests and three ODIs.

While the Twenty20 craze spread quickly, with players only too keen to make a pile of money to play less, and the novel format fitting snugly into the need of the hour, a quick cricketing fix in the evening after work or school, the road now ahead for India is a harder one.

To stay at No. 1, for starters, India need to play more Test cricket more consistently than they do. South Africa could topple India on January 18 (the day the series ends) if they beat England 2-0 or more convincingly. Australia are never more than few points from the top, and they play Pakistan at home in the same period. The good news is that the whitewashes and routs that were the norm when India played abroad from the fifties till the seventies are a thing of the past, and the team now consistently beat the best in their own backyard.

On the field, India are well placed to rule the roost. A creative and highly effective pair of openers in Virender Sehwag and Gautam Gambhir, the best middle-order in the world in Dravid, Tendulkar, and V. V. S. Laxman, the cut and thrust of Yuvraj Singh and Dhoni, an experienced spinner in Harbhajan Singh and a pace attack to reckon with led by Zaheer Khan. To keep this group fit and running for the longest version demands judicious scheduling and plenty of rest, something that seems highly improbable now.

The other serious impediment is the BCCI’s barely disguised contempt for the plight of the paying public. The viewer experience is improving in new stadia like the VCA Ground in Nagpur, which the ICC recently described as a blueprint for how a ground should ideally be, but that’s an exception rather than the rule. Most people who’ve bought a ticket can’t expect space for parking, clean toilets, acceptable food or comfortable seating.

At the Eden Gardens in Kolkata, the last couple of kilometres to the ground have to be covered on foot. At the Kotla in Delhi, several stands are still not covered. In Kanpur, the toilets routinely run out of water, if they had any to start with. In Australia, England, New Zealand and South Africa, going to the cricket ground is a picnic.

Like so many other success stories in India, the Test team’s rise to No. 1 has been almost despite the system, rather than because of it. The heartwarming thing, though, is that the people who run the game are now clambering to do what they can to be a part of the movement.