Opinion

Culture Industry’s Pitch Invasion

Grand theorising about contending cricket cultures makes good copy, but ignores all the contingent and other factors that imparts the sport its thrill

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Culture Industry’s Pitch Invasion
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“Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” aphorised Nasser Hussain, the Madras-born former England captain, from the Sky studio in the UK right after New Zealand’s merciless demolition of his adopted country’s team in the ninth of the 42 scheduled group stage matches. It must have sounded good on television (I heard about it from a London-based aficionado who follows practically everything of interest that goes on in international cricket).

But it was not just Hussain who put forward a ‘meta-cultural’ explanation for England’s comprehensive losses in its first two encounters, against strong teams on the offensive. There has been a good deal of expert analysis, before and during this World Cup, on what has been wrong with England’s ODI culture and the answer seems to be pretty much everything. Not being able to understand the critical differences between Test and one-day cricket; not planning and looking ahead like Australia, New Zealand, or India do; fretting too much about strategy and tactics and not paying enough attention to team culture; not having a positive, aggressive, risk-taking mind-set, and so on.

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To be fair to Hussain, one of the more thoughtful retired cricketers commentating or holding forth on television today, he does elaborate on his aphorism in a newspaper article. England, he points out, has a “less settled approach to the one-day game” than its leading rivals, reflected in the strange timing of the decision to change its team (and captain) on the eve of the World Cup, and also that it has a tendency, exposed in the opening-day match against Australia, to worry too much about strategy. This, in the context of having gaps of several days between games, leads to “a lot of meetings” and “overthinking”, which in turn stifles the ability to be “instinctive” and change plans when they are not working. For instance, the Anderson-led bowling attack is capable of getting the better of any batting line-up in the World Cup when the ball moves around, but England lacks a ‘Plan B’ for flat, drop-in pitches.

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McCullum tears England

You may ask, how many among the five top-ranked teams in the Reliance ICC ODI rankings—Australia, India, South Africa, Sri Lanka and New Zea­land—­have an effective Plan B for the kind of batsmen-friendly pitches we have seen all summer in Australia, in the Tests against India, in the tri-series, and in the World Cup games so far? Which among the top-ranked teams has an alternative plan good enough to stop Chris Gayle when he is on fire, or Marlon Samuels or Kumar Sangakkara or Mahela Jayawardene or Ian Bell or Eoin Morgan when they are in full flow? And I don’t think any bowling attack, especially under the present playing conditions, could have stopped a rampaging Kevin Pietersen—if only the ecb’s top management had not been stupid enough....

Nevertheless, Hussain makes a fair point about the importance of thinking on your feet and valuing instinct and crea­ti­vity over overwrought strategy. This leads me to think these three teams can all advance in this World Cup—England, after its comfortable win over Scotland; Sri Lanka, despite its wobbly performance against Afg­ha­nistan; and the West Indies, post Gayle’s record-setting dou­­ble century against Zimbabwe. After all, they have some of the best and most creative players in the game. May I suggest, counter-intuitively, that one of these three teams will make it to the semi-finals, and then who knows? And if it turns out to be England, what happens to the meta-cultural explanation?

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Whether he realised it or not, what Hussain was doing in trying to account for England’s humiliation at Wellington was Grand Theory. This is a term of art coined by the American sociologist C. Wright Mills in his classic work, The Sociological Imagination (1959). The term denotes and indicts a form of highly abstract theorising that fetishises one’s preferred concepts, that, in the words of Mills, “sets forth a realm of concepts from which are excluded many structural features of human society, features long and accurately recognised as fundamental to its existence”. In other words, the explanatory value of grand theory in relation to human society is exactly zero.

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Likewise, grand theorising about contending cricket cultures explains nothing that has happened or will happen in this World Cup. Talent, selection, experience, hard work, team balance and team spirit, tactics, fielding, form, captaincy and skills, physical fitness and mental strength, injuries, playing conditions, the state of the pitch and, perhaps to a lesser extent, the outfield, the toss, the run of play, umpiring decisions, the opposing side’s errors, sheer chance—these matter and do help explain match results.

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In a recent New Yorker article, The Meaning of ‘Culture’, triggered by Merriam-Webster’s annou­ncement that ‘culture’ was their 2014 Word of the Year, Joshua Rothman, the magazine’s archive editor, reflects entertainingly on the many meanings sought to be conveyed by resort to the word—divergent, polemical, positive, malevolent, trivialising, hack, and, in sum, thoroughly confusing.

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In early 2015, retired and banished cricketers and cricket writers can wax eloquent on Australia’s winning cricket culture—or indeed about India’s and New Zealand’s ODI cultures after the brilliant starts to their World Cup campaigns. Even KP is all praise for Aus­tralia’s competitive, toughening-up cricket culture, club-level up. The jury may be out on Michael Clarke’s contribution to Australia’s team spirit and dressing room environment but Shane Warne is allowed to rhapsodise about his best friend and batsman extraordinaire’s solo role in transforming this culture (“he taught them how to win; it wasn’t anybody else, it was Michael Clarke”). But we must not overlook the concerns ‘Mr Cricket’, Michael Hussey, reveals in his autobiography, Underneath the Southern Cross (2013); deep concerns he had aired to little effect, in 2012, with Australia’s coach, Mickey Arthur, about a team environment where players didn’t seem “genuinely happy for your teammates’ success” and “a culture that makes them want to think about other people and play for the team” being absent. Surely this environment and these attitudes had something to do with Australia’s dismal performance in the 2013 Tests and ICC Champions Trophy before the remarkable turnaround in the return Ashes series in Australia.

For a sound explanation of success and failure on the field of play—never mind if it is Test or ODI cricket—we must turn to the multiple factors, predictable and plannable as well as contingent, that Mike Brearley identifies and analyses so masterfully in The Art of Captaincy (1985).

With about 40 per cent of the group stage matches done, the format of the ICC Cricket World Cup 2015, not to mention the decision to contract the number of teams for the 2019 and 2023 editions to ten, looks less and less defensible. Grouping the 14 teams in two pools of seven each, where every team plays six matches and there are annoying gaps between one match and the next for primed-up teams and fans, makes little sporting sense. The ultimate objective may be maximising television ratings and revenues but what is also being achieved is the maximisation of meaninglessness during this group stage. In the process, the aim of eliminating the less-­fancied teams, the so-called minnows, from the knockout stage is being slowly and painfully achieved—Ireland excepted. Just imagine what a quarter-final line-up might have looked like at this stage had there been a more open and even-handed format of four groups for 16 teams. The plain fact is that two or even three of the underperforming heavyweights would have been in danger of elimination, just as Spain was after one terrible game, a 1-5 thrashing by the Netherlands, in the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil where 32 teams were drawn in eight groups.

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With several players, including Sachin Tendulkar and Jayawardene, speaking up for a more inclusive World Cup system, the campaign to reverse the ICC’s reactionary decision seems to be gaining traction. But the big question is where the conflicted and beleaguered BCCI stands on this issue. Our sense of the economics and politics of international cricket tells us that if the tens of millions of cricket fans in India and the other South Asian countries speak up, on the right side of this issue, we could have a more inclusive and sporting World Cup in 2019 and 2023.

(N. Ram is chairman and publisher of The Hindu group of publications. He’s played first class cricket for Madras.)

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