Eye on Cricket: Reflections on the Great Game

By Samir Chopra

In Eye on Cricket, Samir Chopra, a professor of philosophy and a long-time blogger at ESPNcricinfo, offers us a deeply personal take on a game that has entranced him his entire life in the several lands he has called home.

In these essays, Chopra reflects on a childhood centred on cricket, the many obsessions of fandom, the intersection of the personal and the political, expatriate experiences of cricket, historical regrets and remembrances, and cricket writing and media.

Nostalgic, passionate and meditative, Eye on Cricket is steeped in cricket's history and its cultural significance, and reminds the most devoted spectators of the game that they are not alone. It shows how a game may, by offering a common language of understanding, bring together even those separated by time and space and culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperSport
• Release date: Aug 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9789351365501

Samir Chopra

Samir Chopra is professor of philosophy at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He blogs at The Cordon on ESPNcricinfo and at www.samirchopra.com. He can be found on Twitter as @EyeOnThePitch. He is the co-author or author of: The India-Pakistan Air War of 1965 (Manohar Publishers, 2005); Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software (Routledge, 2007); A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents (University of Michigan Press, 2011); Brave New Pitch: The Evolution of Modern Cricket (HarperCollins India, 2012); and Eagles Over Bangladesh: The Indian Air Force in the 1971 Liberation War (HarperCollins India, 2013).

Book preview

EYE ON CRICKET

Reflections on the Great Game

SAMIR CHOPRA

Foreword by Gideon Haigh

To Noor and Ayana, for making a home with me.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION: POSTCARDS TO MY CRICKETING HOMELAND

A CHILDHOOD OF CRICKET

OUT OF THE CLASSROOM, ONTO THE PITCH

OF CRICKET BATS AND ECONOMIC DIVISIONS

MY HIGHEST SCORE

THE WINTER GAME

CRICKET, UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL

CURIOUSLY OBSESSIVE CREATURES

THE CASE OF THE CURIOUSLY SIGNIFICANT NUMBERS

ELABORATE FICTIONS

STEPPING AWAY FROM THE KEYBOARD: TALKING ABOUT CRICKET

LINGUISTIC LENSES

THE PLAYER-FAN, THE SHARPER VISION

NOT SO SPLENDOROUS SOLITUDE

DESERTING A DREAM

DELAYED GRATIFICATION

THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL

CEMETERIES AND CRICKET

EASY ON THE EXOTICIZING, PLEASE

AGGRESSION OR JUST PETULANCE?

THE SPIRIT OF CRICKET: AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS GONE

WALKING IN AN UMPIRE’S SHOES

AGAINST SPECIALIST FIELDERS

MEMORIES, FAITHFUL AND UNFAITHFUL

THE SPECTACLE

CRICKET’S LOOK AND FEEL: A MIXED BAG

THE BEAUTY OF A CATCH AT SLIP

PASSAGES OF PLAY

INDIA, OH MY INDIA

INDIA'S GREAT MISSES: THE OVAL 1979

TWO PUSILLANIMOUS MISSES

THE METAPHYSICAL HANGOVER: COPING WITH A HEAVY LOSS

LIVING IN THE USA

TALKING TO AMERICANS ABOUT CRICKET

TIME ZONES

THE NEUTRAL CRICKET ENCOUNTER

STAYING UP TO WATCH

OUR HEROES, OUR VILLAINS

GODS NO MORE

COMRADES-IN-ARMS OR CO-WORKERS?

THE MYSTERY OF A TEST CRICKETER’S PROVENANCE

KIMBERLEY!

BOOKS AND THE SILVER SCREEN

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 796.358

WHITHER THE GREAT CRICKET DOCUMENTARY?

A GOOD CLICHÉ IS HARD TO FIND

CRICKET BOOKS AND MASTERS OF THE GAME

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

FOREWORD

I suspect that Samir Chopra and I were born to at least correspond. His blog profile lists as his interests ‘cricket, free software, military history, military aviation, hiking, tattoos, industrial music, travelling’. I don’t necessarily share those interests—although the military and musical tastes overlap—but they are interesting, and he brings to his cricket writing the sort of well-stocked and free-ranging mind ever in short supply.

Cricket bloggers have a tendency to come and go, say what they have to say, and move on. Samir, I think, gets better and better. I enjoy his style of taking a stray or miscellaneous pensée, then comparing and contrasting, unpicking and elaborating, until a surprisingly rigorous argument has been constructed and a provocative conclusion reached, whether it’s that Andy Flower had a nerve asking India to withdraw its run-out appeal for Ian Bell at Trent Bridge in 2011, or that Fire in Babylon was frankly overpraised—views I happen to share, although that is less the point that Samir makes such trenchant yet civil cases. They are like watching cricket with a thoughtful and challenging companion. Perhaps these are the conversations Samir would like to have had with someone at a Test match, but, alas, has had to conduct with himself in his self-imposed east-coast American exile. If so, we’re fortunate that he’s condemned to partake of his cricket by the interwebs in splendid isolation, as he describes in another lovely cameo here.

There was a lot that set me nodding in Eye on Cricket, in recognition and assent. Yes, sport is grossly overstuffed with martial imagery; yes, I also tend to appraise every library by what is on the shelves at 796.358. Being one himself, Samir understands the ‘playing fan’ and the vernacular cricketer with great acuity. ‘No game, no physical or cultural endeavour, can survive or be sustainable if held aloft only by the efforts of those most proficient at it,’ should hang in a gilded frame in the office of every cricket administrator. I revelled in cricket-nerdish references to a light appeal by Sew Shivnarine, and to ‘Kirti Azad’s Finest Hour’ too. I’d read many of these pieces previously, yet was struck by how well they cohered in this collection—it was almost as though Samir had been unconsciously working towards this totality all along. I am surprised only that he has never written anything about Jade Dernbach. After all, it would bring together two of his interests. Over to you, Samir.

Gideon Haigh

INTRODUCTION

POSTCARDS TO MY CRICKET HOMELAND

As I take guard to introduce this collection of essays, it is perhaps appropriate for me to reflect why I write on cricket. I do waffle on quite a bit: I have blogged on cricket for over seven years—first, at my personal blog, Eye on Cricket; then, thanks to the good folks at ESPNcricinfo, on more prominent platforms and soapboxes—I have also written two books on cricket. That’s hundreds of thousands of printed words. Before that, from 1990 to 1997, I wrote on rec.sport.cricket, the Usenet cricket newsgroup (it now exists as a Google group), chatted with cricket fans on the Internet Relay Channel, and wrote many cricket-centric emails to friends. Why write so much on and about a mere game? Can twenty-two men or women in white, knocking around with bat and ball—a reductive description whose absurdity often strikes me in unguarded, perspective-shifting moments—really be that productive and stimulative of intelligent rumination, analysis, and commentary?

In my attempted answer, I want to focus on my particular and peculiar station as a writer who grew up in a cricketing country but now lives ‘abroad’ in—with all due respect to American cricketers and fans—a cricketing wasteland. I have often worried I was peddling too much nostalgia in my blogging at ESPNcricinfo, that I was subjecting my readers to a gushing sentimentalism. It was not that all my posts were thus; indeed, I am often pleasantly surprised by the diversity of subjects I have written on. But there is little doubt that nostalgia continues to make an appearance in my writings. Much of what you read in the following pages will not be nostalgic, but the animating force, the primeval motivation that makes me sit down and write about cricket is ultimately, I think, nostalgic. This should be unsurprising, for I am an immigrant; nostalgia and homesickness are my supposedly perennial states of being.

‘Nostalgia’ is a term coined by a Swiss doctor, Johannes Hofer, in a dissertation submitted to Basel University in 1688; it was used to describe a depressed mood caused by an intense longing to return home. The ‘disease’ had been noticed among Swiss mercenary soldiers yearning to return from their excursions in the flatlands of Europe to their Alpine mountainous perches. I was introduced to this etymology—and its history of diagnosis among American Civil War soldiers—by my friend and fellow cricket fan, David Coady, professor of philosophy at the University of Tasmania. On hearing it, I realized I should have guessed from the ‘-algia’ suffix and my own personal experiences that the term denoted a painful medical condition.

There are two kinds of nostalgia: restorative, which concerns itself with returning to the lost home, and reflective, which concerns itself with longing and the sense of loss. It is reflective nostalgia that sustains and animates the restorative variety; it infects and colours many dimly perceived and understood instinctive reactions of mine—like a sudden lump in my throat or a moistening of the eyes when viewing a cricket documentary or listening to a musical fragment like Booker T and the MG’s ‘Soul Limbo’, the soundtrack for the BBC’s Test match highlights reel. My writing about cricket is a form of reflective nostalgia. It displaces me profoundly; when I write on cricket I am no longer in the US. I have written this book at home in Brooklyn, in a library in midtown Manhattan, at my in-laws’ home in Cincinnati. At each locale, while in America, I have moved away from it by writing about cricket.

For the first few years of my life in the US, I lost track of the cricketing world and entered a strange purgatory where cricket news felt like missives from a distant planet. Now, even though I can watch all the cricket I want, I’m still infected by an incurable homesickness that I cannot stop hoping will be palliated and perhaps even cured by conversation—whether electronic or verbal—with others who love and obsess over cricket like I do. The homesickness, the ‘homeward-bound gaze’ of the immigrant is a well-worn and perhaps excessively theorized cliché now, but its emotional impact remains the same as it ever was. Like many others like me, I miss the light of the north Indian winters, the brilliant sunshine that warmed my non-centrally heated body as I emerged from a cold Delhi interior, the colour and pomp and circumstance of the yearly festivals, the distinctive aromas of marketplaces. I also miss the sounds and sights of cricket: crackling radio commentary and street games and men and boys in white on green and brown cricket fields. Twenty-seven years of self-imposed absence have attenuated this feeling, as has the non-stop saturation by international cricket and its constant on-call presence in video-streaming websites and satellite television; but the desire to talk about cricket has not gone away.

I still feel words spring to my lips as I watch a game; I still find myself possessed by an incurable itch when I witness cricketing folly or excellence, one only assuaged by writing. It does not matter whether someone reads my writings. When I began blogging, my posts disappeared into the ether, falling stillborn from the press, one after another. I wrote because I had to, because it was the only way to address and articulate cricket’s place in my life.

I often wish I could stop writing on cricket; it takes up a great deal of time and emotional and psychic energy. My career and my changing responsibilities seem to demand it occupy a lesser role in my life: despite earning tenure and full professorship I still have academic ambitions, challenging academic projects left unfulfilled, and I’m a newly minted father. I often resent the claims cricket makes on my time and attention: all those nights spent watching the game; would I have done it to read a philosophy tome? Would I have pulled off all-nighters quite as diligently for the final edits on a book? On many an occasion, I have tuned in to watch a game rather than attend to my academic responsibilities, then found myself preoccupied anyway, but, reluctant to switch the game off, stayed suspended in a curious nether world of diverted attention, hopelessly unable to either enjoy the game or work. Hours later, frustrated, irate, my work left unfinished, I resolve never to make that mistake again, knowing even as I do so, that I will. This obsession does not sound healthy; it resembles an addiction and would justifiably elicit solicitous attention from a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist. It is not an attractive picture to paint of oneself.

I can only stop writing about cricket if I stop watching it or thinking about it. The subterranean and subconscious roots of this interest, though, lie deep in a set of memories and impressions formed so long ago, their eviction seems impossible. They are bound up with a sense of ‘place’ that can perhaps only be recreated if I watch cricket again. I know I often watch games telecast from India because I want to catch a glimpse of what I can dimly discern on the sidelines, behind and around the sightscreen: the sights, sounds and colours of India. On occasion, in my Brooklyn apartment, I have subconsciously sought to recreate an earlier time: I switch on the television, leaving it loud enough so that it can be heard in rooms other than the living room; I make a cup of tea and putter around. I realize I am trying to evoke the sounds of an Indian household in the winter: the morning hustle and bustle as its residents go about their work, no one able to actually divert themselves for long enough to actually sit in front of a television, but still invested in checking the cricket scores. This recreation never works, but for a few moments, while I am immersed in its details, I feel a pleasurable sense of comfort steal over me. On the day of the 2011 World Cup final, I woke early in the morning and spent the first part of the match texting my friends and family over the globe and back in India. Once again, I was watching a game with a group, a collective entity; once again, I felt at ‘home’.

Those early imprints left by a childhood seeped in cricket meant I would view sports through a distinctive lens: no matter how deep my investment in the New York Giants and Yankees, no matter how enthusiastically I might look forward to a basketball franchise in Brooklyn and plan to buy the Nets’ T-shirts and assorted merchandise, a distinctive emotional frisson will be missing. My daughter will be—I hope—a New York Giants and Yankees and Brooklyn Nets fan, just like her fossilized father, but I will not hurt as badly as she will when they fail to qualify for the playoffs. She will have grown up in a different place and time; her sense of her earliest days will have been formed away from the land I used to call home. Her arrival has not brought me closer to ‘home’; it has only moved me further. I have settled in Brooklyn, I am proud to be a graduate of—and now—professor at the City University of New York, proud as I have never been—even when I was a resident of India’s storied capital—to be living in a particular city. But this city is not home and never will be. Strangely enough, neither will India and its cities.

Perhaps if I’d stayed in India, I might have grown apart from cricket. I might have been seduced by India’s newer attractions; perhaps the English Premier League (EPL), Formula One, or India’s golfing aspirants would have reconfigured my sporting priorities. Perhaps—most radically—soured by the match-fixing scandals of the 1990s, and unaffected by Sachin Tendulkar’s career, I might have actively separated myself from cricket and resolved to make it a smaller part of my life.

But because I moved across the black water, I took with me my sense of cricket as it was then: the subject of endless conversation and rumination and heartbreak and joy. I left behind friends with whom I played cricket; I left behind the fields on which I played countless matches; I left behind a conversation in progress. The sensations associated with the absence of these things in my life find constant provocation in the attention I pay to cricket, and demand expression in only one way. After all, I’m pretty much useless at anything other than reading and writing.

To stop writing on cricket would require me to not be interested in it any more; it would mean acknowledging that one part of my life is over, a loss too great to bear; and it would mean finally accepting that I can no longer go ‘home’. But despite my explicit acknowledgement above that there’s no ‘home’ to be found, I still dream of doing so.

There will come a time when cricket will play a smaller role in my life; enough discourse about the pernicious political role sport plays in our modern corporatized world would do it; perhaps some awareness of the futility of it all; perhaps one day, I will come up short, look in the mirror and tell myself the attention I pay cricket is more tastefully paid by a younger man.

Till then, I write.

A CHILDHOOD OF CRICKET

OUT OF THE CLASSROOM, ONTO THE PITCH

A little while ago, while digging through a collection of letters I had written my mother during the two years I spent in a boarding school in India’s north-east, I chanced upon one dated 8 March 1981. These letters were written every week—either on the old ‘inland’ form or enclosed in stamped envelope; this was not as much epistolary diligence as it was simple conformance to an ironclad school rule that required us to write with exemplary regularity. (In a final application of heavy-handed boarding school discipline, we handed over our unsealed letters to our housemaster who was allowed to read them; perhaps our school wanted to ensure we did not complain excessively about the awful food, the rainy weather, and the oppressive prefects.) This regime of letter writing ensured I reported most of the week’s events to my mother, eagerly awaiting my dispatches in New Delhi: tales of academic and sporting accomplishment and disappointment, the odd anecdote, and occasionally stories of just-this-side-of-legal escapades with my schoolmates. I also included the usual plaintive requests for more ‘tuck’, and made some polite and essentially pro forma inquiries about the rest of the family.

In that particular missive, among other things, I wrote:

Today was a cricket match between the staff and the students. The students won in an exciting finish by just two wickets with five minutes left. The staff scored 163 all out. The students looked in a bad state with the score at 110 for 7 with just twenty minutes left. Then one boy came in scored 15 runs in four balls and really inspired us. Then we just hammered our way out.

As far as match reports go, I’ll give this one a D. There is the matter of the undistinguished handwriting—which fortunately cannot be reproduced here—and the awkwardly phrased opening sentence. But besides form, there is the problem of content: why is the reporter specifying the time remaining when there must have been an overs limit as there always is in school games? (Limited-overs games, as is obvious to anyone who has played cricket for any length of time, are the norm, not the exception, at lower levels of cricket.) Who scored fifteen runs in four balls? Why has our hero’s identity consigned to the generic ‘one boy’, a description both useless and uninformative because I was writing from a boy’s school about a game between staff and students? What does ‘we just hammered our way out’ mean? Was there another hero who aided the first saviour? Besides, the reporter writes as if he was playing—was he? What was the final score? If seven wickets were down when the rescue act began, did the game end in a cliffhanger with nine wickets down or did the eighth-wicket partnership wrap up things? (I wonder if my mother thought of these questions when she read my letter. I suppose not, for she raised none of them in her reply. But she wasn’t much of a cricket fan to begin with, and therefore, may have tolerated this amateurish attempt at cricket reporting because, well, she was my mother, and would have welcomed anything I wrote from so far away.)

I can answer some of those questions, but not all. I was obsessed with time rather than overs because in those days, I thought of cricket in terms of temporal limits; I was a child of Test cricket, and while I had lived through the 1979 World Cup—and its accompanying disasters for the Indian team—the limited-overs and hundred-overs-a-day sensibility had not yet kicked in. (It took me a long time to start thinking about batting records in terms of balls faced rather than minutes elapsed; even though I recognized the statisticians’ logic in doing so, I was a reluctant convert.) Although I do not remember the name of the hero who scored fifteen runs in four balls, I do remember how he did it: three boundaries off the first three balls he faced, and then a scampered three off the last ball that let him retain the strike. I don’t remember what he did thereafter, but I do remember that broadside of aggressive strokes kick-starting the ‘hammering our way out’. And while I might have been ‘inspired’ and used the inclusive ‘we’ in this little match report, the closest I got to the action was about fifty yards or so; I was safely ensconced in the spectators’ section along with a couple of hundred other excited and excitable blazer-and-tie-wearing schoolboys. I was a cricketing mediocrity then, and have remained steadfastly so; reflected glory has always been my favoured choice of illumination.

My boarding school’s annual Staff versus Students match was an annual highlight of our cricketing calendar. The school year began with the cricket season being kicked off by this fixture; the school team’s local friendlies and competition games began thereafter. It could thus be viewed as a warm-up game, perhaps akin to those played before contemporary World Cups. But the student body did not see it as one; the match was played seriously and competitively to assess our cricket team’s form for the coming season. It was an occasion of sorts, played on a day when no classes were scheduled. There was a festive air about, and if the weather co-operated, as it did on this occasion, the setting was magnificent: in the background, the four summits of the Kanchenjunga massif rose into the sky. A more spectacular backdrop for a game of cricket can scarcely be imagined. Some of us were recovering from a little residual homesickness; the first competitive cricket game of the season was a good antidote to those blues, reminding us that our location, despite its pernicious disciplinary code and pedantic insistence on correct uniforms, still offered us a distinctive venue for our adolescent adventures.

The students won most staff–student games, but the result was never a foregone conclusion. Our staff included several young teachers, fresh college graduates, some of whom had played cricket at the university level; and almost all had played cricket at the school level. This was unsurprising; those who wanted to teach in the hills were likely to be ‘sporty, outdoors’ types. Regular participation in the gymnasium, the sporting field, was often present in their résumés. They might have lost a little of their edge, their youthful resilience and springiness, but they got it back quickly with net practice. A match against the staff was a serious contest for our school team—one that often stretched them to the limit, as in this classic.

A minor exception to the expectation of competent cricketing performance was made when the school’s rector came out to bat. He was considerably past his physical prime; not so much in age, as in girth; we watched with bated breath when he emerged, rather ponderously taking his guard to one of the students team’s fast bowlers. Would the lad dare to bowl a bouncer? What if the rector was dismissed first ball? The rector, though acknowledged a sporting type for his career in the outdoors as a mountaineer and hiker, as someone who had almost summited Mt Everest, was not as well-known as a cricketer. As it turned out, all was