Antidote to Madness

When people make definitive statements about places, or about books, or about people, there is always room for doubt, for contrary opinion.

Some you take, others you leave. Some you agree with, others you dismiss.

When people, as people often do, say that Lord's is 'the greatest cricket ground in the world', I tend to agree (Although that other familiar cliché 'the Home of Cricket' I'm less sure about. The Home of Cricket these days surely lies, literally or metaphorically, somewhere in India.).

I've been going to Lord's since the summer when Sunny Gavaskar batted through sixty overs for 36 not out. Today the ground, and the game, and the Indian cricket psyche, are very different. But they still fascinate and compel.

Friday 18th July 2014 is the hottest day of the British year. The mercury is in the low thirties - Lord's is a Fahrenheit sort of place, you feel, but these twenty-first century days Celsius is king - and, in the early afternoon, with the sky a deep and bottomless shade of blue, the fading vapour trails left by soaring aircraft traverse the sky. They, and the outside world they represent, seem abstract and separate, as they always do when cricket, even slow Test cricket, captures the attention.

The game is an antidote to the madness of the world.

Late the previous afternoon the news comes via Twitter that a civil airliner has been blown out of the sky over the Ukraine, probably by a ground-to-air missile. Then there is Gaza, where defenceless people are killed on a daily basis. Syria, where much the same thing has been happening for more than three years, has been temporarily relegated from the front pages, but it will, as surely as night follows day, return. These are examples of the lunatic chaos of a world in which millions of people have more important things on their mind - simple survival will do - than the outcome of a bat and ball game.

At Lord's, though, things are different, especially in the old Victorian pavilion and the adjacent Warner Stand. The talk is of the lives of sons, of daughters, of former pupils, of the price of London property, which, it seems, is rising faster than the shade temperature. In certain conversations there are deaths and serious, painful injuries, but these are the result of leisure time accidents, suffered while hiking, or skiing, or playing rugby; not of unavoidable exposure to terrorism or war.

During the hour before lunch in the Warner Stand the incessant chatter is punctuated by the sound of corks being forcibly expelled from champagne bottles. Such is their velocity, many of these end up on the beautifully manicured turf, which can often look more like a carpet than something composed of living, growing, grass. And, on a Sunday, when the pavilion fills with a younger class of member, with their pristine yellow passes and their sharp dress sense, the prevailing sensation for the older member is that of a friendless outsider at a public school reunion.

Lord's, with its hotchpotch of ancient and modern buildings, is a very different place from virtually any other cricket ground in the world. And, despite the heat, for the Indian players, brought up on the parched dustbowls of Uttar Pradesh or the cramped suburban fields of Greater Mumbai, that difference must seem especially pronounced.

But it is also welcome and inspirational. At different points in a match which remains even and compellingly contested until lunch on the last day, we are treated to the beautiful yet combative neatness of the Mumbaikar Ajinkya Rahane, and the versatility of Uttar Pradesh's Bhuvneshwar Kumar, a man who knows he can bowl but is finding out at international level that he also has an unsuspected gift for batting. Ishant Sharma, a man who has always looked to have the potential to take on the world but has rarely hinted at consistency, supplies the coup de grâce.

On the English side there are only poignancies and uncertainties and regrets. As the match hurtles to its conclusion on Monday afternoon, Matt Prior and Joe Root are both dismissed pulling the ball to deep fielders placed specifically for such errant shots. It is a kind of collective madness, based on the confidence deficit which repeated failure to win brings, and the uncertainty of the confused mind, brought low by injury and defeat.

As he leaves the field and walks slowly through the Long Room, Prior holds his head high. Although he surely knows, as we do, that not only has he played a poor shot but that it may be the last thing he ever does in an England shirt, he shows little remorse. He is the old warrior leaving the stage. Root, by contrast, can barely drag himself off the field, such is his obvious regret. For all his runs, Root is still a young pro who has yet to learn to guard his emotions. He wears his heart on his sleeve.

A short while later, with the game over and Alastair Cook, a drowning man clinging desperately to a sinking ship, answering Michael Atherton's questions with the same bland assurances we have heard so often before, the eye turns to Paul Downton, standing on his own, close to the pavilion gate. He looks around him with unfeigned seriousness, but you sense that he isn't seeing or hearing much.

He is wondering what on earth he has got himself into.

Cricket in Winter

English winters come in varying forms. There is difference - some are cold, this one has been wet, wetter than anyone alive has ever seen or experienced - and there is also similarity, uniformity. There are always long months of predominantly grey skies and early darkness. This is normal.

For anyone who loves cricket, and, for reasons of time, or money, or both, cannot travel to those parts of the globe where cricket takes place throughout the English winter, the months between October and April are strange ones. Cricket goes on; indeed, if you have access to Cricinfo and Twitter, and, most important of all, Sky Sports, cricket is everywhere.

But it is not cricket as it really is. It is the easiest thing in the world to turn on your television and see cricket; one day it is Perth, the next it is Sydney, then it is Wellington, Dubai, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town, Antigua. But as much as you can see the skies, and marvel at the depth of their blueness, rare in Britain even in summer, or almost convince yourself that you can feel the heat or the humidity by thinking back to a time and place when you were there - or somewhere similar - you cannot really feel the rhythm of the game. It is refracted and distended through the lens of the TV camera, while the commentators' perceptions - skewed by experience and biased by nationality and personal taste - can influence the way in which you see things. Moreover, you can never feel the wind on your face, or properly hear the shouts of the fielders, or the crowd. If you tire of watching from behind the bowler's arm, you cannot watch from midwicket, or low down at long-on, or chatting at square-leg. You have not travelled to the ground, or arrived there; you will not have the experience of packing your bag and leaving at close of play. Unless you have an unusually barren life, perhaps one where you have no work to do and little need to eat or sleep or leave your house, it is rarely possible to watch entire sessions of cricket in the way you would do if you were there. Thus, some of the light and shade of batsmen's innings - fluctuations of tempo and mood - and bowlers' spells - changes of pace, of flight, of spin, of field, are lost. If a bowler's field is altered it may be mentioned by the commentators, or the moved fielder may be shown, but the way in which that changes the impression and the purpose of the field as a whole can be obscured.

What a winter of televised cricket can do is reduce the game, with all its grandness and glory, to a series of distilled impressions, presented to you by the director and his cameramen and mediated by the commentators' personal tastes and opinions. It is a very different way of experiencing the game, but it is by no means an entirely bad thing.

Advances in technology increasingly mean that a television viewer has a closer view of the action than someone at the ground will ever have. Seam position, rotations of the ball as it spins, the way in which batsmen's eyes instinctively close upon impact as they play a hook or pull off their nose, or the way the blade of the bat wobbles on impact with the ball, are all evident to the television viewer in ways they will never be to someone watching from the boundary. And in the Test match arena, as in anything long, and stirring, where emotion and feeling play their part, you can draw many conclusions from being able to see the whites of the players' eyes or the precise way they use their bodies.

Over recent English winter weeks it has been possible to experience the impression of surprise and incidental pride on BJ Watling's face as he hears the announcement that he has broken a world partnership record, and to see him shake hands with Brendon McCullum as the crowd on one of the Basin Reserve's banks rises to acclaim them. Or it has been possible to look in detail at the way in which, as his form slowly returned at St.George's Park, Hashim Amla's bat emerged from its distinctive backlift with all its straightness and ethereal timing, relying on the nuances of wrist and hand positioning for its power and direction. As Australia slid to defeat in the same game, it was possible to see the way in which reverse swing took hold of the ball in the split second between it leaving Dale Steyn's hand and destroying the stumps of Brad Haddin. Or, also from Wellington, it has been possible to enjoy the beautiful, persuasive neatness of Ajinkya Rahane, or Brendon McCullum's return to the changing rooms, 302 to his name and a small, vulnerable, but immensely proud cricket nation saluting him. Week in, week out (it seems), there is the compactness, power and technical efficiency of the man who currently looks like the best opening batsmen on the planet, David Warner. And there is Kohli. There is always Kohli.

Cricket viewed through the prism of television is different. In many ways it is a more limited, less rounded, less involving experience. In others it is richer and more concentrated, while also more artificial.

Now it is March in England, things begin to change. It still rains, but the days are longer, and, when the sun is out, there is a meagre warmth in the air and the quality of the light is indefinably distinctive.

Soon, as surely as the world turns, it will again be time in England for the real thing.

There Was a Time

There was a time, years ago, when Mark Ramprakash wasn't the cause célèbre he later became. The man who embodies both all that is good and pure and true in batting technique, but at the same time the player who, more than any other modern Englishman, represents a certain type of failure. The man who simply couldn't cope with the pressure of performing at the highest level of the game, of living up to everybody's expectations, including his own.

There was a time - such as when I first glimpsed him, scything away at Paul-Jan Bakker on a London club ground in the late eighties - when Ramprakash just used to go out and bat. His technique wasn't the thing of beauty it subsequently became, but it didn't need to be. All he needed was his eye, his footwork, his bravery and his bat. He was relatively unsophisticated, but he was also endlessly aggressive and very good.

I say this because Virat Kohli reminds me strongly of the Ramprakash that once was. Like the young Ramprakash he has a brilliant eye, an orthodox yet uncomplicated technique which works, and he approaches bowlers as though they exist only to serve up balls for him to hit to the boundary. While the statistics which accompany his embryonic Test career are anaemic, his one-day career is taking vivid shape as part of an Indian team which is attempting to create an identity which distinguishes it both from the old guard who are going or gone, and from an England tour which should have shocked it to its foundations. At the moment it is succeeding and there is little chance of mistaking England for a team which knows how to stem the flow.

Just a few short weeks ago England were humiliating India. Now, with home advantage reversed, everything is very different. At a steaming Wankhede Stadium tomorrow, a transformed Indian side will be confident of extending their series lead to 4-0.

Kohli will be more confident than most, because this, you feel, is how he is. It remains to be seen whether he can succeed where Ramprakash failed in the long game, but he will surely have further opportunities.

Rahane is deeply impressive, and the hunch is that more will be seen of Pujara before too long. Kohli, though, with equally outstanding centuries against England at venues as diverse as Cardiff and Delhi over the last five weeks, is India's real diamond.

There was a time when Ramprakash seemed to have the world at his feet. He never quite did.

Kohli really does.