One of the voids in my cricket-watching life has been the absence of Vaibhav Suryavanshi. Twenty20 cricket doesn’t mean much to me so I don’t watch the Indian Premier League. This isn’t because I don’t think the IPL is important. You would have to be a fool to dismiss a tournament that isn’t just the economic engine of Indian cricket but also a way of making room for young talent. There will never again be mournful stories told about the likes of Padmakar Shivalkar and Rajinder Goel who never played Test cricket (then the summit of the game) because the one berth in the team for a left arm, orthodox spinner had been taken by the great Bishan Singh Bedi. However accomplished they were, in public memory they remain great journeymen, forever marooned in the front row of the second rank.
Thanks to the IPL, this won’t happen again. Vaibhav Suryavanshi will be remembered as a cricketing genius even if he never plays a Test. The IPL is, like Major League Baseball, a world unto itself. In the twenty years of its existence, it has left the longer game’s metrics behind and found new ways of quantifying playing ability and effectiveness. It’s hard to believe that for the first season of the IPL, Rahul Dravid was nominated as the Icon Player for Royal Challengers Bangalore. Dravid was a great Test batsman but he would probably admit that no one with his skill set would make an IPL team now. The IPL has its own star system, which overlaps to a small extent with Test cricket’s but is in no way dependent on it.
Kartikeya Date (@cricketingview), contemporary cricket’s acutest analyst, helped formalise this distinction by arguing that players who score runs in Test and T20 cricket are performing fundamentally different roles. The former are committed to minimising risk, conserving their wickets and building their innings over the time a five-day contest affords them. Their average scores are a reasonable measure of their ability and effectiveness. They are batters. The latter are committed to hitting boundaries every ball, they disregard the risk of losing their wickets and score as fast as possible. Their average per innings in this format is misleading; the only real measure of their ability is their strike rate. The twenty-over format with the luxury of ten wickets to spend has made big hitting imperative. Date classes them not as batters, but hitters.
The distinction helps us accept that T20 shouldn’t be seen as the most abbreviated version of traditional cricket but as a different game. Not wholly, as Nehru might have said, but substantially. It took a while for Test cricket’s clichés about building an innings, holding an innings together, conserving wickets, playing with a straight bat to be binned. I’ve twice tuned in to the IPL telecasts because friends have messaged to say that Suryavanshi was on the verge of an insensate century. Both times, I’ve raced to the remote control only to see him dismissed in the 90s, the second time this happened was last Friday. These 90s are fine examples of how T20 has evolved away from the traditional game. Suryavanshi accepts completely that the century landmark matters less than trying to hit a boundary off every ball. The hundred still has a certain cachet but increasingly, it is a vintage bauble from another game.
The reason I don’t watch Suryavanshi’s innings from beginning to end is straightforward: the IPL is so lopsidedly hitting-centric, so loaded in favour of the hitter, that the hits become devalued and I feel surfeited and bored. Hitters take more risks than batters in Tests but, paradoxically, because they have just twenty overs in which to lose ten wickets (as opposed to 80 or 90 overs in the average Test innings), the jeopardy that makes batting in the longer form exciting in that tense, constrained way is hugely reduced. When Suryavanshi hit Bumrah for two sixes in an over, I simultaneously thought ‘wow!’ and ‘I’d like to see you do that to the great man in a Test.’
This is, of course, unreasonable. If, in an adjacent chapter of the multiverse, Test cricket didn’t exist and T20 was the only version of cricket available, spectators like me wouldn’t juxtapose the two and make irrelevant comparisons. I might then watch Suryavanshi’s inspired mayhem without ifs and buts. But if, in that version of our lives, I was an NRI, addicted to and knowledgeable about both the MLB and the IPL, I might make invidious comparisons (as NRIs do) between the way in which the administrators of the MLB tweaked the game to restore the balance between batter and pitcher in the late 1960s and the IPL’s cosseting of hitters with ever shorter boundaries, free hits and field restrictions.
Major League Baseball became so concerned about the dominance of pitchers and the declining averages of batters that in 1968 the size of the pitcher’s mound was reduced from fifteen inches to ten inches. So there is a world in which a bat and ball game can be concerned about the balance between the two without reference to an external format like Test cricket. But one of the reasons why the MLB tweaked the game makes it very unlikely that anything equivalent will happen in the IPL. The MLB did this for greater fan engagement. Its administrators realised that baseball’s fans wanted to see more hits, runs and home runs, so they lowered the mound and reduced the strike zone. The IPL’s administrators already know that IPL’s fans want to see sixes: why would they fix a game that isn’t, in terms of fan engagement, broken?
But if the whooping masses ever get sick of frictionless six-hitting, I have, dear reader, a plan to improve the IPL. The most poetically just solution would be to limit batsmen to the same allocation of overs to which bowlers are shackled; four overs or twenty four balls and off you go. On reflection, this is a bad idea because, as we’ve already established, the IPL’s fans come to watch Suryavanshi bludgeon 100s (or 90s) and even he can’t be expected to do that in twenty-four balls or less.
But there is another solution that preserves the excitement of big barnstorming innings and restores the jeopardy that makes proper cricket a tense duel between bat and ball. Instead of allowing the hitting team ten wickets per innings, a thoughtless borrowing from the five-day game, allow it just five. Once the fifth wicket falls, the innings ends. This will force hitters to count the relative costs of hitting boundaries and defending their wickets. It will encourage captains to bring close fielders in to help bowlers to take wickets. It will incentivise bowlers to take wickets, not merely bowl dot balls. In short, it will let Bumrah be Bumrah while giving Suryavanshi the scope to score another glorious ninety.
Best of all, this tweak might help this larger, more lethal, left-handed Tendulkar to make the transition to Test cricket (the only kind that matters). When that happens, I promise to watch every last ball he plays for the next twenty years.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com