The Hindu : Fleming-speak and the truth of the matter

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Nov 06, 2003

Sport

Sport - Cricket

Fleming-speak and the truth of the matter

By Nirmal Shekar

Stephen Fleming's tongue is a bit like Virender Sehwag's bat — it lashes out without any signs of restraint. The only difference is, when Sehwag rides his luck and lashes out, it is sweet music to the ears of Indian cricket fans while Fleming's say-it-like-it-is comments are as jarring as a broken record played in low-voltage power.

For some time now — in fact, right from the moment Sourav Ganguly's team landed in Fleming's breathtakingly beautiful land of picture postcard perfection last December — the New Zealand captain, a bloody good student of human psychology and one adept at mind games, has found ways to irritate, if not insult, Indian players, and our very sense of self-esteem, with his words and deeds.

After the Indians failed yet again on a made-to-order green-top in the first Test in New Zealand, Fleming was quick to suggest that the Indian batting genius, its depth and its fearsome might, owed much to the fact that it had been allowed to prosper on pitches where the ball reached the shoulder level as often as it snowed during the Chennai winter!

Then, no sooner than he landed in this country for the on-going tour — two Test matches and the tri-series — Fleming found himself in a spot after shooting for the wrong kind of TV advertisement in Gujarat. Now that his acerbic remarks about Indian batting are almost forgotten and the controversy over the ad-shoot has died a natural death, Fleming had to come up with something new to stay in the game, so to say.

In the event, it is hardly surprising that the accomplished Kiwi skipper has hit out at the scheduling of the tri-series. The BCCI, for its part, said what was expected of it. Yet, the point is, when you dig deep, this may be much more than a sour grapes story. Fleming may have been complaining because his team was not doing well but is there not a dash of truth in what he said?

In both the matches in which his team lost to the world champion Australia, the conditions were loaded in favour of the team bowling first. And, just as he said, the conditions eased out after a little over an hour.

This apart, in modern sport where there is so much at stake, it is ridiculous to expect players to prepare themselves for an 8.30 a.m. start simply because the sun happens to set early in the afternoon in North East India in the winter.

That India was not involved in any of the early-start games and on pitches that had something for the fast bowlers in the morning may be more than a mere accident. After all, if the New Zealand cricket board can come up with prescription pitches to counter the batting might of the Indians, then its Indian counterpart can load the dice in the home team's favour in a different way.

Which, of course, brings us to the point: the more we begin to think that the world is shrinking, the more it is actually "expanding,'' the more we tend to believe that local conditions do not make a huge difference in a round-the-year globalised sport, the more they actually seem to matter.

Surely, many of these differences are at the root of cricket's timeless charms. Viva la difference has always been the great sport's theme song. If the Wanderers played like the Wankhede, if the conditions of a wintry early summer morning in Leeds could be copied in Lahore, the game would be so much the poorer.

The vastly different playing conditions — in whose overall sweep I would also include differences vis-a-vis infrastructure, population density, weather, noise, pollution, crowds, food, almost everything — actually inspire great men.

It is precisely because of this the greatest modern-day warrior among cricketers, Steve Waugh, chooses to describe India as the Last Frontier. It is precisely because he wants to rise up to that one last challenge, the great man has suffered ridicule even at home in attempting to stretch his Test career so he can have one more shot at winning a series in this country.

For Ganguly's boys, Australia represents another kind of frontier, a lost frontier perhaps, a land where they have lost and lost... and lost some more. The last time India won a Test down under — at Melbourne, thanks to Kapil Dev's heroics — Sehwag was two years old.

Different frontiers represent different challenges. But then, it is one thing to celebrate the differences which make cricket such a fascinating sport and quite another to deny visitors a level-playing field.

If Fleming had complained about the difficulties in air travel, about food and hotels or about the noise and pollution in Indian cities, it would have sounded familiar — the same old tale of a visiting captain finding excuses for poor performance in the sub-continent.

But what the Kiwi skipper has said does contain more than an iota of truth. Imagine a situation where India and Pakistan or India and Sri Lanka, playing in a tri-series in New Zealand, are asked to play night games every single time in blustery, bone-chilling conditions in Dunedin or Wellington.

Forget Fleming's feisty braggadocio in New Zealand or Ganguly's equally caustic comments at home. Forget, too, the rancid underbelly of modern sport. Anachronistic brands of patriotism have no room in sport; and it is because we cling to these, we are often unable to tell the difference between a whingeing visiting captain and someone who wants to point to an obvious flaw. Fleming belongs to the latter category.

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