The Hindu : Sport : Do cricketers have an obligation to entertain?

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Sunday, Nov 21, 2004

Sport

Sport

Do cricketers have an obligation to entertain?

By Nirmal Shekar

ONCE in a while a television cameraman at the Green Park stadium in Kanpur would turn his attention to a pot-bellied policeman in deep slumber or to a middle-aged woman enjoying a thoroughly refreshing siesta. Once in a while, you'd find even bright-eyed youngsters in the stands stifling a yawn or two even as you — for once — waited for the over to end and the advertisements to appear on screen.

It was that kind of day in Kanpur. Early in the afternoon, a friend — a rather more passionate follower of the game than this writer — called to say that he had decided he had better things to do on a Saturday afternoon than watch the first day's play between India and South Africa on television.

That sounded to me a bit like the honeybee saying that it had better things to do than looking for nectar!

But, then, it was that kind of day in Kanpur, a day when a question that had long tossed about in my mind made a sudden reappearance. Do sportsmen have an obligation to entertain?

Surely, Andrew Hall, Jacques Kallis and Boeta Dippenaar, as much as Murali Kartik, Harbhajan Singh and Zaheer Khan, were doing what they believed was the best for their own team. If South Africa's objective as an underdog, on winning the toss, was simply to take advantage of having the first use of a slow pitch and pile on as many runs as possible, then Hall can hardly be blamed for choosing to anchor the innings — which he did with the one-pointed focus of a Buddha bhikshu.

Best spirit

On the other hand, if you are talking of entertaining cricket played in the best spirit of the game, that's another matter. For, in reality, the spirit, or whatever Victorian dreamers and mid-century romantics like Neville Cardus meant by that, evaporated long ago in the heat of the battles in a game that is far too commercialised and "important" to the players, sponsors, administrators and, perhaps, the audience too, to accommodate anything as trivial as the spirit.

Now, to get back to the heart of the matter, what wrong did the South African batsmen do? Were they obliged to risk hurting their cause by going after the Indian bowling — which was largely mediocre barring the efforts of Anil Kumble — to entertain a few thousand in the stadium and a few million watching on television?

Several years ago, when Ivan Lendl was politely told by a tennis writer that he did not have the capacity to pull in the crowds because he was not an entertainer, the gaunt Czech glared at the sportswriter and said: "I am a tennis professional. If you are looking for entertainment, you should hire a pair of clowns and put them on the court.''

What Mr. Stoneface meant, of course, was that his biggest priority was to play the best tennis he can play and beat the other guy. He would do everything possible to achieve this objective, and nothing might steer him away from this path in his relentless march towards his goal.

Hall and Co. did exactly that at Kanpur on Saturday. Another day, another age, when sport was merely sport without the show-business trappings of this era, these South Africans, coming into the series as no-hopers, might have been celebrated as heroes.

Evolution

If we go back some way to see how sport has evolved this century, we can also see who put this idea that all sporting contests, to elevate themselves to the level of great contests, have to, necessarily, satisfy the audience's need to be entertained.

The good Dr. W.G. Grace, perhaps the first superstar that cricket knew, was as good an entertainer as any modern cricketer can ever aspire to be. Yet, in the days of Grace, and much later, well into the 20th century, sporting contests were seldom looked upon primarily as entertainment, nor were sportsmen deemed to be entertainers first and last.

If sport did have a few things in common with theatre and cinema, then a Don Bradman was no Charlie Chaplin. The greatest batsman of all time had no obligation to thrill cricket lovers in quite the same way as Chaplin captivated his audience. If the lovers of the willow game, nevertheless, were awe-struck every time they watched the legendary Aussie at the crease, then this was simply because Bradman did what he did to the best of his abilities each time he went in to bat.

There were times when thousands of sportslovers sat through marathon battles that would hardly arouse the passions of modern sports fans. That was the era when limited overs cricket was not born and there were no tie-breaks in tennis. Connoisseurs of cricket enjoyed watching gutsy batsmen defend as if their lives depended on staying at the crease for a day and a half.

What changed all this was television. Instant cricket, instant fun, instant everything...sport came to be packaged to suit the needs of television, often prime time television. In came limited overs cricket, night cricket, tiebreaks, golden goals.

Entertaining

And, overnight, the best loved of sportsmen were also ones that played the most entertaining brand of their sport. Also, personality traits that might have been irrelevant in the Victorian era, or even in the 1940s and 1950s, suddenly acquired an importance all their own in front of the television camera in an age of show-bizification of sport.

Little wonder, then, a qualitatively mediocre one-day match — but one replete with contrived seat-edge drama — often lures 100 times as many people to the TV screen as would have watched the action in Kanpur on Saturday.

In the event, what commercialisation of cricket and the domination of television have done is to promote the idea that the game is a sort of cheap home-delivered entertainment. And when a time-honoured contest such as a Test match or a five-set French Open marathon fail to match TV's idea of perfect entertainment, then ratings fall and consequently these things are dubbed boring.

Now, to go back to the beginning, was Saturday in Kanpur "entertaining". Perhaps not. Against bowling that was mostly not upto the mark, the South Africans failed to get anywhere near three an over all day. But Hall is no Adam Gilchrist and Dippenaar is not Michael Clarke.

No team in world cricket today can match the Australians' rare ability to both entertain and serve their own cause best. It takes extraordinary talent and drive to do that.

But, to be fair to the visitors from Africa, they did wonderfully well within their obvious limitations. Stifle the yawn and freshen up, perhaps we have something of a contest on our hands.

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