Rahul Jayaram is a teacher and writer who believes we are living through the apocalypse @rahjayaram
Except for some, Indian cricket media coverage fawns over our stars and the BCCI. Most cricket media and journalists rarely speak up because it may mean losing favour with the players or the BCCI. Thus, several of them, with jobs to keep, stick to the straight-and-narrow of convention, normality, and refrain from rocking any boat. To lend legitimacy to key decisions by the cricket establishment, and to stick to the status quo, they bring up data and statistics to buttress important verdicts, like what players to retain and whom to drop, for example.
Such behaviour envelops our whole atmosphere in these days of heavy data-mapping, analysis, and visualisation. Some of the beauty of contemporary sports-watching (yes, election analysis too) is the way in which data analytics and its parsing are brought to viewers in visually arresting ways that bolster expert opinions. On the last three Indian men’s Test tours to South Africa, one beautiful graphic on TV stood out: the TV teams cobbled data on the lengths that both the South African and Indian fast bowlers bowled, but found the former extracting more purchase out of the wickets, but not the equally skilled Indians. Why? They found out it was due to their actions and bowling muscle memories that had attuned them to bowl in English conditions more than South African ones, that needed more adjustment. This was a startling piece of insight. The Indian bowlers needed to impart greater wrist effort, but draw back the length a touch, so as to accentuate the bounce from the region around the ‘good length’ to make batting discomfiting. This was a superb, technical piece of data disaggregation of great use for touring teams to South Africa.
However, we also live in times where number projection and data analytics appear as self-fulfilling ends. In the aftermath of the home Test series loss against New Zealand and the abysmal batting performance of Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma, the careers of the two superstars have hung by a thread. Previously, and it’s a point made on social media and not in the established press or the cricket media, when one compared the performances of discarded Test veterans Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane with Kohli and Sharma, there wasn’t much to choose. Furthermore, Pujara and Rahane were instrumental when India won the Test series so memorably in Australia in 2021.
Rohit Sharma has been given a really long rope in Tests. Barring a great series in England in 2021, he has rarely merited an assured spot in the XI. Going by sheer numbers then, Sharma and Kohli needed to have made way for Pujara and Rahane. But no. They are stars. Pujara and Rahane don’t appear in ads everywhere. The latter even performed creditably in the just-concluded Syed Mushtaq Ali Tournament.
Numbers lie. The often derided K L Rahul has a poor Test average. Yet he has scored hard-earned runs abroad. Hanuma Vihari scored 8 runs from 66 balls in the Boxing Day Test of 2018 at Melbourne that laid the foundation for the big scores from Pujara, Rahane and Kohli. It helped India win the Test, lead a series it won (a first) in Australia. Such ‘unattractive’ performances make for poor numerical reading but their value is beyond such readings. In this day and age, even in cricket, other sports and spheres of life, numbers and data are made to seem like ends in themselves. That is misleading and wrong: Numbers or no, Sharma and Kohli got to go.