An insensitive take on IPL’s weight-y issues

It’s become shockingly commonplace to ridicule unfit-looking players, but are critics asking themselves whether looking fit and being cricket-fit are the same thing?

The pull off the front-foot, especially against an express pace bowler, is one of the most exhilarating sights on a cricket field. There is just the slightest transfer of weight as the bat comes down in a scything, horizontal arc. When executed flawlessly, it’s the stroke that breaks the heart of a fast bowler, more than any other. To charge in and bowl in excess of 140 kmph, and to then see the ball dismissively dispatched in front of mid-wicket, can be a particularly chastening experience.

It requires a special skill to play the front-foot pull against sheer pace. The key ingredients to successful implementation all revolve around speed, ironically. The speed with which you pick up length. The speed with which you get into position. The speed with which the bat comes down so that it meets the ball at the top of its bounce, in a classic example of meeting fire with fire.

Because of the positioning of the body in the execution of the shot, both the straight and square angles provide an unflattering picture if the batsman has anything less than the flattest of stomachs. It’s not the flatness of the stomach, mind, that facilitates the stroke. But the appearance of prosperity around the midriff is enough to set tongues wagging, as happened on the very first day of the Indian Premier League 2020.

It was plain for all to see that not everyone was in the best physical shape. At so many levels, that was perfectly understandable, never mind if it didn’t make for the most edifying of images. Most of the Indian players were coming off lengthy, enforced absences from proper training facilities. For upwards of five months, several were left scrambling to improvise and customize their routines depending on what they could make do with. Certain body types can adapt to make-shift equipment, certain others need the paraphernalia that only fully-equipped gymnasia can offer.

Three weeks of work, which could only steadily graduate to increasing degrees of difficulty for obvious reasons, can yield just that much result. As simple as that.

For even retired professional sportspersons from other sport, therefore, to pass instant judgement based on physical appearance was certainly out of order. Would we like professional athletes to look the part, with no sign of attendant flab? Of course. Would these athletes themselves like that more than anyone else? Most certainly, goes without saying. But, at the end of the day, it’s not so much about looking fit alone as it is about being fit. Being fit to be able to discharge your responsibilities to the best possible extent. Or, in this instance, being cricket-fit.

Not all fit-looking athletes are necessarily the fittest going around. More pertinently, the fitness required for one physical sport at the highest level doesn’t necessarily have to be the same for another.

Despite its duration – the shortest game of cricket internationally lasts twice as long the regulation time of a football contest – cricket’s fitness demands are as unique as the sport itself. Physicality is a given, especially over the last couple of decades when the pace of the game has shot up exponentially. The advent of Twenty20 cricket has necessitated players to be quicker, stronger, nimbler and more agile so that they can be faster between the wickets and while chasing down balls in the outfield, more powerful in rifling in throws from the deep, and lithe and athletic in pulling off boundary-line catches that would leave a contortionist green with envy.

Cricket’s very fabric demands mental fitness as much as it does its physical counterpart. A fit body helps in the process, it goes without saying, but it’s the fierce powers of concentration that allow a fielder to be equally switched on during the sixth playing hour of a day as he would have been at its very start. For all its recent explosiveness, cricket is more a skills rather than a power game. Citius, Altius, Fortius, the Olympic motto borrowed by Baron Pierre de Coubertin from the headmaster of a college in Paris, alone isn’t the bedrock on which cricketing edifices are built. Were that the case, beguiling spin would have disappeared from view a long while back.

Admittedly, the sight of professional cricketers bursting at the seams, so to say, doesn’t make for a pretty picture. In the pre-pandemic era, ‘unfit looking’ cricketers were not a common sight. Indian cricket, especially, has come a long way in terms of both looking and being fit, driven as they are by their national captain who reinvented his lifestyle with fitness as the fulcrum a half-dozen years back. If, in these unprecedented times, there briefly are a few anachronistic throwbacks, they can do without the ridicule that’s becoming so shockingly commonplace.

(R Kaushik is a Bangalore-based cricket writer with nearly three decades of experience)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.