It's just not cricket

You are batting on a sticky wicket if you are writing about the revered game's controversies, but the author manages to pull it off.

What sells more than cricket? Cricket controversies, obviously. From the 1932-33 Bodyline chapter, which threatened diplomatic relations between England and Australia, to the match-fixing scandal, which irrevocably damaged the clean image of the game, cricket’s rich history is replete with incidents that shook the very foundation of the sport.

Then, there are other talking points like the Packer series, which revolutionised the game, or “Mankading”, which exposed the hypocrisy of the western world. These, and several such dramatic developments, have been dealt with in a concise manner without compromising on details to give even the lay reader a basic understanding of the subject in question.

Courage, Conviction, Controversy and Cricket, written by veteran cricket journalist Vedam Jaishankar, thus makes for compelling reading.

There already is a lot of material available on almost all the topics chosen for this book. Therefore, the challenge such a piece of work faces is presentation designed to capture the reader’s interest. The author manages to satisfy both the casual follower and the serious student of the game.

Stirring of emotions

The book begins with one of cricket’s biggest controversies, Bodyline, a strategy employed by England to contain the prolific Don Bradman. The tactics, conceived by skipper Douglas Jardine and executed perfectly by pacers Harold Larwood and Bill Voce, were highly successful as they severely hampered Bradman’s scoring and the touring Englishmen won the series 4-1.

While Bradman’s travails during that series are well-known (it’s another matter that he still averaged more than 50), the exchanges between the Australian cricket board and the Marylebone Cricket Club, which ran English cricket then — and the MCC extracting an apology of sorts from the host board for its “unsportsmanlike” comment about English players — make for interesting reading. In his introduction, the author explains the reasons and reasoning behind zeroing in on each controversy. Apart from being original in nature, all of them impacted the game and/or stirred emotions at a larger level. In that sense, the chapter on Bodyline sets the right tone for the rest of the book, which breezes through various controversies at different stages.

‘The Blood Test’

Among the more prominent instances are Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket, which turned the world order upside down, the 1976 “Blood Test” in which the vengeful West Indies pace quartet left almost half the Indian team injured on a spiteful Jamaican pitch, following a loss in the previous Test in Port of Spain, the Vaseline Affair in 1977 when Bishan Bedi accused England fast bowler John Lever of illegally using the substance to shine the ball, and a miffed Sunil Gavaskar dragging his opening partner Chetan Chauhan towards the boundary rope on being ruled leg before against Australia at the MCG in 1980-81.

That’s Not Cricket is another interesting chapter that discusses perhaps the most disgraceful act in Indian domestic cricket, during the 1990-91 Duleep Trophy final between West Zone and North Zone. An irate Rashid Patel, the West paceman, chasing North batsman Raman Lamba with a stump was the nadir of player behaviour, compounded by the fact that both had already played international cricket. Neither Lamba, who tragically passed away later, nor Patel, played for India again after serving 10 and 13-month bans respectively.

The acrimonious Monkey-Gate episode of 2008, the Sourav Ganguly-Greg Chappell fallout and R Ashwin’s much-debated run out of backing-up non-striker Jos Buttler during the 2019 IPL are other key dramas outlined in detail.

Poignant profile

The book, however, isn’t only about controversies. It also has chapters on courage and conviction. Courageous tales like Anil Kumble bowling with a broken jaw and excruciating pain, Aussie batsman Rick McCosker batting with a jaw broken in two places and Yuvraj Singh conquering cancer and returning to play break the monotony of reading about controversies. This category also has a poignant profile on leg-spin wizard B S Chandrasekhar, whose right-hand was rendered motionless when he was only four after he was struck by polio, but who went onto become one of India’s biggest match winners in any condition.

Stand-in skipper Rahul Dravid’s conviction in declaring India’s first innings in Multan in 2004 with Sachin Tendulkar just six runs short of his double hundred and G R Viswanath recalling England wicketkeeper Bob Taylor, who had wrongly been given out caught behind, in the Jubilee Test in 1980 had the potential to flare up into big controversies. “...But the unquestionable integrity of the men involved in decision-making made those choices (palatable) to the larger populace,” feels the author.

Too often, writers allow their biases to get into the narrative, especially when it comes to controversies. Jaishankar, a product of old-school journalism, manages to avoid falling into that trap. He helpfully provides a note at the end of some complex issues in the book for the reader to judge the event on his/her own, a definite plus of this book.