A perfectionist’s imperfect mind

This is not your usual sports book. This is a coming-of-age story. Everyone loves those: From Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations to Amitav Ghosh’ The Shadow Lines to Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August to Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending. This one, Imperfect, has the added element of pathos.

The current success of Sanjay Manjrekar as a cricket commentator is tinged with forlorn yearning. Here is a man who is just doing a job, without any of the passion he felt when he played the game. “Most importantly, though, commentary isn’t as dear to me as playing cricket was. I don’t obsess over it. It is just a job that I happen to enjoy,” says Manjrekar.

This could have been similar to the torpor afflicting his father, Vijay, who had a distinguished cricket career of his own, after he retired. Manjrekar Senior could never reconcile to the regular job he was forced to hold, and became “a disturbed, frustrated, and angry man”, towards whom his son’s overpowering emotion was fear.

Manjrekar Junior, though, has managed to build a second career that gives the things his father’s job with a public sector company did not: Visibility and lots of money. Here he unleashes his analytical side to articulate one of cricket’s oldest adages — that the game is played in the mind.

He comes up with an intriguing conclusion about the perils of thinking too much about the game. “Thinkers by nature don’t usually make good cricketers because a lot of cricket is about letting instincts take over. It pays not to ponder too much… It is for this reason many of the greats of the game won’t be able to give you much insight into the game.”

It will be interesting to see how some of the greats of the game, who commentate alongside Manjrekar, take that.

The one “thinking” batsman who managed to succeed was Rahul Dravid. Dravid came into the Indian team towards the end of Manjrekar’s international career. He may have — without meaning to — blocked Manjrekar’s return to international cricket. Both were similar batsmen: Technically so correct they could do well in overseas conditions. Both valued a compact defence higher than the strike rate.

Much before Dravid had his breakthrough Test century in South Africa against a fiery Allan Donald, Manjrekar showed he could be the successor to Sunil Gavaskar in standing up to the fearsome West Indies bowlers of the late 1980s. That despite being hit on the eye in his debut Test — against the West Indies — in India. He returned to the Indian team on a tour of West Indies to score a magnificent Test century.

However, Manjrekar took himself and his batting too seriously. He did not just want to score runs, he wanted to score good-looking runs. Even if he scored a century, he would grieve over the two strokes when he was not fully in control.

This approach allows for no adjustments. Once a chink creeps into your well-oiled batting technique, it’s downhill from there. As you try to fix one problem, another surfaces, and another. You go from weakness to weakness.

Manjrekar provides a fascinating insight into his mind as he went from being India’s premier batsman at the time of Sachin Tendulkar’s arrival, to a Test discard, and to a bitter Ranji Trophy player who took his frustration out against fellow players. He did not spare umpires of domestic matches, and was once sent off the field.

He now comes across as someone who has sorted out his mind. It’s a pity he stops shy of sorting out, for the reader, others’ minds.

He tucks into Mohammad Azharuddin with relish, and makes him out to be a cardboard character who left everything to the Almighty and merely rode his destiny. In my brushes with cricket reporting, I was told frequently that few could touch Azhar in talent. He was the first Indian cricketer to take fitness seriously; Kapil Dev’s supreme fitness was a gift of nature. One domestic stalwart said his best day of watching cricket was from the slips as Azhar put together a breathtaking display of batting in a Ranji match.

But Azhar, out of favour with the cricket establishment, is an easy target. Manjrekar does not have much to say about Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri as broadcasters, though they blazed Manjrekar’s trail into the commentary box. Manjrekar looks more closely at other cricketers-turned-commentators, such as Tony Greig and Ian Chappell.

At the very least, it would have been nice to delve into Rahul Dravid’s mind to see how he sorted out his own issues with seeking perfection. Dravid scored about half his Test runs after crossing the age at which Manjrekar chose to retire as a player.

Manjrekar talks about how Dravid at times sought him out for quiet dinners. They did not talk cricket over those dinners. What did they talk about? What went through Dravid’s mind as he fought his own demons and, unlike Manjrekar, conquered them?

That would have been perfect. But Manjrekar is no longer seeking perfection. Perhaps, like commentary, writing is just a job that he happens to enjoy. That should be a portent for success.