How banning spit and sweat will change cricket
Throughout the 1990s and most of the 2000s senior Indian cricket correspondents were known to become ill and unable to travel shortly before their country played a Test match at Green Park in Kanpur.
They appointed their deputies to cover it, or even a keen but naive junior reporter. As one senior scribe told me, becoming “ill” before the Test was a pre-emptive strike.
Whereas Australia simply refused to sanction an itinerary with the venue on it, the Proteas were invited to play a Test match there on three out of four tours from 1996 to 2008. A week before the first of those a photograph was published in a Kolkata newspaper showing the grass on the Green Park outfield at least a half a metre high. It was a meadow.
Apparently, a dispute between city officials and the cricket association had led to the stadium being neglected but the prospect of some income led to a resolution and the grass was hastily mown. The pitch itself, however, was irreparable, leading coach Bob Woolmer to declare it “comfortably the worst I’ve ever seen”.
Other facilities were no better. The media latrine flooded on the second day leaving a centimetre of untreated filth on the floor. But having fallen foul of the resident stomach bug which persuaded those with experience to stay away, there was no choice — or other option. With plastic bags on both feet tied at the ankles, I waded in.
Squatting above the facility with understandable dread at making contact with it, even with my backside, relief came and extremely quickly.
But it was short-lived. In attempting to unravel a couple of slices of single-ply “white gold” salvaged from the hotel in the morning, I lost balance.
In a fraction of a second I calculated I could sacrifice one elbow and clamber back to my feet. But the elbow slipped, naturally. For the last 23 years whenever I heard anyone say, “I’m really in the shit now,”I have thought: “No you’re not.”
Anyway, the story ended happily for one member of the ground staff who received a pile of rupees worth many times more than the spare clothes I purchased from him. Never has there been a greater distance between me and my co-commentator than there was during our next stint.
For many people the game changed forever after that Test match, at least retrospectively, when Hansie Cronjé admitted to accepting money from a bookmaker to ensure SA lost. It was the penultimate evening and SA were 127/5 chasing a target of 461. During the King commission of inquiry Cronjé described it as “money for jam”, a phrase that also has different connotations for me considering the sort I’d been in earlier.
The game, or at least my coverage of it, also changed. I vowed never to complain about any facilities thereafter. I knew, then, I had reached the bottom.
Which brings me to the latest game-changer — the virus. Let me say immediately that this is inconsequential in the global, humanitarian scheme of things but, hey, this is a cricket column.
Covid-19 may well change the game forever. It may well make it even more batsmanfriendly than it is already. For centuries fast bowlers, and their designated fielders have applied saliva and perspiration to the ball in an effort to clean and shine it. It is a habit that has raised the eyebrows of nonparticipants for just as long.
But even if Covid-19 is wiped out and the world does, indeed, return to normal, will cricket be happy to continue with the application of bodily fluids to the ball? Considering what else may be transmitted that way?
In an effort to seek perspective I consulted an old friend and one of this country’s finest modern-era swing bowlers, Alan Dawson, who spent last week spearheading the SA Veterans in their Evergreen Lifestyle Over-50s World Cup campaign before it was cancelled on Sunday.
“Funnily enough,” he said, “I was having exactly this conversation with Allan Donald [who was coaching the Over50s] just a couple of days ago. It’s not just the players — what happens when someone catches a six in the crowd?”
Could a ban on the use of sweat and saliva really change the game?
“Absolutely no doubt about it,” says Dawson. “I was meticulous about the way I prepared and shined the ball. Without swing I was just a harmless medium-pacer and, like all swing bowlers, there was only one way to shine the ball legally. A ban would leave a lot of bowlers without their most potent weapon.”
It’s hard enough being a bowler these days. Perhaps the game’s authorities should consider issuing the umpires with a tub of aqueous gel to be rationed out to desperate bowlers as a substitute?
It’s nowhere near as bad an idea as those plastic bags over my feet turned out to be.