Readers Write In #645: Guts and glory trumps paper strength

By Madan Mohan

Back in the 90s, chewing gum manufacturers pushed their products on us unsuspecting schoolkids by offering cricket cards and WWE cards with the chewing gum purchase.  I won’t go into the details, but these were basically card games based on the points a player had (derived in turn from his batting or bowling average or other stats).  One such card series was called ‘Guts and Glory’ and celebrated the team that won the Sahara Cup series (against Pakistan in 1997).  For those who may not remember that series (or haven’t watched it – sadly, fellow 80s borns, 1997 is a long, long time ago), the man of the series was Sourav Ganguly and his bowling – yes, his bowling! – played a pivotal role in the outcome.  Of all things, his at best respectable dibbly-dobbly medium pace accounted for 15 wickets in the series, including a fifer no less! The point of this nostalgic-sounding digression is the game is played very much on the field and not on a computer with various scenarios gamed out.  Sport is the final frontier, the last bastion that the number crunchers would dearly love to conquer and duly convert to an algo-driven endeavour.  It happened with player selection in baseball (see Moneyball) and a sport like Formula 1 has been far more about the machine than the driver for a very long time.  But last Sunday was a potent reminder that talent, physical and mental fortitude and thinking on your feet on the field can upend the most meticulous calculations.

Coming into the final of this year’s just-concluded ODI Cricket World Cup, the Indian cricket team were the overwhelming favourites in a waythey had never been before, not in any of the finals they had contested nor even the semis they had contested in 1987, 1996, 2015 and 2019. It didn’t appear too much of an exaggeration to say that India in this tournament looked as staggeringly dominant as Australia in 2003 or 2007.  But winning the final would really clinch it and, fittingly, India had to beat Australia (albeit an Australian team that looked far from as lethal as the 2003 or 2007 sides).  Would they? The consensus was that it would be a major, major upset were India to lose, especially with home advantage and an extremely partisan crowd weighing in their favour.  Well, here we are. There were hints that Australia were putting together a special campaign after a very poor start.  The first clue was Glenn Maxwell’s heroic double ton against Afghanistan that has to surely join the ranks of Kapil Dev’s 175 not out against Zimbabwe in the 1983 World Cup or Vivian Richards’ better than a run-a-ball 189 not out against England in 1984 (for context, his score exceeded England’s team score of 168!).  The second was their deft and patient handling of a tricky chase against South Africa in the semi.  Steve Smith, Josh Inglis, Mitchell Starc and skipper Pat Cummins crawled but hung in there to get across the finish line. And crawl they would all over again in the final. Travis Head’s brisk century was contrasted by Marnus Labuschagne’s Dravid-like 58.  It was grinding and often ugly cricket but it was gutsy.  Australia patiently ground own the middle overs spin challenge posed by India, choosing steady accumulation over flamboyant aggression.  Flamboyant aggression of the sort that perhaps India was too attached to, to their eventual peril. And this is where I’ll circle back to what I said about the desire to reduce sport to a few algorithmized scenarios that would deliver victory come-what-may.  Such foolproof formulations may be exciting to economists and statisticians but the incurable sports romantic in me would like for them to be untrue.  One strain of commentary has repeatedly (and not incorrectly) blasted the conservative approach of Virat Kohli and KL Rahul as out of step with the modern game. Anchoring and playing foil have no place in today’s ODI cricket, according to this formulation (won’t be long before they say Bazball is the only way to play Test cricket). The problem with that is Australia did plenty of anchoring and playing foil to get through tricky passages in both the semis and the final. One could argue that having a low target in their sights made this the obvious choice but they showed a similar flexibility towards consolidation in their match against England.  Smith and Labuschagne’s patient batting in the middle overs set up a respectable, if not insurmountable, total that gave the bowlers more than something to work with. It is possible, then, to suggest that had the Indian team been placed in a similar position as Australia in the final, they might have messed up the low scoring chase in their eagerness to finish it off at blistering pace.  After all, their position batting first in the final wasn’t very different from Australia’s against England. India had a splendid platform at the end of the first 10 overs with the only negative of having lost two wickets at that point.  All they had to do was to keep enough wickets in hand going into the last 10 so that they could make a big push towards a total that, if not daunting, would at least not be a walk in the park.  Think 300 rather than 240, in other words. Instead, India initially seemed to be paranoid they wouldn’t get to 350 if they didn’t go even faster than they were.  And when they got three down, they were so afraid of letting the long tail face Cummins & Co that they shut shop and slowed down too much.  And still ended up 5 down going into the last 10 and made just over 40 runs in the slog overs. India’s on-paper strength appeared to have convinced them that they only needed to stick to the plan to win.  But as Mike Tyson famously said, your plan only survives until you get punched in the face. India’s pursuit of the winning plan appeared to have made them inflexible and robotic. Like the robot cat in the Push Button Kitty episode of Tom & Jerry, they panicked once the operating system within had been scrambled by a wily, proactive and responsive Australia. None of the above is intended as a defence of or a plea for attrition. I found Jonathan Trott about as exciting to watch as you’d have, dear reader.  But embracing even the ugliest option if that is the most appropriate one in a given match situation is what guts and glory in cricket is all about.  There are many international cricketers who can swing the long handle over cow corner for six.  But it’s the ones who put their hand up when slogging over cow corner no longer works that win.   Matthew Hayden once said, “All this going around isn’t aggression. If you want to see aggression, look into Rahul Dravid’s eyes”.  Pity that, as in his days as captain, coach Dravid lacked the conviction of his batting avatar and couldn’t influence a very talented team to stop searching for the playbook and just play. In the end, Australia throttled India and stopped them from demonstrating the fabled strength they had possessed on paper.  Gutsy grind in defiance of the very conditions apologists for the Indian team complained about took Australia to a well deserved sixth World Cup title and left India….hopefully searching at last for answers but more likely in denial of why they have failed at the third time of asking to match their 2011 feat.