SPECTATOR SPORT
Cricketing soul mates
Simon Barnes
THERE is a book, The Tao of Cricket, which claims that cricket is not an English game, but an Indian game that happened to have been invented in England. As the Indian team commences battle with England, my mind flies back to a long, rambling, chest- prodding lunch I took with the editorial staff of an Indian sporting magazine in Calcutta.
We passionately debated the question of whether or not Sunil Gavaskar was the great- est postwar batsman. I have had similar argu- ments in many places, and of course the local hero had been duly championed. Here it was me speaking for Gavaskar, an Indian, while most of my table companions — Bengalis, a Sikh and one Irish-Bengali exotic — spoke for other, non-Indian batsmen.
I don't think this conversation would have been possible in any other country where Test match cricket is played except, perhaps, England. But in India, it is different. Or per- haps I mean it is the same. For there exists the most extraordinary stretch of common ground between India and England.
With most of the leading Test match coun- tries — West Indies, Australia, Pakistan — victory, especially victory over England, is a matter of trumpeting triumphalism, while defeat is a matter of sulking resentment. But in this country victory is always shot through with disbelief, and it is the same in India. In both places, defeat brings a sigh of resigna- tion, gallows humour and a search for some- one to blame; someone on the same side, naturally.
Only India and England possess the same supine quality in defeat. Both countries meet the challenge of playing abroad with the same air of dismal fatalism. Last time England played in India, they lost three Test matches by colossal margins, their cap- tain, Graham Gooch, ruling himself out of one Test by eating prawns in Madras.
It was the kind of self-willed disaster that an Indian would recognise. But in the same way both countries can contrive unexpected heroics from any point of any match. For impossible feats, the countries can always give each other a game. Naturally, with the quotidian miracle of plucking defeat from the jaws of victory, it is hard to know which country leads the way. And when it comes to heroism in defeat, when it comes to true quixotry — a quality quite out of step with the grimmer demands of professional sport — then England and India are soul mates. England lost their last Test series, in South Africa, but the enduring memory is of the heroism of the England captain, Michael Atherton, the boy on the burning deck. India showed all their most impossi- ble, their most glorious, their most perfectly sympathetic attributes the last time they played at Lord's, six years ago.
It takes a lot to overshadow a man who scores 333 and 123 in a single match, but Mohammed Azharuddin managed it. His hundred in 88 balls of whip-wristed stroke- making was one of the finest knocks the old place has ever seen. It was probably the sheer speed of it that gave England the time to win the match. Azza's consolation — the best ever innings at Lord's by a los- ing captain. An Englishman or an Indian would understand the glory of that.
Even the current wet and dismal series of one-dayers between the two countries has seen elements of the endless Indian taste for the impossible. On the edge of defeat, they put England on the rack with brilliant bowl- ing, and then spilled three straightforward chances and lost anyway. As ever, the batting was flavoured with brilliance, but in the main oscillated from the hapless to the feckless.
It was ever thus. The cricket of both coun- tries is caught forever between Lewis Carroll and glory. There is a rare affinity between the two countries, and cricket is not the reason for it. Cricket is only the thing that reveals it.
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