“It’s about…. You go for a catch, you miss, everyone says, “Wow, great effort”. But for that catch to be taken…what was your acceleration from point A to point B? How much did you train for that? What was your nutrition? Have you slept well? These are the factors which determine whether you cover that distance in 3 seconds or in 2 seconds. If you cover it in 2 seconds, it's an easy catch, but in 3 it's ‘a great effort’. So it's about margins…. It's about a second here and there, are you training for that extra second or not… that's what matters now.”
If you think the above lines are excerpts from an eighth or ninth grade physics book, you are in for a surprise! These are in fact, the words of captain Virat Kohli in an interview to a web series host, when asked about his training. He then goes on to talk other things about the demands of today's game, but these lines are the ones which intrigued me the most. Let’s just reflect upon the above lines, say, you pose the same question to a cricketer from Kapil Dev's or even Rahul Dravid’s generation for that matter. They would have definitely told you how hard they worked on their batting/bowling techniques for sure, they still might tell you how much effort they had to put on the field to win a game for the team, but you would never have gotten this sort of a dissection of what the difference is, between a catch being successful and it being just a great effort by the fielder, as a reply.
This gives us a glimpse of the level of intensity, with which the game is being played today. Each and every second of the game nowadays is being televised, and such has become the norm, that most cricket teams around the world recruit a video analyst, in addition to the coach (in some cases like Team India, even the coaching department is split into bowling and batting and there is a head coach to sum it up). There is a huge amount of data which is analyzed by the team before a series is played, for instance, the pitch map of the bowler, the pitch map of a batsman’s weak zone etc. which was rarely done even a decade back. Gone are the days when the game was played just for passion, and the zeal that it generated. Most of the cricketers in today’s generation don’t practice their stance or limit their shots to just the ones in the coaching manual. We’ve heard how the great Mr.Achrekar would keep a coin on the stumps and challenge that any bowler who would get Sachin's wicket shall win the coin. We don't hear such stories now. Today, we hope that when if indeed the ball is going to hit the stumps, “please God! Let it just be umpire's call on impact”, and that the on field umpire has given it not out. It has a lot to do with the infinitely growing expectations that the game has garnered. People just don’t accept a hard fought battle. They expect that if the battle is indeed hard fought, a victory should be the only result, and with that comes the baggage-the pressure of expectations, that leads to the above mentioned gameplay.
It wouldn't be fair to blame just the players and the team management for this win-all attitude. After all, they just oblige to the demands of the people who matter the most to the game-us. Yes, we the fans of one of the most beautiful game which was found as an alternative pastime to shepherding in England, are guilty too. It's high time that we stopped expecting every ball played by a batsman to be hit for a six, and every ball bowled by the team we love, to take a wicket. This generation’s so called aggressive attitude is also a huge factor to be taken into consideration. We rarely come across a family today, that has more than two or three children. So a majority of our country’s cricket fans today are part of a lifestyle where they get what they want instantly, and expect likewise on anything they are involved in, including cheering the cricket team. Being one such cricket fan myself, I am not completely against the sort of gameplay that is prevalent now( After all, why wouldn’t I want my team to win everything?). I just don't want aggression on the field to get translated down to our future generations as something as meagre as ‘lip service on the field’ and would love for it to be something similar to what we learnt from our priors, take for example, Matthew Hayden’s famous quote on aggression -“if you want to see aggression on a cricket field just look into Rahul David’s eyes.” We must learn to appreciate the effort put in by the team, irrespective of the result. Ultimately, cricket is a gentleman's game isn't it?
