Indian cricket deserves some respect abroad

Criticise the hell out of Indian cricket, but give it some credit too, writes Rohit Brijnath

India's cricket administrators are grasping fellows who are preparing to break away from the ICC and run their own little Asian cricket fiefdom. India will play against Bangladesh and then Sri Lanka and then Pakistan, and after that they will play against Pakistan and Sri Lanka and Bangladesh again. Then having played each other all year, all four will meet in an exclusive World Cup. Apparently India does not need the West any more.

In this four-team world of cricket everything will be allowed, especially ball tampering and chucking, after all the only righteous, fair, law-abiding umpires are not to be found on our shores.

Insinuation

Of course all this is nonsense, but listen to some Western observers (writers and former cricketers) and more or less this is the insinuation. It is not only that Indian cricket is irresponsible, and that we don't value the game as it should be valued, but that we are not ready to rule cricket (a bit like how we were once unready to rule ourselves).

Yes, the BCCI is dreadfully inept in many ways. Yes, Lalit Modi should invest in a gag. Yes, we throw our weight around (though after you've been sat on for decades this sort of thing happens, and when England and Australia had a veto at the ICC did you hear anyone say "poor Indians"). Yes, we make mistakes, but no one's harder on their board than Indians, we've made a living doing it. We're even hard on our own media.

Is the problem only about what India is doing to the game or that a subcontinental nation has been smart enough to take control of the game? India is guilty of many things, including having a vision, aggressively marketing the game, breathing financial life into a hopelessly broke ICC which allowed it to spread the game through the ICC development fund. We even helped fund a stadium in Guyana.

Not going to happen

My point is simple: criticise the hell out of Indian cricket, but give it some credit too. And hold off on the hysteria. The Darrell Hair business makes a lot of people uneasy, but without adequate evidence to insist this is the end of umpiring as we know it because of Indian bullying is absurd.

This starting of our own Asian tour, it's a tiresome lament, it's not going to happen. Firstly, it's not a financially sound concept. Second, we love playing Australia and we say so. We respect the way Australia runs its cricket and we respect the way Australia plays its cricket, which is probably why half the Australian team strides around on Indian television hawking stuff. (We certainly don't respect our board president getting pushed around).

But in Australia, respect for Indian cricket is grudging, if at all. The talking-down, slightly supercilious tone that some use (which we got for years from the English and still do in some places) bothers me.

Culture shock

It bothers me also that this is what you often read about India in Australian sports pages. Chaotic. Noisy. Dirty. Cracked pavements. Delhi-belly. Yawn. It's true, but it's also all so 1980s about a country that's changing every day. It's intriguing, too, that culture shock only occurs going from West to East.

Presumably this shock explains why few write about how well Australia's players are treated in India.

I'm not being precious, I'm just plain bored. And wondering, is there nothing in pulsating, economically powerful, rapidly changing, complex India, which is interesting (and I'm not talking about elephants on the street and the maharajas).

India may not be big news in Australia but it is elsewhere in the world, and by resorting to lazy stereotypes some cricket writers, who are the primary messengers, are not being entirely accurate messengers. Writers in Australia such as Peter Roebuck, Greg Baum and Chloe Saltau, and former cricketers like Ian Chappell, do a fine, thoughtful job, but I find them lonely voices. After all, if anyone wants to know about India, all they have to do is ask: we love talking.

Source The Hindu