I feel for you

 Inspiration thin on the ground with the ODI series. The feeling that India is more concerned about being "concerned" about things than winning in Australia - that winning may actually be beneath them - is nothing new. I have followed up my annoying Boyd Rankin “Full Toss” chant of 2013 with an equally annoying and compulsive “Shikhar Dha” rap, Chaka Khan-style, whenever Shikhar Dhawan appears on screen, which is obviously a lot.

A propos, we seem to be moving into a new Golden Age of the cricket moustache, assisted but not quite accounted for by the Movember phenomenon. The great summer of Mitch of course, some fine examples on the Indian team, and the delightful vision of Jake Lehmann laying down his volume of Valéry to deliver a 6 for the Strikers. Are we seeing the Batting Moustache coming into its own after the long dominance of the Bowling Moustache?

Another question to throw out there after yesterday’s final ODI: do we now think Dhoni deliberately delays his “run” in ODIs to make things interesting for himself?

Lots of Hussle

I’m so pleased the BBL05 final is bringing us some hot Hussey-on-Hussey action. I call David Hussey “the Sexy Hussey”, which I’m sure he finds ample consolation for never wearing The Baggy Green. When you throw Hilfy into the mix on top of that, I cannot but back the Stars tonight. They have the irresistible whiff of danger about them, whereas even Dre Russ can’t overpower the strong scent of Upstanding emanating from the Thunder.

Sogfest

Bogfest, even. I was at the SCG on Day 2, when the last fitful efforts at play took place. I always feel sorry for the spectators when I see these days on television, but it was surprising how tolerable it was to sit watching the rain falling on the ground for most of 6 hours. Under cover, with mild temperatures, it was almost pleasant. It's a day out, the ground is pretty, one chats, or not, and grazes constantly from a full cooler bag of delightful foodstuffs. Expecting interruptions, I brought distractions – newspaper, knitting, trashy magazine – but I didn't even get to the last one. I have a theory that driving is enjoyable because you really can't do anything else while you're doing it and there are very few opportunities for guilt-free single-tasking in this world that aren't about work. It's the freedom of having no choice, between work and leisure. Waiting in the rain was a bit like that.

Chase Girly

Another situation where I wonder "What would CLR James say?" I'm disappointed to see that the analysis of the Chris Gayle Incident has turned to the idea of "cultural (in)differences", ie. that Chris Gayle Comes from somewhere A Bit Backward. That strikes me as simply chasing one instance of extreme rudeness with another. There are more churches per square kilometre in Jamaica than any other country in the world, but we can leave the empirical arguments aside here. We know a priori that Chris Gayle's behaviour is not appropriate anywhere, because his bad boy persona is built on not behaving appropriately anywhere. If there were a planet on which Gayle's behaviour didn't skirt the limits of polite society, he would change it immediately. That's his 'brand'.

In that sense I had some sympathy for the commenter who basically said, directing his comments to Gayle's employers rather than Mel McLaughlin, 'if you play with fire, you're gonna get burned'. I have never seen Chris Gayle not be palpably flirtatious in on-field interviews with female reporters and actually wondered how he would handle himself with Mel when the situation arose. There were plenty of opportunities to coach him on manners before this. I would not want that job, but that's the one they signed up for.

Windie Willows

CLR Jame's gravestone, Tunapuna

I’m not sure I can bear a whole summer of How Do You Solve a Problem Like the West Indies? All day every day on the radio, there was a relentless talkfest on the subject with some cricket game going on in the background. Oh, the furrowing of brows, the bewildered headshakes, the well-meaning suggestions, the raising of suspicions, the advancement of theories, the weighings-in and weighings up, all gently taken apart and put down by an extremely patient Fazeer Mohammed, who may be my new hero. By way of intermission there was How Do You Solve a Problem Like Bellerive?

The two problems aren’t unrelated. The irresistible call of the West Indies Problem is due of course to the great height from which the West Indies has fallen: how did, how could the most compelling and dominant of cricket “franchises” come to this? That much is explicitly stated. I wonder though whether the obsessive quality of the rumination is because alongside the spectre of the past glory of West Indian test cricket is the spectre of a future decline of Test cricket in general, conveniently symbolised by Bellerive.

I’m not sure the decline of West Indian cricket is reversible. Fazeer Mohammed made the comparison with the World Series cricket crisis. Before the cricket establishment came to an accommodation with Kerry Packer, you had a second-rate test side because the best players were poached for World Series cricket. Many of those poached players were West Indian. If that accommodation had never been reached and if the cultural shift in the attitude of the establishment towards players had not happened, the situation of cricket in general could have become like West Indian cricket today, where test cricket is the second tier because it has been abandoned by the most valuable players, because they were not treated as particularly valuable. I take this to be Fazeer Mohammed’s point: West Indian cricket simply is world cricket without that evolution. And then a vicious circle sets in because when the talent is drawn away from test cricket, the interest is drawn away too, and when the interest in test cricket falls away, the talent falls away too. I think it might have gone too far down that road to recover.

But does it matter? T20 can only become the most popular form if most people prefer it, and if most people prefer it, most people are happy and if most people are happy, well, isn’t that our purpose as a society? In a capitalist democracy, no one can hear Jim Maxwell scream. For all we know humanity is irreparably poorer for the decline of vaudeville in the face of cinema. But how would we know? And if we knew, how could we care? I’m not sure you can run a tastes good vs good for you argument in the matter of entertainment.

I keep wondering what CLR James would say. His West Indies fit the idea of the colony that is more conservative than its colonist, which in turn fits Fazeer’s suggestion that the West Indies cricket establishment is behind the rest of the world in terms of industrial relations, for want of a better word. CLR James defended sport against his Marxist colleagues who saw sport in general as an opium of the people. Would he defend T20 against cricket colleagues who see it as an opium of the people relative to Test cricket?

The World Series cricket comparison is especially useful when it comes to those (that’s you, Nannes) who basically say Chris Gayle just wants to put up his feet on a Chesterfield stuffed with cash. Because I’m pretty sure that’s what they would have said about Lillee and Chappell and clearly then, as now, there is much more to it than that.