Its such a good topic and i must wonder why nobody has commented from GS as yet. I agree with Gavaskar, even though on the other hand i like a little feeling, emotional involvement of the players as well, coz when i used to regularly play, things on field were very aggrasive and fureously compatitive at times(one time some of the players of our team and opposition ended up locked up by police for a few hours, luckly i was not playing that day.) but those are the actions i would never want my nephew to follow and i would try to keep him away from such stuff. But again i do believe in some compatitiveness showed by player’s controlled aggrassions.
On whats have been happening in international cricket for a few years i would blame Match Refrees more than the aussies. i think they have been very forgiving when it comes to actions taken by austrialin players. during Last series SA refree just called Mcgrath Sarwan incident, a heat of moment Jasture. and did not take any action over that. this is just one example.
:k: hats off for Gavaskar!! he has proven that he is a little different than other Indian cricketers turned Commentrators, who are basicly Kiss A$$, whenever they are on mike with some white dude and talking about ICC’s steps.
http://www-usa.cricket.org/link_to_database/ARCHIVE/CRICKET_NEWS/2003/JUL/225812_CI_30JUL2003.html
Here is the text of the The Colin Cowdrey lecture by Sunil Gavaska
Namaste Mr President, ladies and gentlemen
There may be some among you who on receiving the invitation to this evening’s lecture must have seen who was going to speak and said “Oh! Yeah! Only if he is allowed through the gate!”
There must have been a question in your mind whether the lecture would take place at all. It’s a bit like getting an invitation to a party on 1st April; you don’t know whether it’s for real or if it’s an April Fool’s joke. Having now got to the podium which does afford me a better view than my natural height, I can see that you all did take the chance that I would be allowed in!
I had, of course, made sure that there would be at least a couple of people attending by requesting MCC to invite a few of my friends, who are present here.
As you can see, I am here - let in by the stewards who over the years have become quite charming. No more does one hear “Oi! Where do you think you are going?” Instead, now we hear “Excuse me, sir, can I help you?” Now this is a tremendous change and the MCC needs to be complimented on the remarkable improvement in the attitude of those manning the various entrances at the ground.
Unfortunately, while there has been this most welcome change in the attitude at the gates, there has been a marked decline in the behaviour on the field - especially in the last 15 years or so, and not just at the international level. I will come to that in due course.
I know from experience that a quick breezy innings brings a lot more smiles and is remembered more than a long one, irrespective of its utility to the team’s cause, and so here I will try and play a quick one. In any case, my throat does not last long, so you can relax - it’s not going to be a typical opener’s innings.
It is apt that this lecture is named after Colin Cowdrey who, on and off the field, epitomised all that is good about this great game of ours. Colin showed that it could be played with great skill and grace in the toughest of conditions and against the hardest of opponents, and still have a smile and appreciation for the opponent. Colin is perhaps the only cricketer to have played Test cricket for 20 years. He played from 1954 to 1974 and the only other cricketer who I can recall having a similar span is Mohinder Amarnath, who first played for India in December 1969 and played his last international in April 1990.
Steve Waugh, who has now appeared in the maximum number of Tests, has played for 18 years and, when you look at how many more Test matches he has played than Colin, you will know how much more Test cricket is being played today.
Way back in 1986, Colin was the one with the record for the most appearances in Tests, when yours truly went past him. On the first morning of that game, I was pleasantly surprised to see Colin being ushered into the Indian dressing room by Raj Singh Dungarpur, the team manager. He had come all the way from his home just to congratulate me and wish me luck. He was most effusive in his congratulations and wished that I would celebrate the occasion with a century.
I guess it wasn’t so much that Colin was wishing England ill luck as much as his Indian roots, having been born in Bangalore. The thing about Colin was he was always anxious to know what the players felt about the game they were playing and how to improve it. He was most keen to meet the newcomers and youngsters in the team and would have a word of encouragement for all of them.
Years later, I had the pleasure of being in the first-ever Cricket Committee formed by the ICC to look after the Laws and Playing Conditions of the game. Colin was the first chairman, and his main concern was how to make the game grow, and one of the reasons he felt it was losing out on popularity was that the players were not playing in the spirit in which they ought to - which, in turn, meant that the parents of young kids were reluctant to have their children play the game, and the kids themselves were not too keen to play a game in which there seemed to be so much animosity between the participants.
The MCC is the custodian of the Laws of the game, and thanks to the initiative of men like Colin, Ted Dexter and Tony Lewis, to name just three, they have now put down in writing the Spirit of Cricket, which for more than a hundred years was only spoken about and observed, too, until the late 1980s, and now has been put down in print so that not only Test and international cricketers know what it means, but also youngsters who are taking up the game.
But what does it tell us to have to put the Spirit of Cricket in black and white? It tells us that the old adage “It’s not cricket”, which applied to just about everything in life, is no longer valid - and that’s a real pity. In the modern world of commercialisation of the game and the advent of satellite television and the motto of winning at all costs, sportsmanship has gone for a six.
Will we ever get the likes of Sir Garfield Sobers and GR Viswanath again? That greatest of cricketers, Garry Sobers not only indicated more than once to umpires that he had caught the ball on the bounce but also declared his innings closed once in a Test match in spite of having two of his main bowlers injured and left a challenging target for England to get - which they did, thanks to Colin Cowdrey. If a captain does that today, of course, the Anti-Corruption Unit of the ICC would be breathing down his neck, but all Garry wanted was to enliven a dead series.
GR Viswanath was the captain who recalled Bob Taylor when he was given out by the unpire. Vishy, who was at first slip, immediately realised that Bob’s bat had brushed the pads, which had misled the umpire into giving him out caught behind. Like the true sportsman he is, Vishy walked up to the umpire and politely withdrew the appeal. The match was delicately poised then and the subsequent partnership between Ian Botham and Bob Taylor took England to a winning position. India lost the Test, but Vishy is remembered for that and loved all the more for it.
Today, thanks to the win-at-all-costs theory, appeals are made even though the fielders know that the batsman is not out. There is the other side, of course, where a batsman knows he is out but stays put and rubs some other part of his body if it’s an appeal for a catch or shows his bat if there’s an appeal for lbw. With the game being marketed aggressively by TV, the rewards have become high, and rightly so, but it has to a great extent taken away from the Spirit of the Game, where bowlers applauded a good shot and batsmen acknowledged with a nod a good delivery from a bowler who beat them. While today, in order not to give any psychological advantage to the opposition, there’s hardly any applause from the fielding side when a batsman reaches a fifty or a century.
It’s hard to understand how applauding concedes any advantage to the batsman, but we see it increasingly where, barring the odd fielder, the others feign total ignorance of the batsman reaching a landmark.
This is in stark contrast to my first series in the West Indies, where one could sit with the greats like Garry Sobers, Rohan Kanhai and Lance Gibbs at the end of a day’s play and ask them about batting and how to improve. They were more than happy to give good sound advice, even though it was to an opponent and could be used against them the next day to their team’s detriment. Rohan Kanhai occasionally grunted his disapproval from first slip if I played a loose shot. It wasn’t that these great cricketers did not want their team to win. It was just the fact that they had supreme confidence in their own ability and believed that helping an opponent only produced good cricket and was good for the game.
How about the England team under Norman Yardley raising three cheers for Don Bradman when he came out to play his last Test innings? Mind you, if the England players knew that such gestures brought tears to the great man’s eyes and got him bowled for a duck, then they would have done it every innings!
Such a gesture is unthinkable today where the opponents hardly greet each other and if there’s anything to say it’s invariably not very ple
