There's Nothing Gentle About These Men

I first went to a cricket ground in 1974 when my father took me to the Feroze Shah Kotla. Clive Lloyd’s West Indians were touring India in what was the debut series of one Isac Vivian Richards. My abiding memory of that match is of Lloyd, patrolling the covers, bending down nonchalantly and scooping up a Vishwanath scorcher inches from the ground.

Indian fielding (as different from close-in catching – which was quite, quite brilliant with Eknath Solkar leading the way, and others like Wadekar, Venkatraghavan and Abid Ali were very good) standards in the seventies were still in the Dark Ages and Lloyd’s brilliant reflex catch left me and rest of the Kotla crowd gasping.

I remember Andy Roberts led the bowling attack, Lance Gibbs bowled his looping off spinners, but the trio of Keith Boyce, Bernard Julien and Vanerbun Holder were not really of express pace. Indians still banked on their ace spinning options – Bishen Singh Bedi, Erapalli Prasanna and the maverick leggie, B Chandrashekhar. And me, all of ten years old, was hooked to this game for life.

Those days, Lloyd hadn’t yet decided to unleash his four-man liquid pace attack on the cricketing world. And cricket – played, as yet, only over five days and at a serene, sedate pace -- was still a gentleman’s game.

There was nothing remotely gentle though in the manner Adam Gilchrist chose to dismember what had been touted as the World Cup’s best bowling attack on Saturday. In fact, come to think of it, for quite sometime now there has not been anything close to “gentle” (a few silken Michael Clarke drives, notwithstanding) that can be associated with Australian cricket.

Now, a lot of old timers would tell you, Australian cricketers haven’t been accused of gentlemanly conduct even by their worst critics. They are known to play their cricket hard but fair. But the brand of cricket that Ponting’s boys have played over and over again, both in the Test arena and on day cricket, and most recently during the World Cup, goes beyond the characteristic ruthlessness that has been associated with Australian cricket for long.

There’s an edge to their game, a lack of give when batting, bowling or fielding, a fierce determination to dominate and not just simply win that seems to have extended the boundaries of the game, even re-shaped it, to the extent that it is difficult to recognize it as the same game I first went to watch as a ten-year-old, a few light years ago.

Every now and then you can see a sublime touch in the batting of Clarke or skipper Ricky Ponting, just as you could in the batting of the recently retired Damien Martyn or Mark Waugh before them. But at the slightest hint of doubt or trouble, the Australians drop the surgical precision of a Clarke in favour of the brutal power of a Mathew Hayden and Andrew Symonds, who bring in the subtlety of a sledgehammer to their game.

I have always had a sneaking suspicion that Symonds and Hayden (and perhaps, even Nathan Bracken) are all rughby quarterback rejects who came to cricket quite by accident. I mean they don’t look like cricketers, do they? Or, perhaps, this is how cricketers are going to look like in days and months and years to come? Make them stand next to the likes of Ajit Agarkar and Irfan Pathan and you realise what a mismatch it is – not just in sheer cricketing ability but in muscle quotient too.

You can easily visualize Symonds dressed as a gladiator in a Ridley Scott movie. Bowlers all over the world have little doubt in their minds anyway that the bat he (or, for that matter, Mathew Hayden) wields in his hands is actually a scimitar and often has the same effect on a bowler as it did on a rival when wielded by a medieval warrior.

Gilchrist, not quite in the Hayden or Symonds mould, is as effective – and destructive -- with the bat, as he proved in the World Cup final. He is actually quite a gentleman in the sense that he is one of the few players in international cricket who “walks” when he thinks he is out, without waiting for the umpire’s decision. He is perhaps the only player in the current Australian squad whose name you are going to pencil in without any hesitation in an all time World Eleven for both Tests as well as one-day cricket.

Then there is Ricky Ponting, the captain of this remarkable side. Playing the game at the same time as Brian Lara an Sachin Tendulkar, Ponting is now regarded as good as either of them and by the time he ends his career, may even find a position for himself which is higher than that of Lara and Tendulkar in the pecking order of cricketing gods.

As impressive as their cricket has been their bench strength. The retirement of Damien Martyn, the unavailability of Shane Warne and the injury to Brett Lee didn’t matter. The replacements were as good, if not better. If the old master Glen McGrath walked into the sunset with his third World Cup and a man of the tournament award to boot, the rookie Shaun Tait showed he is every bit as fast and as effective as the man he replaced.

On hindsight, perhaps the Kiwis did a great disfavour to the cricketing world by beating their tans-Tasman rivals so comprehensively, shortly before the World Cup. It took care of any semblance of complacency that the Australians might have suffered from.

Comparisons have been drawn between this side and the all-conquering West Indian sides led by Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards. This Australian side is not the first team that has dominated the game so emphatically and for such a length of time. But what makes it different, and far more frightening, from the teams of the past is the way this success has been achieved and is likely to be sustained.

You look at this team and you know a system has been put into place – from the development of junior cricket to an uncompromising fitness regimen to a strong domestic format of just six state teams – which is most likely to throw up another generation of beefcakes who would bash the living daylights out of another World Cup opponent four, eight, hell, even twenty years from now.

Chew on that thought as the Australians catch up with the beer, the beaches and the babes.