A Marvellous Handshake
IN PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, the West Indian wicketkeeper Jeff Dujon was so impressed by the ball that trapped him leg-before that he went up to the Australian bowler Craig McDermott and shook him by the hand. The occasion? The third Test match between the West Indies and Australia , April 11.
With his side six down for 86, Dujon was fighting a rearguard action. Given out lbw and congratulating the bowler! Was it a newspaper report I was reading, or was it from Ripley's Believe it or Not ?
When I was young, this is how it used to be. When a bowler got you out, you always said, "Well bowled, Sir" before leaving the field and when you straight drove him for four, he was the first to applaud, "Well played Sir."
It was only after the arrival of the professional cricketer that things began to go sour and from being a way of life, cricket became just another means of livelihood.
Thirty, forty years ago, you walked when given out. The umpire was a judge of the Supreme Court against whose decisions you had no right of appeal. Even if you left you had been given out unjustly or wrongly, you took it in your stride and dismissed the matter as one of those things and you lived to fight another day.
Things are different today. You dispute the umpire's decision even when you know you have nicked the ball into the keeper's gloves and that the catch has been fairly taken or that you were bang in front when the ball struck your pads.
And things are becoming increasingly bitter. Take any Test series between any two countries and you will find that it was destroyed by acrimonious umpiring controversies. It has now become customary with visiting captains and mangers to lodge written complaints with the host and home boards of control about how they have been wronged by the umpires.
Vociferous appeals in concert have become the order of the day. Umpires are shouted at, abused, even threatened. If you are fielding close in, say, at slip or gully or short-leg or leg slip, you may have a fair idea in a caught-behind or bat-pad or run-out situation, but how can you claim that you have a keener eye than the umpire's when you are at long-leg deep third man or even at not so deep mid-off or mid-on? Yet this is what happens in Test matches today. Fielders from the deep come charging into join to chorus of appeals whenever a bowler asks for a caught-behind or leg-before.
These appeals are ferocious in their intensity and louder than the minimum norms of decency warrant. They are meant to put pressure on the umpire, to confuse him and to cloud his judgment.
There is a story here, to illustrate how these pressure tactics work. In the Lahore Test match in 1978, Gavaskar was given out caught behind in India 's' second innings when he was in his nineties. He made such a song and dance about it that the Pakistani umpires concluded that he must have been unjustly treated.
In the final Test of the series in Karachi , Gavaskar hit hundreds in both the innings. The late A. F. S. Talyarkhan, one of India 's most respected critics of the game, wrote about that performance: Whether Gavaskar was out or not at Lahore , let him cross his heart and say, that he was not caught behind in both the innings at Karachi before he had scored. Or words to that effect.
Needless to say, Gavaskar never took Talyarkhan on. The master batsman that he undoubtedly is, he took two hundreds off Pakistani umpires whose ability to stand in Test matches he had questioned sufficiently loudly at Lahore . So if fair was foul for Gavaskar at Lahore, foul was made doubly fair by him at Karachi .
How to deal with player pressure, especially when the player in question is of Sunil Gavaskar or Denis Lillee's stature? I think things could improve considerably if the right of appeal were to be restricted to players directly involved.
For instance, only the bowler should be allowed to appeal in leg-before cases, because he is the only man who knows stumps. If it is a caught-behind appeal, only the wicket-keeper and the bowler should make it.
If it is bat-and-pad, the fielder who thinks he took a fair catch should ask the umpire, and similarly for all close to the wicket catches at slip, leg-slip, silly mid-on and silly mid-off, only the fielder concerned should appeal.
Run-outs? Well, I think appeals should not be made at all. If the run-out has taken place at the bowler's end, it is the umpire at the wicket who should, as he does in the case of wide and no-balls, give a decision. And the square-leg umpire should decide if the run out is at the batsman's end. No need to shout at all.
In addition to all this, there should be material incentives to promote fair play. In a recent Nilam Ghar programme, Tariq Aziz brought on stage the youngest people who were fasting that day. Among them was a young boy who confessed that as a matter of fact, he wasn't fasting at all. Tariq gave the others a hundred rupees each but the little one who had owned a lie was given a special prize for being truthful, plus of course, the hundred rupees.
Cricket administrations around the world could likewise institute best behaviour prizes per Test match and per series. These prizes could be on individual as well as team bases. One is sorry for a making such a proposal because cricketers, if they are cricketers, that is, should be on their best behaviour not only on the field but also off it.
I am opposed to the idea of neutral umpiring because it is an admission that home umpires cheat on purpose. Errors of judgment there can be but no systemic, deliberate cheating. Moreover, in 9.99 cases out of 10, a batsman knows when he is out. Unfortunately, however, most modern Test cricketers do not walk like Majid Khan used to and like Imran Khan does.
Batsmen dispute decisions out of fear. They feel that a string of failures will cost them their place in the Test side. Therefore, every time they go out to bat, they hope to make a fifty at least, if not a hundred. Most players have developed a personal, rather than team approach towards the game. Often they tend to ignore team interests for personal gains.
For instance, if the team needs quick runs in order to give itself sufficient time to bowl the opposition out, selfish batsmen, in pursuit of personal landmarks, plod on to make laboured, dull hundreds. The worst example of this type of wholly personalised cricket has been Sunil Gavaskar .
Gavaskar never played for India , only for himself. Most of his hundreds were five-hour-plus jobs. He had an inexhaustible capacity for being selfish. He was a great accumulator but most of his 10,000-plus Test runs brought India little glory.
This is an unending debate. Let me end as I began. Well played Jeff Dujon. I want to shake you by the hand because you shook Craig McDermott by the hand on being given out leg-before and in Port of Spain of all places. That was something different man!
April 20, 1991
