Playing the waiting game

What makes sport turn cruel time and again? France’s best footballer was denied a chance to help his country clinch the World Cup when he head-butted his Italian opponent, who was involved in swearing the former’s family. Jason Gillespie’s test career came to an abrupt end soon after he scored a double hundred, a feat Jacques Kallis hasn’t managed to do yet, as a night-watchman. There is another story of a talented middle order batsman from Australia, who just did not manage to break into the test team. With 51 first-class hundreds, he could only play 6 tests for Australia. It was not as if he played poor cricket and floundered in those 6 test matches. Dodgeball, as he is fondly called, scored a double hundred against South Africa and added 2 fifties with an overall average of 55.88. But still…

There are many such incidents that shows the cruel face of sport with no mercy. While sport could be extremely rewarding (at times), it could also be immensely unforgiving for the ill-fortuned. Just drop in the Indian perspective to this issue and we are assured to see many cases who fall into this bracket at ease.

Most of them who fall in this category bear the pain for no mistake of theirs. Wriddhiman Saha was very lucky to make his test debut. Everyone, including him, was surprised to see that he had a place in the final XI in the Nagpur test. It was a sweet surprise for him and the selectors were responsible for this situation to rise out of the blue. To be fair to the Bengal wicket-keeper, he has been a consistent performer in domestic cricket and has also toured abroad with the India “A” teams recently. Still, he found himself on the wrong side of selection when the selectors decided to drop him for the Kolkata test.

Apart from the first-innings duck, Saha compiled an okay 36 in the second innings. It was a tenacious knock against, arguably, the best bowling attack in the world. Considering the quality of the opposition, the performance of his own team-mates, the importance of the occasion and the surprise element called the selection, Saha did more than a reasonable job for India. As one of the Cricinfo reporters say, “Saha will be left wondering why he was dropped when his primary skill, wicketkeeping, wasn’t even tested.“

If Saha’s inclusion was a surprise, his exclusion was nothing short of another surprise when we find that Dinesh Karthik makes a comeback after one test!

Just when Saha received his Indian test cap, there was another batsman, 4 years older than Saha, who revelled in glory when he finally got his test cap. If ever there was one thing that Badri did wrongly, then it’s the time he chose to play in India. India’s golden generation of cricketers were conquering countries all over the globe with their cricketing skills. While most of them went on to become legends, the lesser known men who were on the fringes spent most of their time on the edge.

Badrinath was one of them who spent close to 4 years on the edge of the selection. Most of the time, the selectors could hardly help his cause. There is no fault of his when we know that it will be extremely hard for anyone to break into a middle order that boasted the likes of Ganguly, Laxman, Dravid, Tendulkar and Yuvraj Singh over a period of time. That, Yuvraj had to wait for quite a long time, says a thing or two about the quality of the Fab-Four.

What could Badri have done differently to have some impact, at least in the selection committee meetings? Every time a season started, he kept scoring runs for whichever side he batted, be it Chemplast, India Cements, Chennai Super Kings, Tamil Nadu, South Zone, Rest Of India, Board President’s XI or India “A” . His 6000 first-class runs are a proof for his hard work and his talent, that was primed for international cricket long time ago.

Every batsman comes with a graph that I might, be tempted to call the Form Graph. When he starts playing international cricket, his curve will slowly rise. The curve keeps rising(Gautam Gambhir is a great example for this slow rise) and at one point of time, stays at the highest value possible. This is what we call as “Peak“. By now the batsman would be an established entity in world cricket. The longer he can stay at the peak, the greater are the chances that he might become a legend of the game.

Once the peak is touched, most batsmen find their way down the curve. There is another crisis that batsmen face when they turn 33. Strangely, their form dips and they stop scoring as they used to do a year before. This phenomenon is strange, but even the likes of Tendulkar (Remember 2005-06?) and Richards have experienced this. Before a batsman calls it a day, his curve rises once more, but doesn’t even near the peak he would have touched before.

Badrinath has entered into test cricket at a time, when he has passed his best. Whatever he is scoring nowadays, is more because of the spillovers of his stupendous peak, which was about 18-24 months ago. Even now, when Badrinath is selected for the two test series, there is absolutely no guarantee for a permanent spot. There is no guarantee for even a temporary slot, forget the permanent spot. The retirement of Ganguly, gave way for Yuvraj Singh. The other legends who are part of the Indian middle order, will definitely take a year or two to bid goodbye to the international scene. So, by the time some slots get free, Badri would be in his 30s. When he comes into contention again, the younger crop of Indian batsmen would easily be more matured and get closer by every inch to reach that peak. And within a few more years, Badri might also be confronted by that famous Catch-33 position.

When he did get a chance to play in the Nagpur test, he was welcomed by a barrage of bouncers from Steyn and Co. Nothing was easy for Badri in his first outing. India had lost 3 wickets in the form of Gambhir, Vijay and Tendulkar. His first 8 balls in test cricket were all from Steyn. A streaky boundary in the third man area got him his first runs in test cricket for India. Steyn soon got him jumping and hit him on his arm guard. There is some curse at least with him. Tamil Nadu has had very few representatives on the national side, till date. When a quality player emerges from the state, he spends playing domestic cricket in an era when India’s middle order batsmen became legends of not just Indian cricket, but world cricket. Finally, when he got his chance to debut, it’s against the strongest bowling attack on earth today with World’s best fast bowler in their lineup. It became tougher when this bowling attack was on top of things at Nagpur.

His 56 was a plucky innings on debut considering the loads of expectations (also from a few men waiting to just dump him right away) he was carrying and other external pressures that come by when a new Indian middle order batsman takes a fresh guard. Kolkata might give him another chance to strengthen his position in the team. Even if he scores a hundred, it might be that tough to hold on when Yuvraj Singh, VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid come back into the team. As of now, Badrinath can enjoy in having earnt the test cap. It’s a culmination of all the hard work he has put since the day he started to hold a bat. After having made his first-class debut in 2000/01, Badrinath has taken 10 long years to play for India. In these years he spent waiting for that elusive India cap, Badri notched up 22 hundreds at an average of 57 with a personal highest of 250 being registered earlier this season against Ranji champions, Mumbai.

Now, there are two routes that Badrinath’s career could find way. It could become a spectacularly glittering one like Mike Hussey, or it could become as unfortunate as Brad Hodge’s test career. Until he does find a place for himself, he has to play the waiting game.