"Sons of pitches!" Are flat tracks killing cricket?

Surely, Vinay Kumar is not the last bowler to be hit for a hundred?

Higher, higher and still higher. Just how high can a sport’s barriers of what’s within range and what’s impossible be raised? Enough for a batsman to hit a triple hundred in a one day match?

For 36 years, the double century remained an anomaly, in a state of arrested evolution, but within a space of three years, the seemingly elusive barrier has now been breached three times.

If recent developments are any indication, the triple hundred now appears to be a sitting duck. There was a time when a team score of 220 in 50 overs was considered par for the course. There was a time when batsmen didn’t pull any Nagarjuna-like stunts in the first 15 overs. There was a time when a target in excess of 300 was considered unattainable. There was a time before Virat Kohli started having his days.

For all the thrill and heart-pounding moments given to the cricket-watching world in the last few weeks, all video evidence of the last series between India and Australia must be surreptitiously destroyed and burned to the ground.

What if impressionable young bowlers were to stumble upon archived videos of the kind of abuse they may be subjected to? Which right-thinking mommy would want her precious little pumpkin to grow up in such a cruel universe?

If Skynet (from the Terminator Series) were to become self-aware, even bowling machines would refuse to bowl. Suffice it to say that had this series run its entire course, the International Court of Justice would have stepped in and charged batsmen with crimes against bowling humanity.

Cricket is a non-contact sport, but watching the bat dominate ball this series was akin to watching Muhammad Ali at his pomp pummel Nawazuddin Siddiqui in a boxing ring.

How cricket has changed. Geoff Boycott’s approach to batting was to pat back full-tosses, weave out of the way of wide half-volleys and duck under/pad up to long-hops until the opposition bowlers were either driven to tears or retirement, whichever came early (unless of course, he was Sachin Tendulkar).

Cricketing orthodoxy at one time was such when once, as a schoolboy, I was congratulated for plundering 36 unbeaten runs off 174 balls in pursuit of a target of 335 in 60 overs while my friend (now my brother-in-law) was expelled from the school for scoring a run-a-ball 40, bringing disrepute to the school’s proud cricketing history with his cavalier strokeplay, even though he was middling banana peels tossed in his direction by the Principal.

That story is not entirely true, but it might as well have been.

And now, I see teams hunting down 350+ targets without so much as breaking into a sweat. And by hunting down, I mean hunting down in the manner that a Cheetah driving a Lamborghini hunts down a tortoise on a pensioner’s Hero Puch.

Cricket grounds have seldom looked so prone. You realise that nine fielders can cover only so much. To put this in perspective, the 38 scud missiles launched by batsmen from both teams into the Bangalore stratosphere on Diwali night eclipsed the previous ODI record by a good 7 sixes.

There was a blacksmith’s efficiency to it, and a blacksmith’s elegance too, alas. It is no secret that the time is now ripe for a batsman. Highway like pitches, LBW laws tailored in favour of batsmen, light helmets, decline in fast bowling stocks, spinners’ mysteries comfortably unravelled over slo-mos and a glass of Jack Daniels’, bats like pick-axes (or is it the other way round?) couldn’t have been more inviting for the willow wielders.

The latest tinkerings, facelifts to the ODI format with the new rules may seem entertainingly intuitive, but have left it looking like a botched Koena Mitra lip job. For a format that frets so much about its often slumber inducing middle-over drags, it has done precious little to encourage wicket-taking bowling. For bowlers entrusted with the task of stopping the deluge with a teacup, that remains the quintessential dilemma.

A triple hundred? Five hundred for a completed innings? Think not if, but when.