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For years there were hypotheses; based on stray observations and a deep concern for cricket in India. There were theories, opinions, a lot o...

For years there were hypotheses; based on stray observations and a deep concern for cricket in India. There were theories, opinions, a lot of us were like the philosophers, or like scientists of old to whom ideas in the mind were the drivers of thought because numbers on paper hadn8217;t appeared yet.

Now we can rejoice because of a pathbreaking piece of research by Siddhartha Vaidyanathan, another of our highly promising young breed of cricket writers. He has looked at data from domestic cricket over the last five years and his findings are like music to the ears. I have read his article twice and each time I have felt like old scientists must have as elements were discovered where they ought to have been in the periodic table.

The statistics he throws up are scary. In November 1999, there were eight double centuries in the Ranji Trophy, that year 64 matches produced 33 scores greater than 150 and in 220 innings there were 137 centuries. Forget diamonds, software and backoffice outsourcing, batsmen should have been our major exports.

And yet, in December 1999, India were in Australia and in the first test in Adelaide our middle order was VVS Laxman at 3, followed by Dravid, Tendulkar and Ganguly. In the five years since, only one batsman, Virender Sehwag, was good enough to challenge those four. And there wasn8217;t a single batsman in the country who could lay genuine claim to being in that middle order. So what were all those runs worth?

They were made on flat tracks, against bowlers who took the field knowing they had goofed and should have been batsmen instead and with balls that allowed the batsman to score freely. It was boring, it was irrelevant, it was taking Indian cricket backwards very fast.

Indicative of that is another statistic that Vaidyanathan throws up 8212; 50 per cent of matches produced no result, meaning they were played 8212; or, to be fair, had to be played 8212; with the sole intention of piling on runs, producing individual records and laying the ground for a category of cricketers to whom the self mattered more than the result or the team.

Typical of that was the innings Rajiv Nayyar produced for Himachal Pradesh. It lasted 1015 minutes, produced for him the most worthless record and probably drove a few people away from the game forever.

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Cricket was, and largely still is, a throwback to the old monopoly-driven era in Indian industry where wealth management was more important than product development. Two key events started to make a difference. They should have happened 10 years earlier if the BCCI hadn8217;t been deaf to the sounds coming from everywhere.

The old zonal system, creaky, incestuous and irrelevant, at last vanished. And pitches were relaid in some centres. They became livelier and a new generation understood that instead of a contest between one set of batsmen and another the game really was about a contest between bat and ball.

Vaidyanathan reports that this year only 95 hundreds have come from 282 innings, half the percentage in 1999-00. Batsmen are having to work for their runs, the ball is doing things late into the innings and, as a result, there is a value attached to the runs scored.

But the national league, still imperfect, is the best thing that has happened. Players are playing equals, the opposition is not being bullied, they are having to travel and play in different conditions; it should mean that the top run-scorers this year are tougher than in years gone by.

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This is the time to test it by sending a strong 8216;A8217; side to play away. Let us see how good Niraj Patel, Venugopal Rao, Shikhar Dhawan and the others can be.

But while the pitches become livelier, we must avoid the risk of thinking that pitches must take wickets. They can, at best, allow good players to take wickets and that is why this first round of Duleep Trophy matches has been so disappointing.

If matches are virtually over in two days, irrespective of the quality of cricketers, it has to be a bad pitch. We must avoid the risk of going the other extreme and producing wickets where ordinary seamers can win matches. Playing for Central Zone Murali Kartik got 3 overs in the match, Kulamani Parida, only 2 and neither got a bowl in the second innings. That is poor.

Now we must cut the number of teams to no more than 16-20 teams. Getting into a first-class team must be tough. Any match that doesn8217;t require a team identity must go for we need to create team players. Good physios are essential and we cannot lose our competitive advantage, spin bowling, completely. And we need to do this today, not wait for a bright journalist to discover it five years later.