In cricket’s Russian roulette, Dhoni’s just upped the ante

Fifteen years ago we were quite happy with the occasional hit over the top within the first 15 overs and waited for the scramble at the end. Then Sanath Jayasuriya showed that the first 15 and the last 10 could resemble each other and that was thrilling. We wanted more for need and greed are often easily interchangeable.

Increasingly now, a one-day game must resemble a freeway and those that can drive on it with skill, the Sehwags, will prosper. Those that were brought up to wait for the signal and not overtake from the left must look dated.

It’s true with the movies as well where a four-minute Helen dance sung by Asha Bhosle was long talked about. It has given way to the lead actress to whom Helen’s wardrobe is now almost the equivalent of office-wear.

The last ten minutes of action must now be spread over a longer period, the occasional banner headline must now be seen twice a week, in some papers every day. It is all right for doctors to refer a patient to a specialist or a hospital and be paid an incentive for it!

Everywhere we want more and in one-day cricket, batsmen have found accomplices in pitch curators who too have changed their definition of a good wicket. Where once it meant a good contest between bat and ball, it now means a wicket full of runs. If it were a computer game, the settings would be completely different now.

And so bowlers must adapt too; the definition of a good spell must change. They can no longer hope to battle like equals, winning for them is surviving an onslaught. They must feel like deer might when told that tigers are being introduced into their park and that it is being fenced. Survival is no longer grazing all day long, it is dodging an attack till you no longer can.

And so, with dead tracks, great bats and field restrictions, the likes of Sehwag redefine the concept of risk completely. Remember while he redefines it with the bat, a lot of us need to do so in our mind. Sehwag is an extraordinary modern phenomenon primarily because he has the ability and the willingness to change the definition of risk, but also because he is playing at a time when the audience wants someone like him.

An earlier generation of batsmen was told to get behind the line of the ball — and we are not talking of a Gavaskar here. Even a Tendulkar or a Dravid, who are no more than six or seven years older, would have derived enormous satisfaction from hitting boundaries past the bowler, between mid-on and mid-off.

Occasionally, like an adventurous playboy, Tendulkar would play beside the line, or significantly inside it and explore third man and point as big scoring areas. When Tendulkar was firing away at the top of the order, his standout shots were past cover, down the ground and through mid-wicket.

When Sourav Ganguly was taking his place among the one-day greats, his trademark shots were the cover drive and the square drive which he leant delightfully into and often offered the full face of the bat.

Sehwag thinks nothing about carving over third man, giving himself room and hitting through the line on the off-side and slogging a leg spinner over mid-wicket at any time.

Ganguly and Tendulkar too scored quickly, by the prevailing definition, but you got the feeling that if a good ball was bowled it had a chance of drawing respect. With Sehwag in full flow, or with a Dhoni, and their kind across the world, that possibility grows remote. And so a total of 357 is not bewildering, neither is the fact that the opposition is able to mount a serious challenge.

I don’t know, I am not sure anyone does, what the next stage is; when audiences take 325-350 for granted. Will we start pulling boundary ropes in, will we make the definition of the wide, even outside the off stump, more stringent? Will the job of the bowler be reduced to merely feeding the batsman? It must go somewhere because as a former producer of mine once told me; if you keep feeding pigs strawberries, they won’t eat grass.