Not cricket?

The England versus India test series is proving something of a disappointment. Hailed as the contest to decide the world’s leading test side, India just aren’t putting up enough fight.

Not only that, but Sachin Tendulkar still hasn’t got his hundredth international hundred.

There can hardly be a lover of the game, anywhere in the world, who doesn’t want the Little Master to pass that milestone. He is not only a great cricketer

                                     but a great advertisement for cricket, playing hard, playing to win, but playing with grace and charm too. The best end to the Trent Bridge test would have been for England to have won, with Tendulkar undefeated on a magnificent double century, having not quite saved his team.

Trent Bridge will be largely remembered for the run out that wasn’t, or rather the run out that was and then withdrawn. That has happened before.

The year was 1974, the venue the Trinidad Oval. On that occasion it was the last ball before the close, and the players involved were Bernard Julien and Alvin Kallicharan batting for the West Indies, and Tony Grieg, fielding for England. Julien blocked the ball towards Grieg, who was at Silly Mid-Off. Julien tucked his bat up and turned and set off for the pavilion rather more quickly than he ought. Kallicharan, at the non-striker’s end, started walking in the same direction, as did most of the fielders. Greig, still in his – aggressive – playing mode, and probably the only man on the field who hadn’t called it a day, picked the ball up, turned sharply round, and threw Kallicharan’s stumps down.

Kallicharan was duly, and properly, dismissed.

It was altogether more dramatic than the Bell run out at Trent Bridge. It was also far more serious. A riot started in the crowd. In the 1960s and 1970s West Indies versus England test matches were not infrequently poisoned by large dollops of sour post-colonial politics. It was even suggested by a few that Greig’s action was evidence of latent racial bigotry; Greig being a white South African by birth. That much, at least, was arrant nonsense. The incident happened because Greig always played the game hard and he always kept his focus, though he certainly played it with a great deal less charm than some others; Tendulkar, for example.

Like Bell, Kallicharan was reinstated, supposedly more in accordance with the spirit of cricket than its laws. But to call such law breaking ‘sportsmanship’ may be stretching the definition. In Port of Spain in 1974 the political atmosphere was very tense, and the umpires and both teams feared that there might be more crowd trouble. One can’t help suspecting that at Trent Bridge Dhoni and his team were as much embarrassed by their poor performance and the slapdash way they ran out Bell as anything else.

 However, it was a far happier incident than the earlier one. And while not everything about international cricket has improved, there can be no doubt that the ugly legacy of colonialism that used to seep into the atmosphere of some test matches is on the wane.

G M Trevelyan observed: ‘If the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants, their chateaux would never have been burnt.’ Who knows, maybe countries that play cricket against each other can't maintain their emnity for too long. It would be nice to think so.

Now when's the next India-Pakistan test series?