CRICKET CROSSES ITS BOUNDARIES

REVERSE SWING

- MADHAVAN NARAYANAN

WHAT a journey it has been for cricket, I told myself last week as two headlines hit the screens: the men’s T20 World Cup tournament getting into gear and Jammu & Kashmir winning the Ranji Trophy for the first time. Though the two fields were far apart, they both amplified a new face of the game—one playing across the world and the other at home.

Reverse Swing, this column’s title, derives its name from a particular form of pace bowling unheard of until the 1970s, when Pakistani fast bowlers perfected the technique to move an old cricket ball towards the rougher side more than the usual shinier one. It’s a metaphor for many things including the journey of cricket itself.

As surprises and near-upsets at the World Cup showed, with Australia not even entering the semifinals, cricket retains its old descriptor as a game of glorious uncertainties. But much else has changed. The game once famous for five-day Tests in which patient bowling and safe batting were de rigueur has now given way to three-hour T20 games that abound in risky hits out of the park.

In the 1960s and 70s, a few elderly Indians tut-tutted over five-day matches as a waste of time, pointing to Japan, the era’s emerging economy that did not indulge in such leisure. The rise of one-day games in the 1970s—initially of 60 overs for each side—with the arrival of the World Cup changed that. The eventual adoption of the T20 format put cricketing bouts closer to football matches in duration.