Cricket memories thrive on the lure of the unseen

The cricket lover revels in reminiscing the great feats on the field. Yet, the more a feat remains unseen, the more is it prone to take on the splendour of epics. Arunabha Sengupta says that memory can be manufactured and reshaped with greater ease with the passage of time, a task made even easier if live telecasts have not spoilt the picture.

The recollections make it special. 

The cricket lover revels in reminiscing the epic innings and the spectacular spell, that splendid match and that magic moment that stopped time and created a ripple that would make wavelets forever splash on the shores of memory. 

It is in the discussions that the great game is relived, replayed and rejoiced. And for many this is what makes cricket what it is. 

Yet, how accurate are our memories? Do we always tell it as it happened? Is it always the account of great moments recollected as ‘I was there’? 

Actually it is always the recollection of matches where one was not present that take on the rosier hues. Memories are often manufactured, appended with imagination. Not being there makes it easier for the mental touch up. 

There is always the well-known saying, “In the bars and at after dinner conversations the sixes become longer, the deliveries are always magical and the catches spectacular.” Romantic lore is too often enhanced with each retelling. Through the journey of time the tales are rolled over the gold sprinkled path of time and develop a lustre that sparkles a bit too brightly to be real and dazzles the eyes a bit too much to peer into the chinks, crevices and holes that accompany the acts of valour.

And this is the same force of nostalgic remembrance that makes us more prone to discuss matches of the distant past — when the bothersome marvel of the live images had not yet started to play havoc with the favoured pastime of attaching superhuman haloes around the heads of mortal men.

Live telecast from the lands far and wide mars it terribly. Centuries always tend to carry a few edges and snicks, five wicket hauls the odd short ball and the full toss. There seems to be no room for the impregnability of heroes of the days gone by who could never make mistakes. Seeing them sink now and again to less than divine heights tends to take away the golden aura. 

It is far too difficult to attach to Anil Kumble the same halo of brilliance as we are used to doing for EAS Prasanna and BS Bedi. It will be the same for at least for another 20 years — till then the memories of some fruitless foreign toils will be too prominent in our memories. In contrast, we never saw our spinning greats of the past being taken to the cleaners in England in 1974. We heard about it, faintly, but they were drowned by the regaling recollections of their wondrous combination.

Or for that matter, it is easy to fuse Sunil Gavaskar’s four centuries against West Indies in 1971 with his many fascinating later battles with the fearsome fast men from the islands — leading one to conclude that he scored 774 runs in his debut series against fire-breathing pace bowlers. The light that trickles in from the distant past is too dim for most to identify that the West Indian pace of 1971 was rather ordinary and headed by one mediocre Uton Dowe. Time, tales and lack of telecast combine into a heady concoction in cricket. 

It filters into the modern age as well. 

Most Sachin Tendulkar fans choose the master’s 114 at Perth in 1992 as his best innings   — scored on a quick wicket against the Australian pace attack. 

True, the bowling was good — Craig McDermott, Merv Hughes, supported by an impressive Mike Whitney. True, Tendulkar was just 18 and that lends a heroic tinge to the tale. True, it was a lone hand as wickets fell around him. And true, it was a great, great innings. 

Yet, my contention is that it is the preferred choice because it was not telecast live. What we do have now are the highlights, which tell us of the flamboyant and audacious strokes that he played that day. 

The highlights seldom show that he edged the first ball he faced from McDermott just short of slip. The highlights seldom show Hughes striking him on the glove and the ball falling in front of gully, David Boon getting a hand on a full blooded flick, but not quite managing to hold on. In recollections, therefore, with verbal and written accounts of the innings snowballing over time, he seems unerring, impregnable. 

Just like the tales of Gavaskar or Richards from the age before telecasts. They too had their share of false shots in every great innings they played, but such blemishes are lost as loose pages in the pages of time blown away by the winds of retelling. Time has converted them into legends with no shortcoming whatsoever. The same has taken place with Tendulkar’s knock in Perth.

I would rate Tendulkar’s 122 in Birmingham, 1996, at least at par with the Perth knock.  It was scored in a thrilling spurt of counter attack even as the next highest score amounted to just 18. The bowling was perhaps not that fancied, but the degree of difficulty and pressure were even more enormous as India collapsed in the second innings while facing a big deficit in the first. It had the stamp of a more mature batsman, the best in the world, rather than the knock by a fascinating but still unfinished product as was the Perth gem. 

However, there were two things that muffled the thunder of the Edgbaston innings. One, it was telecast live and two, the focus shifted to the arrival of Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid in unison in the following Test at Lord’s. I firmly believe that we saw Tendulkar at the peak of his powers in England that season. He scored 177 and 74 at Nottingham in the third Test, something seldom remembered.

Similarly, the 155 scored at Bloemfontein was perhaps an even better knock. Shaun Pollock, Nantie Hayward, Jacques Kallis and Makhaya Ntini formed a terrific attack and India had lost their way to 68 for four on a pitch with bounce and pace when Tendulkar commenced with his counterattacking uppercuts over slip. He not only scored the hundred, an inspired Virender Sehwag on his debut followed suit and India recovered to a formidable score. 

Yet again, however, there was the niggle of the live telecast which took away the dazzle of divinity. It showed the superstar to be mortal whenever his occasional play and miss outside the off-stump came into view. 

The same feature of the modern day perhaps tampered his magnificent handling of Dale Steyn in 2011 during his final hundred in Test cricket.

All such modern knocks have to wait till that day when the passage of time dims the brightest of memories, the television footages are lost in the cacophony of videos on youtube, and are abridged to include only the glorious strokes, cleaned and censored for the snicks and edges. 

And when that happens, these feats of modern times will become heroic displays of the days gone by. They will achieve the same luminous wonder of the great deeds of the past heroes that come to us through rheumy eyed recollections, short grainy videos, black and white photographs and often a flamboyant disregard for facts.

The sixes will then be granted the indulgence to grow longer in the bar room, the deliveries more unplayable and the catches more spectacular.

(Arunabha Sengupta is a cricket historian and Chief Cricket Writer at CricketCountry. He writes about the history and the romance of the game, punctuated often by opinions about modern day cricket, while his post-graduate degree in statistics peeps through in occasional analytical pieces. The author of three novels, he can be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/senantix)