Were those really the days?

During a debate in Mumbai last week, a cricket administrator said a senior player had told him that most of the younger ones were uncaring of defeat in the Champions Trophy. The new crop, it was insinuated, were interested in making their millions, not playing for the team or country, and that this attitude was a departure from players of the past. I find this of dubious truth-value. 

Concern about the team's form and results is imperative for those who play and run the game, but hasty judgment could be ill-founded. My mind went back more than a quarter century when I was on my first tour, to Pakistan in 1982-83, and Indian cricket was to find itself in one of its several crises as the star-studded Indian side led by Sunil Gavaskar struggled badly against Imran Khan's team.

After the series had been surrendered, I recall an evening spent in the manager Fatehsinghrao Gaekwad's room in Hyderabad (Sind) with members of the press corps and a couple of former players. The mood in the room was understandably gloomy and the post-mortem to India's dismal performance rather recriminatory, but one statement stands firm in memory. “I see no remorse in the players,'' he said. “We used to play as if our lives depended on it.'' Six months later, India won the World Cup.

This approach has applications far beyond the sports field, of course. It is in the human condition, perhaps, to see the past full of virtues, in a glowing, non-objective perspective filled with romance and nostalgia, and the present as bleak and niggardly — almost as if the world is about to come to an end.

Grandparents, parents, teachers and mentors like to tell their inheritors of how glorious the previous times were, and how the world is struggling today — in matters of food, climate, crime etc and more particularly in manners, attitude, and a more livable society — almost none of this backed by hard fact. 

“Such sentiments are misleading,'' says the liberal philosopher A C Grayling, “because they promise a belief that somewhere or sometime the world had something which has since been lost — a cosy, chintzy, afternoon-teatime era when there was neither danger without nor unease within. But when we begin rummaging among these myths to provide solutions to present-day troubles, which is what moralisers do, we are in trouble indeed.''

It hardly needs rocket science to understand Grayling's compunctions. A ‘hardened’ moralising position emerges from insecurity about the present and a fear of the future. It undermines the democratic and liberal ethos, and in its extreme form leads to chauvinism of the kind that the Taliban (or the ultras — right or left — anywhere), would like to implement.

But I don't want to digress too much from cricket, which serves as an allegorical tool in any case. Were the Indian teams and players of the past really better than the present? Is there some statistical basis to establish this, some high-value qualitative analysis, or is it just uninformed opinionating? A basic scrutiny of the records will reveal that Indian cricket has fared better in the last decade than in the seven preceding this one, so this argument has very weak legs to stand on.

It is not my case that the current Indian team is playing its best cricket, but big money alone cannot have shaped an attitude of diffidence. Maybe we are just not good enough to be the best in the world for a longish period of time — for reasons of talent as well as other things.

It is presumptuous to believe that just passion and money can make a side the best in the world. These can contribute, but unless there is a culture that promotes excellence as more important than just becoming rich and famous, it will be difficult to become the best in the world: Now, as it has been for so the last several decades.