I must confess that I don't find any type of defeat in cricket intolerable. Its sport and teams win and lose. The pleasure in sport comes from watching it take place. After a Test match is over, I'm always sad, win or lose, because real life and its real consequences have to be faced (unless, on rare days, these can be put off to watch a session of another Test!). The joy of watching high quality sportsmen play sport is over. Unlike in the theatre (or even more so, at the movies), there is no repeat performance nxt week. A Test match is played exactly once. None of the competitors will meet each other in exactly the same form, on exactly the same pitch again. The next time they meet, it will probably be a new season, a new ground, a new captain. New everything. Every time.
I'm not a professional journalist and so I have no obligation to keep my finger on the pulse of my readers' mood. There is a wonderful symmetry between the way players and team staff deal with press conferences, and reporters deal with their readers. I sometimes think that if players sat in press conferences and commented on reporters from a detached distance - if they stepped out of their position and became observers of the place that is the press briefing - we would get far more interesting reporting.
Imagine a reporter sitting at her desk after India's 2nd consecutive innings defeat in 3 days to a bad English team. She types out a report which includes all the proper statistics.
- 3rd consecutive defeat in the Pataudi Trophy.
- First ever series in which India have lost by a 2 Test margin after leading.
- First time since Queens Park Oval and Sabina Park in 1988-89 that India have played two consecutive Tests in which each batsman had the opportunity to bat twice in a Test, and only 1 out of 22 passed 50 in both Tests. Before that series in West Indies, it happened to India against Ian Botham at Brabourne Stadium (Gavaskar made 49, nobody reached 50) and then against Dennis Lillee at Sydney (Sandeep Patil retired hurt on 65 in 78 balls). The last time it happened in two consecutive Tests in India was against Tony Greig's team in 1976-77. Brijesh Patel made 56 at Eden Gardens. Nobody crossed 50 in the next Test at Chepauk.
Perhaps at this point, our journalist decides that she should ask him what India did to recover from those embarrassments. Because India did recover. Some priceless perspective - something no other journalist is doing - would be within reach.
Actually, our journalist is unlikely to ask, or even to report that third statistic. The expected response when "Team embarrasses country: Gavaskar" flashes across one's twitter feed is to echo and amplify. Is it not inevitable then, that the entire multi-crore rupee cricket media industry takes recourse to ridiculous mind-reading when discussing players. "They're waiting for this series to be over", "They don't want to put up a fight". How else does one rationalize one's outrage other than by questioning the motives of others?
It would be one thing if a reporter wrote "A player told me that he was waiting for the series to be over". Or, that "A player told me that he didn't really care about this Test since he knew India weren't good enough". Or even, "I was sitting in a restaurant and I overheard player X telling player Y that they couldn't wait for this series to be over. Then they discussed.....". That would be actual reporting. That would be useful. That wouldn't be mind reading. But the third, especially, would be impossible due to the leverage (withholding access) cricketers have over exclusively cricket media people.
I think what happened at Old Trafford and The Oval was, as Gavaskar once explained the 42 all out at Lord's in 1974, the five Indian batsmen made five mistakes early in their innings and lost their wicket every time. The rest were not equipped to survive in these conditions against fresh bowlers and a newish ball. It can happen to batting sides. It happened to England at Sydney earlier this year. It happened repeatedly to Australia in India in 2013. This kind of run is unlikely to repeat itself. History suggests, as I have shown, that it happens maybe once every 10 years to India. If this kind of batting does become a routine thing, everybody from Ian Chappell to Sunil Gavaskar to Sachin Tendulkar to Rahul Dravid will have misread the ability and skill of Virat Kohli, Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane. Whatever else one may think of these people, they can read batsmen.
What is far more worrying from the cricketing point of view is that India's bowlers did not last 5 Test matches. Apart from one innings at Lord's when England inexplicably hooked their way to defeat in one mad hour after lunch on the 5th day, they've never looked like bowling the hosts out. The last 4 batsmen in England's line up produced 22 runs per dismissal. This is as rare as India going two full Tests with no more than 1 half century in each. And this, against an English batting in disarray. Like India, England have had one unconvincing opener and one good one (Alastair Cook is a different class of batsman compared to Murali Vijay, but his recent form has been poor). They've had a middle order made up of Joe Root, Ian Bell and Gary Ballance. This failure from the fast bowling is likely to repeat itself. The last time India had a plausible Test match bowling attack overseas was in 2010-11 in South Africa (and that too, only when Zaheer Khan played).
India lost this series after leading, to a bad English side with a superb new ball pair on wicket tailor made for them. Its a measure of how good or bad India are right now. Beyond that, I don't really care about nonsense like "humiliation" or "embarrassment".