Pyaasa

Since 26/11, it hasn’t felt appropriate to change the topic to something other than the Mumbai attacks. Sachin’s century at Chepauk has given me permission to do just that.

This test match was always about more the cricket. For England to have shown the gumption to come out and play, for Strauss and Collingwood to play gritty career defining knocks, for Sachin Tendulkar to lead India on a record breaking run-chase, bringing up his century and the winning runs with the same shot, and for Sachin to have the grace and presence of mind to dedicate his century to the victims of the Mumbai attacks...

I'm just grateful that my favourite game can produce such a moment. The best piece I came across on this test match being about more than cricket was by Peter Roebuck in Cricinfo.

Yet, as a long-suffering India cricket fan, this win is special to me in just simple cricketing terms. This tickles the same spot as watching Ishant Sharma dominate Ricky Ponting at the WACA; it slakes a thirst that has been building up for decades.

Great teams chase down big targets. Bradman’s Invincibles chased down 403 at Headingley in 1948, to secure the Ashes and their status as the Invincibles. Steve Waugh’s Aussies chased down 369 in Sydney, 1999, after being 5 for 126, against a Pakistan attack that included Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, Shoaib Akthar and Saqlain Mushtaq. Clive Lloyd’s Windies had their own great chase when Gordon Greenidge made mockery of David Gower’s declaration at Lord's in 1984 by chasing down 342 at a rate of over 5 an over while losing just one wicket. These wins matter more than others; they take on a talismanic quality, keeping the possibility of victory alive in a team’s imagination even in the worst situation.

India, Saurav’s India, had a talismanic win in Kolkata, 2001. But this win felt different from a triumphal march through a fourth innings chase. It was built around Rahul and VVS gritting out for survival in the third innings, with Harbhajan coming in to deliver the kill. Strangely, despite being a team built around a wealth of batting talent, India’s fourth innings performances have been appalling.

Think back to the inexplicable collapse to Shahid Afridi in Bangalore, 2005, needing to bat out a day to win the series. All out for 100 to the mesmerizing spin of Shaun Udal in Mumbai, 2006, again needing to bat out a day to win the series. Or losing three wickets in five balls to Michael Clarke in Sydney, 2008.

Going back a bit, remember the collapse in Barbados, 1997, when faced with the opportunity to be the first team in two generations to dethrone the Windies at home? Or falling achingly short of the mark against Akram’s Pakis in Chennai, 1999, in an ill-tempered and tightly fought series. Even the famous tied test against the Aussies in Chennai, 1987, was a game India should have won in a canter.

India have also generally made heavy weather of small fourth innings targets, even if we did go on to win. It came down to Sameer Dighe and Harbhajan Singh to hold their nerve and chase down 155 in Chennai, 2001. Chasing 233 to win in Adelaide, 2004, was a nervy affair that could have gone either way.

Those ghosts have now been exorcised.

What else would I have wished for in this game? For Rohit Sharma, S Badrinath, Virat Kohli, Robin Uthappa, Suresh Raina, M Vijay and Shikar Dhawan to have been sitting in the dressing room, absorbing the atmosphere, drinking in the subliminal belief that this is how India bats when it really counts.

Seeing the ball like a football

Cricket fans know that a batsman who has spent a lot of time at the crease is hard to dismiss, because he is “seeing the ball like a football”. A batsman who is new to the crease is always easier to dismiss. He struggles to sight the ball.

This is true regardless of the quality of the light. A batsman who is in can bat on comfortably through the gathering caliginosity, while a new man at the crease struggles to sight the ball even in glorious sunshine. This has always been true, something cricketers accept as natural.

The mechanism that makes this natural just became apparent me, from this article by Atul Gawande.

Gawande’s piece is about an emerging scientific understanding about the nature of perception. The new realization: perception is mostly memory. The inputs coming in from the senses are thin/ low fidelity/ low resolution/ highly pixellated compared to the richness with which the brain experiences the sensory input. The mind fills in the blanks.

Our centuries long assumption has been that the sensory data we receive from our eyes, ears, nose, fingers and so on contain all the information we need for perception…Yet, as scientists set about analyzing the sensory signals, they found them to be radically impoverished…The mind fills in most of the picture...Richard Gregory, a British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety percent memory and less than ten percent sensory nerve signals…

Gawande’s article talks a lot about phantom limbs, and intense itches felt on injured tissues which have no nerve endings. These extreme examples are useful because they make a powerful argument; perception of a phantom limb can’t be determined by objective sensory experience, because there is no sensory experience. But to me, this theory is more interesting because of the light it sheds on everyday experiences.

A batsman who is in is literally seeing the ball better than a batsman who has just come to the wicket. His memory has more readily accessible images of the moving ball. He is therefore better able to make meaning of the sketchy data that his eyes pick up.

This is the reason it is hard to listen to an unfamiliar genre of music. The mind simply doesn’t have enough stuff in memory to fill in the blanks and enrich the music.

This is the reason it is hard to drive on unfamiliar roads. The driver literally sees less of the road. The eyes pick up the same volume of information as on a familiar road. But the mind doesn’t have a stock of memories with which to enrich the image.

This is the reason I enjoy watching cricket on TV more than I enjoy watching football. My mind has a bigger bank of cricket memories to draw on, simply because I have watched more cricket over the years.

There is an elaborate academic literature on how Caucasian-Americans are not very good at recognizing Blacks, and to a slightly lesser extent, how Blacks are not very good at recognizing whites. This has sometimes been interpreted as racism, but sheer lack of familiarity seems a simpler and less incendiary explanation. Interestingly, the effects are smaller in racially integrated schools and among children who live in integrated neighbourhoods.

This might also be the reason for the cognitive biases that Greg Pye's blog (and Kahneman and Taversky), keep talking about. The confirmatory bias happens because people, literally, don’t see evidence which goes against their prior beliefs without making a pretty substantial effort.

Gunther, Mother Cricket and Ice Bath Buddies

It's quite rare for a cricket fan like me, who has been following the game avidly since childhood with an avidity a clinical psychotherapist might worry about, to come across interestingly unfamiliar cricketing words or concepts. This English summer I encountered three. Let's celebrate these three concepts before the hopefully-not-too-emotionally-wrenching India-Australia test series gets underway.

Gunther: "Gunther is a guy who lives in the mountains and doesn't get enough oxygen to the brain and that makes him crazy. As soon as I get thrown the ball, its like a little switch goes in my head. Gunther takes over."

This is Springbok speedster Andre Nel on what happens when he is bowling. Compare that to a typical quote from an English quickie like Ryan Sidebottom, "Hopefully, I'll get the ball in the right areas." Or Mohammad Azharuddin's immortal words, "Well, the boys played very well."

In this age of anodyne political correctness, god bless Gunther.

Mother cricket: "It's amazing. There's a lady up there called Mother Cricket, who doesn't sleep...".

This is South African coach Mickey Arthur, giving credit where it is due, when Michael Vaughan was publicly humiliated for claiming a bump-catch after being morally indignant about AB de Villiers claiming a similar catch that same morning. Was Mother Cricket also behind Jimmy Andersen getting hit on the helmet by Dale Steyn after knocking out Daniel Flynn's tooth?

Cricket does lend itself well to the notion of karma. Maybe Mother Cricket is the sociological reason why cricket is so big in the sub-continent.

Ice bath buddy: Cricket-warriors were introduced on Sky Sports with a little box of fun-facts during the English Twenty20 tournament. This is a marketing tactic I like: any sport is a lot more fun if the viewer knows the player's back-stories. Sky Sport's fun-facts included favourite TV Show (mostly Top Gear), favourite music group, and most intriguingly, ice bath buddy.

Apparently, Duncan Fletcher insisted that all England fast bowlers immerse themselves in an ice-bath straight after stumps, to prevent injury. County dressing rooms were not designed with these sophisticated medical practices in mind. So fast bowlers, like Harmy and Hoggy, had to share ice-baths. The practice has endured into Peter Moore's reign. And so "ice bath buddy" is now county circuit lingo for best friend.

Some of the old guard are mocking this trend. David Lloyd, the former England coach and now Sky Sports commentator, would rather share an ice bath with Beyonce than some "hairy bloke".

Not sure if planting the mental image Ravi Bopara and Samit Patel, or for that matter, David Lloyd and Beyonce, frolicking together in tubs full of ice makes the game more or less appealing. Time will tell.

The Point of County Cricket

Here is Christopher Martin-Jenkins on the eve of a gripping finale to the county cricket season:

...county cricket... fulfil its primary function, the production of a sufficient supply of tough England cricketers for the rigours of the international circuit...

What?

Surely the point of playing county cricket is to win the county championship. At least 90% of the England qualified players competing for the championship have no real chance of playing for England. If nobody cares about winning the championship, not even CMJ, its not surprising that the county scene has "greater issues".

What really got me was that this was not CMJ's main point. It was a point made in the passing. In CMJ's mind, county cricket being nothing more than a talent screening service for international cricket is an unremarkable truism.

Unfortunately, what CMJ thinks is usually a good reflection of what the ECB establishment thinks. They seem to have learnt the wrong lesson from the BCCI's success and concluded that the point of cricket is to promote national pride through international success.

The point of the English Premiership is not to produce England internationals. The point of the ATP Tour is not to produce Davis Cup heroes. The point of the IPL is not to produce Indian internationals. These contests are worthwhile as ends in themselves. Players push themselves to the limit because they care about winning. That intensity of effort, that edge, is what produces the drama which brings in the fans. National flags don't need to be flying for sport to fascinate.

And what terrible timing to be damning the county game with faint praise.

I'm thoroughly enjoying the finale to this season's championships. Notts, the team I support, are in the race. Notts' victory march has just been checked by Imran Tahir, an exciting young leggie from Natal. I'm clicking into Cricinfo between meetings to check the latest scores on Notts v. Hampshire, Somerset v. Lancashire and Durham v Kent. Sky Sports are covering the Notts game live. Exactly what the guys responsible for marketing county cricket should have been praying for.

Anybody want to swap Mark Mascarenhas for CMJ?

Adam Smith and the Mystery of Mushie

I finally discovered why Mushtaq Ahmed, the Pakistani leg spinner, was so much more successful bowling for Sussex than any other team. Angus Fraser writes:

"When Sussex signed him for the 2003 season not even the club expected him to have such an impact. His initial deal was on a modest basic salary with huge bonuses for taking wickets. The contract worked. Mushtaq claimed five 10-wicket hauls to become the first bowler in five years to take 100 county championship wickets in a season, and Sussex's 164-year wait for the county championship ended."

The power of incentives. Angus goes on:

"It is a mystery why such a fine bowler failed to have similar success in Test cricket."

Was the Pakistan Cricket Board enlightened enough to offer Mushtaq steeply sloped incentives linked to an objective measure of performance? No. It is stunningly unsurprising that Mushtaq bowled with more heart for Sussex than for Pakistan.

A more serious point: the incentives need to matter at a visceral level. At a cognitive level, every player always wants to win. The bones don't always agree. South Africa are playing like their bones packed up and went home home after the Edgbaston test.

And the point was?

Having lived through the tumult of the Beijing Olympics through the last two weeks, today is a good day to step back and reflect on what the Olympics are about. Or more generally, what sport is about.

Rohit Brijnath kicked off the Olympics with this piece about Natalie du Toit, the South African swimmer and flag bearer at the opening ceremony. She lost a leg in a motor accident in 2001. At Beijing she swam the 10km open race; not a special event for disabled people, she swam the main event.

Simon Barnes experienced the Olympics in a three level hierarchy of partisanship, drama, and greatness. To Barnes, observing the greatness of a Michael Phelps, Yelena Isinbayeva or Usian Bolt is the high point of the Olympics.

Ed Smith, who played test cricket for England and is now captain of Middlesex CCC, had the most interesting and querulous take on the Olympics. Having paid due homage to the record British gold medal haul, he goes on to observe:

“The proof about whether these Olympics have witnessed a true British sporting renaissance will come later, as we watch whether there is any trickle-down effect. Elite sport should inspire new fans to play games themselves. Among the greatest legacies a sportsman can leave is to inspire people to take up and express themselves at sport.

The strongest (though rarely articulated) argument for playing sport is that competitive games, especially team sports, can work against a smallness of spirit. I believe that sport's elevating quality should be available to as many young people as possible.”

This is a natural thought for a cricketer, a game which is inseparable from its roots.

Greatness is not just in the metronomic accuracy of Glenn McGrath, bowling in an Ashes match at Lord’s. It is in hundreds of club bowlers in the Melbourne cricket league, who may be tiling roofs weekdays, trying to emulate McGrath, reaching within, and finding depths they had never dreamt of. The spirit of Sunil Gavaskar was forged in the play-hard-but-fair ethos of the Dadar Union playing Kanga league cricket. The spirit of West Indian cricket comes from clubs like Shannon in Trinidad waging pitched battles waged on the Queen’s park Savannah.

This goes beyond cricket.

The greatness of Bjorn Borg was amplified many times over by the Swedish children inspired to hit tennis balls against their garage doors. The spirit of Diego Maradona is in the flair with which hundreds of pick-up games are played in the slums of Buenos Aires. The spirit of Vishy Anand is in the ferocity with which schoolboys in Madras play chess, with a pencil sharpener subbing for a rook.

I like this lens Ed Smith is using. Are the Olympics a vehicle for expressing of the worst sort of jingoistic nationalism? Are they just a synthetic made-for-TV corporate event? Or, do the Olympics really kindle a flame within millions of real people around the world?

When I’m out by the river Trent or the Thames in the summer, I see dozens of amateur rowers on the water. It’s a wonderful sight, and a lot of credit should be given to the Olympian efforts of Sir Steven Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent. They do seem to have kindled flames within regular people. The marathon, the 100m dash, javelin or discus throw – events that evoke the ancient games - are more resonant at the Olympics than anywhere else.

But synchronized swimming? Modern pentathlon? 16 gold medals in canoeing and kayaking? Do any real people play these games, or do I just not know the right people? A baseball tournament that matters less than any Yankees – Red Sox game? A tennis tournament that matters less than any grand slam? A pale shadow of World Cup football? Maybe this would matter more if it were kept simple.

And back home in India, yes, we are the world’s worst Olympic team. It's OK. Let's laugh at ourselves. Let's drop the bristling nationalism; it is the worst emotion the Olympics could inspire.

And when we are rich enough to promote sports in India, let us invest in sports that millons of real people could take part in and love - like football - rather than in some obscure targeted speciality event that might win us the notional glory of an Olympic medal.

Did Disney Invent Happiness?

Just attended a class at work on how to be a better coach. My employer wants to make sure younger analysts get really good at writing code for regression models and making snappy presentations to management. This class led to my thinking: Walt Disney deserves more credit than he generally gets for humanity's increasing happiness.

Where am I coming from? Or, what am I smoking?

The truism that effective coaching hinges on is that positive visualization works. Asking the coachee to avoid the silly stuff is counter productive. "Don't spill the milk" puts an image of spilt milk in the coachee's mind. The psyche is very good at taking these mental images and making them come true. So the injunction "don't spill the milk" almost inevitably leads to spilt milk, despite positive intent all around.

In cricketing terms, a good coach doesn't say "don't fish outside the off stump". That inevitably results in more slip catches. A good coach says "hit through the line". He wants the batter to have a vivid mental image of good batting.

John Wright, India's cricket coach in the early 2000s, was brilliant at this. Rahul Dravid is one of India's most gifted but psychologically weak batters (Rahul thinks too much?). Wright compiled a video montage of Rahul Dravid batting at his best, and made Rahul watch it before he went out to bat, most famously in Australia in 2004.

Ravi Bopara has a similar take on why winning is a habit in today's cricinfo.

"It makes a big difference to how you play when your team is winning. Then as a player you think less about it. You have that mentality that you are going to win every time you walk out. So you can go out and express yourself..."

The same process plays out in more important contexts than management presentations, drinking milk or hitting cricket balls.

Dr. Eric Berne, a psychotherapist who became famous for Transactional Analysis (TA), later developed TA into a more complete concept he called life scripts.

Dr. Berne's simple idea was that people passively and unconsciously internalize stories about the way their lives will play out, often when they are young or vulnerable, and spend their entire lives fulfilling that script. People who carry a visual, visceral sense of their own life-story featuring themselves as winners tend to be winners, in whatever sphere. Equally, negative life stories are self-fulfilling, even when (or maybe especially when) they are subliminal. Tragedies waiting to happen. This is interesting to a clinical psychologist because re-writing that subliminal script might change people's destiny.

Miguel Sabido is a Mexican film maker who tries to use soap operas, telenovellas, to re-program whole societies towards better lives. Here is the New Yorker's take on Sabido. It includes a thrilling passage on how The Bold And The Beautiful helped change attitudes to AIDS in Botswana.

These aren't new ideas. Religion is embedded within mythology for precisely this reason.

So, coming back to Disney. Generations of children have watched avidly, in a semi-hypnotic state, while princesses marry handsome princes, children go on adventures and return to their loving parents, and baddies get punished. No irony, no moral ambiguity, no confusion. Result = children programmed to live happy lives.

Would the world be materially different if Disney hadn't given happy endings to the gruesome Hans Christian Andersen or Grimm brother's versions of the same fairy tales? Yeah, I think so. Thank you Walt.

Tired cricketers?

The new news from the Asia Cup has been about players being too tired to give 100%.

The players have a point. Back-to-back 50 over games in Karachi in June is insane. The media has a point. There is too much international cricket. And some of the scheduling is just incompetent.

What is not being discussed is a credible way out of this mess. There will be no mystic return-to-innocence of less cricket. More cricket means more money. That is good. The real solution is to find techniques that allow players to remain fresh despite the intense year-round schedule.

A simple technique we could import from baseball is rotation. It is unthinkable that New York Yankees starting pitcher would pitch two games in a row, even in the World Series. Why should Ishant Sharma or RP Singh risk career limiting injuries by opening the bowling two days in a row?

Pick a squad of 25. Make sure the fast bowlers and the batters who have played long innings get a rest between games. Cricket's stars deserve careers like Sachin Tendulkar or Shane Warne. We don't want them to retire at 25 like a Justine Henin.

Test cricket. Live at the ground

Five thoughts after a day watching test cricket at Trent Bridge:

1. The thonchk sound of bat hitting ball. That sound just doesn't come through on TV

2. The new TV screen at Trent Bridge is fantastic. Watching from a stand 150 meters from the screen, the picture quality is as good as on TV at home. They do show the key moments on screen. Makes the classic (expensive) seats over the top of the bowler's arm less relevant, really

3. They market special radios on the ground that pick up Sky Sports' TV commentary. They ought to also market special internet devices that pick up The Guardian's OBO coverage

4. The English start drinking at 11:00 am and drink continuously till stumps at 6:30. Men and women, white haired gentlemen in blazers and yobs in tattoos...they all sustain this rate of consumption. It is an amazing physical achievement. Even more amazing, Britain is ranked only 15th in European league tables for alcohol consumption per capita

5. Monty Panesar does a cool wave to the crowd. His back is towards the crowd, but he acknowledges the "Monty, give us a wave" calls by transferring his weight on to one leg, pivoting his hands at about waist height, shrugging a shoulder and just glancing back for a split second

IPL payments and CEOs

The winners of the IPL will earn $1.5MM. Works out to $75K for each player if there are 20 in the squad.

Sure, $75k is nothing to sneeze at. Unless you’ve been paid $500K to just show up and take part. The incentives aren’t sloped steeply enough. It is creditable that the stars are playing hard despite the relatively small prize.

For the true geeks reading this post…the formula that describes optimal effort in a tournament is (w1 – w2) = g(0)*c’(e). (w1 – w2) represents the increase in wealth due to winning. g(0) is a measure of how much randomness effects winning. c'(e) is a measure of effort. This formula is lifted from a seminal 1981 paper by Sherwin Rosen and Edward Lazear. If you really want to get under the skin of the formula, you can download the paper from jstor for $14.

The intuitive part of the result is that people work harder to win if the rewards of winning are greater. The fascinating part of this result is that the rewards for winning need to be greater in games with more randomness to extract the same effort. If you can win through pure luck, you’re less likely to work hard to win. So the reward needs to be bigger to get the same hard work.

This Sherwin Rosen paper - and the vast body of secondary research that his paper spawned - is often used to understand why CEOs get paid so much. Everybody in an organization works hard to become the CEO because the reward is so big. That hard work is what creates value for the organization, or for society, which is good. The reward goes to one CEO, one individual who basically got lucky, which feels unfair. Horrible dilemma. The only way to square this circle seems to be to design games with less randomness.

Fundas on the IPL

In the cacophony of media hype about the IPL and Twenty20 cricket, one crucial point almost everybody seems to have forgotten: this is not a new idea.

The only interesting media piece so far which sets Twenty20 in historical perspective is here.

Admittedly, the fact that test cricket was invented by an upper-class MCC establishment trying to defend its power base when challenged by a professional league playing an exciting, abbreviated version of the game is news even to a die-hard and relatively well read cricket fan like me. Hope the facts are right.

Another bit of historical perspective is from CLR James in Beyond the Boundary. He watches Learie Constantine playing limited overs cricket in Lancashire in the 1950s, notes that the game is both pure and innovative, and calls it the future.

The other bit of nonsense that keeps cropping up is that Twenty20 is a batsman's game. Cricket has always been a batsman's game. Arthur Mailey, the Australian leggie from the 1920s, noted that "the last bowler to be knighted was Sir Francis Drake".

There is a clear role reversal for bowlers in tests and limited overs. In tests, the bowlers are the attack. In limited overs they play defence. But in that, Twenty20 isn't really different from 50 over cricket. There are silly features like shorter boundaries that can be scrapped, but that doesn't really change the big picture.

My initial worry with the IPL was that the stars would take their money and play in cruise control mode. That worry was unfounded. Now that the top players are showing up to work, we have a great tournament on our hands.

CMJ on IPL

Christopher Martin Jenkins writing in Cricinfo magazine on the opening game of the IPL in Bangalore:

local interest was spurious, because they were watching a game between sides made up of mercenaries and little-known youths.

When Bangalore cheers for Mark Boucher, the sportsman becomes a mercenary and the interest spurious. Manchester United supporters cheering for Christiano Ronaldo if fine. Did CMJ ever describe Mushtaq Ahmed as a mercenary, or Sussex supporter's interest as spurious, when Mushy bowled Sussex to the county championship?

The English cricket establishment's sniffy insecurity when confronted with the success of Indian cricket is downright embarrassing. It starts getting nasty when the sniffiness results in ECB bureaucrats elbowing professional cricketers away from a decent chance to make good money.

Safe in the warm after glow of victory...a gentleman's agreement?

Of all the daft things that have surfaced in this India-Australia series, the daftest has to be the gentleman's agreement between the captains about taking the fielder's word on catches. Kumble should have figured out that the agreement would break down at the pivotal moment when a catch made a vital difference. That’s exactly what happened. It’s common sense.

And if this were about the mythic spirit of cricket, why should a gentleman’s agreement be limited to claiming catches? Why not nicks? One can't blame umpire Benson for asking Ponting if Michael Clarke's catch was clean. That is what the captains had agreed to.

Kumble was naive (or gullible) to have agreed to Ponting's proposal. Jayawardene, one of the most gentlemanly modern players, was smart enough to turn down the same proposal.

The more interesting question is around why Ponting is proposing this agreement. It feels out of character. He has also made his team sign up to a spirit of cricket pledge. Which, in addition to feeling out of character, is bureaucratic and suggests Ponting does not understand that spirit describes what can't be codified.

What's going on here? Is Ponting trying to capture a special place cricket's pantheon that his gracelessness on the field just doesn't support?

Ronting's Australians are the easily the least loved champions in the history of cricket. Just think back to the reverence Clive Lloyd's West Indians inspired to get that into perspective. One of the defining memories of Ponting will be his spontaneous and passionate swearing after being run out by Gary Pratt at Trent Bridge in the 2005 Ashes. The day after the Sydney test, the BBC quoted a poll which showed 82% of Aussie cricket fans rating Ponting a bad captain, despite having delivered 16 wins on the trot. Does this lack of respect hurt prickly little Ponting?

The comparison that hurts Ponting most is with Steve Waugh. Like Ponting, Steve Waugh inherited a great team. Like Ponting, Steve Waugh played to win: his most important contribution to cricket's lexicon was the "mental disintegration" which did not happen to Saurav Ganguly. But Steve could take the Aussie team to lay a wreath at the ANZAC memorial at Gallipolli and look authentic. He raises money for Udayan, a charity for the children of lepers, without provoking a snigger. He won a special place in my heart when we spoke of how cricket would be poorer with Zimbabwe, deprived of quality players like Neil Johnson (one of my obscure personal favourites). Steve Waugh didn't do spin. He meant what he said. He cared. It showed. The gravitas came naturally.

Waugh's nicknames are Tugga and Iceman. Ponting's nickname is Punter. Maybe Ponting fears that he is destined to be a Miandad...snapping away in the shadows the the Imran like figures - Border, Taylor, Waugh - who came before him. Maybe an Indian captain can sense that insecurity, and twist a dagger into that chink in the armour, and engineer a "mental disintegration" at Adelaide that would make even Steve Waugh cringe.

Hope springs eternal :)

Betfair on Perth

Established behavioural economics finding: people are willing to pay more for insurance against death caused by an airplane accident than for insurance against death by any cause. Clearly death caused by an airplane accident is a subset of death by any cause. But when thought of a dramatic cause of death like an airplane accident is planted in the mind, the imagination takes over and makes that cause feel more real, tangible and likely than it actually is.

I have a hunch the same cognitive bias is happening on Betfair in assessing the odds of an Australian victory at Perth. Betfair thinks the likelihood that Australia will win is ~30%.

The point is: it is easy to imagine the Australian batsmen playing out of their skins to steal a memorable win. I remember Ponting's innings in the 2003 World Cup final, Gilcrist's innings in the 2007 World Cup final, Symond's innings in the first innings at Sydney...it's easy to imagine something like that happening again. The sheer ease of imagining another breathtaking, match winning performance from Australia might make the market over-estimate the odds of an Australian win.

What is critical is that India channel their imaginations into just putting the ball in the right areas and holding their catches. Think about nothing else. That's the action which will make the odds on India shorten.

BTW...writing this post hasn't quite given me the courage to go and bet on India. Not yet, anyway.

Perth

On the eve of the fourth day's play in the Perth test, I'm way too excited to sleep. 8 wickets to win. Five of those wickets need to be Ponting, Hussey, Clarke, Symonds and Gilcrist.

India are too close to not hope. And Australia have pulled off the impossible too many times (three wickets in five balls?) for me to let myself hope.

If I can't take the pressure 10000 miles away, how are the team coping? The good ones, the ones who've been around a while - Kumble, Sachin, Rahul, Saurav, Laxman, even Dhoni - they'd be immersing themselves in rituals. Sportsmen are called superstitious, but more accurately, they are ritualistic. The regimen anchors the spirit. Keeps the butterflies and demons from taking over. The same thing works on the field..adjusting the top of the pad, tapping the bat to the ground while taking guard, bouncing the tennis ball before serving...they work the same way. They help focus the spirit and mind on the task at hand.

It's harder for the less experienced players to stay calm because their regimen/ rituals are less well established. It's hardest on us watchers; we don't have rituals to anchor us or any task at hand to focus on.

In praise of Kumar Sangakarra

Kumar Sangakarra, the spiritual heir of David Gower, Mark Waugh and VVS Laxman, is playing out of his skin. Still at the crease. 128 not out.

I'm not calling this the inning of a lifetime because I still hope that Sangakarra can play an innings like this in a winning cause. Looks like his class and courage can't hold off the baying pack of Aussie bowlers. Sri Lanka have slumped from an overnight 263-3 to 272-6 between the time I resolved to write this post and right now, with Lanka need to bat out the fifth day to save the Hobart test.

Still, as long as India are not playing, I don't mind at all if cricket ki jeet hui.

Cultural learnings of Eng-a-land for make benefit glorious nation of Hindustan

How did England's cricket captain Paul Collingwood meet his wife?

Here's how he describes the moment in his own words:

"I was at the bar getting the beers in and she was standing about ten yeards away with her friends. I shouted over 'Oi', which wasn't a very good pick up line. She looked around and I thought 'She's lovely'. So I said 'Come here, like' and she started walking over. She said 'Yes?' and I panicked because I didn't expect her to come over. I said 'I don't know what to say.' And that was that. I guess that is one way of breaking the ice."

Duncan Fletcher. How could he?

Duncan Fletcher is violating one of the sacred codes in cricket. He has published a mean spirited kiss-and-tell memoir about his time as the England coach. With nasty digs about Flintoff's drinking. And about how the England dressing room hates Ian Botham.

He can't do this. What goes in the dressing room must stay the dressing room. For the coach to do this is appalling. That too, the same coach who made a huge deal of the team sticking up for each other in public.

The tragedy is that this sort of thing can be done nicely and constructively. My best insight into the England dressing room is from Ed Smith's On and Off the Field. Ed wrote respectfully and with rare insight about his colleagues. I doubt if any of his team mates minded the way they were shown in Ed's book. And he brought a hard-core fan like me even closer to the game.

Fletcher is spoiling the game for everybody by not exercising enough judgment on what not to say. Ever team meeting now has to be held in the shadow of a potential media sell-out. And the game will be poorer for it.

The spirit of cricket

Extract from the cricinfo story about today's ODI between India and Australia: "With Kartik bowling and the ball spinning away from the right-handers, it was pretty hard to score boundaries," Ponting said. "I spoke to Hodge later and he said he thought Kartik bowled very well. You have to give credit where credit's due."

Ricky Ponting found it in his heart to praise the opposition? And he picked Murali Kartik - one of my favourite India players - to praise? There still is hope in this world.

As captain of the world's best team, Ponting has to set the bar for on-field behaviour. He has been doing a terrible job so far, and the game as a whole is poorer for it. Hopefully Ponting can find the middle ground of being graceful and playing hard.

Kismat

The Twenty20 finals. It came down to kismat. To a simple twist of fate.

India felt like the team of destiny through this tournament. When is it destiny? And when is it just dumb luck?