The days of great bowlers are almost over. The leggies, Shane Warne and Anil Kumble, have retired. The two-some of Waquar Yunus and Wasim Akram have gone sometimes back, so is the Glenn McGrath – and Brett Lee is also on way out. Shoaib Akhtar simply faded away fighting and quarrelling with his country’s Board and Muralitharan is on the verge of giving up. The fearsome quartet of the West Indies have become a part of history.
There is no bowler left anywhere in the world who is likely to approach 500 or even 400 wickets in Test in next couple of years, not to speak in the One-Day International and Twenty20. This is notwithstanding the fact that more cricket is being played today than ever before. It is not that Dale Steyn, Harbhajan Singh, Zaheer Khan, Mohammad Asif, Mohammad Amir, Johnson, Ajantha Mendis, Anderson etc have no talent. But they are no way near the record of those who have just left cricket.
All this is happening when batsman after batsman are breaking world record. In the first ten years of Test and ODI in this 21st century almost all the records have been broken. Batsmen have scored 375, 380 and 400 runs (Lara holds the record of first and third and Hayden of second), West Indies have chased in the fourth innings 418 to win a Test match, South Africa have scored 438 against Australia, which scored 434 in 50 overs. The highest partnership for any wicket 586 and then again 624, both by Sri Lanka, all came up in the last one decade or so. Every day batting record is being broken but the bowlers are getting mauled all over the ground.
There is a huge army of batsmen with more than 20 centuries, and even crossing the mark of 30 centuries is no big deal. Tendulkar has scored 44 and Ponting is not far behind, approaching 40.
All the great bowlers mentioned above are 20 century species – some played in the early years of the 21st century too. In the 21st century the world is producing more class batsmen than quality bowlers – or they pale into insignificance because of the onslaught by the former. We have wicket-keepers as world class batsmen like Kumar Sanghakara, Mahendra Singh Dhoni and now retired Adam Gilchrist. Even the bowlers are expected to make a few runs.
Take out the list of the Man of the Match award winners in all three versions of the game and you would find that players who have excelled with the bat are getting it most of the time in the recent time.
This gradual shift needs to be studied closely. The game of cricket is no more of feudal lords; it has become the first choice of the corporate bosses. What is different is that where the feudal lords failed the capitalists succeeded. The role of money has completely changed the nature of the game. As cricket was always a batsman game, spectators go to watch number of fours and sixes hit in the match rather than see how the wickets fall. They know that it is a natural process of the game, therefore, not much credit is being given to the bowlers.
If the history of the game of Gentlemen is traced, one will find something very interesting. In the 19th and early 20th centuries there were two types of cricketers: amateurs and professionals. While amateurs consider sport a kind of leisure and would play for pleasure and fun and not for money, the professionals used to play for money.
There was not enough money in cricket then for the aristocrats to be interested in. The wages of professionals were paid by patronage or subscription or gate money from the matches.
In those days cricket was a summer game in England. Most professionals worked as miners or in other forms of working class. So there was a social superiority of amateurs and they were called Gentlemen while professionals had to be content with being described as players. They even entered the ground from different entrances.
One just need not go to know these facts from any cricketing encyclopaedia. Even in Class-IX CBSE History book (India and the Contemporary World-I) one can get a brief mention of these facts.
It says that amateurs tended to be batsmen, leaving the energetic, hard-working aspects of the game, like fast bowling, to the professionals. That is why partly the laws of the game always give the benefit of doubt to the batsman. The rules were made to favour Gentlemen, who did most of the batting. It is due to this social superiority that the amateur was always chosen as captain of a team. It was not so because batsmen were naturally better captains, but because they were generally Gentlemen, who were always amateurs. It was not till 1930s that the English Test team was led by a professional, the Yorkshire batsman, Len Hutton, who scored the highest run 364 in a Test match before Gary Sobers of West Indies beat it in 1958.
In the second half of the 20th century cricket became somewhat a common man’s game with bowlers gradually acquiring respectability. But then entered the corporate sector. They slowly started mending the rules to suit more and more batsmen in all versions of the game. The 30-yard restrictions on fielders, introduction of power-play, change in the LBW rules, declaring ball wide in ODI if bowled on the leg-stumps were all anti-bowler rules.
The capitalists used a very subtle way to fulfil their own agenda. One-dayers and Twenty20 started replacing the five-day Test matches. The argument was that five days are too long for a developed country to waste for match. People welcomed the move. But then gradually the number of One-dayers and Twenty-20 matches multiplied manifold. Now the number of days a team spent annually on ODIs and Twenty20s are much more than the Test matches. Unlike the Test matches, which a few people used to watch, the One-Dayers and Twenty20s were made national addiction. They take to ransom the whole country for days together.
The day-night version is a cruel joke on the energy starved people of poor country like India. While it requires displacement of millions of people, enormous amount of money and pollution in environment to produce electricity, the precious energy is wasted in playing cricket matches and not for the education of children or irrigation of farmland. The poor players, otherwise respected and admired by countrymen, are now auctioned like animals by liquor-barons, film-stars and mafia under the very attractive and innocuous slogan of Indian Premier League. And the capitalists laugh all the way to banks with more fantastic ideas to befool the people in the days and years to come.