Eye on India: Ian Botham needs to check the facts before criticising Indian Test cricket

In this week's Eye on India column, Dileep Premachandran puts Ian Botham in his place over comments made by the English cricket legend regarding Indian Test cricket.

Ian Botham has criticised the state of Test cricket in India but his comments are not based on fact. Gareth Copley / Getty Images

“I am disappointed with Indian cricket right now,” said Ian Botham on the sidelines of the Laureus World Sports Awards.

“Cricket is more than just a 20-over game, they need to understand that. England’s contests with India always used to excite me but right now, I don’t know what to say.

“Where is India going in Test cricket? Why is it happening to the team? Is it saturation of Twenty20? India needs to figure out.”

Those are interesting questions, but anyone that lives outside the English-summer bubble could tell you that Indian Test cricket has made significant strides in the past 18 months. They lost 2-0 in Australia at the end of 2014, but drew the games in Melbourne and Sydney.

The defeats, in Adelaide and Brisbane, were by 48 runs and four wickets — hardly margins indicative of a huge gulf in class.

On their last tour of Australia, England were routed 5-0. India followed up that series in Australia with a come-from-behind 2-1 victory in Sri Lanka, and a 3-0 home thrashing of South Africa.

The pitches in Mohali and Nagpur may have come in for plenty of criticism, but India won the decisive passages of play and shut down two of the modern game’s batting greats — Hashim Amla and AB de Villiers.

“Look, I don’t understand rankings,” Botham said. “England, South Africa and Australia are playing the best Test cricket to my mind.”

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He is speaking of the same South African side whose timid surrender in India was followed by a home defeat to England.

England themselves have lost five out of six Tests they have played against Pakistan in the UAE since 2012.

They also failed to beat a West Indies team shorn of star names in 2015. Australia were thrashed in India, and by Pakistan in the Emirates. The rubbishing of Indian cricket seems to focus exclusively on their losses in Australia in 2011/12 (0-4) and on two wretched tours of England (0-4 in 2011 and 1-3 three years later).

Rather than conceding that most teams are struggling away from home, you have selective cherry picking of numbers.

The notion that India don’t take Test cricket seriously is also not backed up by facts. In the past five years, they have played 47 Tests, and at least eight a year. Starting this July, they will play another 13 matches before Christmas. In the same five-year period, England have played 61, largely because there are at least six or seven home Tests every summer.

If India were to adopt the same attitude to its home season, and stop touring between September and March, several cricket boards around the world would go bankrupt.

India have played 28 Tests away from home in this half-decade, one more than England. Apart from Zimbabwe and Pakistan — where the political relationship dictates tour schedules — there have been tours of every Test nation.

These are hardly numbers that indicate a lackadaisical approach to the format.

Botham saved his final salvo for the IPL.

“Australia has an established Big Bash, it’s pretty well fitted in the calendar,” he said. “England is also alright with a proper set up. Look, you can have Twenty20 matches but it cannot be week in and week out. People get bored of it.”

They do indeed. Which is why the Big Bash, which incidentally clashes with the Australian summer’s marquee Test series, attracted an aggregate audience of over a million while matches were played week in and week out in December and January.

As for the Indian season, it’s the best structured of all. The players focus on first-class cricket before a Test series, and only switch to the limited-overs formats in the build-up to the IPL.

That is a far better arrangement than, say, Australia, where a replacement for the Boxing Day Test will come into the side not having played red-ball cricket for weeks.

Legend or not, it never hurts to go over the facts.

Karmarkar putting her name on the map

Until this week, even for Indians that keep abreast of the news, Tripura — one of the small north-eastern states bordering Bangladesh — usually meant stories of Manik Sarkar, Marxist chief minister for the past 18 years, and his austere lifestyle. Thanks to Dipa Karmarkar, a 22-year-old gymnast, that has changed.

Karmarkar has qualified for the Rio Olympics, finishing 42nd in the individual all-round competition at the Test Event in Brazil.

She was the highest scorer on the vault, where she is one of a mere handful that have successful attempted the Produnova, an extremely difficult combination of a front handspring and two forward somersaults, named after the Russian whose five-year career ended with the Olympics in Sydney (2000).

Only 11 Indians have ever participated in the gymnastics competition at the Olympics. All of them were men.

The last batch of six took part in the Tokyo games in 1964. In the 52 years since, no one has managed to meet the qualifying criteria.

In that time, the vault has evolved to an astonishing degree, thanks to gymnasts such as Mitsuo Tsukahara and Natalia Yurchenko.

Karmarkar, whose father is a weightlifting coach, eschewed an English-medium education, because it would not allow time off to attend gymnastics practice. She missed out on a medal at the Commonwealth Games in 2010, but was on the podium four years later.

Her exploits have also given some belated attention to one of the sport’s Indian pioneers.

Ashish Kumar won silver (vault) and bronze (floor exercise) during the 2010 Commonwealth Games, and Karmarkar has spoken of the influence his achievements had. Also in her corner since the time she was a small girl was Biseswar Nandi, the coach whose guidance she has sought even as she scaled peaks no Indian gymnast has.

And she has done this with minimal help from administrators. In fact, when Ashish won his medals, Jaspal Singh Kandhari, then president of the Gymnastics Federation of India asked his Russian coach, Vladimir Chertkov, “Is this all that you can deliver, a bronze?”

Hopefully, his successors will have a little more empathy as Karmarkar tries to vault to glory.

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