A few days ago, in the New Zealand Herald, I read this article that suggested, among other things, that cricket fans in that country were feeling diddled by the Indian team's non-performance.
The story, inter alia, even mentioned that the Consumer Guarantees Act 'requires professional service providers to perform with reasonable care and skill, fulfil the purpose they were hired for and in reasonable time, and charge a reasonable price'.
It then quotes Consumers Institute chief executive David Russell as saying that unfortunately, the provisions cannot be applied here -- which indicates that someone thought it was worth asking if India's performance was worth examining from a consumer protection point of view.
The story is interesting in that it opens up a possibility for debate, if nothing else -- can sportspersons actually be taken to court, even consumer court, for non-performance? Would love to hear from any lawyer types out there on this.
This story prompted me to look at the statistical picture of this series as it has evolved.
At the end of five ODIs (I'm doing my browsing and scribbling this while watching the sixth game in the series) the series averages for India read Sehwag 36.6, Zaheer 22.67, Yuvraj 18, Dravid 16.6, Kaif 9.6, Srinath 5, Ganguly 4.
For New Zealand, the averages are Sinclair 31.25, Astle 24.6, and Fleming 16.6 -- and only those three batsmen have in fact played in all five games. The Kiwis, by virtue of being the home side, have had the luxury of packing out-of-form batsmen back to domestic competition, and adding new players to the squad.
Fair enough, but for comparisons to make sense, the playing field has to be equal -- so I looked at only those players on both sides who have batted through the series, and it seems to me precious little to choose between the sides, when you look at those figures.
Which leads you to ask, why? Even granting that India did not adapt to overseas conditions, New Zealand didn't make much of a fist of adjusting to its own home conditions either. So could the reasons lie elsewhere?
It needs mentioning right now, right here, that this is not an attempt to 'find excuses' for the Indian team's performances, or lack thereof. Pitch and other conditions notwithstanding, what remains is the scorecard, and the book for this series reads 'India played two Tests and lost two; played four ODIs and lost four before winning the fifth...'
Having said that, consider this article. Says here that the pitches were not only bad, but were deliberately so as part of a misguided, misjudged attempt to do India down on designer tracks.
Again, it is up to each country to decide what kind of tracks it wants to greet various opposing sides with -- the Kiwis, in fact, played Russian roulette with fast tracks the last time the Aussies toured and took a bullet in the brain, so in fairness the kind of tracks we saw over the Indian tour was as much to do with the Kiwis' attempt to test themselves in such conditions against any opposition as wanting to set up a few easy wins over the Indians.
Yet, your attention keeps going back to these lines, from the report:
'If it had been a horse race the hooter would gave gone off weeks ago, because it was apparent from the day India arrived that all stops were being pulled to ensure their batsmen played on the most difficult surfaces possible.
'There will be those who point at the adverse weather before the matches as the reason behind the seaming greentops, but the reality is that the water tables at each Test venue were kept too high during the build-up, leading to the extreme conditions.
'India coach John Wright stopped short of making an official complaint yesterday, but did express his astonishment that the pitches at each venue were still being watered only a few days out from the start, despite the ominous weather forecasts.'
Obviously, pitch preparation went beyond the usual leaving grass on top -- and resulted in a track that yielded 500-something runs for 36 wickets in the first Test.
This raises the question -- can the authorities then be taken to consumer court, since they have demonstrably failed to provide conditions facilitating good cricket?
It's all getting to be quite interesting, this argument about legally holding players and teams to account -- one of these days, someone will actually go to court, which should be a whole mess of fun. Imagine someone filing suit against, say, Virender Sehwag for not scoring at a strike rate of over 80 per cent, which said someone expected the batsman would do when he paid good money for a ticket.
One thing is for sure -- if such a day ever comes, captains and players will need to be doubly careful of what they say. For instance, even as the Indians were accused, in some quarters, of not providing entertainment, Kiwi skipper Stephen Fleming was telling the media, 'We're not going to gripe about the conditions while we're winning. We're just going to get on with it, accept the challenge and try to win matches. It's more important than providing entertainment.' (Editor: Emphasis ours).
Setting the question of player liability aside for the moment, there is another aspect you might want to consider. The Indian cricket board, with all the fervour of someone who has just invented the principle of accountability, decided to dock the team half their match fees for failure in New Zealand.
Fans probably would applaud -- after any defeat, our mailboxes are full of angry emails demanding that India's 'overpaid, overpampered underperformers' are hit where it hurts.
My colleague Faisal Shariff in an earlier diary raised one point: The linking of pay to performance was agreed upon at a meeting of the board and the players, in context of negotiations relating to the implementation of the contract system.
At the time, the players willingly conceded that once contracts were in place, they would become de facto employees of the BCCI and thus the board, like any employer, had every right to reward success and punish failure.
For the board now to implement only the pay cuts, without simultaneously implementing the contract system, is double-dealing. Most of the groundwork on the system was in place by September 2001, which was when Jagmohan Dalmiya replaced Dr A C Muthaiah as BCCI president.
One of his first acts was to postpone implementation of the system, pending 'study'. Deadlines were set, and deadlines lapsed. It was finally decided that the system would be in place by the end of the England tour. By then, however, September 2002 rolled along, BCCI secretary Niranjan Shah was replaced by S K Nair, and the contract system was -- you guessed it -- shelved for 'study'.
Now we are assured that the board will "look at it" after the World Cup.
Fine, so we'll wait. And while waiting, how about 'looking at' this, too? Since 'accountability' has now been implemented, how much money is the board going to dock itself for the farce we have all been subjected to?
When top teams tour India, they are invariably preceded -- sometimes six months before deadline -- by official teams from the respective boards. These pilot teams go into every detail -- where their team will stay at each venue, what the transportation arrangements are, what kind of pitches will be provided, the quality of practice conditions and pitches, et al. Teams like Australia even specify that the teams facing them in warm-up games must contain X number of international players.
It is all done to ensure that their teams have the best of conditions on tour.
And India? When it toured South Africa in 1996, the UCBSA invited them to practise on a dead-as-nails pitch, and cynically denied them practice bowlers ahead of the first Test (a fact admitted to, citing 'various reasons,' by no less than Dr Ali Bacher in an online chat), and booby-trapped them on the lightning fast Durban track in the Boxing Day Test of that series.
On that tour, the team in fact was reduced, at one point, to placing advertisements for net bowlers to practise against.
Years later, nothing has changed -- there was no recce undertaken by the board ahead of this New Zealand tour, no attempt to suss out the conditions -- surely any competent official, told that the host country planned to use untested, experimental drop-in pitches for a key international series would have raised holy hell.
So -- now that we have 'accountability' in practice as well as in principle -- how about a dollop of that medicine for the Board as well?
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