The Thinking Game

This tournament has had my love since its first ball, which is exactly why it will not get my flattery. Pretending has never come easily, even when pretending would have kept me on a few more dinner lists. So when, somewhere in the middle of IPL 2026, a hand reached for the phone during the back ten overs of a run chase — the very passage of play once lived for — that small surrender felt like evidence. Four decades inside the game, played through the 1980s and 90s and watched ever since from the middle and the commentary box, had never produced such indifference at a cricket ground. That it should arrive at the IPL, of all places, says something is wrong.

The headline is honourable enough. Royal Challengers Bengaluru went back-to-back, only the third side ever to win two finals in succession — a fine team, well led, and a club known to me from the inside. Having sat at its very first auction table, where the money was spent with the serene confidence of men who had never been shown a balance sheet, and having given three years to it as batting coach — a post that ages a man faster than any other in sport — I begrudge them nothing. But greatness at the summit thrills only when the climb beneath it is real, and for long stretches this season the climb was a moving walkway. Win the toss, consult the dew, post or chase 210, shake hands: too many league games ran on those rails, the result settled by coin and curator long before a contest could break out.

The grievance is not who lifted the trophy. It is what the spectator was asked to watch on the way to it. We have engineered a version of T20 in which the bat carries almost no fear. Flat decks, square boundaries a brisk cough would clear, two new balls, the impact-player cushion that lets a side bat with one eye serenely closed — every lever has been pulled towards the man with the willow. When everyone can clear the rope at will, clearing it stops meaning anything. A six ought to be an event; this season it barely interrupted a sandwich.

Here is the irony that should make administrators sit up. The final, on the night, was a proper contest — Gujarat could muster only a modest total, the bowlers were suddenly allowed a voice, and the match had genuine tension in its veins. That is the whole argument in a single evening. Let the bowler back into the conversation and the cricket grips again. Knockout pressure achieved what flat pitches and fearless batting had spent two months suppressing: it restored doubt. And doubt, not dominance, is what keeps a man in his seat. The most influential figures in the modern IPL are no longer the captains; they are the groundsman with the heavy roller and whichever deity is rostered to decide when the dew descends.

What worries me most is the boy watching at home in Hubballi, or in the maidanas across Mysuru. He is being taught that batting is brute range-hitting and bowling mere damage limitation, a profession to be pitied rather than admired. He is not being taught the slow, beautiful art of constructing a contest: the bowler setting a batsman up across three deliveries, the batsman absorbing pressure and biding his time. A generation is being raised on fireworks and told it is a feast. Having once finished a season as the leading run-scorer, I can promise that the runs worth remembering are never the easy ones. They are the ones wrenched from a bowler trying, with everything he has, to get you out — and succeeding often enough to keep you honest.

A lopsided spectacle can entertain for an over. It cannot hold a nation for two months. This league’s genius was always jeopardy: the conviction that any side could topple any other on a given night, and that within a single match the pendulum might swing four times before tea. Strip the jeopardy out and boredom is never far behind, however many runs are stacked on the board. Let it be plain — this is no plea for low scores. It is a plea for the fight: for the stomach to knot when a captain tosses the ball to a raw quick at the death with fifteen to defend and the look of a man asked to defuse something; for a batsman to be truly beaten, rather than top-edging one to the rope for six anyway and trotting through for the formality of running it.

None of this is fate. The conditions were built and can be dismantled. The companion piece that follows sets out exactly how — pitches, boundaries, the ball, the rules — to drag the fight between bat and ball back to the centre of the IPL, where it has always belonged. A tournament this precious deserves better than a stadium full of people watching it through their phones.

The previous piece argued that IPL 2026 too often mislaid the one thing that makes cricket cricket — the duel between bat and ball. Complaining, though, is the cheapest seat in the house, and it is not one worth occupying for long. So here is the blueprint. None of it is exotic. Taken together, these measures would simply restore to the bowler a share of the contest currently being held for him at the door.

Begin with the pitch. Years have gone into manufacturing surfaces that perform exactly one function: letting the ball arrive sweetly so it can be dispatched a long way. Somewhere a curator is being told, in the gentlest possible terms, that if the match finishes under 180 he need not bother coming in on Monday. Tear up that brief. Give the seamer a little grass at the start and the spinner a little grip by the back end. Not a minefield — nobody is asking for sides bundled out for 120 and a stewards’ inquiry — but pitches that compel a batsman to earn and reward a bowler who thinks. A worthy T20 surface should change character across twenty overs. Variety, not flatness, is the soul of the game.

Move the rope. Square boundaries of fifty-five metres convert good bowling into six runs and have the cheek to call it a stroke. Mandate a sensible minimum wherever a ground allows, and end the habit of dragging the rope inward to manufacture sixes for the broadcast, as though the cricket were a salad in need of garnish. Let the biggest hit be the one that genuinely clears a long boundary.

Reconsider the two new balls. Bowling with two new balls has all but exiled reverse swing from the death overs — one of the great equalisers once available to a cunning quick, and among the few dark arts the game permitted in polite company. A return to one ball an innings, or a rotation that lets it scuff and begin to talk late, would hand the death bowler a weapon beyond the yorker and a quiet prayer.

Audit the impact player honestly. It is popular, and it adds a tactical layer; both are true. But it has also allowed teams to bat deeper than they have any moral right to, and that deletes the fear of dismissal — which is precisely what elevates batting from a slog into an art. A man who swings freely because one more specialist waits in the shed is not taking a real risk; he is taking an insured one, with the ambulance already idling outside. At the very least, the balance deserves an honest look.

Reward the wicket-taking ball. This connects to a reform handled on its own — the free hit. When a bowler beats a batsman comprehensively and only a technicality spares him, he deserves protection, not a second helping of punishment. Small adjustments that side with skill, repeated across a season, change the entire texture of the cricket.

And cherish the squeeze. The sport has built an economy that pays handsomely for the six. It should also exalt the dot ball, the maiden in the powerplay, the bowler who concedes six off his four at the death against the best hitters alive. There are awards for the most sixes and the fastest fifty; the man who bowls a powerplay maiden is rewarded, as far as anyone can tell, with the silent gratitude of his captain and nothing else. Narrate the bowler’s craft as vividly as the batsman’s range, and the young will fall in love with it again.

Assemble all this and the result is not dull, low-scoring cricket but its opposite: 165 defended by a single run; a last-over chase in which nobody in the stadium dares breathe, least of all the commentators; a tournament where every side has a path to victory because the conditions have not quietly chosen the winner before the toss.

This game looks the same from every seat that matters — the middle, the selection room, the dugout, the classroom at the National Cricket Academy, and the commentary box, where more than a thousand matches across every format have taught me, among other things, exactly how long a man can speak when nothing whatsoever is happening. From each of them the conclusion is identical. The IPL does not need more runs. It needs more jeopardy. Return to the bowler his fair fight, and the entertainment — the real, breath-held kind — looks after itself.

Picture a passage of play seen a hundred times, and then ask whether it is just.

A bowler oversteps. His error, and he is rightly penalised: a no-ball, a run to the batting side, a free hit to follow. So far the law is sound. Now, on that free-hit delivery, the bowler responds magnificently. He beats the batsman in the air, induces the false stroke, and the ball balloons gently to long-on, where it is pouched without the slightest alarm. In every cricketing sense, that was a wicket. The bowler did everything right; the batsman did everything wrong, and did it in front of a full house.

And yet, because it is a free hit, the batsman is not out. The principle that one cannot be bowled or caught off a free hit is fair enough. What is not fair is the rest of it: the two batsmen may run, and had that skied “catch” been a thick edge scurrying away for four, those four runs would stand. A man who has just played a shot that in any other walk of cricketing life would send him trudging off to rehearse his excuses instead pockets four runs and, one assumes, a renewed and entirely unearned faith in his own genius. The bowler, meanwhile, having produced a wicket-taking delivery, trudges back to his mark punished a second time for the privilege.

That is a single mistake — the overstep — billed three separate times: the penalty run, the extra ball, and now runs surrendered off a delivery the bowler actually won. It is the cricketing equivalent of being fined for the offence, fined again for the paperwork, and then asked to tip the officer for his trouble.

The remedy is simple, as the best ones usually are. On a free hit, if the batsman plays a stroke that would otherwise have dismissed him — caught, bowled, leg-before — the ball is called dead and no runs accrue. He keeps his wicket; that is the shelter the free hit was designed to provide, and it should stay. But he does not also keep the runs from a shot that, in any other circumstance, would have ended his innings. The reprieve is the bowler’s compensation for the no-ball; it must not double as a free scoring opportunity off a mishit, like a coupon that turns out to have no expiry date.

Beneath the proposal sits a principle that runs through the whole game: cricket should reward skill and punish its absence, on both sides of the contest, without fear or favour. A bowler who beats the bat has shown skill; a batsman who skies one to long-on has shown its opposite, vividly. Reward the unskilled act regardless, and the wrong lesson reaches the wrong people — a whisper to every young batsman that on a free hit he may as well shut his eyes and heave, since the floor is a let-off and the ceiling is six, odds so generous they would embarrass a casino. That is not cricket but a raffle with a bat in hand, and it irritates me more than a man of my temperament should probably admit in print.

The aim is to make batsmen keep respecting the good ball even on a free hit — one thought lodged in the mind as the bowler runs in: a licence, yes, but misjudge this and you get nothing. That single thought restores the contest to a delivery that has degenerated into a formality, a guaranteed swing of the arms with all the jeopardy of a practice throw-down.

So keep the free hit, and keep the protection from dismissal; the principle is sound. But strip away the runs off a stroke that should have been a wicket, and return to the bowler the one thing he earned cleanly and on merit — the right not to be punished for bowling a brilliant ball.

Here is a question worth turning over, as it has been turned over for the better part of three decades without yielding a single satisfying answer: why does a batsman’s team collect runs for a ball that strikes the pad?

Examine what a leg bye actually is. The bowler delivers a good ball. The batsman either misjudges it or cannot lay bat on it, and it thuds into pad or thigh — a moment of pure failure, dressed up after the fact as enterprise. The ball deflects away, the batsmen scamper, and the scoreboard ticks: credited not to the batsman, who failed to hit it, and certainly not to the bowler, who beat him, but to a phantom column called “extras,” cricket’s witness-protection programme for runs nobody will own up to scoring. Nobody on the field did anything skilful, and yet the batting side is paid for it.

That is close to indefensible. Almost every run in cricket is the issue of skill: a boundary is a stroke timed to perfection, a quick single sharp running and shrewd judgement. Even a wide or a no-ball, which also feed the extras column, are at least penalties for a genuine error by the bowler — there is a logic to them, a debt honestly settled. The leg bye obeys no such logic. It rewards the absence of skill, pressing runs into the hands of the side that has just failed, and then asking it to look grateful.

The position here is unambiguous: leg byes should be abolished. If the ball comes off pad or body rather than bat, no runs are scored, whether or not the batsmen choose to run. The delivery counts as a dot ball — as, morally, it always should have — because the batsman did not score off it.

Consider what this would do to the contest. As matters stand, against good seam or against spin on a turning maidana, a batsman can survive a whole awkward over by thrusting the front pad down the line, wearing the ball on the body, and pilfering the odd leg bye for his trouble — rewarded, in effect, for declining to play a stroke. I came up in the 1980s and 90s, when front-pad defence was practically taught as a craft, and one or two of my contemporaries built long and prosperous careers on a method best described as getting hit and looking pleased about it. Remove leg byes and that escape hatch is sealed. The batsman must use his bat, must commit to a shot and confront the bowler properly, and the bowler who beats him no longer quietly haemorrhages runs off the pad. His good ball stays a good ball on the card, where it belongs.

The other side deserves a hearing — no temper, however short, should deny it. Some hold that leg byes are what discourage batsmen from simply padding everything away with no intent, the prospect of a leg bye keeping them playing strokes rather than kicking the ball clear like a bored full-back. There is something in that, and any change would have to be weighed alongside the lbw law and the whole question of pad-play. But it is far better to solve the pad-play problem head-on than to keep paying out runs for failure as a clumsy workaround.

There is a plainer point, too, and it is the one that nags most. Leg byes inflate totals in a way that quietly distorts the game. A side that limps to 150 with twenty of those scraped off pads and thighs has not, in any meaningful sense, made 150 with the bat; it has made 130 and found the other twenty down the back of the sofa. Judge batsmen and bowlers against those totals — in selection rooms, in auctions, in fond and unreliable memories — and they are being measured against a number that includes runs no one earned.

Cricket is at its finest when the scoreboard is an honest ledger of skill: bat against ball, the better performer duly rewarded. The leg bye is one of the few places where that ledger tells a small, polite lie, rewarding the beaten batsman and fining the bowler who beat him. Take it out. Make the bat do the work. Let the dot ball off the pad be exactly what it is — a small, quiet triumph for the bowler, recorded at long last as such.

This is the age of the statistic, and most of it is welcome. Strike rate, average, economy, dot-ball percentage, boundary percentage, expected runs — and any day now, surely, a metric for how elegant a man looks while getting out. The modern game measures everything, and good data has made cricket sharper and fairer in a hundred ways. But a caution is owed, from someone who has been measured and has measured others. A life spent in dressing rooms, in selection rooms and behind a microphone for more matches than anyone could count leads to one certainty: the scorecard does not see everything that matters, and often it does not see the thing that mattered most.

Take a situation that never resolves cleanly into a column of figures. A side is chasing on a difficult, two-paced surface. A batsman walks in and grinds out 28 from 30 balls — an innings so unglamorous it would struggle to attract a sponsor. On paper, a failure. What the paper does not record is that he arrived at 40 for 4, that the ball was misbehaving, that he saw off the two finest bowlers in their finest spell, soaked up the pressure and bequeathed the next man a platform from which he then cantered. The next man flays 50 from 25 and collects the headline, the gaudy strike rate and the bottle of champagne he is not always old enough to open. The scorecard credits the wrong cricketer — and I have watched it happen, and felt the injustice on behalf of men too dignified to feel it for themselves.

This is the marrow of the matter. Numbers measure outcomes; they are wretched at measuring context, and context is where cricket actually lives. A 30 on a snake-pit can be worth more than a hundred on a road. An economy of eight at the death, into the wind against the best strikers in the world, can be a finer thing than a tidy three-for in the powerplay against a crumbling order. The figure is identical, or worse; the contribution is incomparable.

Then there are the things the scorecard cannot record at all. The senior pro who steadies a debutant between overs with a single well-chosen sentence. The fielder whose mere presence at backward point saves three runs a game that are never struck there, because batsmen quietly decline to take him on — a saved run that appears in no ledger ever written. The bowler who shoulders the thankless holding overs so his partner can attack from the other end and harvest the wickets, the glory and the interviews. The batsman who farms the strike to shield a tailender visibly composing his will at the non-striker’s end. None of it surfaces on the card. All of it wins matches.

There is a personal reason this conviction runs so deep, and it can be told without self-pity. My own career was settled not by numbers but by the body. There was a debut series to treasure — one that, in fairness, improves a little with each retelling, as all careers do once no scorer is present to contradict them — and then injury took the decision clean out of my hands. No average, high or low, ever captured what was taken or what might have been. A man’s record, then, is a partial witness: it tells you what occurred, and stays silent on what it cost, what it meant, and what the figures could not contain.

So how should a cricketer be judged? Use the numbers — but as the opening of the question, never its close. When the data says a player failed, the next question must be: failed at what, in which situation, against whom, on what surface? When the data says he succeeded, ask the same, and a little more suspiciously. The figure tells you what happened. Only judgement tells you what it was worth.

This is precisely why the trained eye of a fine selector, captain or coach will never be supplanted by a spreadsheet, however confidently the spreadsheet asserts otherwise. The spreadsheet sees the runs; the watcher sees the innings. The spreadsheet sees the wicket; the watcher sees the plan that built it two balls earlier.

Let the coming generation of analysts and selectors be brilliant with their data — truly brilliant. But let them also walk out of the room afterwards and watch the cricket, sound off and eyes open, and put to every performance the only question that finally counts. Not “how many?” — but “how much did it matter?”

People who do not follow cricket sometimes ask why a single match can stretch across five days and still, somehow, contrive to end with nobody winning at all. The full answer takes rather longer than five days. The short one is that cricket may be the most variable contest ever devised by man — and that this, precisely, is the source of both its difficulty and its beauty.

Consider all that is shifting while one game is played.

The pitch is alive. A cricket pitch is not a fixed stage like a tennis court or a football field. It is a living surface that alters by the hour, and has opinions. In the morning it may hold moisture that quickens the seamers; by afternoon it dries and flattens into a batsman’s paradise; by the fourth evening it is cracked and powdery, gripping and turning square. The same twenty-two yards can be three entirely different games across one Test. No two pitches on earth behave alike, and the same pitch will not behave the same way twice — chiefly, one suspects, to keep everyone humble.

The weather rewrites the script. Cloud cover can render a benign surface treacherous, because the ball swings far more beneath a heavy sky than under blue — which is why eleven grown men can be seen studying the heavens with the anxiety of farmers. Humidity coaxes the ball to move; a dry, baking afternoon dulls it. Dew at night turns a spinner’s grip into wet soap and can decide a white-ball contest before a ball is bowled, which is why captains agonise over the toss, and why losing it feels less like bad luck than a personal slight. A cricketer is never merely playing the opposition. He is playing the opposition, the pitch, the ball and the sky — four opponents at once, rather more than most sportsmen are asked to manage, and some explanation for why they always look so worried.

The ball decays. This is the variable outsiders grasp least and insiders brood over most. Cricket may be the only sport that hands one side a brand-new piece of equipment and then spends the next three hours quietly conspiring to ruin it. A new ball is hard for a handful of overs — it bounces, it seams, it flies off the willow — and then it ages. The shine wears, the seam settles, and at the right moment, in the right hands, it begins to reverse, bending the opposite way to a new ball, late and lethal. One half of the very same ball may be doing one thing while the other does the reverse. Managing it is a craft entire unto itself, and a faintly absurd one when described aloud.

And then the human variables. Form, fatigue, nerve, the match situation, the personnel — each shifts the calculation ball by ball. A plan that is correct at 10 for 0 is folly at 10 for 3; a length immaculate in the eighth over is suicidal in the eighteenth.

Stack all of these upon one another, at once, in real time, and the true difficulty of the game comes into view. A captain setting a field is not solving one problem. He is solving for the surface, the overhead conditions, the age of the ball, the batsman’s strengths, his own bowler’s strengths, the score, the over and the forecast — simultaneously, with the next delivery seconds away and forty thousand people offering their own views. No formula survives contact with that many moving parts.

This is why cricket cannot be conquered as simpler games can. A golf swing can be perfected in a vacuum, where the variables are few and obligingly still. In cricket, the instant one condition is mastered, the conditions shift underfoot, often out of spite. The greatest players — and across four decades, from the 1980s and 90s of my own playing days to the data-drenched game of today, there have been a great many to watch — were never those who discovered a flawless technique. They were those who read the moving variables fastest and adapted the quickest, over by over, hour by hour, day by day.

That is the very genius of the game, and the reason it has had a life given to it rather than to something sensible. It refuses to be solved. Every match is a fresh equation with most of its values unknown until a player is out there in the middle of it. Cricket does not reward the man who knows the answer. It rewards the man who can keep finding it, again and again, as the question itself keeps changing.

Walk out to the middle with any seasoned captain before a match and observe the performance. He presses the surface with his thumb. He rakes it with a key. He studies the grass, picks at a crack, taps the ball upon it to gauge the bounce, then squints down the strip from one end and back from the other, frowning with tremendous significance before delivering a slow, knowing nod. The whole ritual is designed to suggest he has divined something profound. The truth, most of the time, is that he is guessing — beautifully, expensively, but guessing. It remains one of the hardest acts of judgement in all of sport, which is why even the finest minds get it wrong, regularly, in front of everyone.

People are often astonished to learn that reading a pitch is difficult for professionals. Surely, they reason, after thousands of games these men can simply look and know. But that is exactly the misunderstanding. A pitch does not surrender itself to the eye; the surface one can see tells only a sliver of the story. What matters is concealed — how much moisture sits an inch beneath the top, how hard the soil is packed below, how the grass roots are binding it, how the whole of it will behave once the sun has gone to work and the bowlers’ feet have churned it. A captain is being asked to forecast the future conduct of something he can barely inspect, on the basis of a thumb and a hunch.

And the variables are merciless. A pitch that looks dry and bare can hold surprising water just below and seam about for an hour. A pitch wearing a healthy green tinge can turn out to be a flat, lifeless road wearing a wig — the grass dead and purely cosmetic. The same surface plays one way in the morning and another in the afternoon, one way under cloud and another under sun, one way in the first innings and a wholly different way in the fourth. Captains have read a pitch with total conviction, won the toss, batted with their chests out — and then watched the thing behave like an entirely different surface swapped in overnight out of pure mischief. This is why so many captains lose the toss inside their own minds long before the coin lands.

It is an art rather than a science, and the word is chosen with care. Science yields repeatable answers from fixed inputs; pitch-reading offers neither fixed inputs nor repeatable answers, only humility delivered at unpredictable intervals. It is nearer to what a farmer knows of his soil or a sailor of the sea — knowledge accreted in the body over years, part instinct, part hard-won pattern, never quite reducible to a rule one could write down. Working with young cricketers at the National Cricket Academy in Bengaluru, I find this the hardest thing of all to pass on, precisely because the honest lesson runs something like, “Study a thousand of these and you will still be wrong a third of the time” — a sentence that looks rather poor on a syllabus. The great readers of pitches could rarely say how they knew. They simply knew, the way an experienced physician reads a patient before the tests return.

This is also why the bond between captain and curator, and between captain and senior players, counts for so much. No man reads it alone, and the wise ones do not pretend to. A good captain gathers counsel — the curator who prepared the strip, the seamer who senses the moisture underfoot, the batsman who has made runs on that ground before — and then makes a call that is, finally, his own and entirely his to answer for. Getting it right shapes the whole match: whether to bat or bowl, which bowlers to play, what a par score truly is. Getting it wrong can cost the game before a ball has been struck, and the press conference shortly after.

The part worth loving most is the humbling one. A man may do this for thirty years and still be deceived. The pitch is a living thing, and living things keep their secrets close. The best in the world walk out, press a thumb into the soil, and quietly accept that they are making an educated guess about a surface that retains every right to make a fool of them.

That uncertainty is no flaw in cricket. It is the game keeping a little mystery for itself. The pitch is the one opponent that never speaks, never tips its hand, and never plays the same way twice. To learn to read it — knowing, all the while, that one will sometimes be wrong — is among the truest and most demanding arts the sport asks of anyone.

Of all the relationships within a cricket team, one rarely receives the credit it is owed, because it unfolds far from the cameras — in team meetings, on net-side benches, and in hotel lobbies at an hour when no sensible person is still awake. It is the relationship between captain and coach. Get it right and a side plays with a calm, shared purpose you can feel from the boundary rope; get it wrong and no quantity of talent will rescue it. Both roles have been home to me — as a player who served under them, later as a coach and administrator who was one, and now as someone teaching young captains and coaches at the National Cricket Academy. There were batting-coach years, too, spent watching from the dugout as a captain serenely ignored everything agreed twenty minutes earlier, smiling for the broadcast while his coach died a small, private death in the back row. So this comes with feeling.

The reason it matters so profoundly begins with the fact that the two roles are deliberately different — and that the difference is the entire point. The coach lives off the field: planning, preparing, analysing, building the players’ games across weeks and months, tending to bodies and egos, keeping an eye on the long arc. The captain lives on the field, where, in the furnace of the contest, with the variables shifting ball by ball, he alone makes the decisions that cannot wait. The coach cannot signal a field change from the dressing room, however vigorously he gestures at the television; the captain cannot rebuild a man’s technique mid-over. They inhabit two different worlds, and a team needs both worlds straining in precisely the same direction.

That is why alignment between them is not negotiable. Players are extraordinarily sensitive to mixed signals — far more than either coach or captain tends to realise, and considerably more than they let on. If the coach craves one brand of cricket and the captain believes in another, the dressing room splits, softly at first and then in the open. A young player will not know whose voice to trust; the senior men begin, quietly, to take sides and choose seats accordingly. And the team forfeits the one thing that makes a side more than a heap of gifted individuals: a single, lucid idea of how it wishes to play. Gifted squads have underachieved for years for no nobler reason than this — a captain and a coach who never truly agreed, and a team left to pay the bill in instalments.

The finest partnerships share three things. Trust — each believes utterly that the other has his back, so they can quarrel ferociously in private and present a seamless front in public. Clear lanes — they settle who owns what, so that on the field the captain’s word is final and off it the coach’s plan holds, and neither trespasses on the other’s ground in front of the players. And honesty — they can tell one another hard truths: the coach informing the captain that his field setting is a work of pure fiction, the captain informing the coach that his latest selection has the unmistakable look of a personal favour, without any of it curdling into a frosty silence over dinner. That honesty is impossible without trust, which is why trust must come first, always.

This holds across every format, though the texture changes with the clock. In Test cricket, the long game, the partnership is one of strategy and patience — shaping a series plan, managing workloads across five days, holding the nerve through a session that drifts gently out to sea. In T20, where everything detonates in a blur, it is about absolute clarity of roles agreed beforehand, so that when chaos arrives — and it always does, usually around the sixteenth over — the captain is not improvising a philosophy on the spot but executing one settled calmly with his coach days earlier. The faster the format, the more the on-field calls belong to the captain alone, and the more vital it becomes that the thinking behind them was shared long before the toss.

When it works, it is nearly invisible — and that invisibility is the surest sign it is working. You see a team that knows itself. The captain makes a bold call at a taut moment and you sense the whole side, and the man watching from the dressing room, leaning into it as one. No second-guessing in the body language, no confusion in the field. That calm is not luck; it is the dividend of two people who did the unglamorous work of arriving, again and again, on the same page, far from the noise and the cameras.

A captain leads the eleven on the field. A coach leads the squad off it. But a cricket team, in the final reckoning, is led by the relationship between them. Tend to that partnership and everything else stands a chance; neglect it, and all the talent in the world will not be enough — a quietly heartbreaking thing to watch, and watched too often.

Consider the facts, because they are remarkable. A man takes charge of India’s T20 side after a World Cup triumph and, over the next two years, loses just eight of fifty-two matches. He surrenders not a single bilateral series. He lifts the Asia Cup, then defends the T20 World Cup on home soil, making India the first side to win three global titles in the shortest format. His reward, in June 2026, is to be removed as captain and dropped from the squad altogether.

That is the Suryakumar Yadav story in a paragraph, and it ought to give the whole cricketing world pause.

Let the selectors’ case be put fairly first, because it is not a foolish one. His form with the bat had collapsed — a wretched IPL, a run of low scores stretching back well over a year, a once-feared strokemaker reduced to a walking wicket. The committee spoke of planning for the two-year cycle to the next World Cup, of building for the future rather than the past. A captain’s runs cannot dry up forever without consequence, and a selector who plans only for tomorrow morning is no selector at all. None of that is unreasonable.

And yet the sacking tells a deeper story than one man’s batting average — a story not about him, but about us. India has, for two decades, treated captaincy as something you hand to whoever is in form and snatch back the moment his form dips. We do not develop leaders; we discover them, usually by accident, and then cling to them until they break. When a Dhoni or a Kohli or a Rohit is in the room, this works beautifully, and we congratulate ourselves on a system we never actually built. The trouble announces itself only when the well runs dry, and then we are left doing precisely what we have just done: removing a World Cup-winning captain in a hurry and hoping his replacement turns out to have been a leader all along.

That is the wake-up call. We have been spoiled. Three once-in-a-generation captains arrived in succession — each with the rare gift of making ten other men play above themselves — and somewhere along the way we began to assume the next one would simply turn up, fully formed, exactly when required. That is not a plan. It is a lottery we have been fortunate to keep winning, and lottery tickets have a habit of eventually losing.

Consider, for a moment, what the job actually is. The captaincy of the Indian cricket team is, by any honest measure, among the most scrutinised and consequential positions in the country — second only, many would only half-joke, to the office of the Prime Minister. A billion people hold an opinion on it. It carries the mood of a nation on a given evening. And yet, for all that weight, not one serious, structured effort has ever been made to find and nurture the man who holds it. The most important leadership role in Indian sport has been filled, for as long as anyone can remember, the way one fills a raffle — by drawing a name and hoping. That a position of such importance has never once been approached with a system is not a small oversight. It is the oversight.

The error beneath all of it is a confusion about what captaincy actually is. We treat it as a coronation — the prize handed to the best batsman, or the senior pro, or the man the cameras like. It is nothing of the sort. Captaincy is a craft, separate from the craft of batting or bowling, and a distinct one: reading a game as it shifts beneath you, managing a dressing room of egos and anxieties and twenty-year-olds, communicating with clarity when the match is on fire, knowing the laws of the game cold, and carrying the board and the media and a billion opinions without losing your own. A magnificent batsman who cannot do these things is a magnificent batsman. He is not, automatically, a captain.

So is there a way to build leaders rather than wait for them? There is, and it is not complicated — only neglected.

It begins with identification. Long before a man is in the senior side, the future leaders are visible to anyone watching closely: not always the best player, but the one the others instinctively turn to, the one who organises, who steadies, who is unafraid to make the unpopular call. We find fast bowlers at fifteen and build them for a decade. There is no reason on earth we cannot do the same with captains.

Then comes the deliberate work, over years and not weeks. Put the chosen few through a genuine apprenticeship in leadership. Teach man-management — the art of getting the best from a senior who has been dropped, a debutant who is terrified, a star who is sulking. Teach conflict management, because a dressing room is not a postcard of harmony but a room full of ambitious men competing for the same places, and a captain who cannot defuse a feud or absorb a grievance will watch a team quietly come apart in his hands. Hone communication until a captain can deliver a plan in the dressing room and a verdict in the press conference with equal command — and train him, specifically, to address the press, to hold his line under a hostile microphone, to say what must be said and protect what must be protected, because in this country the press conference is a contest in its own right. Test them on strategy, relentlessly: simulated run chases, pressure scenarios, field-setting under the clock, decisions drilled until they become instinct. Challenge them with case studies — the real captaincy dilemmas of the past, the famous decisions and the infamous ones — and make them argue what they would have done, and why, until judgement becomes a muscle rather than a guess. And — a small thing that is forever overlooked — make them learn the laws properly, because a captain who fumbles an over-rate, a review or a field restriction at the death has handed the opposition an extra man. These things can be taught at the academy, in domestic cricket, in real captaincy of India A and the leadership group, in a structured ladder that produces a ready leader before the crisis rather than during it.

None of this denies that leadership carries an innate spark you cannot manufacture in a classroom. Not every cricketer can be made into a Dhoni, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of folly. But a raw leader can be sharpened enormously, and the difference between a captain who has been built for ten years and one thrown the keys in a panic is the difference we have just watched play out.

Suryakumar Yadav deserves to leave the captaincy with his head high; his record is among the finest any Indian captain has owned, and the manner of his exit reflects on the system far more than on him. The lesson is not his to learn. It is ours. The next great leader of Indian cricket should not have to emerge by happy accident, the way the last three did. We should be building him right now — quietly, patiently, years before we need him — so that the next time a World Cup-winning captain has to go, his successor is not a gamble, but a man we have been preparing all along.

It must be done by the system, and not left to chance. We have trusted to luck for the better part of fifty years and dressed it up as tradition, and luck has been kind. But the most important job in Indian sport cannot rest forever on the hope that greatness will keep arriving unbidden, exactly when required. Greatness, given a system, can be built. It is long past time we started building it.

A bowler beats the bat, raps the pad, appeals to the heavens; the umpire’s finger stays at his side. The fielding side reviews. Forty thousand people watch the ball-tracking unspool on the big screen, the projected path creeping toward leg stump until — there — a sliver of the ball kisses the timber, lit up in a colour that ought to mean joy. And then the verdict lands like a wet towel: not out, umpire’s call. The bowler throws his head back. The crowd, certain it has just been robbed by a machine, howls. Somewhere a broadcaster intones the sentence the modern game has come to dread — “the ball is hitting the stumps, and yet” — and a fresh round of the oldest new argument in cricket begins. I want to defend the rule everyone in that stadium has just decided to hate. Umpire’s call is right. It is, in fact, one of the few genuinely wise things we have done with technology.

Begin with what umpire’s call actually is, because most of the fury comes from misunderstanding it. The Decision Review System arrived in Test cricket in 2008, on a ground in Colombo, and within a season it had handed us a question nobody had quite thought to ask: how sure must a machine be before it is allowed to overrule a man? The answer the game settled on is the fifty-per-cent threshold. For the ball striking the stumps, or for the point of impact being in line, the projection must show at least half the ball overlapping the zone before an on-field decision can be reversed. Clip it with less — not quite half the ball brushing leg stump — and the verdict reverts to whatever the umpire said in the first place. Out stays out; not out stays not out. The technology does not get the final word. It gets a vote, and a weighted one.

The principle beneath this is one every engineer understands and most spectators never hear about: a prediction is not a measurement. Ball-tracking does not film the ball striking the stumps — the pad got there first and stopped it. What the screen shows with such serene confidence is a forecast, a clever and well-built extrapolation of where the ball would have gone, drawn from a handful of frames before impact and projected forward through the air. Like every forecast, it carries a margin of error, and that margin grows with the distance the ball must travel after it is struck. The further from the stumps the pad intervenes, the more the model is guessing, however crisp the graphic looks. Umpire’s call is simply the game’s honest admission of that uncertainty. When the projection is marginal, the system says, in effect: we cannot be sure enough to call a man wrong. So we let his decision stand.

Now the other side, because it is not a foolish one and deserves a proper hearing. The complaint is real and it stings: two deliveries that look identical to the naked eye can produce opposite outcomes, purely because one umpire raised his finger and another did not. A batsman given out, the ball clipping leg stump by a sliver, is on his way; his opposite number, given not out off the very same projection, bats on. Same fraction of timber, two different fates — decided not by the ball but by a decision made a moment earlier. To a bowler that feels like being told his wicket-taking ball counts only on alternate Tuesdays. And there is a tidier instinct underneath it all, seductive in its simplicity: if any part of the ball is hitting the stumps, that is out, and the machine should say so and have done with it. Bowled is bowled; surely hitting is hitting.

It is seductive, and it is wrong, and the reason matters. “If it is hitting, it is out” assumes the machine knows it is hitting. But on a marginal call the machine does not know — it estimates, and the estimate sits inside the very band of doubt the threshold was built to respect. Strip out umpire’s call and you do not abolish the uncertainty; you merely paper over it, handing every near-half guess the full authority of fact and pretending the margin of error went away because the graphic was pretty. That is not more accurate cricket. It is the same doubt, dressed in a confident voice. I would far rather the game admit what it cannot quite see than perform a certainty it does not possess. We spent a century trusting the umpire’s eye precisely because someone, in the end, must decide; the review system was meant to catch his howlers — the plumb one given not out, the one missing leg by a foot given out — not to depose him over half a centimetre no camera ever actually witnessed.

There is a deeper thing here, and it is one I find myself arguing in the commentary box and again in the classroom at the National Cricket Academy. We have grown so enamoured of the screen that we have begun to resent the human standing twenty-two yards away, as though his judgement were an obstacle to truth rather than a part of it. But the umpire in the middle has the angle, the sound, the deviation, and a lifetime of watching in his bones; he is reading the delivery much as a captain reads a pitch, with an art that does not reduce to a number. Umpire’s call keeps him in the contest. It makes his trained verdict the default and allows the machine to overturn it only when the machine is genuinely sure — which is exactly the right way round. The marginal cases were always going to break somebody’s heart; the only question is whether we break it honestly.

So keep umpire’s call, and keep the discomfort that comes with it, because the discomfort is the truth showing through. A game played to the width of a human hair will always produce moments that feel unjust when frozen and magnified ten times on a screen; that is the price of fine margins, not a fault to be engineered away. What we must not do is trade an honest doubt for a manufactured certainty merely because the manufactured one photographs better. Cricket has spent its whole life teaching one hard lesson — that the scoreboard cannot see everything, that the pitch keeps its secrets, that even the masters are sometimes only guessing well. Umpire’s call is that same humility, written into law: a rare and rather noble admission that there are things we cannot be sure enough about to ruin a man over. Better a true “we cannot tell” than a false “out.” The day we forget that is the day we let the graphic do our thinking for us — and thinking, as this game never tires of reminding us, was always meant to be ours.

The result that should have led every cricket bulletin in the country was instead tucked in beneath the franchise noise, where the franchise noise lives by right of sheer volume. In late February, on a ground in Hubballi, Jammu & Kashmir won the Ranji Trophy for the first time in their history. A side with no pedigree whatever in the long format, ending a wait stretching back more than six decades, did it by dethroning Karnataka — my old state, and one of the most decorated names the competition has known — in a final settled the old-fashioned way, on a first-innings lead, after five days in which the trophy changed hands not on a single thunderclap of a shot but on the patient accumulation of a fortnight’s better cricket. Paras Dogra, a domestic veteran of precisely the kind the franchise game tends to discard long before his work is done, lifted it. I felt the defeat as a Karnataka man; I felt the romance as a cricketing one, and the romance won comfortably.

We are told, gently and without pause, that this competition is a relic — that the future belongs to the franchise, the three-hour spectacle and the auction paddle, and that the Ranji Trophy survives on sentiment and the inertia of a board that cannot quite bring itself to switch off the lights. I want to make the unfashionable case for it. The long domestic grind is not the museum piece of Indian cricket; it is the engine room of everything the country still does well in the longest format, and we are running it down at a cost that will not show on any balance sheet until it is far too late to make the loss good.

Begin with what the grind actually builds, because it is precisely the thing the franchise game cannot. A four-day match on a wearing surface in Rajkot in January, watched by a few hundred souls and one thoroughly bored dog, asks a young batsman a question that twenty overs under lights will never put to him: can you do this for six hours? Can you leave the ball you do not need to play; can you bat through the second new ball with the score becalmed and your throat dry; can you find runs when the field has been set specifically to starve you and not one bowler is offering the width that the shortest format hands out like a welcome drink? Temperament of that order is not taught in a classroom or bought at an auction. It is forged, ball by unwatched ball, in exactly these unglamorous places.

It is the same for the bowler. The franchise game asks him for four overs and a clear head; the Ranji Trophy asks him for a fourth and a fifth spell on the same unhelpful afternoon, for the discipline to bowl a side out on the final day rather than merely to keep one quiet for twenty-four deliveries. The seamer who learns to nurse a tiring body through a long second innings, the spinner who learns to buy a wicket rather than rent a dot ball — these are Test-match skills, and they are domestic skills first. No country has ever produced a fine Test side without a serious first-class competition beneath it, and none ever will. The national team is only ever as deep as the grind that feeds it.

And then there is the romance, which is not a soft word here but a structural one. Jammu & Kashmir’s triumph is the system working exactly as it was built to: a path that runs from a maidana with no spectators to the highest table in the domestic game, open to anyone good enough and stubborn enough to walk it. That a state long synonymous with everything except cricketing pedigree could assemble eleven men and beat the establishment over five days, on merit, with no shortcut available and none taken — that is close to the most democratic thing in Indian sport. The auction enriches the few already anointed; the Ranji Trophy still, now and then, anoints the unknown. It is the whole difference between a lottery and a ladder.

The other side deserves a proper hearing, and it has a strong case. The domestic game’s troubles are real and they are not new: meagre match fees set against franchise contracts that can earn a man more in a fortnight than a decade of Ranji ever will; grounds so empty the fielders nearly outnumber the watchers; a calendar so congested that the red-ball competition is forever being shunted aside to make room for the white-ball windows that pay the bills. Young cricketers now quietly weigh whether a heavy Ranji season is even worth the wear and tear, when freshness for the auction is the more bankable asset. None of that is imagined, and none of it is the players’ fault. A man must feed his family, and we have built an economy that pays lavishly at one door and a pittance at the other.

But the conclusion that follows is to mend the grind, not to bury it. Pay the domestic professional a wage that reflects what he actually is — the raw material of the entire enterprise, the Test team’s nursery and its insurance policy at once. Give the Ranji Trophy a clear, unbroken window in the calendar instead of the scraps left over once the leagues have eaten their fill. Ask the franchises, which harvest the finished product, to owe something tangible back to the system that grew it for them. The domestic game is not failing because it has become obsolete; it is struggling because it has been neglected, and neglect is a choice that any administrator can reverse the moment he decides the long format is worth the trouble. To let it wither and then pronounce it dead would be a self-fulfilling prophecy of the laziest kind.

A career, like a single match, is finally judged on rather more than its loudest moments, and the truest ledger a cricketer owns is the one written slowly, across seasons, in the four-day game. I came up in the 1980s and 90s, when the Ranji Trophy was not one ladder among many but the only one there was, and I have never quite shaken the conviction that a man learns who he really is as a cricketer somewhere on the third afternoon of a match nobody is watching. Jammu & Kashmir in Hubballi is what the system produces when it is allowed to work as intended — not luck, not largesse, but a long apprenticeship rewarded at last. Build the grind, fund it, protect it, and it will keep handing the game its fairytales and its Test cricketers, which have always, on closer inspection, turned out to be the same thing. Trust instead to the auction to raise them for us, and one day we will look up from the spectacle to find we have quietly forgotten how to make a cricketer at all.

The Oval, the fourth evening of the second Test, and a chase that had been billed as improbable was busy becoming impossible. New Zealand, having batted twice with the unhurried good manners of a side that trusts the long format, had posted 391 and then 362, and set England 463 to win — the kind of figure that is less a target than a sentence. Joe Root, who had reached fourteen thousand Test runs earlier in the week and looked, as he so often does, like a man playing a different and calmer game from everyone around him, was unbeaten on 75. The trouble was that he was very nearly unaccompanied. Matt Henry, with the career-best figures of his life, kept finding the outside edge and the front pad at the other end, and England subsided to 209. A series they had opened by winning ugly at Lord’s was suddenly level at one apiece, and the oldest argument in the modern game reopened with it: how much aggression is wisdom, and how much is merely noise wearing the costume of courage?

Let me give the fashionable answer its due, and rather more than its due, because it has earned it. The reinvention of England’s Test cricket these past few years — the creed of relentless positive intent, of treating a Test match as something to be seized rather than survived — rescued a format that was quietly dying of its own caution. Grounds filled again. Dead draws turned into results. A generation of watchers who had been taught that the five-day game was an examination in endurance discovered it could be one in nerve instead. I admired it without reservation, and I admire it still; the contest between bat and ball is the sacred thing in cricket, and a batsman who refuses to be pinned down, who makes the bowler earn every dot rather than gifting him a morning of maidens, is upholding his half of that contest. Intent, properly understood, is a virtue.

But intent is a tool, and somewhere in the triumph it hardened into a creed. That is the moment any good idea begins to curdle — when the means is promoted to an identity, when attack stops being one option among several and becomes the only respectable answer to every question the game can ask. The leave outside off stump comes to look like cowardice; the dead bat played with soft hands on a seaming morning looks like a failure of belief rather than a reading of the conditions. And a tool wielded without regard to the surface, the situation or the scoreboard is no longer a skill. It is a tic.

For the highest batsmanship was never courage and it was never caution; it was discernment. The thing the maidana taught, ball after unwatched ball, was not to hit or to block but to know which delivery deserved which — to punish the half-volley, respect the one that nipped away, and leave, with something close to contempt, the one that asked to be left. A great innings, watched closely, is mostly a long sequence of correct decisions, the overwhelming majority of them undramatic; the cover drive that draws the gasp is merely the dividend paid by the forty quiet judgements that came before it. To remove that act of judgement — to decide in the dressing room, before a ball is bowled, that the answer is always to attack — is not bravery. It is the abdication of the very thing that makes batting an art rather than a reflex.

That, to my eye, was the quiet lesson of The Oval. New Zealand did not win by out-swaggering England; they won by declining the duel on England’s terms. They batted long and twice, made the opposition chase a total rather than a moment, and trusted Henry and a disciplined attack to do the patient work of bowling a side out rather than merely keeping it honest for a session. And the most eloquent witness for the case was England’s own: Root, the most orthodox craftsman of his generation, marooned on 75 while the method around him could guarantee neither the partnerships nor the patience that a fourth-innings mountain demanded. One man reading the situation, surrounded by ten obeying a doctrine, is not a chase. It is a parable.

The other side deserves a proper hearing, and it is stronger than the purists will allow. England did not stumble into their revival; they reasoned their way out of a defensive cricket that had killed more Tests than it ever saved — the grim, attritional cricket of an earlier era, when a side three down could shut up shop for a draw and call it professionalism. Caution is not a virtue either; it is merely the opposite error, and a duller one. And the very first Test of this series cut the other way: on a low, treacherous Lord’s pitch that the MCC itself later apologised for, a surface that lasted barely a thousand legal deliveries, it was positive cricket and brave bowling that won England the match by 115 runs. Aggression has banked England results that the old timidity would have drawn or lost. None of that is imagined, and none of it should be waved away.

But the honest conclusion is not that attack is wrong and defence is right, or the reverse; it is that the argument was always miscast. The choice is not between brave cricket and careful cricket. It is between thinking cricket and cricket on autopilot — and a philosophy that always attacks has surrendered its judgement every bit as completely as one that never does. The finest sides I played in and against were neither the most reckless nor the most cautious; they were the ones who could read the afternoon and change their minds, who knew that the same pull shot is a masterstroke at two o’clock and a calamity at half past four. Method should serve the moment. The moment must never be made to serve the method.

England and New Zealand go to Trent Bridge on the twenty-fifth with the series level and, the reports say, Ben Stokes expected back to lead. I have no idea who will win it, and I am content not to; a decider that could fall either way is the format advertising its own good health. But whatever the result, the lesson of The Oval will outlast it. This game has never, in four decades of watching it from the middle and from the margins, rewarded courage or caution as such — only the man who knows the difference between a ball to hit and a ball to leave. Intent is a fine servant and a ruinous master. And the bravest thing a batsman can do, far more often than the highlight reel will ever admit, is precisely nothing — to let the good one go, and wait, with all the discipline he can muster, for the ball that actually deserves him.

The Comfortable Lie We Tell Our Children

We live in an age of participation trophies.

Every child gets a medal. Every effort is “amazing.” Every parent cheers with equal volume whether their child scored the winning goal or stood in the wrong half for forty minutes picking grass. We have convinced ourselves that this is kindness — that protecting children from pressure, from failure, from the burning discomfort of being pushed to their limits, is a form of love.

It is not.

It is, in fact, one of the most quietly devastating things we can do to a child who has the potential to be great.

This is not an argument for cruelty. It is not a call to scream at ten-year-olds or strip childhood of its joy. It is a deeply reasoned, evidence-backed case for why pushing young athletes — with intelligence, with purpose, and with love — is precisely the thing that separates those who reach their ceiling from those who never even find it.

The Window Nobody Talks About

Here is the most important fact in youth sports development that almost no parent is told:

The window to build a champion is shockingly short.

Motor learning, neural pathway formation, coordinative development, psychological resilience — all of these have critical periods. For most sports, the foundational years are between ages 6 and 16. After that, you are largely building on what was already laid. Neurologically, the brain’s plasticity for motor skill acquisition begins to plateau in the mid-to-late teenage years. The movement patterns, the spatial awareness, the instinctive reading of a game — these are cemented in childhood.

Sports scientists call this the Long-Term Athlete Development (LTAD) model. It identifies distinct phases: FUNdamentals (ages 6–9), Learning to Train (9–12), Training to Train (12–16), Training to Compete (16–18). Each window has a purpose. Each window, once closed, cannot be fully reopened.

The tragedy is not that children are pushed too hard.

The tragedy is that most children are not pushed at all during the years it matters most.

By the time parents decide their child is “serious” about a sport — usually around 14 or 15 — the neurological scaffolding is nearly complete. They are now trying to lay a foundation in a building that is already being plastered.

The German football federation understood this. The Chinese state sports system understood this. The Romanian gymnastics programme understood this. Béla Károlyi understood this.

Most suburban football coaches on a Saturday morning do not.

What “Intensity” Actually Means

Let us be precise, because the word “push” frightens people.

Pushing a child does not mean:

• Screaming at them from the sideline
• Shaming them for errors
• Training through injury
• Removing joy from sport

Pushing a child does mean:

• Raising the expectation of effort progressively
• Introducing deliberate discomfort — the kind that builds
• Teaching them that the edge of their ability is not a wall, it is a door
• Loading them with cognitive and physical challenges just beyond their comfort zone

This is what sports scientists call progressive overload — not just in the physical sense, but in the psychological one. A child who is never asked to do something they think they cannot do will never discover that they can. And once they discover they can, once they cross that threshold, something changes in them permanently.

The brain learns: difficulty is not danger.

That reframe is everything. It is the difference between an athlete who folds under pressure and one who rises to it.

The German Model: Building from the Ground Up

In 2000, Germany was embarrassed at the European Championships and failed to qualify from their group at the 2004 Euros. They had a crisis.

Their response was not to buy foreign talent or find a quick fix. They went to the root.

The German Football Association (DFB) mandated that every Bundesliga club build academies with compulsory elite youth programmes. They invested billions in coaching education. They created a uniform, progressive curriculum for developing young players aged 6 to 17. Every child in the system was coached to a standard. Every coach was trained in the pedagogy of youth development. The curriculum was built around technical intensity from the earliest age — not games, not fun days, not participation. Technique. Repetition. Cognitive load. Tactical understanding layered progressively onto physical development.

By 2014, Germany won the World Cup. The squad that defeated Argentina 1–0 in the final was almost entirely the product of those academy years — players who had been intensively developed as children a decade earlier.

Thomas Müller. Toni Kroos. Mesut Özil (who was Turkish-German but formed in the German academy system from age 15). All products of a system that believed that excellence in youth development is not optional, it is infrastructural.

The lesson is not just about football. It is about what happens when a culture decides that childhood athletic development is serious work, worthy of serious investment and serious intensity.

The Chinese Model: The Factory of Champions

Few nations produce elite athletes as consistently and across as many disciplines as China. Gymnastics, diving, table tennis, weightlifting, badminton, shooting — China dominates with a regularity that looks, to Western eyes, almost supernatural.

It is not supernatural. It is systemic.

The Chinese state sports programme identifies talented children as young as 3 and 4 years old through national talent identification programmes run through schools. Selected children are moved to provincial sports schools — full-time academies where they train 6–8 hours per day, with school education built around their training schedule, not the other way around.

The loads placed on these children are extraordinary. A Chinese diving prodigy at age 8 will have accumulated more hours of deliberate practice than most Western athletes achieve by 18. A Chinese table tennis player identified at age 6 will be doing structured tactical drills, not just rallying. Every session has a purpose. Every purpose has a measurable outcome.

Is this harsh? By Western standards, yes.

Is it effective? The Olympic medal tables speak without ambiguity.

The Chinese model reflects a philosophical belief that Western culture has largely abandoned: that greatness requires sacrifice, that the development of excellence is a project that begins early and requires consistent, high-intensity investment, and that the job of the adult — the coach, the system, the parent — is to create the conditions for that investment.

China’s young athletes are not simply drilled into robots. The best of the system produces athletes of extraordinary technical and psychological resilience. They have been taught, from the youngest age, that effort is the currency of achievement. They do not expect sport to be comfortable. They expect it to be demanding. And in that expectation, they are psychologically free — because the discomfort is not a shock. It is the price they agreed to pay.

Romania’s Gymnastics Golden Age: The Károlyi Philosophy

Between the 1970s and 1990s, Romania produced a string of Olympic gymnastics champions that remains one of the most remarkable concentrated runs of excellence in sports history. Nadia Comăneci. Ecaterina Szabo. Daniela Silivaș. Lavinia Miloșovici.

The architect of this golden age was Béla Károlyi, the coach who ran Romania’s national gymnastics centre and later defected to the United States, where he produced Mary Lou Retton and Kerri Strug, among others.

Károlyi’s methods were controversial then and remain so now. His training was relentless, physically demanding, psychologically intense. Children lived at the training centre, separated from their families for long stretches. Discipline was absolute. Standards were non-negotiable.

But here is what is often lost in the debate about Károlyi:

The results were not coincidental.

Romania under Károlyi produced champions at a rate no nation before or since has matched in gymnastics. Not because Romanian children were genetically exceptional. Not because Romania had superior facilities or equipment. But because the system believed in the transformative power of intensity, and it applied that intensity consistently, early, and deliberately.

Nadia Comăneci did not become the first gymnast to score a perfect 10 by being handled with care. She became the first perfect-10 gymnast by being trained, from childhood, at an intensity that made the impossible routine, and the routine, automatic.

The lesson from Romania is this: champions are not discovered. They are made. And the making requires conditions that comfort-first cultures struggle to create.

The Indian Problem: The Culture of Pampering

India is a nation of 1.4 billion people. It has produced precisely one individual Olympic gold medallist in its independent history — Abhinav Bindra in shooting at Beijing 2008 — until Neeraj Chopra’s javelin gold in Tokyo 2020.

For a country of its size, this is not a resource problem. It is not a talent problem. India produces extraordinary individual talent across disciplines. It is a cultural and systemic problem, and at the heart of it is a very particular form of parental relationship with children’s potential.

The Indian middle-class child is, broadly speaking, sheltered from failure. The premium placed on academic success — engineering, medicine, the competitive examination system — means that sport is treated as a hobby, not a vocation. The child who struggles is helped rather than challenged. The parent who sees their child in pain during training does not think: good, they are being pushed to their limit. They think: my child is suffering. I must intervene.

This is not love. It is anxiety dressed as love.

The result is a generation of talented young athletes who never find out how good they could have been, because no one had the conviction — or the courage — to push them to find out.

There are exceptions. Mary Kom. Saina Nehwal. P.V. Sindhu. Significantly, most of them came from modest backgrounds where hardship was not a coaching methodology but a daily reality — and hardship, it turns out, is one of the most efficient intensity-training programmes ever designed.

The Indian system is changing. The Khelo India programme, the Sports Authority of India’s academies, the emergence of private coaching academies — these are shifts in the right direction. But the cultural resistance to intensity remains deep. Until Indian parents understand that discomfort is developmental, India’s potential in global sport will continue to go unrealised.

Mind Training: The Forgotten Half of Development

Physical training for young athletes receives most of the attention. Technique drills, fitness work, tactical sessions — these are visible, measurable, and coachable.

Mental training is the orphan of youth sport. And it is, arguably, more important.

Here is why: physical talent is widely distributed. There are millions of children in the world with the raw physical attributes to be elite athletes. The number who become elite athletes is infinitesimally small. The difference is almost never physical. It is psychological.

Mental toughness — the capacity to maintain performance under pressure, to recover from failure, to sustain effort when the body wants to stop — is a trainable skill. And like all skills, it is most efficiently trained during childhood, when neural pathways are most plastic and psychological habits are being formed for the first time.

What does mental training look like for young athletes?

• Pressure simulation: putting children in high-stakes situations in training — penalty shootouts, final rallies, last-second decisions — so that the emotional experience of pressure becomes familiar rather than overwhelming
• Failure protocols: teaching children not just to lose, but to analyse, adapt, and recommit after failure
• Self-talk and focus cues: age-appropriate cognitive tools that help children manage distraction and maintain concentration
• Visualisation: used systematically in Chinese, Russian, and Eastern European sports systems from very early ages, largely ignored in Western youth sport
• Emotional regulation: teaching children that feelings of fear, anxiety, and frustration are information, not instructions

The psychological profile of elite athletes — across virtually every sport and culture — shares common traits: high pain tolerance, low fear of failure, intrinsic motivation, the capacity to focus under pressure, and a deep relationship with discomfort. None of these traits are innate. They are all developed. And they are developed most efficiently between the ages of 8 and 16.

The child who is never taught to manage discomfort will, as an adult athlete, be managed by it.

Does “Load Management” Apply to Children?

In professional sport, load management has become a dominant philosophy. NBA stars sit out back-to-back games. Football players are monitored for fatigue with GPS and heart-rate variability data. The science is sound: the body has limits, and exceeding them produces injury, not improvement.

So does the same logic apply to children?

Yes — and the application is more nuanced than most coaches understand.

The critical distinction for children is between acute load (the stress of a single session) and chronic load (cumulative stress over weeks and months). Children’s musculoskeletal systems are still developing — growth plates are open, tendons and ligaments are not yet fully matured. The risk of overuse injury in young athletes who specialise too early and train too monotonously is real and well-documented.

The principle should be:

• High intensity within sessions — demand full effort, cognitive engagement, competitive sharpness
• Periodised load across the season — cycles of high load and recovery, not relentless pressure
• Multi-sport participation in the early years (under 12) — which develops overall athleticism and reduces overuse injury
• Sleep as a non-negotiable — children need 9–11 hours; sleep is when the adaptation from training actually occurs

The upper limit for load in child athletes is not a simple number. It is a dynamic interaction between the child’s training age, biological maturity, recovery practices, psychological state, and the quality of coaching. A child doing 10 hours per week of deliberately designed, technically coached, periodised training will develop more safely and more effectively than a child doing 20 hours of monotonous, uncoached, repetitive drilling.

What kills young athletes is not intensity. It is bad intensity — volume without purpose, pressure without recovery, specialisation without foundation.

The question is never simply “how much?” It is always “how much of what, and for what purpose?”

The Upper Limit: Where Does Push Become Harm?

This is the question that makes parents and coaches uncomfortable. And it must be answered honestly.

The research on early specialisation offers a clear warning: children who specialise in a single sport before age 13 are significantly more likely to suffer overuse injuries and significantly more likely to burn out and quit by their mid-teens. The teenage years carry their own physiological and psychological load — puberty, identity formation, social complexity — and a training environment that does not account for this creates dropout, not champions.

The upper limit, then, is defined not by hours alone, but by these indicators:

Physical red flags:

• Persistent pain that doesn’t resolve with 48–72 hours of rest
• Repeated injury in the same anatomical location
• Fatigue that doesn’t clear with normal sleep
• Loss of power, speed, or coordination

Psychological red flags:

• Consistent dread before training (not nerves — dread)
• Loss of intrinsic motivation; child trains only to avoid parental disapproval
• Anxiety or depression that appears to be training-related
• The child stops talking about sport with enthusiasm

The distinction that matters most:

There is a vast difference between a child who is tired and challenged and a child who is broken and depleted. Champions are made in the first state. They are destroyed in the second. The job of the parent and coach is to know the difference — and that knowledge requires attention, trust, and ongoing communication with the child.

The best systems in the world — Germany’s football academies, China’s diving programme, the current USTA tennis development model — all build in psychological monitoring alongside physical monitoring. They understand that the mental state of the young athlete is as critical a variable as their fitness levels.

How Champions Are Actually Made: The Five Pillars

The evidence from sports science, from the world’s most successful development systems, and from the biographies of elite athletes across every discipline converges on five consistent factors.

1. Early Exposure, Not Early Specialisation. The greatest athletes were almost all exposed to high levels of varied physical activity from early childhood. Federer played squash, basketball, and football before settling on tennis at 12. Most NBA stars played multiple sports through high school. The goal in the earliest years is not to build a specialist; it is to build an athlete — someone with rich, varied, deeply embedded physical literacy.

2. Deliberate Practice, Not Mere Repetition. Ericsson’s famous 10,000-hour rule is misunderstood. It is not simply 10,000 hours of doing the thing. It is 10,000 hours of deliberate practice — structured, purposeful, cognitively demanding repetition at the edge of current capability, with immediate feedback. A child can kick a football for 10,000 hours and learn nothing beyond what they already knew. They can spend 1,000 hours in a properly coached, deliberately designed session and develop capabilities that transform their ceiling.

3. Psychological Resilience as a Core Curriculum. The greatest junior development programmes treat mental skills as technically as physical skills. They are taught, practised, assessed, and developed. A child’s capacity to handle failure, pressure, and discomfort is designed into the programme, not left to chance or home environment.

4. A Culture of High Standards. Champions rarely emerge from environments of low expectation. The culture of the training group, the standards of the coach, the norms of the peer group — these are the most powerful shapers of a young athlete’s identity. In Germany’s academies, the culture says: technical excellence is non-negotiable. In Chinese diving, the culture says: perfection is the only acceptable target. In Romanian gymnastics, the culture said: there is always another tenth of a point to find. Children absorb the culture they train in. Put them in a culture of mediocrity and they will become mediocre. Put them in a culture of relentless, joyful, purposeful excellence and something extraordinary happens.

5. Parents Who Understand Their Role. The most underrated variable in elite youth sports development is the parent. Not the coaching parent — the supporting parent. The parent who understands that their job is not to manage their child’s emotions for them, but to create the conditions in which their child learns to manage their own emotions. The parent who does not intervene every time training is hard. The parent who asks “what did you learn today?” rather than “did you enjoy yourself?” The parent who holds the long view: that the discomfort of today is the capability of tomorrow.

Research is unambiguous on this point: parental pressure applied with warmth and confidence-building is correlated with elite athletic achievement. Parental pressure applied as conditional love — “I’m only proud of you when you win” — is correlated with burnout, anxiety disorders, and premature dropout. The difference is not in the pushing. It is in the love that surrounds it.

A Message to Every Sports Parent

Your child’s sporting window is not infinite. It is, in truth, heartbreakingly short.

The years between 8 and 16 are the years in which the neural architecture of a champion is either built or left unbuilt. The motor patterns, the psychological habits, the competitive instincts, the capacity to perform under pressure — these are being formed right now, in every training session, in every match, in every moment when your child decides whether to push through discomfort or retreat from it.

You are not their friend in this context. You are their architect.

An architect does not ask the building what it finds comfortable. An architect looks at what the building is meant to become and makes decisions — hard ones, far-sighted ones — based on that vision.

Push your child, not with fear but with belief. Push them with the unshakeable conviction that they are capable of more than they currently demonstrate. Push them with standards high enough to be worth reaching for. Push them with a culture in your home and your training environment that says: effort is honourable, difficulty is developmental, and greatness is not luck — it is choice, repeated daily, for years.

The Germans chose to build a system that believed in the child’s potential more than the child did.

The Chinese chose to begin earlier than anyone thought was necessary.

The Romanians chose to pursue perfection when everyone else settled for good enough.

What will you choose?

The State of the Mind: The Final Frontier

Here is the truth that every elite coach knows and few parents accept:

Physical talent is the floor, not the ceiling.

The ceiling is the mind.

The athletes who make it — the ones who are still performing at the highest level when peers with equal or greater raw talent have long since faded — are not physically exceptional. They are psychologically exceptional. They have, through years of training the mind with the same seriousness they trained the body, developed an internal environment that makes excellence sustainable.

Michael Phelps meditated. Novak Djokovic has spoken at length about mindfulness and mental training. Kobe Bryant was as meticulous about his mental preparation as his physical. The All Blacks have embedded psychological practices — including Māori cultural rituals of identity and purpose — into their training structure since the early 2000s.

These are not soft add-ons. They are core infrastructure.

A young athlete who is trained to manage their internal state — who can bring themselves to calm before a big moment, who can recover from error without catastrophising, who can sustain effort under fatigue — is an athlete who will consistently outperform those with greater physical gifts but lesser psychological ones.

Build the mind. Build it early. Build it deliberately.

Teach your child that the voice that says I can’t is not truth. It is feedback. It is the edge of their current capability, and the edge is where growth lives.

That is where champions are born.

Not on the day they win.

On the thousand ordinary days when they chose, against all comfort and all doubt, to push a little further than they thought they could.

Gold medals are not won on the day of the competition. They are won in the thousand training sessions before it, on the days when nobody was watching, when it would have been easy to stop — and the athlete chose not to.

Written for coaches, parents, and every child who has ever been told they’ve done enough — when they haven’t.

I have spent time on both sides of the boundary rope on this question — as a coach trying to develop a player, and as a selector trying to pick one. They are not the same job, and the second is the one we get wrong most often.

Put the coach-and-selector hat on together and the question changes. You stop asking “how do I get this kid in?” and start asking the only question that actually matters: “how do I build a selection system that finds talent — and stops missing it?”

Here are ten ideas. Most of them cost almost nothing. All of them are doable at state or zone level, today, with the people and the phones you already have.

1. Kill the One-Day-Trial Lottery

A single trial day rewards whoever slept well, won the toss in his own head, and got to bat first. It tells you almost nothing about the player and almost everything about his luck that morning.

Replace it with a three-touchpoint window: the trial day, one league or age-group match watched in the flesh, and one net or skills session. Nobody earns a place — or loses one — on a single innings or a six-ball spell.

2. Score on a Rubric, Not a Gut Feel

Hand every selector the same scorecard. One to five on defined traits: technique, decision-making, game awareness, fielding athleticism, temperament under pressure, fitness. Then aggregate the scores.

This is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It forces consistency across a panel of strong opinions, and it gives you a paper trail the day you have to drop a ‘name’ and explain why.

3. Separate Talent From Output

A boy who scores 40 on a flat track is not the equal of a boy who makes 25 on a seaming pitch against bowling that asks real questions. More often than not, the 25 is the better innings.

Build context into the score — the pitch, the quality of the attack, the match situation. Reward how the runs were made, not just the number in the book. The scorecard does not see everything; the selector has to.

4. Bring Data In — Cheaply

You do not need Hawk-Eye to bring numbers into selection. A phone, a tripod and a free video app give you side-on and front-on footage of every trialist — footage you can watch again when the memory of the day has faded.

Add a basic fitness battery that everyone does:

• Yo-yo test, or a timed 2km run
• 20-metre sprint
• Standing broad jump
• Throw distance from the boundary

Numbers do not argue, and they do not have favourites. They also catch the athletic late-bloomer the eye walks straight past.

5. Make Fielding a Gate, Not a Tiebreaker

I have ranted before about butter-fingers in the field. Apply it here. Set a minimum fielding and throwing standard, and make it non-negotiable.

A brilliant bat who cannot hold a catch or hit the stumps from the deep is a liability at the next level, not an asset. Test it, score it, and gate on it — do not leave it as the thing you remember only when two players are otherwise level.

6. Hunt Where Nobody Is Looking

Most selectors over-fish the same Bengaluru clubs, because that is where the nets are and that is where the drive ends. The biggest edge in our cricket is the talented kid with no academy money behind him.

Run open scouting days in the tier-two and tier-three districts — Kalaburagi, Ballari, Mandya and the rest. Build a small ‘raw talent’ pool that you develop separately from the polished pool. Polish can be coached. The raw material cannot.

7. Watch Temperament, Not Just Skill

Engineer pressure into the trial. “You need twelve off the last over.” A tight run-chase simulation. Bowl the death with a packed off-side field and a total to defend.

You learn more about a player from one genuine pressure scenario than from ten comfortable throwdowns. And in that scenario the selector should be scoring the things the highlight reel never shows — body language, decision-making, what the player does when the plan stops working.

8. Build a Tracked Talent Database

Every trialist goes into a sheet: scores, video link, date of birth, fitness numbers, the matches he was seen in. Then you track him across two seasons, not one.

The U-16 who pops at fifteen-and-a-half is the player every system loses. A database does not forget him the way a panel does. You are not making a one-off list; you are building a pipeline.

9. Audit Yourselves

At the end of every season, review your own hits and misses. Of the players you picked, who kicked on? Of the players you cut, who went and did well somewhere else?

A selection panel that never audits itself simply repeats its blind spots — and that is exactly how the ‘same old patterns’ everyone complains about at senior level take root at junior level too.

10. Run Blind-ish Trials

Wherever you can, run trials with bib numbers instead of names. It strips away the halo — “I know his father,” “he is from a famous academy” — that quietly tilts a panel before a ball is bowled.

Pick the player in front of you, not the reputation that walked in with him.

The Honest Part

None of this is expensive. A scorecard is a sheet of paper. A tripod costs a few hundred rupees. A scouting day in Kalaburagi costs a tank of fuel and a willingness to drive. What this asks for is not money but honesty — the discipline to write down what you saw, to test what you assumed, and to check, a season later, whether you were right.

We do not have a talent problem in this country. We have a selection problem. The talent is out there — in districts no one drives to, in late developers no one waited for, in the kid who failed his one trial day because he happened to bat second. The job is not to go and find more of it. The job is to stop missing what we already have.

Jacob Bethell walked off Old Trafford on the fourth of July unbeaten on seventy-six, having made the chase of a hundred and ninety-one look like a Sunday errand, and England went one up in a series India had every intention of winning. That is a defeat, and defeats happen; a five-match series has a great deal of road left to run. The sharper wound was inflicted a week earlier and a short flight away, at Stormont in Belfast, where Ireland — who had lost to India eight times out of eight before this — beat us not once but twice, by thirty-four runs and then, on the second evening, by a single run. Sixteen T20 series without defeat, nearly three years of it, ended against a side ranked nowhere near us. That is not a bad day. That is a message.

I want to be careful here, because the easy thing after a fortnight like this is to reach for the pitchfork — sack the captain, drop the batsmen, blame the young man learning his trade in the hardest possible classroom. I have no interest in any of that. Shreyas Iyer has inherited the captaincy in a lean patch, and a fifteen-year-old made his debut at Old Trafford; neither is the story. The story is in the manner of the failure, not the margin of it, and the manner has been telling us the same thing for some years now, quietly, in a language we have chosen not to learn.

Here it is, as plainly as I can put it. You cannot fake a defensive technique against a moving ball. You can fake almost everything else in the modern game — you can fake power with a short rope and a flat deck, you can fake tempo with an aerial route the surface has pre-approved, you can fake command against bowling that has been quietly disarmed before it left the top of its mark. But when the ball nips off a green seam at Belfast or holds up and swings late at Old Trafford, the honest questions arrive all at once, and there is no cameo in the world that answers them. A technique built to defend against the ball that talks is not learned in a crisis. It is grooved over years, against exactly that ball, until leaving becomes as natural as launching.

And that is precisely the diet we do not serve. We have spent a decade manufacturing surfaces that perform one function — letting the ball come on sweetly so it can be dispatched a long way — and we have taught a generation of gifted young cricketers that this is what batting is. The ropes are dragged in for the broadcast. The Impact Player lets a side bat so deep that the fear of dismissal, which is the very thing that turns a slog into an art, is quietly deleted; a man swings freely because a specialist waits in the shed, taking not a real risk but an insured one, with the ambulance already idling outside. None of this is stupid. It fills stadiums, it funds the whole edifice, and it produces a genuinely thrilling brand of cricket in the one climate it was designed for. But it is a climate. And cricket, unlike almost every other sport, is played in many.

So we raise tourists, and then we are astonished when they behave like tourists abroad. A tourist arrives somewhere unfamiliar, finds the food strange and the weather worse, and spends the trip longing for the comforts of home. A traveller has been uncomfortable before, on purpose, and knows what to do with it — where to put his feet, which ball to leave, how to survive the first hour so that the fourth belongs to him. The difference between the two is not talent. It is exposure. We are not short of talent; we are short of exposure to discomfort, because we have engineered the discomfort out of the domestic game in the name of entertainment.

The other side of this deserves a proper hearing, because it is not a foolish one. Two weeks of white-ball cricket is a small sample, and it would be a poor coach who rebuilt a system on the back of one bad fortnight; India remain, on any honest reckoning, among the two or three strongest sides in the world. T20 is its own discipline, and there is no law that says a flat-pitch game must translate to a seaming one — different formats, different demands. And the money the flat game generates is not a vice; it pays for the academies, the age-group cricket, the very pathways that might one day fix the problem I am describing. All of that is true, and none of it is enough. Because the pattern is not one fortnight — it is every away tour where the ball moves, arriving at the same conclusion; and the technique that folds in Belfast is the same technique that will fold in Cape Town and Manchester and Melbourne when the matches actually matter, in front of far larger crowds, with a trophy on the line.

What I am arguing for is not a punishment. It is closer to a gift, though it will not feel like one for a season. Give the seamer a little grass at the start and the spinner a little grip by the back end — not a minefield, nobody wants sides bundled out for a hundred and twenty, but surfaces that compel a batsman to earn what he gets. Move the rope back to where a big hit has to be a big hit. Let the fear of dismissal back into the room. Do these things and the howls will last exactly one season, because for one season the scores will dip and the highlight reels will complain. And then something quieter will happen. Within three years, the players themselves will thank the game for it — because they will walk into Cape Town and Manchester and feel, for the first time, not like visitors but like men who have been here before. That is how you win in alien conditions. Not by praying the toss falls your way, but by building cricketers who were forged in exactly those conditions from the very first net.

Losing to England at Old Trafford stings, as it should. Losing to Ireland — twice — ought to do more than sting; it ought to be the thing that finally moves us from blaming the boys to rebuilding the system that shaped them. If it does, this wretched little fortnight will not have been a low point at all. It will have been the best thing to happen to our cricket in a decade. The game never promised us fairness — the toss, the weather, the rub of the surface see to that. But it has always, without exception, told us the truth. The scoreboard at Stormont spelled it out in block capitals. The only question left is whether we are brave enough to read it.

There is a moment in the modern Indian Premier League that would have baffled any cricketer of my generation, and it now passes without a murmur. A bowler finishes his four overs and walks off — not to the pavilion at the innings break for a breather, but out of the match altogether, replaced by a batsman who has fielded not a single ball, will bowl not a single one, and exists solely to be dangerous through the back ten. The two men never once stand on the field together. In the accounting of the game they are a single cricketer wearing two bodies. I spent a career as the other kind of player — the sort who both batted and bowled for his living, picked precisely because he could do two things at once — and I will confess the sight unsettles me a little more with each passing season.

The Impact Player rule, brought in for the 2023 season and now confirmed to run at least through 2027, lets a side name five substitutes alongside its eleven and introduce one of them at the fall of a wicket, the end of an over, or the start of an innings; the man he replaces takes no further part in the match, not even as a fielder. Strip away the elegance of the mechanism and what it means in plain terms is this: each team fields not eleven cricketers but twelve — a batting eleven and a bowling eleven, stitched together at the seam and never asked to be the same men. On its own terms it is a clever piece of design. It is also, I want to argue, quietly making extinct the most valuable and hardest-won cricketer the game has ever produced — the genuine all-rounder.

Consider what the rule does to the arithmetic of selection, because that is where the damage is done. For the whole history of the game a captain has faced a single unforgiving question when he picks his side: do I want the extra batsman or the extra bowler, knowing I cannot have both? The all-rounder is the elegant answer to exactly that question — the man who lets you play seven batsmen and five bowlers out of eleven bodies, who balances a side that would otherwise be a coat too short at one end. He was, in the old currency, worth very nearly two players. The Impact Player abolishes the question. A captain no longer needs a cricketer who can do both, because he can now field a specialist batsman and, when the moment demands it, swap in a specialist bowler. The all-rounder, overnight, is worth one player again — and a slightly inferior one at each discipline than the two specialists who have replaced him. So teams stop picking him. And what the franchises stop picking, the academies, in time, stop making.

This ought to trouble us more than it does, because the all-rounder is not merely one cricketer among many. He is the rarest thing the sport knows how to grow. Two full skills housed in one body, each maintained at the highest level while the other is also being asked of you — it is nearly a biological improbability, which is why every great side in history has been built around the two or three men who could manage it and been the poorer for lacking them. A Kapil Dev, a Jadeja, a Pandya is not a luxury a team indulges; he is the hinge on which its balance turns. Make him optional and you have not trimmed a little fat from the eleven. You have removed the load-bearing wall and told yourself the room looks larger for it.

The other side of this deserves a proper hearing, and it is a good deal stronger than the purists will allow. The rule has produced the highest-scoring, most relentlessly entertaining cricket the league has ever staged; totals that were once the stuff of a curator’s fever dream now arrive most weekends. It has handed captains a genuine tactical chessboard — insurance against a toss lost under a dew-soaked evening sky, cover for a young cricketer having the worst day of his life, a way to match the game state rather than pray at it. It has, undeniably, deepened both batting and bowling at once, so that no side any longer carries a passenger at number eight swishing hopefully. And the audience has voted with a full house and a raised roof; broadcasters adore it, and the crowd it thrills is the crowd that pays for everything else. There are shrewd cricket people, whose judgement I respect without reservation, who see in it nothing more sinister than the T20 format finally growing into its own skin. None of that is nothing, and none of it should be waved away.

But the honest reckoning is that twelve-a-side is a different game from the one this sport spent a century and a half agreeing upon, and the difference is not cosmetic. Eleven against eleven is not an arbitrary number plucked from the air; it is the very constraint that forces the hard choice, and the hard choice is the mother of the all-rounder. Remove the constraint and you remove the need for the answer. Worse, the rule lets a captain hide a weakness where once he was made to solve it — and a competition that rewards the concealment of flaws rather than their repair is training the wrong instinct into everyone who plays it. The deepest cost, though, is downstream and all but invisible: the IPL is now the furnace in which India forges the cricketers it sends into the world, and a furnace that no longer demands a second skill will simply stop producing men who have one. The young cricketer who learns to bowl a canny four overs because his franchise place depends on it is precisely the cricketer India will need at a World Cup — where, tellingly, the Impact Player does not exist, and a side must still field eleven men each capable of a full day’s honest work. We are grooving our best young players for a game we play nowhere else on earth. It is no accident that several of the shrewdest Indian captains and all-rounders of the age, Rohit Sharma among them, have voiced their unease in public; the men who understand balance most intimately are the ones who trust the rule least.

I would not pretend the clean answer is simply to tear the thing out by the roots and declare the matter closed. The entertainment is real, the money it makes is real, and the audience has made its feelings unmistakable; a reform that ignores all three is a sermon, not a policy. Perhaps the honest course is to keep the rule as a declared experiment with a stated sunset, and to measure across a full decade, with clear eyes and open books, what it is actually doing to the national supply of all-rounders — and then to have the courage to act on what the numbers say rather than on what the highlight reel wants. But we should at the very least stop pretending the rule is a free lunch. Every season it runs, a gifted fourteen-year-old somewhere is being quietly advised that the second skill is now a luxury he may safely skip, and he is believing it, and one day the men who make our teams will go looking for the cricketer he might have become and find the shelf bare.

For cricket, when everything fashionable has been stripped away, is still eleven against eleven — and the all-rounder is the fullest, most complete expression of that number, the one man on the field who has been made to master both halves of the contest the game is finally about. A rule that renders him optional is not a tactical refinement; it is a convenience we have granted ourselves, and conveniences, in this sport more than most, have a habit of presenting their bill long after the man who signed for them has left the room. Build the cricketer who can do both, and you build a side that needs no insurance. Buy the insurance, season upon season, and you may wake one morning to find you have quietly forgotten how to build the cricketer at all.

A boy walks out to bat at a trial, and before he has taken guard the whole ground has quietly done the arithmetic. It knows his father’s average to the second decimal; it remembers the hundreds, the series won, the particular way the great man used to lean into a cover drive. The boy has faced no ball yet and already the scorecard is being kept — not against the bowler waiting at the top of his mark, but against a ghost who is not playing, and who cannot be got out. I have sat behind that arithmetic more times than I can count, at the National Cricket Academy and in selection rooms up and down the country, and I have come to believe that the hardest new-ball spell in all of cricket is not bowled by any fast bowler. It is bowled by a surname.

Consider what we actually do to these children, because we do it without noticing. Every innings a famous son plays is read not as an innings but as evidence — evidence for or against a single, unspoken hypothesis: is he as good as his father? A fifty becomes “promising, but not yet the old man”; a duck becomes “the son who never had it.” No cricketer alive could pass that examination, because it is not an examination of him at all. Rohan Gavaskar played eleven one-day internationals for India, took a wicket with the fifth ball of his international life, and made one half-century, against Zimbabwe; by any ordinary measure a serviceable first-class career and a place in the side. Yet he was measured against the man widely held to be the finest opening batsman the game had produced — his own father — and against that yardstick no fifty was ever going to be enough. He is a thoughtful voice in the commentary box now, and still, three decades on, he is introduced as Sunil’s boy. That is not a fair contest. It was never meant to be one.

The other side of this deserves a proper hearing, and it is a good deal stronger than a sympathetic essay would like. Spare the famous son your pity, the argument runs — these are the most fortunate cricketers alive. They grow up in the nets the maidan boy can only dream of; they are coached from the cradle by men who charge fortunes; the connections are there, the selectors take the call, the door opens for them that stays bolted shut against the gifted kid from Hubballi with no academy money and no surname to trade on. I have argued in these very pages that our system fails the boy with no money and no contacts, and I will not pretend now that the son of a Test cricketer starts level with him. He does not. The access is real, it is large, and it is unearned. All of that is true.

And none of it, in the end, is quite the point. Because the same door the world throws open for the famous son is the door the world then gathers to watch him walk through. Access buys him the trial; it cannot face the ball for him, and it doubles the height of the fall if he middles nothing. The maidan boy who fails at his one trial fails in merciful anonymity and goes home to try again next season; the famous son fails on the back page, in a headline that writes itself, in front of a crowd that came precisely to see whether the magic ran in the blood. Privilege and pressure are not opposites in this story. They arrive in the same envelope, addressed in the same hand, and the boy must open both.

So is it hopeless — is the wise counsel simply that a great cricketer’s child should take up anything on earth but the game his father mastered? It is a tempting thing to tell them, and I understand the instinct entirely; a life is a heavy thing to spend auditioning for a role that was cast before you were born. But the record is stubborn on this, and it says otherwise. The Pataudis remain a feat without parallel in our cricket — Iftikhar Ali Khan captained India in 1946, and his son Mansur Ali Khan captained India too, appointed at twenty-one, one of the youngest ever to hold the office. The son did not spend his career trying to become the father; he built a legend of his own, leading the side for the better part of a decade with the sight in one eye all but gone. Yograj Singh played a single Test for India and faded; his son Yuvraj built a career the father never approached and won us World Cups doing it. Abroad it is the same tale — Geoff Marsh sent two sons, Shaun and Mitchell, into Test cricket, joining only Walter Hadlee and our own Lala Amarnath in that particular club, and Mitchell grew into a genuine match-winner rather than a footnote to his father.

Look closely at how the successful ones did it, though, because the lesson is not “out-bat the ghost.” No one out-bats a ghost; the ghost has stopped making mistakes. What they did instead was change the examination — refuse the comparison and sit a different paper altogether. Which is why I think the shrewdest thing I have watched a famous son do in recent years is what Sachin Tendulkar’s boy has done. Handed perhaps the single heaviest surname the game has ever placed on a young pair of shoulders, Arjun Tendulkar became a left-arm fast bowler for Goa — a different discipline from his father, a different state, a different craft, a different identity built deliberately at arm’s length from the one he was born into. He scored a first-class hundred when it suited him and took a five-wicket haul, but the deeper wisdom was in the choice itself: he declined to audition for a part already immortally played, and went off to write his own. You cannot be a disappointing sequel to a film you are not in.

That, in the end, is the whole of it, and it cuts two ways. To the selector and the coach and the man in the crowd: judge the child as a cricketer, not as a sequel — the surname on his back tells you nothing the eye cannot tell you better, and often it lies. And to the boy himself, if he ever cares to hear it from someone who spent a life inside this game and watched too many bright young men crushed under a name they did not ask for: the surname is an inheritance you cannot bat with. It opens the gate, and then it leaves you exactly where every cricketer who ever lived has had to stand — alone in the middle, twenty-two yards from a hard new ball, with a father famous or a father unknown and no earthly difference between them once the bowler starts his run. Build your own game. The crowd came hoping for a sequel. Give them, instead, an original — it is the only innings that was ever truly yours to play.

Picture the scene, because you have surely watched it, and watched the reaction it provokes. A bowler arrives at the crease and, instead of delivering the ball, pauses, removes the bails at his own end, and turns to the umpire with an appeal. The non-striker, who had wandered a yard or two down the pitch before the ball was released, is given out — run out, squarely, by the letter of a law that has sat in the book since before any of us drew breath. And yet the ground does not respond as it would to any other dismissal. There is a gasp, then a murmur, then something close to outrage. The fielding side half-apologises. The commentators reach for “controversial” and “against the spirit.” A wicket has fallen entirely within the laws, and somehow it is the bowler who stands accused.

I want to make the unfashionable case, which is really only the plain one: it was always just a run-out. There is nothing underhand about it, nothing sly, nothing that should require an apology. The non-striker who leaves his ground before the ball is bowled is stealing an advantage, and the bowler who removes the bails is doing no more than any fielder who whips down the stumps on a batsman ambling through at the striker’s end. That we have spent the better part of eighty years treating it as a moral scandal — and, more tellingly, naming the act after the bowler rather than the batsman — tells you everything about how thoroughly we have got this the wrong way round.

The name is the first injustice. In late 1947, on India’s tour of Australia, Vinoo Mankad — as fine an all-rounder as the country has produced — ran out the Australian opener Bill Brown at the non-striker’s end, having first, by most accounts, warned him. For his trouble the dismissal was christened “Mankading,” and a perfectly legal piece of cricket was hung, in perpetuity, around the neck of the man who executed it correctly rather than the man who had left his ground. Imagine branding every stumping with the name of the first wicketkeeper sharp enough to claim one, as though the skill itself were a stain. We did precisely that to Mankad, and we have made generations of bowlers since flinch from a wicket that is theirs by right.

Consider what the non-striker is actually doing. Every yard he steals before the ball is bowled is a yard shaved off every single, every scrambled two, every run-out attempt at the far end. Across an innings it is no trifle; it is a systematic theft of ground, repeated ball after ball, on the unspoken understanding that nobody will be so impolite as to punish it. The batsman backing up too far is not being enterprising. He is taking something he has not earned and gambling that the bowler’s embarrassment will shield him. The remarkable thing is how often the gamble pays — how completely we have trained the bowler to feel guilty for declining to be robbed.

The custodians of the game, to their credit, have finally said as much. In 2022 the Marylebone Cricket Club moved the dismissal out of Law 41, which governs unfair play, and into Law 38, which governs the run-out — a small administrative shift carrying an enormous declaration: this is not sharp practice, it is simply one of the ordinary ways a batsman may lose his wicket. When Deepti Sharma ran out Charlie Dean at Lord’s that same year to win India a one-day international, and the predictable storm broke over her head, the MCC itself confirmed the dismissal had been properly officiated and ought to be considered nothing more than that. The lawmakers, at least, have stopped flinching. It is the rest of us who lag behind.

The other side deserves a proper hearing, and it is held with real sincerity by people who love the game as much as I do. The objection runs like this: cricket is not merely a contest of laws but of conduct, and there exists between bowler and non-striker a tacit understanding — a gentleman’s agreement that one does not pounce without at least a warning. To run a man out while he is only backing up, the argument goes, is to win by ambush rather than by skill, to claim a wicket the bowler never earned with a good ball. There is a warmth to this view, a wish to keep a little chivalry alive in a hardening game, and I will not pretend it is foolish.

But examine it closely and the spirit argument is standing on its head. It asks the wronged party to extend grace to the only person at the crease actually gaining an unfair advantage. Where, in all this tender concern for conduct, is the expectation that the non-striker keep his bat behind the line until the ball is gone? The warning so many demand is a courtesy, never a law — and it is a curious code of honour that obliges the victim to caution the offender before he is permitted to defend himself. As for the wicket being unearned: the bowler earned it the instant the batsman chose to leave early. And here is the part the spirit brigade can never answer cleanly — the remedy lies wholly, entirely, in the batsman’s own hands. He need do exactly one thing to render the dismissal impossible forever: stay in his crease until the ball is bowled. There is no simpler instruction in all of cricket, and none more reasonable.

That, in the end, is why I will defend this dismissal in the commentary box and in the classroom at the National Cricket Academy every time it arises, however briefly unpopular it makes me. Cricket is at its finest when it rewards skill and punishes the theft of advantage evenly, at both ends of the pitch — the same principle that should strip the cheap runs off a free hit or a leg bye applies here with even greater force. The crease is not a suggestion. It is a line drawn for a reason, and it binds the man at the bowler’s end exactly as it binds the man on strike. Stay behind it and no harm can come to you; stray beyond it and you have only yourself to answer to when the bails come off. Call it a run-out, because that is all it ever was — and let us, at long last, retire the notion that the cricketer with the grievance is the one who was standing where he had no right to be.

There is no shame in a classroom.

There is no shame in coaching a club side. There is no shame in taking a first-class team from November to March, learning your craft in the grinding work of selection, rotation, player development, and institutional memory.

There is certainly no shame in sitting down — really sitting down, for weeks — and studying the theory, the tactics, the psychology, the history, and the plain hard work of managing thirty-five adult men through the most intense scrutiny any profession in this country can throw at them.

And yet.

Every few years, we hand over the Indian team to someone who has skipped every single step in between.

The Job Nobody Actually Understands

Let’s be clear about what coaching the Indian national cricket team actually is.

It’s not just technical. It’s not just tactical. It’s not even primarily about knowing how to bat, bowl, or field — though yes, you should know those things properly.

It’s everything else.

Man-management. Handling a 23-year-old superstar who is suddenly dropped, a 32-year-old veteran whose contract is ending, a bowling all-rounder who wants to bat at number 4, a pace bowler who thinks the selection is personal vendetta. All of them have managers, all of them have egos, all of them are being watched by 1.4 billion people who have opinions about their career.

Reading people. Understanding that pressure doesn’t affect all players the same way. Some need to be screamed at. Some need space. Some need to be told they’re not good enough. Some need to be told they’re the chosen one. You need to read which is which, and you need to be right.

Tactical preparation. Not just knowing that a pitch will turn on day three, but understanding what your team needs on that pitch, what their team will try to do, and how to position your eleven to negate their strengths while exposing their weaknesses. That’s not instinct. That’s years of study.

Opposition analysis. Not just having a vague sense that their opening batsman plays short balls badly, but understanding why, understanding the frequency of that weakness, understanding whether it matters in this format, on this ground, with this field placement, against this bowler.

Talent identification. Harder than people think, because talent at domestic level doesn’t always translate. You need to know what a player will become at international pace, at international intensity, against international fields. You need to know what he’ll become under pressure. What he’ll become when he fails three times in a row. That requires study, not just watching a net session.

Building a dressing room. Eleven different backgrounds, eleven different egos, eleven different ideas about how the game should be played. Some are from small towns and have never seen a five-star hotel. Some are already sponsors of five-star hotels. Some have played fifty Tests. Some are playing their third. You need to make them one unit, not eleven individuals in matching uniforms.

The mental game. Cricket is 90 per cent mental and everyone knows it and nobody actually trains it the way they should. You need to understand motivation. You need to understand fear. You need to understand what a player needs to hear at 11 PM on the night before a crucial match, and what he needs to hear at lunch on the third day when things are going wrong, and what he needs to hear in the dressing room when he’s just been out for a duck in front of his home crowd.

Custodianship. Being a representative of Indian cricket, a custodian of its history, someone who understands that when he walks to the boundary in an India cap, he’s representing not just the team but the country. That matters. That needs to be trained, not just assumed.

Institutional memory. Understanding where Indian cricket has been, where it’s going, what has worked, what has failed, why Kapil’s 1983 team won, why we lost in ’96, why 2011 worked, why 2019 didn’t. You can’t make decisions in a vacuum. You need to know the game’s history, your game’s history, intimately.

Standing firm. When the team loses three matches in a row, when the press is calling for your head, when the board is asking questions, when the players are second-guessing, when the country is angry — you need to stand by the team. You need to believe when belief is hard. That’s not taught in a weekend seminar. That’s forged through experience.

The Path

There is a path. It doesn’t have to be the only path, but it should be a path, and it should be available, and it should be required.

Study. Sit down and learn the game at a level that most cricketers never do. Biomechanics. Psychology. Periodization. Nutritional science. Opposing team analysis. History. Read the classics. Study the coaches who built dynasties. Understand why a certain approach worked in a certain era, and what’s changed since then.

Apprenticeship. Coach a club side. Coach a first-class team. Take them through a season. Make selection decisions. Watch them fail because of your decisions. Watch them succeed because you prepared them right. Live with the consequences. Learn what actually works when there’s no safety net, no corporate structure, no sponsorship deals to fall back on.

Case work. Real situations. A player is not performing but has been with the team for ten years. Your opener is injured. Your death bowler is getting hit every match. Your spinner is being targeted. Your batsmen are struggling against left-arm pace. Study how these situations have been handled. Study what worked. Study what didn’t.

Man-management training. Conflict resolution. Leadership under pressure. Handling media. Understanding institutional dynamics. How to deliver bad news. How to motivate. How to discipline. How to support. This is learnable, but only if you actually learn it.

Mentorship. Work under a great coach. Understand how they think. Why they make the decisions they make. What they see that others don’t. This is where the intangibles get transferred.

Certification. At the end of it — not at the beginning — there should be a framework. A standard. Not a guarantee of success (no coaching certification guarantees that), but a minimum standard of preparation. A statement that says: this person has studied the theory, done the practical work, understood the psychology, managed the conflicts, and is ready to step into the most demanding coaching role in Indian cricket.

The Cost of Skipping the Steps

We don’t do this. And so we get:

Coaches who know how to bat but don’t know how to teach batting. Coaches who can spot talent but can’t manage it once they’ve found it. Coaches who understand tactics but fold when the pressure comes. Coaches who are great at addressing the press but terrible at addressing a player in distress. Coaches who don’t know the history of the game they’re coaching.

And the result is predictable: instability, inconsistency, players who don’t trust their coach, support staff who aren’t aligned, a team that plays well in patches and collapses under pressure.

Not because the players aren’t good enough. Because the coach wasn’t prepared enough.

There Is No Shame

The irony is this: the best coaches in the world — the ones who have built dynasties, who have turned mediocre teams into champions, who have managed the most intense pressure without flinching — they all did the work.

There is no shame in any of it. The classroom, the club side, the long unglamorous seasons of first-class cricket — that is not a detour on the way to the top job. That is the qualification for it.

The only shame is ours: that we keep pretending the most important job in Indian cricket is one you can walk into without a licence.

Let’s get one thing straight before the critics sharpen their knives — Brendon McCullum tried something nobody in the history of Test cricket had the guts to try. And whether it filled the trophy cabinet or not, that alone deserves a standing ovation.

Test cricket had become a slow, cautious, tuck-it-away-for-a-rainy-day affair. Draw a game, save a series, live to bat another day. Safe. Predictable. Yawn-inducing. Then along came Baz — a Kiwi who batted like he had a plane to catch during his own playing days — and he looked at the oldest format in the game and said, why not have some fun?

Bazball wasn’t a tactic. It was a philosophy. A dressing-room culture. A middle finger to the fear that had crept into Test batting. Attack first, worry later. Chase 300 in a session and mean it. And here’s the thing nobody wants to admit — even when it didn’t fetch England the results in the Test format, it gave the cricketing world something it had lost: excitement. Something to argue about over a beer. That’s not failure. That’s oxygen.

Because here’s a truth the game keeps forgetting: every sport that ever moved forward was dragged there by someone the establishment first called a lunatic.

Take Dick Fosbury. In 1968, the entire high-jump world went over the bar belly-down — the “straddle.” Fosbury turned his back to the bar and flopped over it backwards. An Oregon newspaper wrote that he looked like “a fish flopping in a boat” — Fosbury liked the line so much he named his technique after it, the “Fosbury Flop.” Then he won Olympic gold in Mexico City with it. Within a decade, every high jumper on earth had abandoned the straddle and copied him. The trend didn’t change him. He changed the trend. Sound familiar?

Or look at football. When Johan Cruyff and the Dutch turned up with “Total Football” in the 1970s, defenders attacked and attackers defended — positions became mere suggestions. They didn’t win the 1974 World Cup. They lost the final, 2–1 to West Germany in Munich, after leading through an early penalty. And yet Total Football rewired how the whole planet plays the game — the DNA of every modern possession side, from Cruyff’s own Barcelona to Pep Guardiola’s City, traces straight back to that “beaten” Dutch team. Losing the final didn’t bury the idea. It immortalised it. That is Bazball’s story in a different jersey — the scoreboard said one thing, history said another.

Cross to basketball. For years the three-pointer was treated as a gimmick, a desperation heave. Then Stephen Curry and the Warriors decided the maths said otherwise and started bombing from range with a straight face. Purists moaned that he was “ruining basketball.” Today the entire NBA is built on the shot he legitimised. The critics didn’t stop him — they eventually copied him.

And in tennis, everyone “knew” you served, came in, and volleyed. Then Björn Borg and the baseline generation that followed proved you could win by staying back and out-lasting anyone. The serve-and-volley orthodoxy that had ruled for decades quietly died. Trends don’t defend themselves; someone bold always comes along and asks the question no one else will.

Even Formula 1 has its heretic — Colin Chapman at Lotus, whose mantra was “simplify, then add lightness.” Rivals thought his cars were flimsy toys. He kept winning championships and reinvented what a racing car even was.

Now put McCullum in that company, because that’s exactly where he belongs. Bazball is Fosbury turning his back to the bar. It’s Cruyff losing the final and winning the argument. It’s Curry taking a “bad” shot until it became the only shot in town.

And will the critics cry? Of course they will. Critics always cry. Every time someone goes against the grain, there’s a queue waiting to say “I told you so” the moment a plan wobbles. But let me call out the part that genuinely deserves calling out — what McCullum did for individuals like Joe Root and Harry Brook was phenomenal. He freed Root to play the cricket of his life, and he handed Brook a licence to be fearless from the very first ball. That’s not luck. That’s a leader who understood men, not just methods.

And that’s the real McCullum, isn’t it? The same character he showed as a player — walk your own path, back your instinct, stick to what you believe is right for you and your team, and let the scoreboard chatter follow. He didn’t blink under the odds. He doubled down.

Here’s the bit that so often gets missed: at least England had a plan. A team plan. A culture. A shared belief. No other side in world cricket attempted the unthinkable — they watched from the sidelines, took the safe route, and quietly hoped it wouldn’t work. It all depends on how you look at it. Perspective is everything. And through that lens, you see exactly what Brendon stood for.

The best part of the whole story? The ECB bought the idea. They didn’t flinch, didn’t water it down, didn’t reach for the panic button at the first bad week. England stuck their neck out and committed. These were no longer the timid Poms of yesteryear, playing not to lose. This was something new. Something bold.

Something refreshing.

Say what you want about the results. Cricket is richer for Bazball. And the game owes Brendon McCullum a quiet thank you — for reminding us all that Test cricket, at its best, should make your heart race.

Ask any captain what kept him up the night before a Test, and it won’t be the opposition batting line-up. It’ll be twenty-two yards of soil. The pitch. The one thing on a cricket field that nobody fully controls and everybody pretends to understand.

Reading a pitch is part art, part science, and — let’s be honest — part witchcraft. You’ve seen it a hundred times: two seasoned pros crouch over the strip, press a key into it, tug at a blade of grass, exchange a knowing nod… and then get it completely, gloriously wrong. Because that’s the beauty of it. The pitch keeps its secrets right up until the first session, and sometimes long after.

The science half is real, and it’s fascinating. Moisture is the whole ball game. Too much and the seamers lick their lips. Bake it dry and by day four it’s a minefield of cracks and rough for the spinners. Then there’s the clay content — the more clay, the harder and truer the bounce; sandier soils crumble and slow up. Red soil, black soil — they behave like different animals. A groundsman rolling the surface is quietly deciding how the game will be played before a ball is bowled. Grass binds the surface and offers seam; shave it and you’ve changed the contract entirely.

The art half is where it gets human. You can measure moisture, but can you feel how the sun’s going to work on it over five days? Read the cloud cover, the humidity, the way the outfield’s holding dew? That’s instinct earned over seasons, not something you’ll find on a spreadsheet.

And here’s the thing every stat-head needs to hear: records will not reveal everything. Historical data at a venue tells you a tendency, not a truth. Grounds get relaid. Curators change. Weather does what it wants. The scorecard from three years ago is a rumour, not a forecast. Lean on it too hard and the pitch will make a fool of you.

Now, the roller — cricket’s most underrated weapon. This is where reading the pitch turns tactical, because the Laws hand the batting captain a genuine choice, and most fans don’t even realise it. Under MCC Law 9, the pitch can’t be rolled willy-nilly during a match. It’s rolled at the request of the batting captain, for a maximum of seven minutes before the start of each innings (bar the very first innings of the game) and before the start of each day’s play. That’s it. Seven minutes to shape your fate.

And the choice within those seven minutes is everything. The heavy roller presses the surface down, binds the top, and can buy you a day or two of flatter, truer batting — but roll a drying, cracking pitch with a heavy roller and you risk squeezing moisture up and breaking the surface open even faster. The light roller freshens and smooths without that same risk. So the captain has to ask: do I want to seal this thing shut for run-scoring, or am I better off leaving it be? Bat first on a belter and you’ll want the heavy roller keeping it honest. Chasing on a fifth-day dustbowl and a heavy roll might just knit those cracks together for a session — or blow them wide open. It’s a gamble, and it’s yours to make. That single seven-minute decision has swung Test matches.

Here’s the truth every great captain knows: you cannot lead a Test side if you cannot read a pitch. The best skippers in history weren’t just tacticians — they were readers of the game, and the surface was the first thing they read. And make no mistake, it’s hard. Reading a pitch is as difficult as a young man in love trying to read the mind of the girl he’s fallen for — every signal ambiguous, every reading a leap of faith. It’s as unpredictable as guessing the mood of Bengaluru traffic on a Monday evening — free-flowing one minute, gridlocked the next, for no reason anyone can name. And just like the weather, the moment you think you’ve got it figured out, it changes on you. That’s not a flaw in the game. That’s the beauty of it — the conditions shift, the pitch shifts with them, and the challenge is never the same twice.

And the great readers? They belong in a class of their own. Think of Mike Brearley — a captain whose genius wasn’t runs but reading: the pitch, the moment, the men. Of Ian Chappell, who understood exactly when an Australian surface would turn and set his side accordingly. Of MS Dhoni, whose feel for a subcontinent track and when it would grip made his bowling changes look like clairvoyance. Of Sourav Ganguly, who read home conditions and backed his spinners with utter conviction. Hard-nosed skippers who won tosses and matches on the strength of what they saw in the strip. These men didn’t just captain sides — they diagnosed pitches, and their teams reaped the rewards.

Which raises the real question — whose call is it, anyway? Is reading the pitch the analyst’s domain, armed with data and probabilities? The captain’s, who has to live and die by it? The coach’s? The truth is it should be a collective reading. The analyst brings the numbers, the captain brings the gut, the coach brings the balance, and — never forget — the groundsman knows that strip better than all of them combined. Get those voices in the same huddle and you get a decision. Silo them, and you get an excuse waiting to happen.

Home and away is where the whole subject catches fire. At home you know your soil, your curator, your conditions — you can shade the surface to suit your attack, and there’s no shame in it; everyone does. But away? Away is the true examination. That’s where reading a pitch becomes survival, not strategy. And it’s exactly why teams that only ever learn to read home decks get exposed the moment they land somewhere the ball does something they’ve never seen. You can’t read what you’ve never had to.

And here’s a thought only a certain kind of sportsman will appreciate: only golf can truly match cricket for this. In golf, you read the green — the grain, the slope, the speed, the way the moisture sits at dawn versus dusk — and no two are ever alike. Like cricket, the playing surface itself is a living, breathing opponent that changes by the hour. Every other sport plays on a standardised court or field. Cricket and golf alone ask the athlete to read the ground before they can master it. That kinship is no accident — both are games of patience, judgement, and reading what the earth is telling you.

So here’s a genuine thought, not a throwaway one: why not put captains and coaches through proper seminars on pitch-reading? We coach batting, bowling, fielding, fitness, media, mental conditioning — everything. But the single biggest variable in the sport, the surface itself, we leave to hunch and folklore. Bring in the curators. Bring in the soil scientists. Let captains learn why a pitch does what it does, not just that it does. That’s not over-coaching. That’s finally coaching the thing that decides matches.

Because reading a pitch will always keep a little of its mystery — and thank god for that. But the teams that treat it as a craft to be studied, rather than a coin to be flipped, will always be a step ahead. It’s a great subject. It deserves to be taken seriously.

Consider the week just gone. India were beaten four times out of four by England — one match washed away by the weather, the other four simply lost, the heaviest of them an evening at Trent Bridge where a batting line-up was folded up for 76. For their trouble England were pronounced the best Twenty20 side in the world, top of a ranking table that will be reshuffled long before the format’s only tournament that matters comes round again. And by Tuesday the same two teams had reassembled at Edgbaston for the first of three one-day internationals, where India won by six wickets and the “number one” of Saturday was already not worth the breath it takes to mention. A whitewash, a coronation, and a shrug, all inside a fortnight.

I want to make an argument I suspect a good many people inside the game make privately and few will say aloud: the bilateral Twenty20 international, played between World Cups for no prize anyone can name, has quietly lost its reason to exist. Not the format — Twenty20 is a genuine and difficult game, and I have spent a fair share of my life in the commentary box celebrating it. It is the bilateral series I mean: five matches strung across a summer, decided, and forgotten, that settle nothing and cost the men who play them a great deal.

A contest is only ever as alive as the stakes it plays for. That is the first law of any sport worth watching, and cricket has honoured it for a century — the Ashes urn, the Ranji Trophy, a World Cup held aloft on the Lord’s balcony. Ask an honest question of the series just finished and the trouble is plain: what, precisely, was at stake? No trophy that anyone will remember, no place in a tournament earned or forfeited, no consequence beyond a ranking that behaves like a stock ticker — up on Saturday, down by the next window, meaningless as a measure of anything except the last side to hold it. A result that costs nothing teaches nothing. A 4–0 in that setting is not a verdict; it is weather.

And it is not free, whatever the fixture list pretends. Consider what the glut actually charges. The players pay in the coin of their bodies and their attention — cap after cap in matches that blur into one another, until international cricket, the thing that was once the summit of the whole pyramid, begins to feel like another lap of the franchise treadmill in a different shirt. The boards pay too, in a currency they affect not to notice: they cram so many of these fixtures into the calendar that they must rotate and rest and experiment, so that half the time a series does not even pit the two best elevens against each other — which rather gives the game away. If a contest is worth staging, you field your strongest side; if you dare not, because there is simply too much cricket, then you have already answered the question of whether it needed staging at all.

The instinct of a man who has spent his life inside the game is not to complain but to mend, so here is the mend. Give the bilateral Twenty20 international the one thing it lacks: consequence. Fold these series into a real competitive structure — a standings table that feeds directly into World Cup qualification and seeding, so that every match, however far from the final, becomes a rung on a ladder that leads somewhere. Play fewer of them, and mean them; a taut three-match series that settles a seeding is worth a dozen limp five-match ones that settle nothing. Protect the room on the calendar this frees for the red-ball and fifty-over cricket that the shortest format has been quietly crowding out. Let the ranking become the product of matches that mattered, rather than the consolation prize of matches that did not.

The other side deserves a proper hearing, and it is more substantial than the purists will allow. Bilateral cricket is how the game pays for itself — the broadcast money from a full English summer of India keeps the lights on from Chester-le-Street to the smallest board that could never fund itself on tournaments alone. It is also, genuinely, where young cricketers are forged: a debut at Southampton against a hostile crowd and a ball that moves teaches a boy more in three hours than a month of throwdowns ever will, and you cannot blood a whole generation only at World Cups that come round once in two years. And the spectators, who owe us nothing, want live international cricket in July — not an empty ground waiting on a tournament. None of that is trivial, and none of it should be waved away.

But look closely and every one of those goods survives the reform untouched. Matches that carry World Cup qualification still draw the broadcast money — more of it, if anything, once the result means something. A young man still wins his cap and learns his trade; he simply learns it in a match that counts, which is the only kind of match worth learning it in. The crowd still gets its July cricket, only now the scoreboard is telling them a story rather than merely killing an afternoon. What the reform strips out is not the funding, nor the blooding, nor the spectacle — it is only the emptiness at the centre of it, the nagging sense that players and watchers alike are going through motions that lead nowhere. More cricket was never the disease. More cricket that means nothing is.

I have sat through a great many of these series, and the tell is always the same — the flatness in a dressing room that has just won something it cannot quite believe was worth the winning, the speed with which the result evaporates from every memory, the victors’ included. A game that asks men to bleed for it owes them, in return, a reason; and a result they have fought for ought to leave a mark somewhere that outlasts the handshake — on the record, on a tournament, on the road to a summit. Give the bilateral Twenty20 international genuine stakes and even a whitewash becomes a story worth the telling. Leave it as it is — a coronation nobody will remember, handed out in a week the calendar had already moved past — and we should not be surprised when the players treat it as lightly as the game has taught them to, nor when the rest of us look up one day to find we have staged a thousand matches and can remember almost none of them.

Postscript, August 2026. The ranking held for rather less time than even I had expected. England’s reign at the top lasted a fortnight: India took the position back at the end of July, on the strength of a series in Harare against a rebuilding Zimbabwe. Two sides separated by a decimal point, a summit changing hands on the evidence of matches that no one will remember — if a further argument were needed that the table measures the fixture list rather than the cricket, the fixture list has been kind enough to supply it.

Every time Gautam Gambhir is unavailable, Indian cricket reaches for the same comfort blanket: hand the team to VVS Laxman as interim head coach. It is meant as a compliment. It is actually a waste — the equivalent of pulling a master architect off the blueprints to lay bricks for a fortnight. You get a wall. You squander the one man who should be designing the entire city.

Laxman should not be India’s stop-gap coach. He should be its Director of Cricket — a role that sits above the head coach, above the selectors, above the administrators, and owns the game across the whole country and every age group. We have already half-admitted this is his calling by handing him the Centre of Excellence, and as I write there are reports that the Board may at last be preparing to do exactly this. Good. But a title is not a system. What follows is what the role must actually mean — because if it becomes merely a senior man in a boardroom, we will have wasted him a second time.

A Coach Owns a Dressing Room. A Director Owns the Pipeline.

A head coach’s horizon is the next series, the next XI, the next toss. A Director of Cricket’s horizon is the next decade. He is not asking who bats at four in the Boxing Day Test. He is asking where India’s number four in 2034 comes from, and what we are doing today to guarantee he exists. Two different jobs, two different temperaments. Laxman — patient, cerebral, a builder of people rather than a chaser of headlines — is built for the second one. Spending him on the first is malpractice.

What the System Actually Does

A Director’s job is to remove luck from the equation. Not slogans — mechanisms. Concretely, the system he builds should:

• Audit selection against birth-quarter. Record the birth month of every age-group player and audit selections against it. Right now we systematically over-pick the January-born, who are simply bigger at fourteen — the relative age effect — and quietly discard late-born talent that matures later. Measure it, correct for it, and stop throwing away half the pool.
• Scout on “many eyes, many times.” A boy is watched across a whole season by multiple assessors, not judged on one trial day, on one pitch, in one mood. One-day trials reward the ready, not the talented.
• Run a rolling development pool. A rolling two-year pool from under-17 upwards, so players are groomed along a defined pathway — not scrambled together weeks before a tournament.
• Never lose a player’s thread. Follow every identified player for years, his progress kept on a shared record — not lost the moment he ages out of an age group.
• Study how good becomes great. How did Rohit Sharma go from a wristy talent to a mountain of an opener? How did Virat Kohli convert ability into relentless output? Reverse-engineer those journeys and feed the lessons back into the pathway, so we build greatness on purpose instead of waiting for it.

We wait for a Sachin. We marvel at a Vaibhav Suryavanshi. But we did not manufacture them — they arrived. The job is to make the good cricketer a reliable output of the system, so that the great one becomes a matter of odds, not miracles.

Build the Support Staff, Not Just the Players

Here is the part Indian cricket forgets: a pathway for players is worthless without a parallel pathway for the people who develop them. The Director must build a pipeline for the next line of support staff — trainers, physios, strength-and-conditioning coaches, analysts, and yes, the next head coach — with the same deliberateness.

That means a credentialing ladder: certify coaches, trainers and physios to defined standards the way medicine and law license their own. It means rotating promising support staff through age-group and state setups so they are seasoned before they reach the national team. And it means that when a head coach is unavailable, the successor is someone the system has grown and vetted — not a name grabbed in a panic.

If you have to improvise your interim coach, your pipeline has already failed.

Systems Beat Geniuses

This is not theory. Other sports have run the experiment, repeatedly, and the systems win.

Germany, football. Humiliated in the group stage of Euro 2000, the DFB forced through a national overhaul: every Bundesliga and second-division club was required to run a certified youth academy as a condition of its licence, backed by a nationwide talent-promotion programme and hundreds of regional talent bases. The team that lifted the 2014 World Cup was built from products of that reformed system. They did not get lucky in Brazil. They built it, deliberately, out of a moment of embarrassment.

Belgium, football. Knocked out early as co-hosts of the same tournament, Belgium — led by Michel Sablon — commissioned the university at Leuven to study its youth football scientifically, made entry-level coaching courses free (enrolment jumped tenfold), standardised one playing philosophy across every academy, and built a national centre at Tubize. A nation of eleven million went from irrelevance to the top of the world rankings, producing Courtois, De Bruyne, Lukaku and a whole golden generation. Their own people are careful about the phrase: the golden generation was not the project — it was proof the project worked.

Britain, Olympic cycling. From almost nothing, British Cycling paired long-term Lottery funding with Peter Keen’s structured world-class plan and, later, Dave Brailsford’s “aggregation of marginal gains” — improve everything by one per cent and let the sum transform you. A couple of world-championship golds in 2002 became nine of the eighteen on offer by 2008, and then domination of successive Olympic Games. A pipeline plus a philosophy plus patient funding — not one gifted rider.

The common thread is impossible to miss: a moment of failure, an institution above the noise that owned the redesign, a written long-term plan, and the patience to let it compound. None of them waited for a genius. All of them built a factory.

Every State Needs Its Own Director — Above the Politics

National reform dies if the states stay broken. Each state association needs one Director of Cricket of its own, working independently of the political setup, placed above coaches, selectors and administrators — someone who understands the local game and its players’ culture, carries a vision for their development, and is insulated from the boardroom churn. Rooted in the local. Immune to the politics.

Give Laxman the Whole Game

So the next time Gambhir is unavailable, find someone for that series — but do not spend Laxman on it. Make him the Director of Cricket. Let him build the factory: the talent pathway, the support-staff pipeline, the roadmaps short and long. And ask every state to appoint its own Director — independent, respected, and above the noise.

That is how you stop praying for the next Sachin — and start producing him.

Two captains walk to the middle a little before the appointed hour, a match referee between them, and the whole apparatus of a Test match — the broadcast, the crowd, the months of preparation — pauses to watch a small disc turn over in the air. Heads or tails; a word called, a glance down at the grass, a decision to bat or to bowl. It is the most photographed triviality in sport, and we have taught ourselves to see it as harmless ceremony, a coin-flip of no more consequence than choosing ends. On a good pitch under a kind sky, that is exactly what it is. But on a certain kind of morning — and these are the mornings that decide the cricket we remember — the man who calls correctly has, in that half-second, been handed an advantage no amount of his opponent’s skill can honestly claw back. And I have never been able to make my peace with a game that prizes the contest between bat and ball above all else, then quietly lets a coin settle a portion of it before either has been lifted.

Let me be precise about when the toss matters, because most of the time it does not, and the case falls apart if I pretend otherwise. On a true surface, in settled weather, in a format long enough for conditions to turn over twice, winning the toss is worth a cup of tea and very little else; bat or bowl, the game will find its level. The trouble lives at the edges — and modern cricket has been busy manufacturing more of those edges, not fewer. A day-night Test, where the side bowling in that treacherous hour after the lights take hold gets a pink ball hooping under a darkening sky while the other trudges out to bat in it. A subcontinent turner that is a pitch for three sessions and a minefield thereafter, so that the team batting first plays a different, kinder game than the team batting last. An English morning under low cloud, the ball talking for a session and then falling silent once the sun burns through. On days like those the toss is not a fifty-fifty formality. It is worth a session, sometimes a match — and it is awarded not to the better-prepared side, nor the braver, nor the one that read the conditions more shrewdly, but to whichever captain guessed a coin.

Here is the distinction I want to hold on to, because it is the whole argument. Cricket is a game of variables, gloriously so — the living pitch, the decaying ball, the weather rewriting the script between lunch and tea. I would not strip one of them out; they are the reason the game refuses to be solved. But a variable and a lottery are not the same thing. The pitch and the sky are conditions both sides must face and both sides may read; the skill lies precisely in reading them better than the man opposite. The toss faces no one and rewards no reading. It is a third party at the contest, blind and mute, that does nothing but decide which of the two teams gets to meet those conditions from the advantageous end. Everything else in cricket asks a question of the cricketer. The toss asks a question of the coin.

And the game has not been indifferent to this — it has, at least once, tried to do something about it. In 2016 the England and Wales Cricket Board took the mandatory toss out of the County Championship. The visiting captain was given first refusal on bowling: if he wanted to field, he simply said so, and only if he declined did the coin come out at all. The stated aim was narrow — to shame home counties out of preparing rank, result-chasing seamers by handing the away side the very choice such a pitch was designed to deny them, and, it was hoped, to coax truer surfaces that might let a spinner into the game. It was retained for a second summer, tinkered with, and then, by 2020, quietly abandoned; the board judged it had not moved the needle and turned instead to sterner penalties for poor pitches. A tidy little experiment, tried, and shelved as a failure.

The other side of this deserves a proper hearing, and it is more robust than reformers usually allow. The toss is one of the oldest rituals the game owns, and there is a real romance to it — the two captains, the shared uncertainty, a moment of pure and honest chance before the skill begins. It is genuinely even; over a five-Test series it will, near enough, come out square, and a side that cannot win from behind the toss half the time has larger problems than the coin. There is a decent argument that to engineer chance out of cricket is to misunderstand a game whose entire appeal is that it cannot be controlled — that the toss is simply the first of the day’s thousand accidents, and no more deserving of abolition than the ball that keeps low or the dropped catch. And the county experiment, let us be honest, was tried by serious people and judged not to work. That is not nothing. A reform that failed in the laboratory carries the burden of explaining why it should be let out again.

But look closely at why it failed, and the verdict reads rather differently. The county rule was asked to fix bad pitches single-handed, by a change at the toss alone — and when it did not cure that disease on its own, it was declared to have no value at all. That is a misreading. The visiting captain’s choice and honest, well-policed pitches were never rivals; they are two halves of the same repair. And the deeper point survives the county verdict untouched, because it was never really about spin or seam. It is that the toss evens out only across a long series, and the matches that live longest in the memory are not series at all — they are single, unrepeatable occasions. A World Cup semi-final under lights; a one-off final on a used pitch. There is no second leg over which the coin can come good; you win the toss or you do not, and on the wrong kind of day it has spoken louder than anything the cricketers manage in the seven hours that follow.

So I would not abolish the toss everywhere, and I would not pretend a coin decides every match; most days it decides nothing, and on those days let the captains flip it and enjoy the ceremony. But on the occasions when conditions have loaded one end of the game against the other — the pink-ball Test, the day-five decider, the knockout on a surface already three days old — I would give the visiting side the county choice, and I would pair it, this time, with the honest pitches the county experiment was denied. Let the away captain decide whether to use the advantage or hand it back; let the home board know that a doctored surface is a gift to its opponent rather than itself; and let the coin retreat to the games where it can do no harm. Reform is not the enemy of romance here. The romance was never in the coin. It was always in the cricket the coin too often gets to overrule.

The conviction underneath all of this is the plainest one I hold about the game, and I have held it since I was a boy on a maidan where nobody tossed for anything and you simply took your turn: skill should be rewarded, and luck should be punished, or at the very least kept away from the levers that decide who wins. We accept, gladly, the luck that falls on both sides alike — the shooter, the shower, the edge that drops short. What we should think harder about is the one sanctioned piece of luck that falls on only one side, and does so before a ball is bowled. A contest worth staging is worth deciding by the bat and the ball. It should not, on the days that matter most, be half-settled by a coin that has learned nothing at all.

The toss is the smallest act in a Test match and, some will tell you, the most decisive. Two captains walk to the middle in their blazers, a coin goes up, a former player holds a microphone between them, and in the three seconds it takes the thing to land, a fair number of people believe the result has already been settled. On a raging home turner, or a green and seaming Tuesday, win the toss and you win the match; lose it and you have five days in which to lose respectably. It is, the argument runs, an absurd way to decide contests between the best sides in the world — a lottery bolted onto a game that fancies itself a test of skill. Abolish it, they say. Hand the visiting captain the choice and be done with the coin.

I want to defend the coin. Not out of sentiment — though I confess a weakness for the game’s old rituals — but because the campaign against the toss is aimed squarely at the wrong target, and we have the evidence to prove it.

The reformers’ case deserves a full and honest hearing, because it is not a silly one. Their logic runs like this: a home board that knows it will win the toss half the time, and that can doctor a surface to suit its own attack, has every incentive to prepare a snake-pit — a dust-bowl for its spinners, a lush green seamer for its quicks — and then simply bat first upon it. Take the coin away, give the away captain the automatic right to choose, and you pull that incentive out by the roots: no curator will lay a minefield if the opposition gets first use of it. It is a tidy argument, and, to their great credit, England’s county game did not merely argue it — it ran the experiment for real.

From 2016, the County Championship scrapped the mandatory toss. The visiting captain could decline the coin altogether and simply choose to bowl first — the “uncontested toss” — the stated aim being to shame groundsmen out of preparing result pitches that did the seamers’ work for them. And in the narrow sense, it did something. That first summer, eighty-five per cent of matches reached a fourth day, the highest figure in seven years; the spinners bowled more and took more; scores rose; there were more draws. On paper, the reform worked more or less exactly as it had been designed to.

And here is the part the abolitionists tend to hurry past: the counties scrapped it again. After four seasons of tinkering, the board concluded the uncontested toss was not achieving what it had hoped for, dropped it, and reached instead for tougher penalties on poor pitches. That sequence is the whole argument in miniature. They tried abolishing the coin; it did not fix the thing that was actually broken; so they gave the coin back and set about policing the pitch instead. They spent four years treating the symptom, and then turned, belatedly, to the disease.

Because that is what the toss is — a symptom, not the sickness. The coin does not doctor the pitch; the curator does, at the board’s quiet instruction. Remove the toss and you have not made a single surface one blade fairer; you have merely moved the advantage from the winner of a coin flip to the visitor with the new ball, which is its own distortion. Worse, the incentive can invert. A home side denied the guarantee of batting first will not suddenly acquire a taste for sporting pitches; it may just as easily flatten the thing into a lifeless, result-proof road, so that the visitor’s hard-won choice to bowl is worth precisely nothing. You have not restored the contest between bat and ball — the one thing in all of this actually worth protecting. You have swapped a rigged toss for a rigged pitch and called it reform.

This, more or less, is what the game’s own cricket committee concluded when it looked hard at the question in 2018. Chaired by Anil Kumble — not a man one associates with sentimentality about coins — the panel weighed the very proposal to award the toss automatically to the touring side, precisely to deter home doctoring, and declined it, calling the toss an integral part of Test cricket and of the narrative of the game. That is not establishment nostalgia dressed up as principle. The toss carries something real: the choice of whether to bat or bowl is one of the purest tactical judgements the game asks of a captain — a reading of soil and sky and of his own attack, made in the open, to be vindicated or punished across the next five days. Strip the coin out and you do not remove luck from cricket; you remove a decision, and hand it, unearned, to whichever side happens to be visiting.

None of which is to pretend the reformers have no case. They have a real one, and it is the strongest thread in the whole debate: home advantage by way of the pitch is real, and at its worst it is grotesque. A touring side can lose a match at the toss on a surface built expressly to be lost on, and that is genuinely unjust — the away game, as I have argued in these pages before, ought to be the true examination, and an examination is a hard test honestly set, not a rigged one. On the disease, the abolitionists are simply right. It is only on the cure that they have reached for the wrong instrument entirely.

And the cure is to make the pitch honest, not to abolish the coin. Rate every surface, and rate it independently of the home board. Let demerit points accumulate and genuinely bite — docked championship points, neutral curators where a venue cannot be trusted, grounds suspended when they offend often enough. Make the preparing of a snake-pit cost a side more than it can ever be worth, and the incentive the reformers so rightly fear simply dissolves — with the toss left exactly where it has always stood. That, in the end, is the order of operations the counties arrived at, and it is the correct one: mend the thing that is broken, and leave well alone the thing that is not.

For the toss is one of the last honest pieces of chance the modern game has left, in a sport increasingly determined to engineer chance out of itself altogether. And chance, evenly applied, was never the enemy. Skill unrewarded and luck unpunished — that is the injustice worth fighting; a coin that gives each captain an equal call is not. Give both sides an even surface and an even call, and the toss stops being a lottery and returns to being what it always was — the first small test of a captain’s judgement, at the head of a long examination of it. Fix the pitch. Keep the coin.

This English summer, the story that would not go away was neither a batsman nor a bowler but a small red sphere. Over after over the umpires gathered by the boundary rope with their little brass gauge and their grave faces, holding the Dukes up to the light, deciding it had gone soft and out of shape before its time, and reaching into the box for another. India’s captain said so plainly; one of England’s most decorated seamers agreed; the makers promised a review. When the ball itself becomes the headline for a whole series, something has plainly gone wrong — but the cure now being prescribed in certain quarters is a good deal worse than the disease.

For every time a ball misbehaves, the same tidy proposal returns: standardise it. One Test ball for the whole world — pick the best of them, hand the contract to a single maker, and let every match from Perth to Chennai to Lord’s be played with an identical seam. It sounds like fairness. It sounds like the removal of an unnecessary variable, the sort of clean administrative solution a spreadsheet loves. And it is, to my mind, one of the quietly worst ideas in the modern game.

Because the three balls are not three brands of the same thing; they are three different questions. The Dukes, hand-stitched in England, wears its seam proud and keeps it proud — swing that lasts, a seam that grips the air deep into an innings, a ball built for grey skies and a bowler who can hold a length. The SG, hand-stitched in Meerut, sits a shade lower but stands a shade harder, made for the subcontinent’s abrasion — it is the reverse-swing artist’s ball and the finger-spinner’s friend, the ball that rewards a man who can rough up one side across forty patient overs. The Kookaburra, machine-stitched in Melbourne, gives you perhaps twenty overs of assistance and then goes quiet as a stone, its seam pressed flat, leaving the bowler to earn everything on pace, bounce and sheer bloody-mindedness through a long hot afternoon. Three balls, three trades.

And that is precisely the point of them. A bowler who has mastered the Dukes at Trent Bridge has not thereby mastered the SG at the Chinnaswamy or the Kookaburra at Perth; he must learn a different craft in each, and the learning is the whole of the thing. It is why touring is hard, and why it ought to be. The batsman I most admire is the one who can leave the Dukes talking outside off in the morning and still find a way to score off the Kookaburra in the afternoon, when it has stopped talking altogether; the bowler I most admire is the one who can swing the new Dukes at will and then, on a dead fourth day, drag reverse out of a scuffed old Kookaburra by force of will alone. Take away the difference between the balls and you have not made the game fairer. You have made it smaller.

We have been here before, and recently, with the pitch. We shaved and rolled and flattened our surfaces until the ball came on sweetly everywhere, dragged the ropes in, and called the run-glut entertainment — and then we were astonished to find we had raised cricketers who could play only one way, in one climate. A single global ball is the very same mistake aimed at the other half of the contest. It would do to the bowler’s craft what the flat deck did to the batsman’s: reward the man who learned one method, and impoverish the game that used to demand several. The ball and the pitch are the two variables that make cricket a sport of many climates rather than one. Homogenise either and you are quietly voting for a duller game.

The other side deserves a proper hearing, and this summer handed it a strong one. A Dukes that loses its shape inside thirty overs is not a noble variable; it is a broken product, and no amount of romance about craft excuses a ball that will not do the one job a ball exists to do — hold together for eighty overs and let the contest run its course. India were right to complain, and the makers are right to review. Nor is the Kookaburra’s early surrender a trifle: it tilts the middle overs so far toward the bat that England’s own county game, having trialled the Kookaburra for three seasons, has just abandoned the experiment and gone back to Dukes for every round, precisely because bat was trampling ball. Consistency of quality is not a bureaucrat’s fantasy. It is a fair demand, and the manufacturers have not always met it.

But notice what that argument actually asks for. It asks that each ball be made properly — that the Dukes hold its shape as a Dukes should, that the Kookaburra keep a little more life a little longer — not that all three be melted down into one. The failure this summer was not that England play with a different ball from India. The failure was that this year’s Dukes was not a good enough Dukes. Fix the manufacturing and you have solved the very problem the reformers are pointing at; standardise the ball and you have solved nothing, while destroying something rare. Standardise the quality, by all means. Never standardise the character.

For the ball is the bowler’s half of a contest the batsman has spent twenty years being handed — the short rope, the flat deck, the two new balls, the field restrictions all pulling one way. Three balls that behave three different ways are three different examinations of the same cricketer, set in three different lands; and a game brave enough to keep asking a touring side a question it has never faced before is a richer game than one that asks the same easy question everywhere and mistakes the sameness for fairness. Mend the Dukes. Chasten the Kookaburra. But leave us, for pity’s sake, the three of them. The day cricket plays with one ball the world over is the day it decides it would rather be simple than be hard — and the whole beauty of this game, the thing that kept a boy watching in the fading Hubballi light long after the sensible ones had gone home, was that it was never, ever simple.

There is a sound a cricket ball makes when it grips a dry surface and spits — a low, dry hiss off the pitch that a batsman feels in his forearms before he hears it — and nowhere in the game is it heard more often than at Galle, that small ground by the sea where the fort wall watches and the surface begins to talk by the second afternoon. India go there this month for the first of two Tests, and the examination the venue sets is the oldest and most searching the game knows. It is not, whatever the highlight reels suggest, a test of who can hit spin the hardest. It is a test of who can play it at all.

Let me draw the distinction plainly, because the modern game has blurred it almost past recognition. Hitting spin and playing spin are not the same craft, and they are not even close. Hitting is what the shortest format has perfected — the slog-sweep over the shorter boundary, the reverse that turns a good ball into a bad one by geometry, the premeditated swing through the line before the ball has left the hand. It is a genuine skill, and often a thrilling one. Playing spin is something quieter and far harder: reading the ball out of the hand, using the feet to reach the pitch and rob the turn of its length, meeting it with soft hands and a still head, working it into gaps, defending the one that deserves defending and leaving the one that deserves leaving. One is an act of aggression. The other is an act of understanding.

The trouble is that we have spent fifteen years rewarding the first and quietly starving the second. On the flat, true surfaces the white-ball game is played on, you do not need to go to the pitch of the ball, because the ball is not doing enough off the pitch to punish you for staying at home. You can sit deep in the crease, wait for the length, and hit through the line with impunity — and if the boundaries are short and the field is up, that is not merely permitted but optimal. A whole generation has been coached, consciously or not, that the answer to spin is power and premeditation. And why would they think otherwise? It works, night after night, on pitches built so that it works. The footwork withers not because anyone decided to abandon it, but because the game stopped asking for it.

Then the ball actually turns, and bounces variably, and the game changes its currency from tempo to survival — and the bill for those years falls due. On a fourth-day Galle track, the sweep that was a percentage shot on a flat deck becomes a gamble against sharp turn and low bounce; the man rooted in his crease finds the good-length ball spitting past a defence he has offered it a full length to beat; the hard hands that served him on the up now pop catches to the ring of fielders crowded round the bat. He has one answer to spin, and it is the wrong one for the question the surface is asking. This is not a failure of courage. It is a failure of vocabulary.

The other side deserves a genuine hearing, and it is stronger than the purists like to admit. The innovations of the white-ball era are not decadence — they are real additions to the language of batting. The sweep, played well, is one of the finest answers to turn ever devised; it takes the pitch out of the equation and scores where no fielder stands. The reverse and the ramp have expanded what a batsman can do to a good ball, and the best players of this generation defend and destroy with a range their grandfathers never owned. Nor is using the feet automatically virtuous — charge a turning ball without reading it and you are stumped by a yard, and the crease has saved more good players than it has trapped. I would never coach a young batsman to put the sweep away, nor to treat footwork as a moral good in itself. These are tools, and a full bag beats an empty one.

But a tool is not a foundation, and that is the heart of it. The sweep is a supplement to playing spin, not a substitute for it, and a batsman who owns only the supplement is at the mercy of any surface that punishes the gamble. Getting to the pitch of the ball is the one answer that removes the surface from the contest altogether — kill the turn at its source and it no longer matters how sharply the pitch is spitting, because you have met the ball before it has had the room to deviate. That is why the feet remain the answer when the game asks you to bat time rather than score at eight an over; the sweep manages the risk, the feet remove it. When the match situation demands survival, the player who can only hit is holding a hammer in a room that needs a key.

There is a particular irony in an Indian side needing to be reminded of this. We were the tutors of spin play — a country where every maidana had a wily off-spinner turning it square on a bare patch, where a boy in Mysuru or Hubballi learned footwork against the ball that gripped because there was no other way to survive the afternoon. The subcontinent gave the game its finest players of spin precisely because our surfaces charged the craft as the price of batting at all. And now we feed our most promising young batsmen a diet of flat academy tracks and bowling machines that never turn, then wonder why they arrive at Galle with soft feet and hard hands. We are outsourcing a birthright, one net session at a time.

The mend is not complicated, though it asks for a patience the modern schedule rarely allows. Coach the feet again, and coach them deliberately — on surfaces built to turn, against bowlers told to grip it rather than merely dart it in, in situations that reward the rotated single and the killed length and not only the boundary. Make young batsmen bat time on a worn surface in the nets until survival becomes a skill they own rather than a panic they suffer. Keep the sweep, keep the reverse, keep every yard of range the new game has taught — and put back underneath it the footwork the old game knew was the floor you build all of that upon. None of this is nostalgia. It is simply refusing to let a foundational skill wither because a shorter format found it optional.

The ball that turns is one of cricket’s oldest and most honest examinations, because it cannot be solved by power alone — it demands that a batsman read, move, and understand, and it exposes anyone who would rather swing than think. A player who can only hit spin is forever at its mercy, waiting for the surface to be kind; a player who can truly play it is its master on any track in the world. That is the whole of the difference, and it is worth more than any strike rate: skill of that order is built, patiently and on purpose, never borrowed for an evening and handed back the moment the pitch turns nasty. Galle will remind us which of the two we have been raising. I hope, this time, we have been listening.

There is a particular light on the fifth evening of a Test match that you never forget once you have batted in it. The shadows are long, the close catchers are almost in your lap, the scoreboard says the game is lost and the only question left is when. And a man decides, quietly and without fuss, that it will not be today. He plays and misses and does not flinch; he takes the blow on the thigh and does not rub it; he lets ball after ball go by until the light fails and the umpires confer and the two captains shake hands on a result that will appear in no highlights reel and win no man the match award. A draw. The dullest word in the modern game — and, on the right evening, its most heroic.

I want to make a case that has become quietly unfashionable: that the draw is a result, not a failure, and that a game which has taught itself to sneer at every stalemate has forgotten something essential about its own soul. We have reached a point where a captain who saves a Test he could not win is spoken of as though he has cheated the paying public of something — as though the only honest outcome is a corpse and a victor standing over it. That is a poverty of imagination, and it is a recent one. Cricket spent a century understanding that its third result was not an absence of a contest but a particular and difficult kind of one.

Consider what a fought draw actually asks of a cricketer. To win, you must be better than the opposition for long enough; to save a match you have already, by every measure, lost, you must be something rarer — you must refuse, hour upon hour, to make the single mistake that ends it, with no reward at the far end but survival. Think of Michael Atherton at the Wanderers in the winter of 1995, unbeaten on 185 across nearly eleven hours, Allan Donald steaming in at him session after session, Jack Russell hanging on at the other end for a defiant, almost comic 29 off well over two hundred balls. England did not win that Test. They drew it, at 351 for 5, and it stands as one of the finest innings an Englishman has ever played. Or think of Faf du Plessis at Adelaide in 2012, on debut, batting through the final day for an unbeaten hundred off 376 deliveries to steal a draw from an Australian side that had done everything but bowl his stumps out. No trophy changed hands. No ranking moved very far. And yet those are among the most valuable innings of their era, precisely because the scoreboard could not measure what they cost.

Here is the trouble. The modern game has built a machine that cannot see any of this, and it is called the points table. Under the World Test Championship, a win is worth twelve points and a draw four — a third of the value, no matter how it was earned. The heroic rearguard and the rain-ruined bore are priced identically, and both are priced at a fraction of a routine victory on a flat pitch against a tired attack. Layer on the over-rate penalties that strip points from sides who dared to set attacking fields and bowl spin from both ends, and the incentive structure becomes plain: gamble for the win or be punished, and whatever you do, do not spend five honest days grinding out a draw, because the table will treat that as very nearly a defeat. We have made the honourable stalemate a poor commercial and competitive proposition, and then affected surprise that captains no longer value it.

The other side of this argument deserves a full and honest hearing, because it is not foolish — I have made a version of it myself in this very column. For a long stretch, the draw was cricket’s great disease. Sides batted first, batted forever, insured themselves against defeat before they had earned the right to think about victory, and served up week after week of attritional nothing that emptied grounds and drove a generation to the shorter formats. When Brendon McCullum and his England looked at that culture and decided that a Test was there to be won or lost but never merely survived, they did the game a genuine service; I have written admiringly of exactly that daring. A sport composed entirely of cautious draws would deserve to die, and for a while ours was flirting with the sentence.

But look closely and you see that the reform has thrown out the wrong thing. The real distinction was never between the draw and the result — it was between the fought draw and the dead one. A rearguard that saves a match is a contest at its most intense: eleven men trying with everything they have to break a batsman, and a batsman refusing, ball by ball, to be broken. A bore draw is the opposite — the deliberate avoidance of contest, a side declining the fight altogether and running down the clock. The first is cricket at full stretch; the second is cricket abdicating. Punish the abdication by all means — dock the timid, reward the aggressor, keep the over rates honest — but do not pretend that Atherton at the Wanderers and a captain shutting up shop at lunch on the first day are the same crime, because they are opposites wearing the same result in the scorebook.

What we have lost, in our hurry to make every match produce a winner, is the understanding that a contest can be complete without a conquest. Football has its goalless classic; chess has drawn its most celebrated games; the boxer who goes the distance against a bigger man and is still standing at the final bell has not lost anything worth having. Cricket alone seems embarrassed by the outcome that made it the most searching examination of character in all of sport — the five-day siege that ends with neither side beaten and both sides emptied. Strip that from the game and you have not made it braver. You have merely made it shorter, and a little more like everything else.

So let me end where the whole thing rests. The scoreboard is not the only ledger a cricketer answers to, and some of the game’s finest hours are recorded nowhere but in the memory of the men who were on the field when a batsman decided he would not be beaten today. A draw earned in that spirit is not a match that failed to finish; it is a match that asked the hardest question the game possesses and received, from someone, an answer worthy of it. Devalue that on a points table if the accountants insist — but do not let the accountants persuade us it was worthless. Not every story needs a loser to have been worth the telling, and a game that forgets as much has stopped understanding what it was ever for.

There is a particular pleasure to watching a left-arm spinner who knows exactly what he is doing — and Manav Suthar knows. The 24-year-old from Sri Ganganagar, that dusty border town in Rajasthan where the state runs out of India, is not here to make up the numbers. He is here to carry a burden on his shoulders, and he looks built for it.

Start with the facts that ground the hype. On Test debut against Afghanistan in June 2026, filling in for a rested Ravindra Jadeja, Suthar took six for 33. Ten weeks later, in his second Test and his first away from home, he took six for 55 in the second innings at Galle to finish with ten for 131 in the match, and India won their six hundredth Test by 165 runs. Two Tests, two six-wicket hauls: only Narendra Hirwani had begun an India career that way before him. This is not a flash. It is the culmination of a first-class record — 147 wickets now, at a shade over 25 — assembled the hard way through the Ranji grind, where he once led Rajasthan’s attack with 39 wickets in six matches in 2022-23. The Jadeja comparison is inevitable, and it is not lazy. It is earned.

The Mechanism: The Wrist and the Seam

What separates Suthar from the crowd of honest left-armers is not that he turns it — plenty turn it. It is how he imparts the revolutions. The wrist position is clean, the seam sits upright, and he rips through it. That control of the seam is what gives the ball its purchase off the surface and its dip in the air. This is the difference between a ball that arrives and a ball that works on the batsman before it lands. Ask him what he is chasing and he will tell you himself: how to deceive a batsman in flight without becoming predictable in length. That is the right question. It is also an old one, and an art, and Suthar belongs in that story.

The Lineage He Is Walking Into

This is the tradition that makes left-arm orthodox the connoisseur’s art. Bishan Singh Bedi — possibly the greatest conventional left-arm spinner the game has seen, and the only left-armer in that fabled quartet alongside Prasanna, Chandrasekhar and Venkataraghavan — took 266 Test wickets at 28.71 across 67 Tests, and finished with 1,560 first-class wickets, still the most by any Indian bowler. His genius was not turn; it was flight, the loop that lured a batsman half a foot forward of where he wanted to be. Dilip Doshi carried the torch after him, taking 114 Test wickets despite not debuting until he was 32. Maninder Singh wheeled away through the eighties; Venkatapathy Raju and later Sunil Joshi gave India control and bite through the nineties, Joshi’s accuracy the kind a captain builds a session around.

And then the greatest what-if of them all. Rajinder Goel took 750 first-class wickets at 18.58, among them 637 in the Ranji Trophy — still the most anyone has taken in the competition’s history — and never played a single Test, blocked by Bedi in the same era and in the same style. “I was born at the wrong time,” he said of it. His name belongs here precisely because it reminds us that this art has always produced more masters than the game had room for.

Beyond India, Daniel Vettori proved the craft travels: for New Zealand, often the lone spinner in the side, winning through accuracy, subtle variation and the reading of batsmen rather than turn alone. That is the company Suthar is now keeping.

The Skill on Top of the Skill: The Crease

Any spinner can bowl a length. Suthar’s gift is width. He can go tight to the stumps and he can drift wide of the crease, changing the angle without changing the length. That is the hardest thing to do at Test level and the most valuable: length is mandatory, but adjusting the line while keeping the length constant demands a control most bowlers never acquire. It is misery for the batsman and a gift to the captain.

And he bowls to his own field. He sets it, then bowls to it — dictating the terms, not reacting to them. There is a captaincy to his spells even when he is not the captain. He does not compete with a batsman over an over; he dominates the passage of play. That is temperament as much as skill, and it is the part of a bowler you cannot coach into him at 24.

The caveats are the honest ones, and they are the ones his career will turn on: fitness, work ethic, and the right place at the right time. Talent this pure still needs the luck to be picked when it matters and the discipline to keep the engine running for a decade. Goel’s story is the warning; Bedi’s is the aspiration.

For now, savour it. When you next list the finest left-arm orthodox spinners going around — Bedi, Doshi, Raju, Joshi, Vettori — leave a space near the top, because the man has already started filling it in his own hand. The itihasa of quality left-arm spin does not end; it gets a new storyteller. Suthar is here to be the torch-bearer. What a player. What an artist.