Why doesn’t India’s domestic cricket produce finished cricketers, ready for the highest level?
Sidharth Monga23-Nov-2006
Gagandeep Singh is an unfortunate example of a player who, at 25, is all but finished as an India prospect © Getty Images
Gagandeep Singh is called “bowling machine” in Indian domestic cricket circles. By both his Punjab team-mates and opponents. If you have seen him bowl over after relentless over on unresponsive Indian tracks, you wouldn’t wonder why. Even in the heat of March he can virtually bowl all day. And he doesn’t just turn up and bowl; he gets a wicket every eight overs.December 2004 was a good time to be Gagandeep. In the four matches of the 2004-05 season till then, he had taken 28 wickets. He had been the leading wicket-taker in the previous season’s Ranji Trophy, and had 45 first-class wickets at 18.46 in all. At 23 he had forced his way into the Indian team on tour to Bangladesh. Five years of hard work in dreary domestic cricket had paid off.October 2006 is not a good time to be Gagandeep. He came back from that Bangladesh tour not having played a game. In July 2005 he attended a national conditioning camp as one of the 36 best available Indian players, but has since been forgotten by the selectors. He has seen Under-19 fast bowlers come and usurp his position on the fringe of the national side. In 2004-05 he finished with 48 wickets at 18.10. The next season he took 32 at 19.09, but he is no longer part of India’s future, it seems. He feels already that his time is almost gone. “This year is very crucial. In two years’ time another Under-19 batch will come up,” he says. “First-class performances, as it is, don’t matter as much as Under-19 nowadays. After 27-28, selectors stop looking at you.”For a contrast, take a look at Australia. The last year was hard for them. They lost the Ashes, and changes were being called for in a team where the average age was over 30. In waltzed Hussey, 30 years and 164 days old, and a veteran of 15,313 first-class runs. Seamlessly he fit into the side and became the fastest ever to 1000 Test runs. It took 29 matches for his one-day average to drop below 100, and his strike-rate still hovers around that figure. He now averages 70-plus in both forms of the game, and is considered a threat to Ricky Ponting’s captaincy.He is not an exception. Four months after Hussey’s debut, when Glenn McGrath pulled out of the South Africa tour to tend to his ailing wife, his place was taken by Stuart Clark (30 years and 168 days), who ended up Man of the Series with 20 wickets at 15.85.And there have been many before them: Simon Katich, Stuart MacGill, Adam Gilchrist, Justin Langer, Darren Lehmann, Michael Kasprowicz, Brad Hogg, Matthew Hayden, Damien Martyn – it’s a long list. Moral of the story: for Indian cricketers 25 is over the hill; for Australians it’s only the beginning. For Australia it is a triumph of the system; in India’s case it is testimony to the absence of a system. Australia look for the finished product, players who have gone through the grind, been hardened by competition, and are ready to plunge into international cricket. India search for precocity, a spark, and hope it can survive the cauldron. When asked if Suresh Raina wouldn’t be better served if he spent a couple of years in domestic cricket, a senior member of the Indian team asked: “For what? To rot?”In recent years the U-19 league, and not first-class cricket, has become the feeder system for the Indian national team, and 23 seems to have become the upper limit for making it. Ramesh Powar in one-dayers and Aakash Chopra in Tests, have been the only players above 25 to have made their India debuts in the last few years. Chopra has since been discarded, while Powar holds on. Nayan Mongia was the last player to have enjoyed a successful run in international cricket after making his debut at 25. Sanjay Bangar, who played his first international match at 29 was India’s oldest debutant in many years, and Robin Singh made a comeback at 33. But they are exceptions.Over the last five years 22 players under the age of 25 have made international debuts for India. Fourteen of them were 21 or less, and two under 18. Only seven players over 25 have made debuts over the same period. On the all-time list of youngest Test debutants, one has to scroll down to 19th position to find an entry that is not from India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh. Nine of the 10 youngest centurions come from these countries.The reason isn’t hard to find. The system doesn’t produce cricketers in India. Wasim Jaffer probably knows it best. He made his debut against South Africa eight days after his 22nd birthday, after three impressive domestic seasons, the first of which included a triple-century in only his second game. But Allan Donald and Shaun Pollock were in an altogether different league from the bowlers he had faced till then. “The gap between first-class cricket in India and international cricket is just too much,” he says six years later, after having made a comeback to the national side. “Australia have only six first-class teams. That means only about 70 cricketers, while we have some 300. It’s tough for players to keep improving in this set-up.”VB Chandrasekhar, a former national selector, has a slightly different view. “You have to work with what is available. And our domestic cricket is definitely not of the highest standard,” he says. “Plus, when we pick a player, as selectors we want to look at someone who will come and stay for 10 years. When you bring in somebody, it is always better to get someone who is younger, likely to stay, learn, and contribute for 10 years.”Not that players from domestic cricket are completely overlooked. At 31, Railways cricketer JP Yadav’s international career was almost over when he was picked for the Zimbabwe tour in 2005. “I had taken around 60 wickets and scored around 600 runs in first-class cricket that season. So it was like saying, ‘I dare you to keep me out’ to the selectors,” he says.”You can’t ignore anybody like that,” says Chandrasekhar. “The only thing is, they don’t catch up. He [Yadav] didn’t do badly but didn’t come and take Indian cricket by storm, which is what we expect when we pick somebody. Or we expect to have them deliver at some point of time, like Raina.”Yadav is now out of the national side. And Railways have been relegated to the Plate group of the Ranji competition, which makes his domestic performances even more insignificant.
Robin Singh’s exceptional fitness worked in his favour when he made his comeback at the age of 33 © Getty Images
What worked for Robin Singh when he made his India comeback in late 1996? He had taken 29 wickets and scored 443 runs the previous season? “There is no comparison between Robin and anybody else,” says Chandrasekhar, “He was supremely fit. He is still fit. Fitness does play a big role.”Domestic cricket is played over a period of four months in India. It’s not a year-round activity, so it’s difficult to keep the fitness up. Maybe the training methods are changing. Maybe now we would have guys at 28-29 who are still strong and fit, but it hasn’t always been the case.”Amol Muzumdar will be 32 this month. He has been playing for Mumbai for 13 years and is a mainstay of their Ranji line-up. He averages 51.17 in first-class cricket. He was marked out as an India prospect when he scored 260 on his first-class debut in 1993-94 – still a world record. Today he is reconciled to never having made it into the national team. His initial years coincided with the strongest Indian batting line-up in a long time. Sachin Tendulkar and Mohammad Azharuddin were already in, and Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly arrived in 1996. “I was competing with the real dadas of Indian cricket,” he says, without rancour. “Those days I was trying to figure out where I would fit in.”But the fact is that when vacancies arose in the Indian team, Muzumdar, though a regular in the Mumbai side, was nowhere in the frame. By the reckoning of one of his own colleagues, the years put in on the domestic circuit hadn’t made him a better player: “By then he had stagnated. In terms of skills he was where he had started.” The lack of security didn’t help. “After eight years of playing first-class cricket for Mumbai, I didn’t have a job,” Muzumdar says.”Compare our scene with Australia,” says Gagandeep. “In cricket, and in life, they have many more securities. We are prone to giving up more easily if the chance doesn’t come our way. Four-five years is what we can go on for. If we don’t get a chance by then, it’s very hard to keep the motivation up.”Gagandeep can’t be blamed if he, or someone else like him, gives up at 25 and starts preparing for a life in domestic cricket without a higher goal motivating him. “Selectors very easily build rigid views about such players. They think a certain player is good for domestic cricket only,” says Yadav. But it is difficult to reconcile with it when you are still strong and think you can make it but know you won’t. “It is also more of an individual thing,” says Jaffer, “to stay motivated when you see your performances get less weightage than [those of] an U-19 guy.”Chandrasekhar cites the case of Raina, who didn’t exactly take Indian cricket by storm in his first few matches. Raina had turned in good performances in Under-19 cricket, and was chosen for a probables camp, where he impressed the coach and the captain. After 15 one-dayers without a fifty, he was chosen for the Test team against England, although he didn’t make it to the XI. “The idea is, once you see a spark, you want them to straightaway get used to the rigours of international cricket,” Chandrasekhar says. “I made my India debut when I was 27. I made one solid effort to come back. After that I knew it was going to be very difficult. That’s probably why you want to have somebody who is young and can be given a long rope, not someone who is 29.”When she won another Grand Slam at close to 50 years of age, people asked Martina Navratilova how she could keep up with and beat players half her age. She said, “The ball doesn’t know how old I am.” Navratilova’s big advantage was that she never moved away from top-level tennis – even if she didn’t play singles, she kept playing doubles with some of the finest players of both sexes.Top-level competitive cricket is a luxury Indian domestic cricketers are not afforded. And when an opportunity comes, they let the ball know how old they are – and a few other things about their first-class cricket besides.