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Wasted Cricket Talent

[This blog entry is a combined effort of Aman Parich and Mayan Viljoen. The former is the main contributor, so his name appears first, beneath the write-up, in the author credits, as it should.]

In this article my focus is on players who, either, have been or, still, are top quality players, but for one or other reason (like injury, lack of support, bad luck, inappropriate behaviour etc.) didn’t get /aren’t getting the extended run in their countries’ national teams which they should have had / should get. In situations like these, which are all too common in the modern, professional game of cricket, both the players in question as well as, of course, the national teams, in which they should have featured, suffer loss.

The first player, in this regard, that jumps to mind is, undoubtedly, Subramaniam Badrinath. With a first class batting average of 59.39 and List A average of 37.64 this Indian batsman was, clearly, banging on the door for selection in the National Indian Team, for quite a while, during his middle and late twenties, but he, very rarely, got selected.

The reasons for this unfortunate occurrence are twofold, in my opinion, i.e. . .

1. At the time he was at the very peak of his performance, he had to compete with the likes of Dravid, Sachin, Ganguly and Laxman for a place in the Indian national test squad, all of whom, we all know, were Indian batting legends of their day.

So brilliant were these four batsmen in team India’s middle order, for more than a decade, that, Sehwag, at the top of the order could have been dismissed for strings of single digit scores[1] and it would still not have made the slightest difference to India’s consistently massive batting totals during this entire golden period of Indian Cricket. There was clearly no space in this team for Subramaniam Badrinath, who unfortunately played his best cricket during this very same period.

Whenever one or more of these four legends, moreover, got injured, they, mostly, got replaced by either one or both of India’s budding young cricketers, at the time, i.e. Mohammad Kaif and Yuvraj Singh[2], rather than the more worthy Badrinath, for reasons that still eludes me to this day. Whatever the reasons may have been for the non selection of S. Badrinath, I truly believe that Indian cricket has been the poorer for it, in the end.  

To me S. Badrinath will always remain one of the finest Indian batsmen that I was fortunate enough to watch, on the field of play, during his best years. He has worked hard, throughout his professional cricket career, to improve his game, but unfortunately, the latter was only ever good enough to earn him a fairly regular spot in the T20 IPL Franchise he plays for, i.e. the Chennai Super Kings, not the Indian Test Team. Today, at the age of 33, he will, almost certainly, be considered as too old for selection in said test team by the majority of those making up the BCCI (Board for the Control of Cricket in India), who are looking at a whole new generation of Indian cricketers to carry the Indian people’s massive cricket aspirations forward into a new era.

Leaving Badrinath behind, we can, next, move on to Australia’s Brad Hodge. He is an even better example, than the former, of a wasted player. In a cricket career that has, to date, spanned almost two decades, he has, tragically, only had a mere handful of opportunities in Australian colours, in all three formats of the game. The fact that he is, at the age of 39½ (He will be 40 years old on the 29^th Dec. 2014), still, among the top run scorers in the T20 format of the game, worldwide, is more than sufficient proof, in itself, of just how good a cricket player he is.

He has featured in only 6 test matches for Australia in which he had a batting average of 55.88, a highest score of 203* and a half century in his last match. On the evidence of that one score of 203*[3], alone, he should have had a prolific test match career for Australia, but, inexplicably, never played test cricket for his country again. It is hard to imagine what more, than the above, a batsman must do to earn himself a spot in a national cricket test team.

I am sure that those Australian selectors of old, who, in the end, failed to select him for more test matches for Australia, who, now, see him, literally, murdering opposition bowlers in the T20 format, at the age of 40, must be wondering about . . . what could have been.

Let us now move straight on to one of world cricket’s naughtiest boys, i.e. New Zealand’s Jesse Ryder. He is quite a big bloke who quickly got a reputation for smacking bowlers, everywhere (I remember that he took a particular liking to bowlers in the IPL Tournament as well, playing for the Royal Challengers Bangalore franchise at the time), to all corners of a cricket field. This is how I first came to know of him, but it was only when the New Zealand Cricket Team came on an official tour to India that I realized that he was much more than the occasional good performer in ODI and T20 cricket.

He was, pretty much, the only New Zealand test batsman, at the time, who could, at all, handle the Indian cricket pitches and it didn’t take him too long to start climbing into the Indian spin bowlers, either. In the end the latter barely got him out, and also not a moment before he scored a double ton for his country, against them! Sometime after this, back in his home country, he completely lost it, though, as he, regularly, got himself involved in all manner of late night brawls, usually after having consumed excessive amounts of alcohol. On one such night he almost lost his life.

This kind of completely unacceptable behaviour of one of their senior players, obviously, became such a huge embarrassment for the New Zealand Cricketing Authorities, at the time, that they decided to significantly, reduce the number of matches in which he would play for his country, after these events. Today, his cricket career doesn’t seem to be completely over, yet, but he has done such a massive amount of damage to it, that it remains to be seen if it can ever be, completely, or even only partially, resurrected again. If he had only concentrated on his cricket instead of, literally, wrecking his own life, history would, no doubt, have remembered him as one of the greatest batsman of his era.

About the very talented, former Pakistani fast bowler, Mohammed Amir, who, together with three of his team mates, were found guilty of match fixing shortly after underperforming during a test match between their country and England, at Lords Cricket Ground, in 2010, former Pakistani cricket captain and current chief executive of the PCB (Pakistan Cricket Board), Ramiz Raja, commentated in the 30^th August 2010 edition of “The Telegraph”, as follows:

Begin quote < It is the mindset of making a quick buck rather than working for the long haul. Mohammad Amir is a living example of this. What a waste of talent. He had the world at his feet. He could have done anything. Counties would have been queuing up to sign him, the IPL also. He was guaranteed a place in the Pakistan side for 10 years. He would have made a fortune anyway, but somebody made use of his innocence in a negative way instead of empowering him to go out and make a name for himself and money in a genuine way. > End quote

This comment really says it all, doesn’t it? He is still young. If the ICC (International Cricket Council) and PCB gives him another chance, after he has served his relatively short gaol sentence, he will have another opportunity to put this match fixing moment of madness behind him, for good. Let us all hope the latter will happen, so that the world will, once again, be able to enjoy one of the game of cricket’s finest young bowling talents.

Well, if Jesse Ryder is one of world cricket’s naughtiest boys, South Africa’s Herschelle Gibbs is a very close second. Long before he even made it into the Western Province Provincial Side, South African cricket experts already talked about his extra-ordinary ability as a batsman. He only played for Western Province for a short time before he got selected to play for the Proteas, in all three formats of the game.

If there were some in the cricket world who doubted his talent before the, so called, 438 game[4], in which he top scored with a massive 175 runs, no one doubted it any more, after the game. This was, undoubtedly, the pinnacle of Herschelle’s Protea career, but he was just not able to handle the instant fame and quick riches the game of cricket brought him.

On international tours, especially, he got himself involved with women and drugs, which led him to not pitch up for team meetings and practice sessions, resulting in confrontations with the Protea team management, fights with team mates, wholly inappropriate and crazy statements to the media etc. etc. If all the above affected only himself, CSA (Cricket South Africa), might, perhaps, still have overlooked it, but as a senior player in the Protea team he was a terrible example to the younger players in the team, especially, and, quite regularly, dragged a couple of them down with him.

There was no way that CSA could, indefinitely, tolerate this kind of behaviour, the end result of which was that his international cricket career for the Proteas was over a good decade or more before it should have been. In my humble opinion this was a terrible loss, not only for the cricketer, Herschelle Gibbs, himself, but for the game of cricket and its supporters, as a whole. Well, this is where we will have to leave it, I am afraid, otherwise this write-up will become a short story instead of a blog entry, only. 

 Thank you so much for having taken the time to read this rather lengthy blog entry through. I trust that you have benefitted, somewhat from it. Until next time, this is . . .

Aman Parich & Mayan Viljoen, signing off

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