The Beauty of Bish

Michael Henderson

THE death of Bishan Singh Bedi, one of the finest slow bowlers, is a sad day for lovers of cricket. He wasn’t merely a great bowler (as if greatness could ever be ‘mere’!); his slow left armery was a thing of beauty. If the immortals assembled an all-time XI based on the aesthetic appeal of the players, they would find it very hard to leave him out. You had only to watch him bowl one ball to know how graceful he was.

His achievements are there for all to admire. He played in a more reflective age, which some of us old-stagers found attractive, when India were not quite so formidable, on and off the field, as they are today. It was a great day when India won at the Oval in August 1971, to claim their first series victory in England. They even trotted an elephant round the boundary!

Charming as he was, ‘Bish’ could be a bit of a handful when he had a bee in his bonnet. As captain of India he declared the team’s innings closed when he thought the West Indian fast bowlers were trying to hurt the batsmen rather than get them out. And he let England know that John Lever was applying Vaseline for use on the ball rather than to protect his face. ‘Some years later’, he told guests at a dinner, where he was guest of honour, ‘I realised that in England they used Vaseline for other purposes’. Oh matron…

He didn’t spare his team-mates either. He tore a strip off Sunil Gavaskar, who had refused life membership of MCC. ‘Bish’ regarded it as an act of insubordination. Ravi Shastri got another shellacking. He wasn’t good enough to be a star on the field, ‘Bish’ wrote in one of his extraordinary newspaper columns during the World Cup of 1996, ‘but he excels on the idiot box’.

Those columns, in the Hindustan Times if memory serves, brought marmalade-droppers every morning. Mohammad Azharuddin, as beautiful a batsman as Bedi was a bowler, was denounced as ‘the devil incarnate’. One day he rose to a fiery rhetorical climax, announcing that ‘I do not mind going to a Dutch auction, but I will not buy a pig in a poke’.

Robin Marlar, who was a fairly irascible chap himself, one wrote a beautiful piece in the Sunday Times about a passage of play at Southampton when Bedi, playing for Northamptonshire, bowled at Gordon Greenidge and Barry Richards. Two great batsmen tried to get the better of him, only to find the ball they thought was there to hit wasn’t there at all!

That was the mystery of Bedi’s bowling. He was an exotic cricketer in manner and performance, and loved the world over for the joy he was always happy to share with others. ‘And if I had bowled to better wicketkeepers, I would have taken many more wickets’. We must honour a superbly gifted, mischievous and singular man.

THE World Cup, which seems to have been going on since the relief of Mafeking, represents the triumph of modern India. But while we can celebrate the country’s pride in cricket and its cricketers, isn’t Indian triumphalism as tedious as any other kind? This tournament was designed for television, and as Simon Wilde reported in a bracing piece for the Times, it has been a complete shambles.

Nothing has changed, and one supposes it never will. Well do I recall a match in Bombay (not ‘Mumbai’, thank you very much) during that 1996 tournament. India were playing Australia, and the city was raging. Even the snake-charmers put down their pipes.

Mark Nicholas and myself walked the mile from our excellent hotel, lost our bearings, and were obliged to enter the ground by an unfamiliar entrance, waved through by police officers who took great pleasure in thrashing the locals with their lathis. One inside we met Ian Wooldridge, the great sportswriter, who had arrived from London that morning, and walked in without any form of identification!

It was a wonderful match, won by Australia after Mark Waugh, bowling his dinky offspinners, had Sachin Tendulkar stumped. Those were the days, writing up copy longhand and then dictating to copytakers several thousand miles away! Chandigarh, now Mohali, proved even more of a challenge on the phone front. What happy memories, despite the chaos.

WHAT a feat it was when India won the third World Cup final, at Lord’s in 1983. The West Indians were clear favourites. They had won the first two tournaments, and Clive Lloyd was looking to make it three in a row. Yet India somehow defended a total of 183 as the West Indians endured a ‘Calypso collapso’, falling 40 runs light.

Did anybody realise that day that cricket had, in a trice, changed for ever? Of course not. Revolutions are viewed very differently from a distance. In 1789 the sans-culottes who liberated the Bastille found a handful of prisoners who resented their intrusion. When Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914, Viennese society enjoyed walks in the park, and the band played on.

Forty years it is. Plenty of time for the game to change. The West Indies conquered all for a decade. Look at them now. Test cricket has collapsed in the Caribbean as surely as the batting did on that afternoon at Lord’s. We are told, with a confidence which betrays desperation, that West Indian people still love their cricket. It’s difficult to find supporting evidence. Within a generation a game that means so much to so many, which helped to define them, has become invisible.

‘Change and decay in all around I see…’. The Indians won’t see it that way, not while they bathe in a tub of dollars earned each Spring by the all-consuming IPL. It’s their game now; a very different game to the one that Bedi knew. Richer, of course, and poorer in spirit.

Be honest. Does anybody really give a hoot about this World Cup?

FOR England, the worm has turned. They were fortunate to win the World Cup four years ago, and the team Jos Buttler inherited from Eoin Morgan is clearly past its best. There are good players out there but something has been lost in translation.

It happens to the best, and it happens to the rest. Brazil’s footballers won the World Cup in 1970 with the finest team yet to take the field. Seven great players they had. Four years later, in Germany, they were dismal, left behind by the ‘total football’ of Franz Beckenbauer’s West Germany and Johan Cruyff’s Holland. These things happen.

If any player’s career has been shaped by the forces that have disfigured cricket, that man is Buttler. He began at Somerset, then went to Lancashire, where he has appeared once every Preston Guild. Essentially he has been a hired hand, ready to load a gun for whoever pays most.

Round the world he goes, counting his notes, but can he be truly content? As the song goes he’s ‘a real nowhere man’, even if he is wealthy beyond the dreams of those who came before. ‘Money can’t buy me love’ was another hit for the Fab Four. Cricket loved Bishan Bedi, as he loved the game. Buttler will be a footnote.