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Magazine
Time capsule
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In a fast changing sports world, the Brisbane Tied Test of 1960 will always remain a very satisfying game of cricket, writes ASHWATH NITYANANDAN.
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THE HINDU PHOTO LIBRARY
The fielders celebrate as the last wicket fell in the Brisbane tied Test of 1960 ...euphoria then ...
GARY SOBERS loafs from wicket to wicket, as vintage Australian fieldsmen seem strangely unhurried in their pursuit of the ball. Spectators lounge on the grass outside the boundary, some of them even climbing into trees for a better look. The West Indies team are a novelty to the commentator, who refers to them as "these fellows"; he sounds a bit patronising, but cheers this Calypso antidote to the dreary Ashes. The black-and-white footage, shot with a single silent 16mm camera and dubbed with weird, repetitive applause tracks, is as surrealistic as a French art film. I am having a spiritual moment.
The tied Test match at Brisbane in 1960 was an incredibly satisfying game of cricket. When I was a kid going cricket-crazy in Chennai in the 1970s, the greatest thing about the Brisbane tie was that it was shrouded in mystery. We had no TV, so we had no idea what a Sobers sweep or a Hall bouncer actually looked like; we were left to interpolate between newspaper stills and glossies from cricket books. Words like Kanhai, Hunte and Benaud had become the stuff of legend rather than the names of real people. Once my biology teacher, disserting on leucocytes, paused to reflect on the passing of Sir Frank Worrell to leukemia. She murmured, "I know he was beloved to you..." More beloved than Natural Science, anyway.
A classmate titled his article in the school magazine "I Hate Sobers". This defiance was meant to bring a hush of horror to the readership, and it did.
I was in Second Form when disaster struck. My school, somehow, managed to get hold of the hour-long movie of the Brisbane tie, and I, somehow, managed to catch the flu the day before they showed it. When I returned, the first thing I heard was how hilarious Valentine's left arm spin action had looked; the second, a debate over whether Ramadhin had been getting away with chucking (he had, as he casually admitted 40 years later). I don't remember any more, having tuned out in a haze of self-pity. Over the following decades, international cricket went from occasional treat to regular fare to threadbare overexposure to a terminal descent into scandal and apathy, but I never really got over the Brisbane Test.
Finally, my wife lit up a 21st Century birthday by getting me the video from a little-known Caribbean outlet. The original footage had been fleshed out with 1980s retrospectives by Davidson, McDonald and Kline, the interviews themselves oddly dated by now. As Sobers began to pound the Aussie bowling on the opening morning in what has been called the greatest innings ever seen Down Under, I realised that my wait had not been in vain. The match ended with one ball to spare on the fifth day. Three wickets fell in the last over, including two run-outs. A dolly catch was dropped as bowler Wes Hall, unable to contain his excitement, rushed out to mid-wicket and bumped into Kanhai. Hall had done an extraordinary amount of bowling over the previous week to prop up the top-heavy Windies line up; in the last over he stopped after every follow-through, put his hands on his hips, turned away from the batsman, stared at the earth, and seemed to contemplate his endless fate.
There were no histrionics from anyone, no high fives or brow slapping, until the apocalyptic explosion of bails as Solomon struck the stumps edge-on from 20 yards out to end the match. The final image of Meckiff running full tilt towards the disintegrating wicket, bat outstretched in desperation as West Indians become airborne all around, is probably the most famous photograph in the history of cricket.
... and now, a common sight as fielders erupt for the fall of any wicket.
The teams scored 737 runs each in just under five days. They ended up dead even without even a declaration to help them (as in the "other" tie at Chennai in 1986). What does this mean, in this era of World Cup games that routinely end in photo finishes? What is cricket, really? Are we even playing the same game today as they were in Brisbane back then?
A couple of summers ago, a colleague told me that he was taking a transatlantic long weekend getaway in London. Never having left the United States before, he was racking his brains as to how best to spend his three days in the old country. I suggested watching some cricket. He said, "That's a really different game, isn't it? Real slow? Sort of like croquet?"
Not really, I explained... you have two teams, one batting and the other fielding. A guy from the batting team holds a bat and a guy from the other team sends the ball at him. The guy with the bat tries to hit it. If he does hit it, he tries to run. If he gets there before the ball does, he scores. If the ball gets there first, he's out. If he misses a straight ball, he's out. If he hits the ball and someone catches it, he's out. After some guys are out, the other team bats. After doing this a couple of times, whoever has more runs wins the game...
"Why, that sounds like baseball!" he said.
"No," I said, struggling with this unexpected desegregation. "You see, you don't have to run when you hit the ball."
The biggest difference between Test cricket and pro baseball, the thing that really makes them diverge into different universes, is that you don't have to run. You can think about it till the next over, or till after teatime. You can procrastinate till the sun sets on the Empire. While daydreaming at the non-striker's end, you can ponder the fact that baseball was mentioned in a Jane Austen novel 200 years ago.
This is also the single biggest difference between the Brisbane magic and the World Cup. Limited overs cricket has created, in my opinion, a completely different sport. The most interesting thing is that its "I'd better run" mentality has, like water flowing up the sporting hill in defiance of colonial gravity, changed Test cricket itself. The twitchy, mouth-foaming behaviour of Ganguly or Donald is part of the recalibration of the game. But so also are the brittle urgency of fielding (nobody in 1960 Brisbane would have dreamed of seeing three fielders chasing a ball to shave a half-second off the throw-in), the rapid-fire single gathering and professional target chasing that have transformed Test cricket in the past decade. It's starting to look a bit like, well, baseball.
And this mutation may become the saving grace of an old game in a new century, excusing it from going the way of the dinosaurs. The Brisbane Tied Test will then remain the perfect time capsule. When someone digs it out of the archives in 2050, the wait will not have been in vain.
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