Cricket
Winning without Botham
Mihir Bose
The night the Calcutta Test ended an Indian journalist, who takes a keen interest in betting, offered odds of 16 to one against England winning the Madras Test. I regret to say I did not take him on — and you can imagine my feelings during it — but the reasons the Indian gave to justify the outrageous odds seem to me to give some idea of the way this series has turned. The odds, the journalist explained, had been fixed by India's unofficial bookies — there being no legalised off- course betting in India — on the strength of England's 5-0 defeat at home against the West Indies and the absence of Ian Botham.
The bookies may now be feeling silly, but before this series began, or even after Bombay, not many would have questioned that England without Botham would be weaker than India with Kapil Dev. Yet in a perverse way almost exactly the opposite has happened. Very simply, England with- out Botham have played like a team that is precisely aware of its limitations. India have veered from delirium — as on the first day of the Madras Test — to somnolence — as in the dreadful Calcutta Test. Edmonds thought, during the Calcutta Test, that the Indian crawl was born out of fear — and memory of the collapse that gave England the Delhi Test. I am more inclined to think that the Indian perform- ance in this series — which must be quite the most extraordinary by a home side in Test history — has been prompted by fear of what Kapil Dev will or will not do and, inevitably, his relations with Gavaskar.
Similar speculations about Botham and his relations with England captains Willis and then Gower — have dominated English cricket for nearly three seasons. In many ways, till this series against India, England had been playing for the Botham miracles of the 1981 season. Magical as they were — Botham with the bat at Headingley converting an almost sure in- nings defeat to victory, Botham with the ball at Edgbaston brushing aside the last five Australian wickets — they could hard- ly have been sustained. No cricketer in the history of the game has done so, and not even Botham can. But with Botham in the team there has always been that hope both for England's supporters and even for some of the team.
On this tour it has been instructive to watch England adapt to a world without Botham. It was most vividly, and for England happily, illustrated in Delhi on the last afternoon. The Indians had gone to lunch with just four wickets down and just a bit ahead of England. Most Indians, particularly Kapil Dev, had written it off as a draw, as had Tony Lewis, who had actually taken a bet with 'Tiger' Pataudi against England winning the Test (Lewis later explained that the two ex-captains had bet against their countries not from lack of patriotism but from superstitious guarding against evil). Had Botham been in the side I am almost sure he would have emerged from lunch with the ball — and might have bowled England to victory, or on recent form conceded a hatful of runs and made the draw inevitable. Without Botham Gower persisted with the spin of Pocock and Edmonds and the patience game worked wonderfully well.
Calcutta, even Madras, also, provided examples of England adapting to the abs- ence of their deus ex machina. In Madras for instance, with Botham in the side Foster — who should have played earlier in the series — might not have got on with the new ball and it was his new bowling that, in many ways, was even more crucial than Fowler and Gatting's batting for that memorable victory. Contrast this with the Madras Test on Fletcher's tour, three years ago, when, if anything on a faster wicket,
• England put India in, Botham bowled like a drain and it was India who went a whole day without losing a wicket. Kapil Dev may not have worked the Test miracles that Botham has for England but for many Indians their whole perspec- tive on cricket was changed by Kapil captaining India to the World Cup win against the West Indies in 1983. Kapil's equivalent of Botham's Headingley innings was played against Zimbabwe at Tun- bridge Wells when, coming in at 17 for 5, he hit 175 and transformed the game. Since then a nightmare has enveloped Indian cricket: the Indians have lost eleven one-day internationals on the trot. What Is worse the Indian cricket public read quite the most misleading lessons from that World Cup victory. Instead of treating it as a lucky fluke they have begun to believe that India are really world champions not only in one-day cricket but potentially in Test cricket as well.
Before the World Cup win Indians ex- pected little from their cricketers. Most were satisfied if their team did not lose at home — India's away record is dreadful, and even during the day of the great spinners India rarely won by big margins.
This explains the passion and the anger with which Indians have reacted to their defeat — something not always associated with Indian cricket. And in trying to make sense of their cricketers' disarray Indians have readily believed in conspiracy theories. Thus the favourite explanation for the defeats is that Kapil Dev has `betrayed' Gavaskar — a"betrayal' promp- ted by the fact that during last winter's series against the West Indies Gavaskar, deprived of the captaincy, allegedly played for himself and not the team and helped contribute to India's defeats.
There is something in that. Gavaskar himself, in his latest book Runs 'n Ruins surely the most extraordinary book a cur- rently playing cricketer could have written — does a subtle and cruel demolition job on Kapil. But more than the undoubted differences between the two, and the essentially Byzantine nature of Indian cricketing politics, the Indian talk of 'bet- rayal' exposes the growing and distressing immaturity of Indian cricket reporting and reaction. Like the Indian nationalists, who still see the British conquest of India in terms of Indian 'disunity' and 'treachery' in high places, rather than the military and political genuis of Robert Clive, so Indian cricket does itself little good by refusing to believe that it has a moderate team of some good batsmen, one potential match-winner in Sivaramkrishnan and some pretty awful fielders.
England, on the other hand, have the makings of a very good side. Gooch and Emburey will undoubtedly strengthen it and if Gower and his sergeant-major tat- ting have learnt enough from India to control Botham — or at least take the ball away from him when he is bowling badly we could be in for some very exciting times for English cricket.
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