Kolkata: There was a moment during the Guwahati ODI on Wednesday night when the question was no longer whether India would chase 406. It was whether anyone was still watching the bowlers.
West Indies scored their first 400-plus total in ODI cricket, but India still chased it in 43.3 overs, losing only two wickets, crossing 300 in 29.1 overs and 400 in 43rd. The match produced five centuries—three from West Indies and two from India—for the first time in ODI history. Safe to say that from the first ball to the last, it was just a one-way show.
It was magnificent batting, of course. But it was also, increasingly, a worrying advertisement for what one-day cricket is becoming. The problem is not 400. Nor is it aggressive batting. Cricket has always evolved, and every generation has complained that the next one hits the ball too hard, scores too quickly and plays too little “proper” cricket. The problem is when the contest between bat and ball becomes so lopsided that the bowler’s principal objective is no longer to take wickets or create pressure, but merely to survive.
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Gautam Gambhir, India’s head coach, put it more bluntly after the match: “This is not cricket, this is only batting”. He acknowledged that the records were outstanding and the entertainment value obvious, but argued that there had to be more of a contest. Young bowlers, he said, need some “sympathy” and “margin” because there are occasions when their figures make them look worse than they have actually bowled.
{{/usCountry}}Gautam Gambhir, India’s head coach, put it more bluntly after the match: “This is not cricket, this is only batting”. He acknowledged that the records were outstanding and the entertainment value obvious, but argued that there had to be more of a contest. Young bowlers, he said, need some “sympathy” and “margin” because there are occasions when their figures make them look worse than they have actually bowled.
{{/usCountry}}“Often you can’t be hard on bowlers, because sometimes bowling figures are such that they haven’t bowled as poorly as their figures suggest,” he told the broadcasters. “Because the margin is very small. Plus, I think you can only bowl in good areas because besides that, with five fielders inside, two new balls, and the kind of power-hitting there is now, bowlers don’t really have many options. That is why, as a coach, as a support staff, the first thing you look at is, were they able to execute their bowling or their plans properly?
This is an important distinction.
A bowler conceding 80 runs because he has been poor is one thing. A bowler conceding 80 because a pitch offers almost nothing, the boundaries are inviting and the rules leave little room for defensive fields is another.
The Guwahati match exposed that distinction brutally. Five individual hundreds in one ODI sounds like a celebration of batting abundance. It is also a warning that the currency of a century is being diluted when conditions make run-scoring this easy.
There is nothing wrong with Gill’s 223. It was an extraordinary innings. He still had to hit the ball, concentrate for hours, battle cramps and implement the skill, fitness and temperament to sustain an extraordinary scoring rate.
But cricket is not supposed to be a collection of batting skills performed in isolation. Its fascination comes from interaction—the fast bowler trying to intimidate the batter in the opening overs, spinners changing pace and angle, the captain moving a fielder, the batter attempting to manipulate a field, the ball reversing, gripping or deviating just enough to create doubt. Remove too many of those variables and the game becomes something closer to batting practice with a scoreboard.
This isn’t an isolated gripe. Even Fraser Stewart—the MCC’s head of cricket—has acknowledged that the game has increasingly tilted towards batters despite the 2017 attempt to limit bat dimensions as an effort to curb the dominance of bat over ball. “That’s helped to have an effect but we still see balls flying a long way,” he was quoted as saying at an umpires’ workshop at DDCA recently.
There was a time the one-day game was considered a format in which neither side had complete control. It was shorter than a Test, but long enough for conditions, tactics and fatigue to matter. The introduction of two new balls, successive changes to fielding restrictions and the expansion of power-hitting have steadily shifted the equation. The ICC itself noted when the two-ball system and revised powerplay arrangements were introduced that playing conditions materially altered the balance between bat and ball.
The irony is that cricket has spent years trying to make limited-overs batting more exciting. It succeeded spectacularly. Perhaps too spectacularly.
If every youngster watching cricket now sees the glamour attached to sixes, hundreds and strike rates while watching bowlers getting pummelled on a daily basis, where exactly are we leading the next generation? Why would a child dream of becoming the next great fast bowler when the sport appears to reward only the person hitting the ball rather than the person trying to stop them?
With the game heading towards a point of no return, there is a growing urgency for administrators to take up this matter seriously. Cricket needs bowlers. Not merely people capable of completing their allotted overs, but characters who can change games. And bowlers need fair conditions.
The great batting performances of cricket history are not diminished because they occurred on difficult pitches. Quite the opposite. Brian Lara’s 400, Sachin Tendulkar’s centuries, Viv Richards’ assaults, Virat Kohli’s great chases—their mythology comes partly from the circumstances in which they were achieved. That is the essence of sport—not simply how high the number is, but what had to be overcome to attain it.
There will always be aberrations, and there should be. There will always be 350s and 400s, because modern white-ball cricket needs those portions of numbers to represent evolving practices. But that can’t be the norm. Which is why all stakeholders of the game must sit down together and ask a simple question—what exactly do we want an ODI to be? If the answer is an even contest between two teams, then the conditions must occasionally give the bowler something to work with.
Cricket does not need to turn the clock back. It needs to restore a bit of that uncertainty which made it watchable. Give the bowler a little swing, give the spinner some grip. Let a well-directed ball occasionally beat the bat without requiring a mistake. Let there be slip cordons in the first 10 overs, close-in catching in the middle overs. Let the batters earn their runs sometimes. Let a 300-run chase feel like a contest rather than an appointment.