If you could film India play one-day cricket in black and white, it would feel just right; occasionally arresting and charmingly dated. You can still enjoy Mughal-e-Azam or Shree 420, or marvel at Madhubala and weep with Dilip Kumar, but neither of those would challenge a Dil Chahta Hai for a contemporary cinema award. This Indian team would look good in the retrospective section of a film festival for there is still much to respect and admire.

But one-day cricket is about the business of winning cricket matches as modern cinema is about filling multiplexes. This team can still win, they have beaten South Africa and England in recent times, but increasingly they need too many things to be in their favour; there aren’t too many degrees of freedom, if ‘x’ doesn’t work there isn’t another ‘y’ to step in. So the batting must outscore the opposition by a minimum of thirty runs and since only the top six score runs, they must outscore the opposition top six by at least fifty or sixty runs. You can’t expect a movie to succeed if the hero can deliver only a certain kind of dialogue; it might, like with Sivaji, but it won’t all the time.

And so Rahul Dravid knows what to do to win, but cannot always do it because individual players are quite excited by the idea of being dated as well. He is like a scientist who knows that a reaction will succeed at 250 degrees but is stuck with a burner that only provides 200 degrees. Fielding and athleticism are either individual passions or team diktats; where individual passion is absent, the directive must work. The problem is that if the directive is enforced, there aren’t enough players to put on the park.

... contd.