Raj reflects…

Cricket c players b media

Surfing the net a day before the start of the first Test in Bangalore, I chanced upon Australian captain Ricky Ponting’s comment to the visiting media that he found Virender Sehwag’s charge that the Australians claimed half-volley catches to be ‘fairly insulting’.

“It’s amazing how they’ve picked out a lot of negatives from the Sydney game and don’t seem to be speaking about the Perth Test (the third Test which India won), where we probably had the same things happen to us,” Ponting said.

“Not one member of the Australian team has spoken about that — we go about our cricket in different ways.”

I thought Sehwag had done well to draw first blood before a ball was bowled in the series, having rattled the Australian captain and said as much in a text to the Indian opener. His reply was simple: “I did not say anything [like that] to anyone.”

That set me off on a bid to try and reconstruct that episode, starting with the AAP report a day before the opening Test. It claimed Sehwag had alleged that the Australians had cheated to win the Sydney Test at the start of the year.

Its first paragraph was quite dramatic. “Indian opener Virender Sehwag has dramatically raised the temperature surrounding Thursday’s first Test against Australia in Bangalore by loudly claiming the Australians cheated to win the spiteful Sydney Test match in January.”

Clearly, Sehwag was responding to a question if India would accept any attempt to have an arrangement with Australia. The question itself had its genesis in Ponting expressing a desire to reinstate the catching pact, after demanding the highest standards of on-field behaviour from his players during the coming series.

“I will have a think about it and see if I think it is the right idea to bring it up again,” Ponting said in Hyderabad after the lung-opener against the Board President’s XI. “Anil was the one who did not want that after the Sydney Test for one reason or the other. We will have a chat and it’s important to us Australians to play the game in the right spirit and embrace the culture.”

Let me use the same report to reproduce what Sehwag actually told ESPN-STAR Sports. “We suffered the most in the catches pact during the last series,” he said. “There is no point in having such an arrangement when the Australians are claiming one-bounce catches. We’d have won the Sydney Test if they hadn’t claimed catches off half-volleys in that game.”

The AAP writer did not take any of this into account when concluding that Sehwag had called the Australians cheats. Of course, any one is free to make inferences but to attribute the word to the Indian opener defied logic and smacks of sensationalism.

Barely a day later, former India captain Sourav Ganguly had to issue a denial against an interview that he had purportedly given to a Bengali newspaper. The interview – reproduced in substantial chunks by English newspapers – was damaging, not just to his team-mates and selectors but also to the man himself.

Ganguly’s insistence that he did not give anyone any such interview has a note of truth. From what we can put together, the reporter was eavesdropping on a private conversation that Ganguly was having conversation with someone else. Now, this is as good – or as bad as a sting operation – and raises questions about the ethics prevalent in modern cricket reporting.

That brings me to the point I am making here. There is a third team involved in the series – and this is the media. Reading between the lines is a tricky art and not everyone, Australian or Indian, can do it right. The cricket teams have enough going between themselves and the media to fuel the fire. Yes, the media has to inform, educate and analyse. But to incite?

The degeneration of cricket reporting is easy to understand, given that news TV seems to set the agenda for all media. Nearly all news TV channels in India draw eyeballs with their cricket programmes and make some money as well but there are only a few channels that really care for cricket. Others prefer to track cricketers and spice up even the slightest of controversies.

Some years ago, the then Chairman of Selectors Dilip Vengsarkar told me in an interview that TV had no credibility. Unless other sections of the media exercise caution now, I am afraid credibility will not be a quality that is associated with any media any more. That can lead to all media being dismissed as sensational. And that is not a healthy situation at all.

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