The Change in Seasons

Winter is on its last legs now. You can see the signs everywhere. Leafless trees are suddenly bursting into a riot of colours, the days are become inordinately longer, the birds are chirping their hearts out, and you know that spring has finally broken through. Watching the gradual transition is quite comforting really. It makes you appreciate the seasons more, makes you look forward to the experiences of the season ahead, and assures you that you can trust in the inevitable cycle of the natural world.

Which makes it pretty amazing that we have an international tennis schedule, which does the same thing! Aside from the regular complaints of an overcrowded itinery, the ATP calendar is a great advertisment for the virtues of familiarity and order. The early hardcourt season Down Under and in the States, transition to the extended hustle-and-bustle of the European red clay, followed by a brief skirmish with the green grass of Europe, and then the seemingly never-ending hardcourt season culminating at the end of the year in London. Each provides a flavour of its own, with individual tournaments serving as season-markers with their own distinct personalities. The perfect context against which we follow the course of our favourite sport – how the rivalries pan out, how stars emerge, how heroes fade, how the sport evolves. It goes to show that all a good sport needs is context. How I wish international cricket would learn from this. But that’s a tale for another day.

As far as tennis goes, the clay court season is upon us already (Monte Carlo is well underway). The grunts are in the air at full strength, the slides are coming out on the dirt-red surface, the baseline grinders are putting in their extra hours (but is there actually a baseline grinder left in the game?), and all under the pleasant European spring sun. And this year, the tussle at the top promises to be exciting indeed.

For the first time in half a decade, the overriding theme of men’s tennis discussion will go beyond the perennial plot-within-the-Fedal-plot, “Can Federer beat Nadal on clay?” And that is primarily because we have a new contender for the throne in Novak Djokovic. He has just come off a stupendous run in the hardcourts this year, beating both Nadal (2-0) and Federer (3-0) time and again, and signalling his intentions to finally bring the curtains down on one of the most enduring hegemonies of sport. The Djoker has always been a consistent performer on clay without being spectacular. This might be the season he takes the next giant step forward.

The man he will try to usurp, Nadal, is only one of the all-time great clay court specialists. Well, all-time greats, period. And he is in fine form himself. But will the pressure of defending all those points from a pitch-perfect summer last year take its toll on him? And we would be ignoring Federer only at our own risk here. Like Nadal, he has had a solid year so far, but has been overshadowed by the Djokovic show. Will the mantle of a No. 3 ranking prove to be an extra incentive for him, or will the lack of pressure, relatively speaking, enable him to play more freely?

The trends of the top three players going into the clay court season are pretty interesting. Djokovic is clearly on the way up, while Nadal is in cruise-control and getting into his favourite part of the year. It’s harder to place Federer who is still playing well enough not to lose to anyone but these two, but within the troika, he definitely comes third. And this subtly changes the context of the Fedal rivalry too. Can it actually accomodate a third member on a sustained basis, especially given that the rivalry might be in its twilight stage anyway? Lots of intriguing questions to be answered over the next few months.

And in the hype of the Djokovic show, let’s not forget the supporting cast who could set up stirring storylines themselves. Will Andy Murray finally get himself off the ground? We know from Monte Carlo that he has won at least one match post the Australian Open. Will the gentle giant from Tandil, Del Potro, continue his steady comeback from injury? Will the Ferrers and Almagros of the world show us again what bloody-mindedness can achieve on a clay court? Will the Next Gen players announce themselves? And will they be among Raonic, Harrison and Dolgopolov? And is Robin Soderling finally past his extended purple patch, the patch which began with that memorable toppling of King Rafa at Roland Garros a couple of seasons ago?

It’s a brand new tennis season, and the questions before us are new and different, and yet vaguely familiar at the same time. But that’s what a fresh season brings, I guess. New perspectives, new expectations, new experiences, all against a familiar background.

Full Stop to the World Cup

The day finally dawned, to a lack of buzz which I found excruciating. People were out for their morning jogs, breakfast was being made, the traffic was steady. It was, for all purposes, just another day in everyone’s lives here. And that’s when it struck me how far away from home I was, and I felt what can only be described as home-sick.

But deciding to make the best of the situation, and also to avoid the trials of unpredictable live streams from dodgy websites, I, along with a couple of  equally buzz-seeking companions, decided to spend the ‘red-letter day’ of our cricket watching lives in that great British establishment, the sports pub. And this place was promising. Not only did it have the usual suspects of Indian expats with British accents, it had a couple of young Sri Lankan female supporters who could pass off as WAGs for their national team. Throw in a couple of members of that hard-to-find species – the British cricket fan, Sky Sports in high definition (and therefore, without Sidhu), and some good cider, I was ready for the grand finale, comfortable in my surroundings, and confident with Team India.

Being confident with the Indian cricket team doesn’t come naturally to me. All those years of experiencing disappointment and frustration do leave their scars, I guess. And that’s why I’ve felt surprised at how easily the tag of favourites rests on the shoulders of the current bunch. The much famed batting line-up actually delivered consistently through the tournament (notwithstanding their inability to take on the Batting Powerplay), the fielding improved gradually right through, and the bowling managed to keep things together. But most importantly, the team seems to be confident of its ability to manoeuvre itself out of tight corners, it seems to believe that it is the best team out there, and the feeling is gradually percolating to me, the normal Indian spectator. Is this how the Aussie cricket fan used to feel in the last decade?

After the fiasco of the toss which reminded you of gully cricket between ten-year olds, the first innings started sedately enough. Zaheer seemed intent on exorcising the ghosts of 2003 and came up with the stingiest possible opening spell. The Lankan top order batsmen played their part by being demure in their attempts at strokeplay. In fact, for a match in which around 550 runs were scored, there were no real explosive phases where the batsmen went ballistic. This again goes to prove that there are so many ways in which the game can flow in the 50-over format, in which lies its appeal.

Jayawardene’s silky-smooth century brought hearty cheers from everyone at the pub, especially the Lankan WAGs. And at the half-way stage, a target of 275 in a World Cup final seemed to put the Lankans firmly in front. But even then, I found myself quietly confident about the run-chase. India’s bastmen were in form, this was Sri Lanka against whom they enjoy a mental edge in recent times, and above all, there was this new found confidence (for me) in the team. Maybe it comes down to the skipper, Captain Cool himself. MSD’s style of captaincy can be eccentric at times. You can see he is an intuitive captain, much like Dada, and he really backs himself. So much so, that if one radical move of his doesn’t come off, the only way he feels he should react to it is with another radical move! Case in point would be Sreesanth’s inclusion in the playing 11 ahead of Ashwin, a move that ultimately did not work out. The best way to redeem himself, he decides in his own wise way, is to promote an out-of-sorts bastman (himself) up the order at a critical juncture ahead of a batsman who is the frontrunner for the Man of the Tournament. And the amazing part of the ploy is, it works! Time and again! The detractors and doubters and proponents of the ‘lucky captain’ theme are still waiting for MSD to fall flat on his face, but this latest addition to his glittering CV makes you wonder if he has actually cracked the captaincy code. One thing is for sure, his evolution as a player and captain in the years to come is going to be fascinating to watch.

Despite all this, India’s run-chase ran into choppy waters early on. Sehwag ended the tournament with a performance that was the polar opposite of his opening-match blitzkreig, and then….Sachin edged behind to slinga Malinga. Sachin, for whom the stars seemed to be coming together, for whom the fairytale script was in readiness to be enacted, for whom the 100th ton in a World Cup winning cause seemed so predestined as to be blatantly obvious, for whom I had manipulated my Fantasy Team to make him my trump. And he edged behind to slinga Malinga. You could have heard a pin drop in the pub at that moment. So naturally, we were able to hear the Lankan WAGs shrieking in joy and hugging each other. And that was the closest I felt to my conviction in the Great Indian Run Chase being shaken that day. But even as Gambhir and Kohli went about steadying the ship, you knew it was just a matter of time before things were back to normal. The Indian batting line-up just could not flop in this tournament! MSD came in at the fall of Kohli, much to my consternation, and promptly went about crafting a masterpiece of an innings. And as time went by, Sri Lanka’s highly experimental bowling line-up headed by a maestro literally on his last legs, withered against the steady onslaught of the Indians.

MSD’s tournament-clinching six, which was the closest he has come to delighting the cola sponsors with his helicoptor shot, was lost in the pub in a delirium of cries, hugs and high-fives. For a place used to shouts of ‘Rooney’ and ‘Goal!’, we satisfactorily managed to bring the roof down with chants of ‘India’, ‘Dhoni’ and ‘Sachin’. A little bit of ‘Sreesanth’ too, for good measure. But we were happy. The Cup that Counts had been won by India, by the pre-tournament favourites, by the team most confident in its abilities, by the best cricket team around. That’s how it should be, and that’s what made it so satisfying.

MSD’s six also served to enlighten me on an earlier typically cryptic comment of his at a press conference

” Till the full stop doesn’t come the sentence is not complete”

Reading past the ambiguous use of the double negative there, MSD chose to end the sentence himself, and not with a full stop, but with an exclamation.