Saina Nehwal's Take On Cricket Is Out Of Touch With The Game's Evolution

Saina Nehwal, former world number 1 badminton player, recently expressed her disappointment over cricket hogging the majority of sporting limelight in India.

She found it bizarre because she believes cricket is more of a skill-based game and lacks the physical demands of other sports like badminton, tennis, and basketball.

The Olympic medallist’s comments felt like deja vu for me and likely many other kids who grew up playing cricket. It was a prevailing notion growing up that cricket is inferior to other sports due to its perceived reliance on skill rather than fitness.

To begin with, there is nothing wrong with relying on skills. It takes a person with experience, strategy, and alertness to come out on top in sport.

However, some ideas about cricket are rooted in the history of the game. The Victorian moral standards defined batsmanship as a craft that suited the dominant class of the era — the 'gentlemen.'

On the other hand, bowling, which demanded back-breaking physical fitness, was put on a lower pedestal in the social ladder.

It is true that for a large period of the game’s history, batsmanship has been associated more with rotating wrists, carefully calculated foot movements, mastery over the angle of the bat, bending down on one knee to execute a sweep, getting outside the line of a bouncing delivery, and, not to forget, an extension of the front foot to cover spin, swing, or seam.

And because spectators tend to admire batsmanship more than bowling, people hopped to those conclusions quickly. In their zeal, they forgot that endurance, both physical and mental, is also a big part of fitness.

Maintaining the highest levels of concentration to keep executing a variety of skills in test matches, which run for multiple days, requires superhuman strength and mental will. Back then, these qualities were not admired much outside cricketing journals and circles.

Meanwhile, bowlers remained mostly out of the spotlight. They were highlighted only when batsmen got bloody noses, leading to debates around safety in cricket.

Even Norman Gordon sending down 738 legal deliveries in a timeless test match in 1939 was not well-known until only a decade ago.

For batsmen, the late 1970s and early 1980s brought a cultural change. In Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket, the West Indian team had received a thrashing, leaving Packer fuming.

Soon, Dennis Waight was appointed as a trainer to change the culture of the West Indian team.

Waight added running, sprinting, and hundreds of sit-ups to the players' fitness regime. Over the next two decades, he became the go-to man for the West Indies, helping them dominate the game for a substantial period of time.

The new training regime required developing more muscular strength for limited-overs batting, as well as building endurance for Test-match batting.

The new fitness standards resulted in the emergence of limited-overs specialists in many teams.

Around the same time, South African Jonty Rhodes’ revolutionary pyrotechnics in fielding forced batsmen and bowlers to up their fitness game a few levels.

The team that responded first to these challenges was the mighty Australian team. It had Adam Gilchrist putting his body on the line, Ricky Ponting with his direct hits, Andrew Symonds’ all-round abilities, and Mathew Hayden's brute force, among others.

At the time, when players began to move slowly as they approached retirement, the Aussies would bow out at very high levels of athleticism. Famously, Gilchrist retired just because he dropped a catch.

Soon enough, South Africa and New Zealand adopted these new fitness standards. This past decade, even India, first under Mahendra Singh Dhoni and then under Virat Kohli, has adopted these standards. Both these players led from the front.

Cricket continues to evolve in bridging the gap with peak sporting fitness levels.

The red (or white) ball that bowlers hold in their hands weighs 156 grams. To deliver it at 140-160 kilometres per hour (kph), bowlers need to take 20+ sprinting steps and then angle their shoulders and wrists in such a way that the targeted slot on the pitch is not missed by even an inch.

The art of bowling requires well-developed bones in the upper part of the body, a strong core to support the pressure on the entire body, and rock-solid ankles to tolerate a pressure as high as 10-15 times that of the body weight.

Generally, the first major injury and related rehabilitation for a fast bowler leads to a pace drop-off of 5-10 per cent. That is why you see tearaway teenage fast bowlers like Glenn McGrath and James Anderson develop into seam and swing bowlers over time.

But, as Batman's butler Alfred Pennyworth says, there are men who can’t be reasoned or negotiated with. Shoaib Akhtar, Mitchell Johnson, Dale Steyn, Brett Lee, Duncan Spencer, Neil Wagner, and Varun Aaron are among those who refused to bow to nature.

Consequently, they ended up with fewer matches and wickets than one might think they deserved.

The demands on the body are similarly tough for the batsmen facing up to these fast bowlers. Just having an agile eye to see balls approaching at a rapid pace and then responding within a fraction of a second is unimaginable for regular folks like us.

A slight error in judgement and a hospital visit awaits. Cricket and baseball are probably the only sports where life is at risk because another human is legitimately hurling a hard object at a rapid pace at the player. For batsmen, it is as close to a battle as it can get in a civilian set up.

If defending deliveries was not enough, batsmen are actually required to hit them and hit them as hard as they can. The evolution of the shorter, T20 game requires batsmen to access different parts of the ground for scoring opportunities.

Add to that the agility requirement of the new fielding standards, where one needs to put their body on the line to save every single run.

Even the great AB de Villiers was not able to survive the onslaught. A stress-affected back was the key reason for his sudden retirement. “I am tired,” announced arguably the best batsman and fielder of his generation. The additional workload of wicketkeeping took a toll on his back.

That is probably why teams are now rotating their wicketkeepers. South Africa switches between Heinrich Klaasen, Tristan Stubbs, and Quinton de Kock, while England has Johnny Bairstow, Ben Foakes, and Jos Buttler for wicketkeeping duties.

For New Zealand, Glenn Phillips doubles up as wicketkeeper and maverick fielder at every nook and corner of the ground, carrying on the fierce tradition left behind by Brendon McCullum. Other teams have similar arrangements.

Amid all the physical demands, the mental aspect of the game is insufficiently talked about. Maintaining exceptionally high fitness standards while ensuring that the brain is working smoothly and swiftly is a feat in itself. Players have been trying yoga, philosophy, counselling, and what not to deal better with cricket's gruelling ball-by-ball proceedings.

Prominent players like Ben Stokes, Glenn Maxwell, Jonathan Trott, Marcus Trescothick, and Steve Harmison have succumbed to the demands from time to time. Some players recovered, while others went into oblivion. For Harmison, playing cricket was the only way he kept his sanity up.

To sum up, modern-day cricket demands flexibility, agility, endurance, and muscular force to counter-punch a hard ball and field well around the park as balls fly to every corner, in addition to strict mental health, to maintain the highest standards demanded of players.

Of course, it all looks effortless on the cricket field. But, as former tennis player Roger Federer has said, "effortless" is a myth.

Saina’s heart is in the right place. Every sport deserves its share of public attention. However, it doesn't mean that cricket and cricketers are undermined in any way relative to other sports and athletes.

As I write this, my mind takes me back to a memory. In 2008, I was deployed at mid-on in a cricket field in the middle of a dense forest. "What does this game offer? It does not even require you to get fit," said an uncle passing by.

As he was speaking, I flung my teenage body to take a catch and failed. My clothes turned dirty and the only thing he told me was that I had increased my family's workload of washing my clothes. Not so, not so.