Insider’s take on craft of cricket

one of india’s finest opening batsmen aakash chopra pushes the politics and fanfare of cricket to the backdround and zooms in on the craft of the beautiful game in his recent book

Not too many people would begin what is their magnum opus on a nation’s most popular sport with an account on Tillakaratne Dilshan’s now forgotten scoop. But then again, Aakash Chopra has always taken a deep interest in what can be easily ignored while following a match of cricket today — the craft itself. So Dilshan’s swinging bat, Graeme Swann’s odd spin and the remarkable stillness of AB de Villiers’ head take centrestage when it comes to Chopra, pushing the politics and fanfare of cricket to a far background. On the heels of his two popular previous books on the game comes The Insider: Decoding the Craft of Cricket — a book by an international opening batsman, intended to open the vault leading to the proverbial insides of a terribly beautiful game.

With a website, really popular Twitter, Instagram and Facebook accounts, and a consistent presence on the tumultuous world of online sports media, Chopra is one of the few cricketers who provide us with fresh and easily accessible perspectives on the game. Aakash Chopra might not have been present on field when the most important events of Indian cricket took place, but he was certainly the one ‘insider’ who would make the machinery a little easier for fans to grasp. He says, “I’ve always had an opinion. And I’ve always liked to express them. It was a conscious decision to write in a manner that brought the fans closer to the game. While growing up I always felt that there was a lot of jargon and very little consumable wisdom available in our texts... and hence I made a promise to myself that I shall always keep it very simple.”

Indeed, The Insider is remarkable in its lucidity and the simplicity of terms used. Instead of explaining ideal foot positions of complex cover drives, Chopra tells us neatly crafted stories of how one Rahul Dravid reads newspapers on the morning of a match day and why the Indian team began playing football as a warm up game under Dhoni. Aakash, who is by now a familiar face when it comes to post-match analysis, says, “It took me five long years to compile The Insider. So, every single piece was well thought and researched. It also included talking to players and coaches, for I firmly believe that one person can’t know it all. And since I wanted the volume to become an encyclopedia on cricket, it had to be very thorough.”

And thorough he has been — from explaining why a captain like Kevin Pietersen needed to have learnt the names of his IPL team members to shedding light on the arduous team planning that John Wright and Sourav Ganguly employed in order to make the whole team feel involved — Chopra has left no stone unturned to educate the reader on the role of small events in the large outcomes of first class cricket.

For the man who enjoyed playing at Dharamshala and Eden Gardens, and who ‘cannot look beyond’ his most valuable opening partner, Virender Sehwag, Chopra has been upstaged by an unlikely analyst of late. “Earlier if I wasn’t playing cricket, I was either watching or writing about it. But with the arrival of my daughter (two-and-a-half-year- old Aarna, to whom he dedicates the book), cricket at home has taken a backseat. Whenever we watch it together, she does mention how the batsman has played a wrong shot and how he should have played instead!”

Generous though Aakash’s attention to cricket might be, in a day and age where the nation depends on the outcome of a cricket match for its very happiness and where, in spite of cricket being the Indian dream, younger and obscure players like Ankit Keshri pass away after field injuries, being one of the custodians of such a complicated form of entertainment and sport is a tough challenge. Chopra says, “I do feel responsible. It’s our duty to make the game accessible to the masses, help them understand and enjoy the game better and also, help kids to play better. It’s a collective responsibility of us — the former cricketers and the administrators who’re running the sport in this country.”