‘Sport is human life in microcosm’
—Howard Cosell

Sport and History have a lot in common. What can Lukas Rosol’s upset over Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon reveal about the way history works?

The writing of history and sportswriting might not appear to share too much at first thought. Historians sit in quiet archives, calmly analysing documents revealing past events and dynamics, thoughtfully arranging them into causative and explanatory patterns, trying to answer how things came to be the way they were. History itself moves quickly, but history-writing is a slow process: not only does it take a long time but historians also prefer to wait until events are quite a bit past to analyse them (a guiding element of this project). Sportswriters on the other hand live and work first-hand, either on-site or watching events as they unfold, instantly having to react to the quick-moving, dramatic, competitive world of sports. Explanations and judgements are more proximate, causation more easily revealed by the fact that sport will, unlike history, always produce clear winners and losers. Sport is considered a pretty crude metaphor for historical events, its black-and-white, A vs B, winner and loser simplicity hardly an accurate reflection of history, the infinite shades of grey.

But historians are missing out on sport (and not just because it is thrillingly, exhilaratingly, gloriously, endlessly fascinating, entertaining and exciting: most academics would prefer a nice book). Sport may produce simple contrasts, inherent confrontations, and simple outcomes, but sportswriting and history-writing do mostly the same thing: they try to explain causes (both proximate and long term), examine patterns, build narratives, build up or tear down or analyse iconic heroes and villains, focus on the micro story or pull back to the wider picture, and above all, explain why a certain thing happened instead of all the other possibilities, to tell a story which answers that most human of questions, “why?”.

At Wimbledon last week, Lukas Rosol beat Rafael Nadal in five sets on Centre Court. Rosol is ranked 100, whereas Nadal is ranked 2. Rosol has never won a tournament on the ATP Tour; Nadal has won 50. In nine years as a professional Rosol has never been ranked in the world’s top 60; Nadal has spent nearly seven years ranked either 1 or 2. Before Wimbledon began Rosol had won three matches at Grand Slam tournaments in his whole career; Nadal has won 11 Grand Slam titles. Rosol had never before qualified for the 128-man main draw at Wimbledon before this week; Nadal is a two-time Wimbledon champion, the winner of perhaps the greatest match in The Championships’ history (the 2008 Final).

The two men are from different classes of talent and achievement, different worlds of experience, wealth, and fame. Rosol is not a classy veteran hoping for a last hurrah, not a dangerous dark horse who sometimes springs an upset, not a rising talent who impresses the pundits, not an exciting wunderkind, not even a developing young player (he’s nearly a year older than Nadal). To tennis journalists, the fashioners of the sport’s narratives, he is an invisible extra, without even an entry in the ATP Tour’s media guide of player information, not even worthy of the backhanded compliment ‘journeyman’.  In the cold-hearted terms of professional sports, he is nothing, nobody.

And he was playing Rafael Nadal, sporting legend, at Wimbledon, on Centre Court. When Nadal won the first set, some time-pressed tennis journalist probably switched attention to another court, or headed to the interview room to hunt out a story. The intelligent analysis was that Nobody was not going to trouble Nadal. Rosol seemed blissfully unaware of the script, and hit some great shots, surprisingly going up two sets to one. But Nadal roared back to take the fourth set 6-2. Twilight was giving way to dusk and the players took a break to allow the roof and lights to be turned on for the final set.  All the intelligent analysis predicted Nadal would now win the match, as the intelligent analysis had of course predicted at the start: all the important factors – class, talent, momentum, ability to deal with pressure – favoured Nadal. An entertaining late evening cameo from Nobody, but it was all over. As the players waited for the lights to come on, the sports fan watching on TV might have switched to the Euro 2012 semifinal. The up tight man in Row G might have looked at his watch and said to his wife that maybe now was a good time to beat the rush to the Tube.

Somehow, though, the intelligent analysis was wrong. Rosol didn’t wilt under the Centre Court lights; instead he became utterly possessed. He played the fifth set as if in a trance, thundering 20 winners (5 full games of them) past Nadal. Every time it seemed that he might get nervous, Rosol swiped another winner. By the time Rosol had thundered through the final game with three aces, the word ‘historic’ was filling the mouths and keyboards of tennis journalists. Was this the biggest upset in Wimbledon history? How could something so unusual happen? The shocked analysts agreed that this had no explanation, it defied analysis. Rosol won because…he won. This was a lightning strike, a freak, a black swan.

Black swans are random occurrences, unexplainable and unpredictable.[1] Nassim Taleb has argued that The Black Swan is history’s fatal flaw. Only by looking at history in hindsight, with a Platonic desire for narratives and explanations do historians make events look like they follow patterns with underlying causes. A ‘hotel journalism’ of the  academic archives, a deluded research programme following hindsight bias, retrospective distortion, and group-thinking ‘clusters’ of thinking and source-selection cause historians to ‘reverse engineer’ history into causative narratives when in reality ‘history does not crawl, it jumps’.

This is clear because history hides The Black Swan: the most dramatic, radical, important historical events are those which are totally unpredictable, those which defy historians’ attempts to create explanations. Black Swans are not ‘the exception proving the rule’, or distracting blips in historical progress, or dramatic froth over deeper historical waves, they are central to history, the events shouting out that the Emperor has no clothes. Historians can’t accept that the world is more complicated and random than is explainable: “Nobody knows what’s going on”. Others who believe in history’s explanatory power still see the Black Swan as a flaw in the way historians work: Niall Ferguson has commented that historians too often search for underlying linear explanations of events instead of accepting that their proximate triggers can ‘explain the sudden shift from a good equilibrium to a bad mess’.

There is undoubtedly some truth in this. Far too often hindsight bias does indeed make history look more explainable and predictable than it really is. Historians can reverse engineer an explanation for the French Revolution, or the Holocaust, casting them in a long sweep of narrative and cause, but they were still historically unthinkable events, and Taleb (and Karl Popper) would argue that historicising them denies that unthinkability. Good history, though, is not inherently incapable of dealing with Black Swans: exogenous and endogenous, thinkable and unthinkable, predictable and random, can all be integrated into a match report or a historical argument. But Black Swans will always be a historical problem.

Sport has no problem with Black Swans. Nadal was admirably philosophical in his post-match comments. When asked how he could explain such an incredibly unlikely result. Nadal shrugged: ‘That’s sport. You win, you lose.’ Rosol agreed: ‘It’s sport. Nobody’s unbeaten. Everybody can lose and everybody can win’. Unpredictability helps add to sport’s excitement, its drama. In many ways The Black Swan is the most thrilling of all sporting outcomes, either as an unbelievable upset, or as an outcome which somehow totally defies all narrative. Bill Simmons recently wrote about Larry Bird’s final shot in Game 4 of the 1987 NBA Finals:

‘I would have bet anything that the shot was ripping through the net. I would have bet my baseball card collection. I would have bet my Intellivision. I would have bet my virginity. I would have bet my life. Even the Lakers probably thought it was going in. Watch the tape and you will notice Lakers backup Wes Matthews crouched on the floor and screaming behind Bird in sheer, unadulterated terror like he’s about to watch someone get murdered in a horror movie. You will hear the fans emit some sort of strange, one-of-a-kind shrieking noise, a gasping sound loosely translated as, “Holy shit, we are about to witness the greatest basketball shot ever!” Hell, you can freeze the tape on the frame before the ball strikes the rim. It looks like it’s going in. It should have gone in.

It didn’t go in.

…[After the buzzer] my father looked at me.

“That was supposed to go in,” he groaned. “How did that not go in?”

More than twenty-two years have passed since that night … and I still don’t have an answer for him. For everything else, I have answers.’

For the sports writer such moments are part of the glory of sport, the reason every sportsfan in the world will effectively wear a blindfold and ear plugs to avoid the result of a game if he’s going to watch it later: no one knows what’s going to happen. For a historian looking back on a past event where a historical argument says something should have happened, whatever model or argument upon which that assumption rests is obviously flawed. But that difference between future and past uncertainty is the flaw of The Black Swan: perhaps the randomness of the event means we cannot explain why the ball didn’t go in, but we still want answers. In the historian’s gut, The Black Swan’s most extreme criticism of history – ‘nobody knows what’s going on’ – is as heretical as telling a scientist that an unexplained physical phenomenon is a mystery, or the work of angels: a cop-out which responds to the difficulties of history, the challenges of intellect, by throwing one’s hands up and saying “it is written”, “who knows?”.

People yearn to understand why things happen. “Why?” is the most human of all questions, the question, in many ways, which makes us human: historians are adults following the lead of the child who continues to ask “Why?” to every parental answer, unconvinced by a jaded “because”. While The Black Swan Problem is undoubtedly a challenge for history, the fact that we cannot explain the historically unthinkable in an endogenous model, or explain why Bird missed the shot, or how Rosol beat Nadal, is not evidence of history being a random series of ‘one damn thing after another’. It’s evidence that history, like sports, is cast with people, humans – complex, unpredictable, contradictory. A human history is one which does not see The Black Swan as either the abberation outside the narrative or the randomness which shows that narratives are damaging. A human history delights in the challenge of explaining. When asked to explain his performance, Rosol commented that for all the records and results, “it’s always open. It’s sport. Nobody’s unbeaten. Everybody can lose and everybody can win…We’re just people. We’re just humans.” In sport, in history, just people, just humans.

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[1] Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: 2007).

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[This post originally appeared in "A History of the Present"]

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[The cover picture is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license and is attributed to  Rl91]

The first set went in Nadal’s favor, 6-4. The Spaniard could have been excused for thinking what all the hype about the unbeaten run was. He was outhitting Djokovic from the baseline, pushing him wider and wider on the backhand wing, and constantly opening up the angle for the down-the-line winner. Yes, it was a struggle, at times, but it was a struggle that he was used to, a struggle that had routinely helped him succeed in the past, a struggle that had seen him win 16 out of 23 matches against the Serb.

The second set saw Djokovic change both gears and tactics. He was unafraid of going for broke with his forehand, and he used his strong, double-handed backhand down the line—a stroke that he hits with remarkable pace and precision—to constantly push Nadal deeper and deeper into an abyss of uncertainty. Djokovic was able to use, perhaps, his most feared weapon, and direct it at Nadal’s achilees heel. He was blending caution and fearlessness with a hitherto unseen élan. He had his own serve broken once, but broke Nadal twice to take the second set 6-3. The third set saw the Serb take on an even more imperious air—he was recovering and placing balls with extraordinary accuracy from absurd angles. It was tennis at a different level, and it was a step too high for the world’s number one player.

The stage shifted to Miami, two weeks later. Again, Djokovic won in three. Madrid, on Rafa’s clay? Novak in two straight sets. Rome where Nadal had won the title six times? Djokovic in two easy ones. Could he do it in a grand slam final against Nadal, we wondered. We wouldn’t know at Roland Garros where Djokovic fell in the semifinal to an inspired Roger Federer, paving the way for Nadal to retain his championship. At Wimbledon then, in the hallowed grass, where Nadal was the defending champion? The answer: a resounding, authoritative yes.

Yet, this was no case of the vanquished having played poorly. Nadal was superb in the final, he’d have likely beaten any other opponent. He was striking the ball gloriously, finding angles that would have resulted in winners against anyone else. But Djokovic chased them all down; he was sliding on the grass like a skater on ice, twisting his body into weird, gymnastic shapes, and fighting and staying in every point before somehow finding either the room for a winner or forcing Nadal into an error. Djokovic’s excellence had now reached an otherworldly level. He had thrown down the gauntlet and how. This, you thought, was perfection, only there was even more to come from the Serb.

At the U.S. Open, Nadal would again face Djokovic in the final, this time a Djokovic who had defeated Federer in a truly epic five set semifinal, one in which he had saved two match points, the first with “The Shot.” The final was a punishing, beautiful affair—4 hours and 10 minutes of spellbinding, exquisite stroke-making. Nadal pummeled shot after shot with depth and topspin, Djokovic skidded across the blue, acrylic floor and returned with strokes of beguiling angle. It was nirvana for the neutral tennis fan. It was like you, as a viewer, were a part of the struggle. You couldn’t take your eyes of the ball; it was an exhausting, yet thoroughly mesmerizing spectacle. But for Nadal, who had not too long ago conquered the great Federer, this was decidedly cruel. He had, after all, been the best player in the world, perhaps, on all surfaces, between 2008 and 2010. He was still seemingly doing nothing wrong. He was playing as well as he could, hitting shots that would have been winners against any other opponent, yet Djokovic in lifting his tennis beyond earthly expectations was now untouchable.

How much longer could he sustain this, we wondered. Nadal did too, we’d imagine. Maybe the end of season break would shatter Djokovic’s resilience, and provide Nadal with time to make the tactical tweaks required to overcome his latest challenge. What could these tactical tweaks be? Was there anything that Nadal could seemingly improve?

The answer, oddly enough, would present itself in a grueling, psychologically crushing defeat that Nadal suffered at the Australian Open Final in January—his seventh in a row to Djokovic (the full match is available here, in case you’re interested). If we thought the final at Flushing Meadows in September was exhausting, this left us, the viewer, in a heap of pain. A tennis match that lasted for nearly 6 hours, a tennis match, which ebbed and flowed into a vibrant, entrancing theatrical performance. Djokovic lost the first set 5-7, only to take the second and the third with relative ease—relative only in the nature of the score-line. Nadal, we thought, was broken beyond redemption. Yet, he fought back, plugged away like the champion that he is, and took the fourth on a tiebreaker. The fifth saw Nadal get to within six points of victory, but Novak was more aggressive in the final phases, ever the anti-choker, as Siddhartha Vaidyanathan describes him in his latest piece. But even though Djokovic had triumphed, the match was indicative of a slight change in the tide.

Often, when we think of Nadal, we think of his biceps, his stamina, his power, his endurance, the sweat, the toil—all distinctively physical characteristics. But Nadal is more than his physical form. He is a master tactician—every shot that he plays is well thought out, every move that he makes is calculated. There is nothing chancy about his game. His strokes are placed with acuity, and he maneuvers the spin on his shots depending on the opponent and the surface. As, Tom Perrotta wrote in the WSJ: “Nadal’s consistency hides his often-brilliant tactics.”

Nadal was very quick to grasp that there were two essential elements of Djokovic’s game that were hurting him more than anything else—one being, the backhand down the line to his weaker wing, and the other, Djokovic’s return of serve. There was, though, at first viewing, nothing he could do to counter the Serb’s weapons.

Yet, perhaps on greater introspection, aided no doubt by his uncle and coach, Toni, Nadal realized that he needed to move away from his preferred serving areas. He has a tendency to serve to his right-handed opponent’s backhands—he almost always serves down the middle on the deuce court, for instance. At Roland Garros, this year, he apparently began each of his games in his first four matches with serves down the middle: extraordinarily predictable, but with the spin that he gets off the court, a tough serve to return effectively. But against Djokovic, this is a serve that rarely works. Novak has an amazing wing span that helps him not only reach the curved serve, but also return it with terrific depth and accuracy off his backhand, almost always right at Nadal, forcing him on to the defensive.

Craig O’Shannessy, who researches tennis strategy, pointed out in his review of the Australian Open final, that Nadal did, in fact, alter his serving strategy for the match. “His mix of serve location was better than usual,” O’Shannessy wrote. “On first serves, Nadal served out wide in both courts 39 times, at the body 41 times and down the middle to the ‘T’ 57 times.”

Nadal was broadly successful with his strategy–he came closer than he had in his previous six encounters to defeating Djokovic. Yet there were additional tweaks required, and these would be displayed, first in Monte Carlo and Rome, and then in the final at Roland Garros.

In Monte Carlo, as O’Shannessy said: “Nadal served much more to Djokovic’s forehand in this match and reaped the rewards of serving not where he prefers to serve but where Djokovic is not as deadly returning.” The key, though, was not just in the placement of the serve, but in that Nadal was able to use his forehand on the second shot a lot more. ““My serve worked very, very good,” he said. “Sure, I had a few free points with the serve. But most important thing, after the serve, I had the chance to go inside with my forehand a lot of times, so this makes a big difference, no?” he said after the match.

In the finals in Paris, Nadal showed a completely different dimension. Not only was he able to retain his new serving tactics against Djokovic, but he was also able to use his backhand far more effectively as a defensive weapon—he made only 23 unforced errors on the wing to Djokovic’s 37. O’Shannessy wrote: “[W]hen Nadal served, he was able to keep Djokovic away from his backhand far more effectively. Nadal served four times in the fourth set, and only hit 16 backhands in those four service games. That enabled him to use his sword a lot more when serving, where he hit 36 forehands for four winners and only one error.”

These may seem like minor tweaks, but when you’re used to serving predominantly to a right-hander’s backhand—particularly on the deuce court—making a change in the peak of your career is far from simple. But Nadal knew that to overcome his new challenge he had to work harder than, perhaps, he ever had, and force Djokovic to do things differently. And therein lies his greatness.

]]> http://www.criticaltwenties.in/sport/nadal-tweaks-tactics-to-overcome-the-djokovic-barrier/feed 5 http://www.criticaltwenties.in/sport/the-god-who-failed http://www.criticaltwenties.in/sport/the-god-who-failed#comments Fri, 16 Mar 2012 19:21:51 +0000 Alok http://www.criticaltwenties.in/?p=4660

I write this not to praise Tendulkar, but to denounce the hundred.

1. It has come in a game India  lost.

2. It was the cause of the loss (he scored too slowly).

3. It took the focus away from the rest of the team on the game itself.

4. The year long drama waiting for this hundred has clearly affected the man and the team negatively.

5.  It is no indicator of the form that he has been in of late (in Tests and ODIs).

6. The year long focus on the hundredth hundred has meant that we’ve not paid enough attention to the complete disarray the team is in right now. The disarray has happened in front of our eyes but very few eyes have been focused on the causes and solutions of the problem and far more have been obsessing over the hundredth hundred.

7. It is perhaps his most meaningless hundred (in both senses). It didn’t possess the boy-on-the-burning-deck grit of the 114 at Perth, the ferocious beauty (and utility) of the twin hundreds in Sharjah, the spine tingling relevance of the 100 at Chepauk post the Mumbai-terror-attack, the epic Greek-tragedy of the other Chennai hundred (and to a lesser extent the 175 in Hyderabad), the barrier breaking nature of the 200 or the sheer self-denial and strength of will that went into the 241 at Sydney.

All of these hundreds mean something to me and most others. When we tell our long-suffering descendants (yet another) Sachin story, it will be one of these.

Of the cuts and pulls on that Perth bunsen burner as boy barely taller than the stumps. Of the many barriers of pain he walked through under that wrenching Chennai sun to hold up a faltering batting lineup. Of the elevation we all felt when, for two days in Sharjah, he was the most invincible batsman on the face of the planet. Of the tears we wept with him at the emotional release of that hundred after the terror attacks.

As with all good devotees, I’m going to end up blaming the worshippers and not the deity.

We expected too much. We wanted a sign. We wanted affirmation of our own beliefs.

When they were not forthcoming, we raged, ranted and raved at the deity.

At the end of it all, the deity’s just a man. Flesh, blood, bone and sinew.

We refuse to believe that.

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*I’m not using “God” here in the times of India headline sense, but from this DFW piece

There have of course been exceptions – Steffi Graf, Curtly Ambrose, Wasim Akram and Justine Henin to name a few off the top of my head – but in general, particularly, during the 1990s and early 2000s when fandom was still the most vital aspect of my appreciation of sport, I usually made bizarre choices. Generally, though, when a great sportsman was in decline – whether it was a temporary blip or terminal – I found myself suddenly gravitating towards him. I wanted to see more. I found myself mysteriously rooting for him. I felt like an idiot when Sampras retired for not having supported him when he was at his zenith. How could I not support Michael Jordan when he was being His Airness? How could I have not seen greatness when it was presenting itself with such crystal clarity? When Tendulkar was going though a terrible phase in late 2003, I suddenly found myself backing him, wanting to see him rediscover his mojo, to see him return to his imperious self. All this idiotic fandom may have skewed much of my sports watching, but I believe it has nonetheless given me the perfect perspective to judge some of these sportsmen, a kind of perspective that only unpleasant ruminations can give you.

This sets me up very nicely then to tell you why I want to see resurgence from Federer, a Federer whom I have often disliked and a Federer that I have never supported, not in a single match that I can remember. Maybe I backed him in his fourth round victory against Sampras at Wimbledon in 2001, which brought to an end Pistol Pete’s superb run, but Sampras had had a pathetic year and it’s probable I wanted to see him win. When Novak Djokovic came back from two sets to love down and saved two match points before ending Federer’s run in this year’s U.S. Open in the most cruel of manners, I couldn’t have been more satisfied. Bottom line: I’ve almost never supported Federer, never seen the elegance, in every aspect of his game, that others purr about, although I may have lied about it in past posts to sound sensible. But watching him win the Paris Masters today, for the first time in his career, gave me a sense of satisfaction, a feeling that there may be gas left in him for a final surge.

The same aesthetics that draws people to Federer has, bizarrely, been at the forefront of my dislike for him. No doubt, he has almost always made things look simple. But simplicity doesn’t transcend elegance, and the two certainly don’t always coincide. Federer’s forehand, everyone will agree, is his chief strength – a stroke of amazing virtuosity. But is it really an elegant stroke? I would argue it’s not. Usually, it’s a whiplash, snappy movement and his bodyweight is transferred awkwardly. There is no technical purity to it. Of course, technique is a funny and often overrated concept; it’s the player’s comfort and the ensuing results that matter. And technique is also probably irrelevant to a discussion on aesthetics.[1] But whether it is because of the lack of absolute technical purity or the whiplash motion, I haven’t ever found Federer’s forehand to be beautiful, certainly not in the manner of Henin’s backhand or Edberg’s volleying. The fluidity that people attribute to Federer’s forehand is a myth. In reality it is a jerky stroke, albeit a brilliant and even astounding stroke, which perhaps accentuates his genius, but my irritation with people describing the shot as beautiful, possibly, invoked the anti-Federer in me; even more so than his arrogance and generally pitiful attitude.

Now to his backhand, an often flaky and floundering weapon that even the most ardent Federer fans will agree is his weakness. In his prime, Federer’s foot speed allowed him to step outside the ball and convert his backhands into forehands (the beauty here, it must be noted, was in his movement and not in his forehand). Over the years, his backhand, though, did improve immensely, so much so that it is perhaps at its acme today, even as his game is otherwise waning. And it is his approach to the backhand, again curiously, that I have found most endearing. Repeatedly you would see him shank his backhand, yet he would persist with it, not slicing it as he would have in his early years, and eventually he would produce a remarkable angle, a remarkable winner, entirely out of the blue. The beauty again, though, wasn’t so much in the stroke as it was in the result and in his sheer bloody-mindedness.

Federer’s serve has always been excellent and a hugely underrated aspect of his game. The motion is neat and crisp, and minimalistic, but elegant? On the volley particularly on the drive forehand volley, Federer it must be said, looks supremely splendid – there is a nonpareil regality to it. But endeavoring to deconstruct every aspect of his game to examine the aesthetic appeal of the respective parts, as I have done briefly here, is an ultimately tedious and futile experience that has somewhat soiled my tennis watching experience. Yes, the simplicity of Federer’s strokes, to me as the beholder, hasn’t translated to beauty, but in watching him play in Paris, I realized that I have been a stuck-up asshole.

For in my general irritation with every aspect of his game being described as beautiful, I allowed myself to look beyond what I have always found extraordinarily beautiful, a kind of beauty that I should have been delighting in – his on court movement. I have played tennis, mostly recreationally since I was six, giving it up intermittently every now and then since I was, maybe, fifteen. Each time I try to get back and play, the aspect I find hardest to recover is my movement – it is unquestionably the hardest trait to master. Shot making is essentially an extension of court coverage and therein lies Federer’s genius. If his greatness were to be deconstructed to a single element, it would have to be his movement on the court, which as it happens is also a thing of inimitable beauty.

Now that Federer’s aura has dissipated, I want to see him regain it. I want to watch his game only for his movement, not for the whippy forehand or the erratic backhand, as loveable as it may be, but just to see him cover the court like a prince. For, there never has been a greater representation of transcendence.

[1] Laxman’s leg glance, for instance, may not be technically pure, but it’s certainly beautiful.

I must admit that I have not served as any exception, until recently, to this general Indian aversion to baseball. The only times I saw the game were on highlights reels on ESPN’s Sportscenter. The home runs made for good viewing, but I wondered what the big deal was. Now I know or at least I think I do.

I moved to New York City, late July, to study journalism. One of my first tasks was to choose a neighborhood to cover for my class website from a plethora of uptown areas. In spite of my nonchalance – and at some levels, maybe even a dislike – towards baseball, I veered towards Highbridge, a small portion in The Bronx – the poorest of the city’s five boroughs – located on a sloping bend around Yankee Stadium, the historic home of the New York Yankees. Highbridge is, apparently, the most deprived congressional district in the whole of the United States and yet it is home to the world’s most valuable sports franchise. There is an anomaly to this that is disturbing at so many levels, making it a very good neighborhood for a journalist to cover. I would be lying, however, if I said that this incongruity was the reasoning behind my choice, for it was a decision, almost solely, based on the location of Yankee Stadium – if nothing else, I thought, I’d get to hang around one of the world’s most iconic stadia for a few months.

But why? I am no baseball fan. The Yankees don’t mean anything to me. Until very recently, I couldn’t give a diddlysquat about them. Yet, there is this unparalleled vibe that you get as a sports fan, from just being around a great arena – this feeling is by no means to be underestimated. It makes you feel part of a community, a community where sport is the one unifying factor. I’d taken only a glimpse of Yankee Stadium from a tinted window of a bus and that was enough to make my decision.

In the weeks that have followed, I’ve made many visits to the area, several times on game-days when hordes of supporters wearing Jeter and Sabathia jerseys congregate on the 161^st street subway stop. It is an occasion to behold – just sitting outside the station, watching fans fervently march toward the stadium gates. Each, expectant, excited and hopeful. There is a buzz to the place. The street vendors come alive, the local bars surrounding the stadium steam with people – it is almost like a ritual carnival experience.

When you see the sheer number of fanatics, it makes you think: “there has to surely be something about this sport?” And indeed, I can proclaim with an equal dose of embarrassment and revelation, there is. At many levels, this process – a continuing one – of watching and understanding a new sport has been weird. Over the years, I’ve grown to enjoy a variety of sports, but I can’t remember the last time I sought to pick up a new game, virtually from scratch. It is usually a process that has no clear, decisive beginning. At any rate, it has been many years since I endeavored to watch and understand an altogether new sport. As a child or as a teenager, it is easier to see a sport for what it is – in other words subtle nuances don’t often come into the process. Implicitly, maybe, an understanding of other sports impacts the process of learning a new one. But at 25, the experience is vastly different. Almost 20 years of watching a number of sports contributes directly to the process of learning about a new one.

I am not suggesting that I’ve compared each play in baseball that I’ve seen to other sports, but in grasping the several gradations of the game, my understanding of other sports has played a critical role. To better explain myself, in game 3 of the ongoing New York Yankees versus Detroit Tigers post-season American League Division Series, CC Sabathia, the lead Yankees pitcher, intentionally walked Miguel Cabrera in the bottom fifth inning. In other words, he allowed Cabrera to walk to first base by pitching the ball several feet away from home plate giving the Tigers a man on the first two bases with two out. This was a tactical ploy that I might not have immediately grasped had it not been for my general understanding of sport. Sabathia was tiring and the last thing he wanted was Cabrera swinging with a man on first base, especially considering that the Yankees were trailing by a run. It is, no doubt, a common strategy, but one that would have been harder, I presume, to understand for a sports novice, as opposed to a baseball novice. The play in itself may not be directly comparable to other sports, but it involves a thought process that is common across the sports world. It is these little characteristics that I’ve started to enjoy about baseball. On the face of it, it looks a prosaic, slow sport, but it has not merely a physical facet, but also a highly nuanced tactical one.

Numbers, play a more important role in the baseball than in perhaps any other sport. I am still not in a position to comment on the efficacy of the models deployed, but I am presently reading Alan Schwarz’s “The Numbers Game” to understand “baseball’s lifelong fascination with statistics.” I also watched Moneyball, the movie starring Brad Pitt and based on Michael Lewis’s 2003 book on the Oakland Athletics, its general manager, Billy Beane and the sabermetric approach to assembling a baseball team. The movie, by itself, was scarcely enjoyable and has done little in adding to my appreciation of the sport.

Over and above the fascination offered by the strategic and numerical aspects of the game, though, is its pure beauty. David Schoenfield, writing for ESPN.com on Justin Verlander, the Tigers’ lead pitcher, reminisces about Roger Angell’s description of a Nolan Ryan fastball as a “liquid streak of white.” He said, “That has to be how opposing hitters have felt about Justin Verlander this season. Even if they do go to bed early the night before facing him, they must be thinking about liquid streaks of white or curveballs dropping from heaven or unhittable changeups or sliders that make you flail like a snowflake in a windstorm.” In game 3 on Monday, Verlander was nearly irrepressible. He pitched with variety and precision; his fastball, in particular, was a thing of beauty. He ramped it up at 100 mph even well into the game. His action and his release had a raw, grace to it that makes you want to keep watching him pitch. This was the Eureka moment for me – it isn’t as easy to be a batter, as it can sometimes seem to be.

I am learning more and more about the sport with each passing game, but what I’ve already come to recognize is its pure beauty. It has a subliminal elegance to it that can go unnoticed in the eyes of its most ardent followers and can be unfathomable for the nonbelievers. Thankfully, for me, I’m still somewhere in the limbo.

The single greatest tennis match ever played.

Apparently, so many people were transfixed by the spectacle unfolding at Centre Court that day that they no longer noticed the passage of day and forgot to turn on the lights till after the match was over. Millions of households turned on the lights at around the same time, leading to the surge. Viewers were probably still shaking their heads at what they had witnessed.

At least, I know I was.

The late hour tugged at my eyelids, the rain breaks tested my patience, the tension slowly tore my nerves to pieces and after a while, I was no longer able to sit down in one place in the living room to watch the match. I moved from the comfort of the sofa after the first set, wandered around the room, back and forth into the study as the second set seemed to confirm a lopsided mismatch that would end soon, almost forgot about the match during the rain breaks, got closer and closer to the TV as Federer came back to take one set, then another, and ultimately found myself a few inches from the TV screen egging Roger Federer on in the last moments of the last games of the final set. The subsequent year’s Wimbledon final by comparison, followed in the bright evening sunshine of Oxford in summer, despite being just as close as a contest, seemed a positive let-down.

Suhrith’s last post got me thinking about my own interest in tennis. My introduction to the wide world of Grand Slam tennis was also through the eyes and experience of my grandfather, himself a tennis player of no small skill and a connoisseur of fine tennis on the telly. The era of Sampras dominance and the end of Steffi Graf’s career, however, saw me drifting away from tennis until, like others, I was drawn back by the magic and genius of Federer. What keeps me glued in to tennis now, like others, is the immortal rivalry between Federer and Rafael Nadal.

I shall make no secret of the fact that in this rivalry, I back Federer. It seems to be a very guy thing to cheer Federer over Nadal – a straw poll over twitter confirmed it – as Federer seems to be the favourite of male fans, and Nadal, female fans. Why and how is another subject for another day, but I want to dwell on the rivalry itself in this post.

On the face of it, the statistics would suggest that it is not so much a rivalry as the domination of Roger Federer by Rafael Nadal. But statistics never tell you the whole story, and anyone who’s followed this great rivalry would tell you as much. Why does this particular rivalry draw so many of us to the game so often and with such passion?

Tennis, like any other sport, can be enjoyed and appreciated by fans at many levels. On one level, one’s interest can be purely parochial; one can cheer one’s fellow countryman/woman taking on the best in the world and doing well (i.e., Indians cheering Sania Mirza). At another level, one can appreciate the great skill and talent that goes into performing feats that seem beyond the capacity of mere mortals, such as, say, Usain Bolt’s breathtaking 100m and 200m runs at the Beijing Olympics. Or one can appreciate aesthetic beauty in sport; a cover drive by VVS Laxman timed to perfection finding the gap between four fielders with what seems to be perfect ease and grace.

In a sense, however, these are only limited ways of understanding and appreciating sport.

Does one give up on a sport because no one sharing the same nationality/race/ethnicity play the game? Do we even want to reduce the appreciation of sports on such narrow bases? Nationalism in sport has reared its ugly head on many an occasion (the end of Monica Seles’ promising career, and Eden Gardens, 1996 to name but two) and the nationalistic sports fan is at best, tolerated.

Superhuman feats, whether in athletics, cricket or tennis, reach natural limits very quickly and beyond a point, become mere statistics. Professionalization of sport has also meant that the great feats of yesterday have become mundane and run-of-the-mill in our day and age as improved knowledge and training methods has raised the bar of the average. If every miler can expect to beat the four minute barrier and scoring at 8 runs an over becomes routine, what joy remains in attaining these feats? It is true that there are some barriers that probably will never be broken for all time to come (99.94) but such feats are fewer and further between these days. Interest in a sport cannot be sustained only on the hope of spotting the next Bradman, Beamon or Bolt.

Aesthetic quality in sport is also not an end in itself. Not married to the efficient attainment of the goals of that sport, it becomes a mere frippery and just showmanship. The point of a game is to win; to score more goals, points or runs, or as the Olympic motto urges, go faster, higher and stronger. The sportsman who survives in the highest league is one who adds efficiency to aesthetic ability, or more likely sacrifices the latter for the former. Rare is the genius such as Maradona, Federer, or Tendulkar who combines ruthless efficiency to artistic finesse to take viewers to the higher plane of ecstasy.

Whatever level one may enjoy sport, sport’s ability to truly elevate occurs when it presents to us a compelling story. If we honestly ask ourselves, what does it matter if someone is very good at hitting balls across a net, or has the capability of swimming a distance of 100m in so many seconds? These feats, examined in isolation, and devoid of context, mean nothing to anyone but the ones actually involved in the feat. What draws the rest of humanity (or at least that part of humanity capable of appreciating sport) into finding meaning in these acts is the context. Really, we are asking ourselves, what does this feat, this victory or this achievement mean? or how does it fit into a larger narrative to form a whole greater than the sum of is parts?

One can appreciate sport so much more when one understands the narrative underlying the action unfolding. To know that the two teams on the pitch have just fought a war that has created resentment among the defeated adds an edge to a simple game of football. To know that one team is being driven to terrifying excellence in response to the opposing captain’s reminder of their shackled, colonial past adds so much more colour and poignancy to the proceedings than a dry recollection of scorecards ever will.

As I’ve said before, sport is at best when it does this spontaneously; unscripted and untrammeled by convention. The stories of sport are really, the stories of our lives. Being unscripted drama, it allows us to experience all of life’s passions, sorrows and emotions at a safe distance, yet close enough for it to have an impact. The underdog victory, the search for excellence, the shot at redemption, are all stories we want in our lives, and sport gives us a chance to live these stories out by proxy through our sporting heroes. (The skeptics’ attention is invited to Beyond a Boundary and “Fire in Babylon“)

It is this aspect of enjoying a sport that allows a non-Spaniard, non-Swiss person to appreciate the compelling rivalry between Federer and Nadal. It is the story of an absolute, acknowledged genius striving to overcome the one challenger who stands between him and unquestioned immortality. It is also the story of the challenger himself striving towards immortality by confirming his dominance over the genius. In the process, it is also the rivalry itself which has entered the halls of immortality. In that sense, this rivalry is also a rivalry just between two humans, albeit two extra-ordinary humans. Here, the “story” is the sport itself, or rather the quest of two individuals playing at their peak in around the same time, each trying to prove that he is the greatest player of the sport, not just in his era, his generation, but for all time.

Each match played out between the rivals is filled with dramatic potential. Will Federer overcome the inevitable decline brought about by age to beat a stronger, younger, opponent? Will Nadal sustain his excellence for any length of time and get rid of any last doubts about his greatness? Will Federer be rid of his clay-court bogey? Will Nadal repeat his grand performance of 2008 by beating King Federer on his grasscourt kingdom (so to speak)?

It may seem a bit of a disservice to the other magnificent players in the tournament but the French Open final has confirmed for us the most anticipated tennis event of the year: the Federer-Nadal final at Centre Court, Wimbledon.

A significant part of football’s splendour lies in its low scores. Goals are meant to be a premium and a team’s ability to defend competently while not compromising on its attacking options is a vital element of the sport, and contributes towards much of its beauty. Spectacular as some of yesterday’s games were, they were marked by particularly pitiful defending. The Newcastle United–Arsenal fixture, for instance, embodied a typical game of two halves, only though for all the wrong reasons. Arsenal were no doubt irrepressible in the first period, spraying incisive passes that tended to beguile, but the nature of Newcastle’s defending must have had its fans cringing in anguish – the space that was allowed to each of the scorers to either stroke or head home their finishes was quite inexplicable. In the second half, it was the turn of the Arsenal fans to cringe as their team somehow contrived to let slip a four goal lead. Some would point to the red card accorded to Abou Diaby that preceded Newcastle’s goals as the basis of Arsenal’s failings, but the incident only served to mask their otherwise deplorable defensive showing.

At the Molineux, Manchester United, hitherto unbeaten and perched at the top of the league, scored inside three minutes before allowing Wolverhampton Wanderers to equalise and take the lead inside the first half by committing acts of footballing hara-kiri. Rafael’s decision to turn his back on Matt Jarvis and allow the Wolves winger to take a quick corner led to a free header for George Elokobi for the equaliser before Nenad Miljas’s floated free-kick was bundled in by a gratefully unmarked Kevin Doyle to give the home side an advantage that eventually proved insurmountable.

A glimpse at the highlights of the other games played yesterday and a reading of the match reports clearly indicate that wretched defensive performances pervaded across the league. Maybe this was nothing more than a flash in the pan, with a rare concoction of attacking brilliance and shoddy defending providing a day of nutty entertainment. But defensive frailties have been at the root of the problems of almost all teams near the top of the League. Nemanja Vidic has, perhaps, been the outstanding defender in England this season, but as a team United have looked dreadfully vulnerable from set-plays. Manchester City have been steadier than most at the back, but a centre-back pairing of Vincent Kompany and Kolo Toure does not always inspire the greatest confidence. Arsenal’s failings are far too well documented to hark back upon, while Chelsea have the found the need to splash twenty-five million pounds on David Luiz, a young centre-back of supposedly rich talent. Are these problems, though, a mere reflection of the quality of players or are they a product of greater tactical causes?

Zonal marking from set-plays – where defenders mark specific zones of the penalty box as opposed to an assigned opponent – has often been derided as a tactic incapable of providing success. Every time Liverpool conceded a goal from a set-piece during Rafael Benitez’s tenure, it was attributed to ‘inherent flaws’ of the zonal marking system that was in operation. Yet, when teams using a customary man-to-man marking method concede goals from set-pieces, rarely is it considered a result of the system, with only its poor implementation deemed as the cause – best exemplified by Liverpool’s own movement away from the arrangement.

For all the hostility against the method, in theory, zonal marking seems a sensible tactic. By stationing its best defenders in the most dangerous zones inside the penalty box, a team is quite likely to alleviate the pressures of defending its goal. One of the primary concerns against the system relates to a defender’s ability to deal with attackers who have a run on them. But as Howard Wilkinson says: “Attackers get a run on you whether you are zone defending or man-for-man marking. They always call the shots. You start from a standing position but once the ball is in flight, you’ve got the distance the ball travels to get yourself moving.” Of greater practical significance, though, is Alan Hansen’s statement that the use of the system by the hugely successful Liverpool teams of the 70s and 80s of which he was a part, never weakened their ability to win Championships in England or in Europe.

An interesting parallel may lie in the larger movement towards zonal marking as a holistic defensive strategy. For many years, teams had defended by assigning a specific defender to deal with each of the attackers with the very notion of marking in zones considered antithetical to football strategies. Luis Vincio at Napoli in the mid 1970s and Nils Liedholm at Roma in the early to mid 1980s had tested a system involving zonal marking with variable success, but it found its perfect synthesis only under Arrigo Sacchi at AC Milan in the late 1980s. Sacchi’s system entailed pressing in zones and concentrating on marking space as opposed to marking in relation to the position of individual players. The success of his Milan side is often considered the last great tactical revolution, with almost all modern-day teams applying a version of the system. Yet, when it comes to defending set-pieces, a general opposition to zonal marking continues to persist. In almost all of the six seasons under Benitez, Liverpool were amongst the teams that conceded the fewest goals from set-pieces – a statistic that should be a celebration of the tactic as opposed to the misplaced indictments that are often served out.

On the face of it, a tally of forty one goals in seven league games is suggestive of a league that is brimming with attacking excellence. Behind the facade, though, lie the blighted defences that constitute the more telling cause behind the goal-glut. Any argument in favour of the Premier League’s quality must be softened by its defensive artlessness, which runs counter to one of the fundamental elements that makes football beautiful.

Yet, in Murray, more so than it did with Tim Henman, Britain has a tennis player blessed with skills that are certainly worthy of a Grand Slam victory, making the expectations that much starker. Whether this weighs heavily on Murray’s shoulders and represents the cause for his frailties in the biggest of stages, we may never know. Regardless, it can serve as little excuse for his capitulations in the three Grand Slam finals that he has competed in. The latest, a 4-6, 2-6, 3-6 trouncing at the hands of Novak Djokovic only aided in highlighting the depth of the Serbian’s talents and the infirmities that continue to haunt Murray’s game. Overcoming expectations is a vital step in achieving sporting greatness. In Murray’s case, though, it is perhaps his own lack of self-confidence rather than the burden vested upon him by 60 million people that he needs to address. He only needs to look at the women’s singles champion at the Australian Open this year – Kim Clijsters – who lost her first four Grand Slam finals before winning the U.S. Open in 2005. So, Murray’s dream is not unattainable and the good thing for him is that he has all the assets that make a Grand Slam champion.

Now, though, is not a time to harp on Murray’s failings and prospects, but to celebrate the supreme talents, scintillatingly showcased by Djokovic, over the course of the two weeks at Melbourne Park. Losing only a set through the course of the tournament – in the second round to Ivan Dodig – Djokovic most significantly cruised through the quarter-finals, semi-finals and finals, against Tomas Berdych, Roger Federer and Murray respectively, with consummate ease. The Serb, constantly behind the shadows of Federer and Rafael Nadal, in spite of his victory in Australia in 2008, has made staggering improvements to his game, which when exhibited as it has been in the last week makes for thrilling viewing.

Djokovic tends to excite in an unusual manner. He doesn’t have a booming serve with which he can serve aces at will, or ground-strokes with which he can readily kill, but he does boast a supreme ability to convert defence into attack, which by itself makes for an awe-inspiring spectacle. His innate sense of the geometry of a tennis court coupled with an astute on-court nous means that he can scamper and retrieve seemingly unreachable balls before finding angles of dazzling brilliance.

Each of his opponents in the last three rounds constituted a distinct threat. The big Czech, Tomas Berdych possesses easy power with which he often dismantles opponents in terrific fashion. Djokovic, though, on a relatively slow surface – the Australian Open is played on one of the slowest hard courts – was able to negate Berdych’s threat with a combination of excellent service-returns and neat use of all the perimeters of the court, taking the match 6-1, 7-6, 6-1.

With Rafael Nadal nursing an injury, ousted by David Ferrer in the quarter-finals, many felt that the Slam was Federer’s for the taking. Yet, the Swiss was outclassed by an imperious Djokovic, who unrelentingly attacked and exposed weaknesses in Federer’s backhand that even if always perceptible had never been so cruelly laid bare. Also apparent in the straight sets victory, was the extent of improvement that Djokovic’s serve has undergone – his ability to find accuracy on the big points was particularly noteworthy. But most astonishing was his athleticism. Very often after retrieving balls on his backhand side with his left foot sliding past the tramlines, he still managed to muster the racquet-head speed necessary to send the ball back with purpose. Even when it seemed like Federer was in the ascendancy, Djokovic was able to find the resilience to stay with the Swiss and ultimately hit strokes of resounding excellence.

In the final against Murray, right from the offing, Djokovic set out to attack – striking his ground-strokes with scintillating pace and depth – never once allowing Murray to settle into any rhythm. In the first four games, he was hitting the ball at an average of 20 kilometres faster than Murray, and at the same time finding sharper angles and greater depth. The crucial point though came on 15-30, when Djokovic serving for the first set at 5-4, played a rally that showcased the complete array of his most vital skill – an ability to convert defence into offense with ridiculous simplicity – he scurried to reach both corners of the baseline on numerous occasions before stroking a backhand past his hapless opponent with remarkable pace and alacrity. All through the match, he displayed elasticity in footwork that allowed him to defend even the most searching of Murray’s strokes, invariably culminating in an error from the Scot, an imposing winner or an irretrievable blow from the Serb.

In the second set after racing to a 5-0 lead, Djokovic, possibly showing the first hint of nerves, allowed Murray a little peep, losing two straight games before breaking again. The third set was slightly more topsy-turvy with both players exchanging breaks of serves, but ultimately Djokovic exerted his superiority. Leading 4-3, he broke Murray and went through some jittery moments on his serve before a Murray forehand crashed into the net to give him the championship.

Nine victorious sets of tennis in the final three rounds of the tournament, played against three of the top players in the circuit, means that Djokovic’s success couldn’t have been more deserved. His 2008 win at the Australian Open had already proved his Grand Slam credentials, but with Nadal and Federer dominating almost all Grand Slams since, few expected Djokovic to triumph here. And in doing so in a thoroughly convincing fashion, he has brought to light the prospect of a shattering of the duopoly at the top of men’s tennis.

Yet for all its physical and psychological challenges, and for all the power hitting and vicious ground-strokes, the sport remains one of grand beauty. Its majesty does not lie merely in the format of the competition, but also in the sheer mechanics of its stroke-play. Within the myriad maze of wonderful strokes, though, some provide more joy than others. The single-handed backhand, which for periods in the last two decades had been relegated to the archaic, is perhaps more beautiful than any other stroke in the game. And nobody in recent times has played it more splendidly than two players who were ousted from the Australian Open today – Justine Henin and Richard Gasquet.

The Belgian, Henin bowed out to Svetlana Kuznetsova who played in a halcyon state almost unbecoming of a Russian, bar the two games where she served for the match and in parts of the second-set tiebreaker. Henin’s backhand was not on showing in all its magnificence and she often mistimed it, a rarity, which would have been startling if not for the news of her struggles with an injury to the right elbow. At most times, though, it remains a thing of entrancing brilliance. The bent knees, the right arm flowing in a perfect arc, the ball met at the sweetest of spots on the racquet and the resultant, prodigious angle have made Henin’s backhand one of the finest in the history of the sport. A petite girl, by tennis standards, it is quite remarkable that she gets the kind of pace off the racquet that she does. It does, though, make for spectacular viewing. The stroke helped her to seven Grand Slam titles, before she most unexpectedly retired from the sport at the age of just twenty five, days before the French Open in 2008. A return to the circuit last year, like most other such comebacks hasn’t quite gone to plan – an injury at Wimbledon saw her miss rest of the season. It will doubtless take her a while to get back to groove, but if she does stay injury-free, I’d expect her backhand to propel her towards greater deeds.

France’s Richard Gasquet is an enigma. He boasts some very obvious gifts, none more dazzling than his single-handed backhand. But he was found wanting, yet again, against Tomas Berdych, in the third round, losing in straight sets. A former Junior No.1, Gasquet appeared on the cover of French Tennis Magazine when he was only nine, but his talents have failed to translate into success, with mental frailties often the product of his downfall. Tennis, certainly probes more than just the talent and flair of its competitors. When it comes to natural flair, though, few can better Gasquet and no shot beguiles in the manner of his backhand. Stroked with pristine technique – looped backswing, eyes over his right shoulder, his upper half uncoiling as his knees bend and a transfer of his weight onto the front foot – the backhand makes for captivating showing. It is not, though, his only strength. He has an intrinsic understanding of the dynamics of a tennis court, able to find remarkable angles from both wings and his touch at the net can be quite sublime. If only he can find the perfect amalgam of ‘mental and physical’ factors that make a champion. The game would be the better for it.

[1] Cited in Marshall Jon Fisher’s book, ‘A Terrible Splendour’ – set in pre World War II times.

For the best part of his career, Sachin Tendulkar notwithstanding, Ponting has been a batsman of unrivalled distinction – between January 1999 and December 2009, Ponting averaged a colossal 58.75 at a strike-rate of 61.31, while Tendulkar averaged 54.78 at a strike-rate of 54.62, scoring ten centuries fewer than the Australian. It is trite, no doubt, to say that Ponting’s job was made easier by the quality of the team that he played in, epitomized no more than by the openers that preceded him, for most of the time, Mathew Hayden and Justin Langer. Yet, there were numerous occasions when Ponting went into the middle, with the ball and bowlers, new and fresh, and batted with magisterial splendour. Never one to shy away from the pull and the hook or on-the-up drives through the covers, Ponting’s batting has always been a thrilling spectacle. Lunging nervously forward, with the highest of back-lifts, one could be forgiven for thinking, just for a moment, of the lumbering technical deficiencies in Ponting’s batting, but when he flashes the blade to make contact with the ball, rarely is the result anything but of resounding primacy.

Statistics, as always, are only partially helpful in expounding on Ponting’s virtues. His contribution as a batsman to the Australian cause for well over a decade has been exemplary. Knocks of utmost quality in the most trying circumstances, turning potentially perilous situations into ones of authority, has been a hallmark of his batting. Nonetheless in recent times, Ponting has been pedestrian, struggling on tour to India – his record in the country will remain a blotch on his illustrious career – and at home against England. Sensing technical faults in his batting, teams have bowled to him with acuity, often getting him early on the hook or the pull – strokes which Ponting has doggedly refused to sway away from – and with the moving ball, to which he has been strangely vulnerable.

But most batsmen, however great they may be, go through the phases of inquests, where their methods are tested to the hilt. Rahul Dravid, a batsman universally renowned as one of the most technically perfect, has been found wanting against left arm seamers off late. Tendulkar, not too long ago, was considered by some to be over the hill, to have lost his imperious aura – he scored just one century at an average of 44 in ten Test Matches between Novembers, 2004 and 2007 – yet he has ascended great heights in recent times, notching up seven centuries in 2010 alone. What sets the great batsmen apart is their ability to iron out flaws and regain an air of invincibility. In Tendulkar’s case, his poor run of form was, perhaps, a product of a glut of injuries – primarily to his elbow and back – which he has overcome to return to his magnificent best. Ponting, though, is a player of supreme physical fitness – even now he remains one of the best outfielders in the world – but the rigours of captaincy and the prospect of another Ashes loss are sure to have weighed on his batting.

His captaincy record – in spite of him being the most successful captain in Australian history – will forever be stained by the three Ashes defeats. His team’s enormous slide in recent times means that he must necessarily face the axe as captain. There is a need for a fresh start, perhaps with an unsullied leader, but a year fraught with numerous struggles aside, Ponting still has much to offer as a batsman. If released from the shackles of skippering the side, Ponting could well enjoy a new lease as a batsman. But Australia aren’t in the habit of retaining sacked captains in their side, and Ponting’s self-esteem may suffer a dent by playing as a mere member of a team that he has captained for over seven years. An exception, though, must be made by all parties.

In their darkest phase since the days of Kim Hughes’s pains, Australia could do with Ponting’s batting nous to guide them through what is likely to be a tricky and turbulent time. The case for him to drop down the order is well argued – Ponting is no stranger to a lower middle order position, having played at No. 6 in the early stages of his career, and Usman Khawaja, who makes his debut in Sydney should be given a chance to make the No. 3 position his own. But to relegate Ponting completely to the wilderness would not only be crude justice to one of the great batsmen of all time, but would be ill-advised considering the pitiful state of Australian cricket.