World Cricket II

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Karthikeya Date on Fitness/Fielding
Interesting thoughts:

Yet, much of this apparent brilliance is just wastage of energy. What, for example, is the point for the cover fielder to race across to his left and dive to try and stop a ball that has been pushed into the gap between cover and point, towards deep point? The dive isn't going to stop the single, and not diving isn't going to cost more than one. It appears to me to amount to an amazing unawareness of the ball game. What's the point of diving about every time the ball is hit in your general direction, even though you have no hope at all of stopping it (and don't actually stop it about 80% of the time). Which batsman in a Test Match is going to get worried and play differently because there's a bunch of fielders diving about?

Would those extra hours of fielding practice not have been better spent batting for an extra hundred deliveries (far more strenuous than fielding for 100 deliveries), or bowling those extra 100 deliveries? Would they not have been better spent working on that additional subtle variation? Virender Sehwag doesn't field as well as any of the New Zealand batsmen. Neither does he move as much as any of the New Zealand batsmen when he bats. But boy can he bat!

One persistent counter argument to any effort to situate fielding only marginally in assessments of quality is that fielding is an indicator that a player is trying hard. Well, which is the better indicator? A stubbornly disciplined, professional batting effort like the one we saw from Tendulkar and Dravid this evening, or all the aimless diving about that we saw from New Zealand? Virender Sehwag and Gautam Gambhir always look like they are looking for runs. Every movement they make suggests that they would like to find every last run that is on offer and then some. It means that they throw their wickets away a number of times. They are allowed to bat like that because they know that there is iron discipline that follows in the middle order. Professional batsmen who are unlikely to be swayed by the brilliant run scoring of Virender Sehwag. When it works perfectly like it did today, it gives you a glimpse into the very top drawer of Cricket. That is only if you are willing to resist being swayed acrobatic beauty of the latest perfect physical specimen in the New Zealand Test team.

Do you want to decide who the fitter cricketer is? Ask yourself a couple of simple questions. Who would you rather have batting for you if you needed 1 player to bat for six hours? Tendulkar or Taylor? Who would you rather want to call on late in the day at a crucial moment in a Test? Zaheer Khan or Chris Martin? The answer in both cases is obvious. It also indicates who the fitter cricket men are. If a physio were to assess fitness, then Taylor and Martin would probably out perform Tendulkar and Zaheer in every measure. But even so, I argue, not only are Tendulkar and Zaheer better cricketers, but fitter cricketers