TOP ARTICLE | Who Is A Cricket Expert?

India has one billion experts on cricket. Most of them have not played the game or played it casually as a child or teenager. That has never deterred them from pronouncing their judgments on cricketers and cricket matches or from advising India's national cricket team. I had a friend, an accomplished doctor, who had never played cricket. He would dismiss summarily most things well-known cricketers said, often adding disdainfully, "He knows nothing about cricket; he has not read a single book on it.'' Another, though an excellent player of chess and bridge, had his private theories only about cricket.
Cricket is that kind of a game and it invites such eccentricities.That has been one of its main attractions, particularly in South Asia. Globally too, no other game has produced the kind of literature cricket has done. And some of the greatest of them have been produced by persons with no experience in first- or second-class cricket. One of these greats, Neville Cardus, played little serious cricket but remains, till today, the model of all talented cricket writers. The play of imagination and the cadence of his writing came reportedly from his acquaintance with music.
This is not unique to cricket. In my discipline, psychology, the most major sub-disciplines have been pioneered by non-psychologists from Sigmund Freud to Jean Piaget. Likewise, great experts and theorists in defence and strategic studies have rarely come from the armed forces. The most famous of them in our times, Captain B H Liddell Hart, always faced the scepticism of the British army for not having a particularly distinguished career in the army. But sometimes the armies of Britain's enemies deployed his ideas in their strategic planning. Expertise is not the last word in human affairs. Probably some day, from among the hundreds of millions of lay-readers of the game in South Asia, will emerge a few works on cricket that will be remembered as lasting literary and ethnographic achievements.
Also, in this age of professionalism, experts are a difficult lot to contain socially, politically and ethnically. Indeed, the major democracies in the world are increasingly captive to expertise. All social change has already been redefined as development and its control has been handed over to development experts; the actual conduct of foreign policy is more and more the prerogative of experts in foreign policy, diplomats and area specialists; even election campaigns and electoral strategy now require media specialists.
The space available to Parliament, political leaders and movements are shrinking. Ordinary citizens, after casting their votes once in every four or five years, are expected to relax in front of their televisions at home and have a vicarious sense of participation by viewing political news as entertainment. The contemporary culture of democracy is encouraging a form of planned, sponsored infantilisation.
In such a world, we should feel fortunate that in some small areas of life in some odd sports, forms of art and local politics ideas of autonomy and sovereignty of the individual citizens survive. The sovereignty is not complete; specialisation is creeping into these areas too. People can and do have their opinions on popular cinema (though they have lost the right to evaluate or criticise the likes of Satyajit Ray and Akira Kurosawa) and cricket (many other sports like athletics and tennis have already become slaves of expertise and look less like sports and more like business ventures). In very few areas of life today, people can act as their own experts and reject expertise.
The importance of cricket is not that it can bring glory to Mother India and cure the feelings of inefficacy and irrelevance with which many of us live, but that it can give us the satisfaction of seeing a collective effort to grapple with the vagaries of fate with grace and good humour. Cricket may or may not supply a vicarious sense of personal achievement when we passively see a match or listen to a commentary, but it introduces us to the pleasures of living in a world in which probabilities matter, where you can play with ideas of what could be, probably is, or might have been. That is the meaning of that cliched saying about the glorious uncertainties of cricket.
Cricket betrays you after you have trained yourself to death and believe that you have assembled the best available talent in the world. It teaches you to look at life with equanimity. It is not a game that can be handed over to experts lock, stock and barrel. Not even through hare-brained schemes like having four captains to strategise and make it yield results commensurate with the efforts put in.
Shah Rukh Khan has attacked and then apologised to Sunil Gavaskar for speaking on captaincy issues in 20-20 cricket without ever playing the game. Basking in the glory of owning a cricket team, Khan has offered no apology to the millions of Indians who consider it their birthright to comment on cricket and refuse to be reduced to passive spectators of the game. He is yet to learn that, even in this age of expertise, cricket to be cricket cannot but be open to everyone's comment, foolish or wise.
The writer is a political psychologist.