Read the following, and see if you can fill in the blanks.
"When I became a sports journalist, in the mid 1990s, the _ _ _ _ _ _ _ boom was in its nascent stage. It was in the mid-1990s that _ _ _ _ _ _ _ stopped being a sport and was converted into a money-making industry. Before that _ _ _ _ _ _ _ was just one part of the wide and wonderful world of sports in which everything had a place. Now, my articles are relegated to the inside pages of the paper. As far as _ _ _ _ _ _ _ is concerned, there have been endless hours spent at the copy desk cleaning up messy stories by self-important _ _ _ _ _ _ _ correspondents. "
The missing word is, of course, "cricket".
I laughed the first time I read the article from which that tightly condensed extract came. It was the heartfelt plea of an Indian football journalist named Siddhartha Saxena, published in Himal magazine last year. The piece seemed like a paean from a parallel world, one in which the norms have been inverted. Saxena's futile struggle to interest his editors in his minority sport, his battle to elbow out the room on the page that he felt his piece on football nationalism in Manipur deserved seemed like familiar complaints. You hear the same grumbles in press boxes and news rooms up and down this country, only here they're not made by football journalists. Unless they happen to be lower-league correspondents.
Bolstered by the reminder, that while it may come in many different forms, it's always the same nonsense, it's time to dismiss headlines like this one – "ICC slammed for not praising Tendulkar as greatest". The insertion of the word "slammed" should give the game away. This is exactly the same sensationalism that represents the worst excesses of football journalism in this country. And if you think I'm joking, you may like to remember the ire unleashed on Pele when he left Geoff Hurst out of his Fifa-sanctioned list of the top 125 footballers (here and here are a couple of the more restrained responses).
Some unfortunate PR, and how my heart weeps as I type that phrase, has made the regrettable error of offending India's greatest cricketer. You can almost picture them cowered in the corner, clutching their knees and rocking back and forth as they realise what they had done. All they had intended was to procure a little sly sponsorship for their client with a press release about Matthew Hayden, revealing that according to their oblique calculations, he was the 10th greatest Test batsman of all time.
Which rather invited the question of who they had placed above him. Sadly for the PR in question, not Sachin Tendulkar. In fact, in a bizarre turn, Tendulkar was 16 places beneath Hayden. A mistake. I imagine that the look on the PR's face was a little like those I last saw being worn by the Volkswagen people when they roped a bunch of journalists up for a press junket in which we stood and watched Ravi Bopara accidently flip over a 4x4 by pulling a doughnut on a downhill slope.
At that point, no amount of backtracking, explanation or explication was going to help the ICC. There was more than enough fuel for a small firestorm on the back pages and, worse still, to spark off the lunatic fringe of the blogging community. There was a valiant follow-up press release, clarifying that the list was "not a measure of greatness over a career". A sentiment only mildly contradicted by their own website blurb, which states "our ratings take into account a player's entire career".
Despite that, the list is quite explicitly a ranking of the greatest purple patches. It measures the best performances against the strongest teams in the most difficult conditions. Even then there are all the spurious inconsistencies you'd expect from such an endeavour – among them, Shane Warne being ranked only the 15th best bowler, behind Derek Underwood. The rankings page acknowledges this, and invites people to come and use the surprisingly neat graph comparison tools and make up their own minds about who might be the greatest player of all time.
But it was too late for something as irrelevant as the facts of the matter to have any bearing. The story had been inflated by too much hot air. Already, a raft of people linked only by their righteous anger and extremely tenuous connections to the situation had been passing comment in the Indian media. My favourite? Former left-arm spinner Maninder Singh: "The sadistic ICC officials should stop coming out with such lists. I think these jokers should not be given the pleasure of rating players in this way." Now that is a good-value quotation.
Clearly this wasn't useful, informative or insightful. The ICC must have sussed that none of the outraged parties who were busy giving them a "slamming" were actually going to commit to a cursory explanation of what the rankings meant, because today they released a follow-up list measuring the plateaux rather than the peaks of each players' career. Somewhat less controversially, it places Tendulkar fourth, behind Sobers, Richards and Lara.
So, two days on and the traumatised PR has presumably taken consolation in the commonplace falsehood that all publicity is good publicity, the Indian papers and TV stations have grabbed some easy attention-grabbing copy, the irate fans have something to get worked up about, and everyone's a winner. It's a new day at the circus, and we all have other things to write, read, shout and pontificate about. Now, if someone could just point out to the Aussies that the new list has somehow squeezed the Don down to sixth place …
