For the sake of truth, let cricket archivists breathe!

The image of Brett Lee and Andrew Flintoff taken at the end of the 2005 Edgbaston is iconic in so many ways. So much that I don’t even need to post it for you to tell which image I am talking about. And why not? It came at the end of a nail-biting Ashes contest in one of the greatest Test series of all marking a moment of great empathy and compassion between two champions of the game. And you all know the story behind the photograph too. 

But you haven’t seen this image. And you most probably don’t know the story of this image. Here’s what happened. Michael Holding while bowling a 1987 ODI to Ian Botham pulled his hamstring after delivering the ball. Interestingly, while he clutched his thigh he also realized that the ball has popped in the air and he went on to catch that ball with his outstretched hand. What followed is something very interesting. Botham who had just gotten out realized that the bowler is in terrible pain and while on his way to the pavilion, he gave Holding’s teammates a hand as they carried Holding also off the field for one last time as Holding never played an ODI again.

A very beautiful little incident that tells a lot about the Spirit of the Game, something that has come to be equated with that photo of Lee and Flintoff. Who knows someone with better creativity could have used this image as a poster for inter-race harmony, especially in times of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Now as someone who was born much later after that England-West Indies encounter from 1987, I had no idea of such an incident transpiring, unlike the story of the other photograph. And that despite me being a voracious reader of cricket literature and knowing a fair deal about the game. I only came to know about it very recently through a video that was posted by a Twitter handle named Tri Sports Cricket who also had a wonderful YouTube channel where he posted footage of ODIs played in Australia in the 80s. Yep. ‘Had’ is the operative word. Sadly, his channel was taken down recently due to copyright infringement notices by Cricket Australia. What makes it really unfortunate is that before it was taken down, there was so much cricket content that Tri Sports Cricket was uploading on his YouTube channel that a lot of us had not seen before. And that’s what this post is about. About the likes of Tri Sports and why removing their channels is not a great idea.

So, what’s my grouse? My grouse is simple. Not too many sports have been written the way Cricket has been. And that’s why so much that we know about the game is largely due to those who have written about it and told us tales from the game. At the same time though, let’s pause for a while and think how much has been left out of those stories? For instance, the Botham-Holding incident, amazing as it might be, wouldn’t possibly have made it to a lot of match reports. It’s not the fault of the scribes either. If you’re supposed to write a match report, there is only so much that you’d be able to incorporate. And the incident took place in a rather dull one-sided affair, unlike the Edgbaston Test. Therefore, despite the best efforts of the journalists, a lot slips through the gaps.

Sometimes, it also results in misinformation getting proliferated. For example, all these years, the image of Sunil Gavaskar batting left-handed against Karnataka in the 1982 Ranji Trophy semi-final was told with the tale that the little master would start batting left-handed to tackle the left-arm spin of Raghuram Bhatt. He himself told in an interview that the moment the right-hand spinner (B Vijayakrishna) came along, he switched to batting right-handed again. Lovely story, right? The trouble is only recently a photo has emerged on social media which shows Sunny G batting left-handed to the off-spinner as well.

Then there is also the famous picture of Fanie De Villiers showing a red card to the crowds in a match played in England in 1994 in the presence of Umpire David Shepherd. The South African claimed that he showed a red card to the members of the MCC in the pavilion after they booed him for showing his displeasure to an umpiring decision. Although it makes for a great story and adds another dimension of quirk to a man who’s known to rub the ball in his armpit to make it swing, the truth is that De Villiers’ claim is false. The incident didn’t happen at Lord’s but at Leeds, where the second match of the series was played. But the incident keeps getting written about with the false piece of information.

Now imagine if all these matches were there for us to go back to on some platform ball by ball. Neither would we be merely at the mercy of those who write the game but we also would not just blindly buy everything that’s presented to us on face value. This is exactly what people who put out these old matches on YouTube help us achieve as cricket lovers. As someone who loves reading the game, I often feel that there are just a handful of moments, matches, players that cricket writing celebrates. It’s as if every writer is telling us the same story but with different expressions and, sometimes, different angles. These are stories that they read about because they were the only ones available to read. Nor does that help in establishing certain incidents as landmark events or certain players as special, it also ends up obscuring the untold part of the game. Remember even the writing of the game was largely restricted to writers from certain countries who often wrote very glowingly about cricketers of their land. Not that anything is wrong with it but what it ended up doing, in the long run, was that it told the story of too few while ignoring the stories of too many. And that’s a problem, mind you.

And that’s also why the work of these cricket archivists shouldn’t be pulled down from the public domain by cricket boards. These cricket archivists help us go beyond the writings and allow us to see for real how good a certain cricketer was and how undeserving of mention his counterpart from the other team was. They help us develop an alternative history of the game which is often more factually correct and takes away anything extra or unnecessary that was added by the writer for whatever reasons. In fact, so many articles these days on so many websites have links to the footage of the match on the YouTube channels of archivists like Rob Moody and Mainak Sinha. This also shows how much new age cricket writing is actually enhanced by this alternate history that has developed due to the works of these archivists who are now making everyone look at cricket from a very different angle.

I understand that there must be some financial reasons which results in the boards and the broadcasters taking such measures. However, the boards also should realize that the popularity of a sport is greatly dependent on stories and debates and discussions around it among fans. And their clamping down on archivists isn’t helping at all. I’m as old as the ‘Ball of the Century’ and trust me there is nothing new I have come to know about it in the past decade that I didn’t know a decade ago. How wonderful it would be if fans can have access to footage from other matches and see if there are more such deliveries that can match that one from Warne to Gatting. And only recently, thanks to the archival footage made available by these archivists on YouTube, ESPN Cricinfo has begun a series delving deeper into deliveries that can also be called the ‘Ball of the Century’.

In the minds of the cricket lovers like me, there is little doubt that the game needs people like Rob and Mainak and they are doing a great deal more at popularising the sport than many who are paid for it. I hope some better sense will prevail in the future and this taking down of YouTube channels of cricket uploaders will stop.

Here is the link to the video of the Holding-Botham incident - 
https://twitter.com/trisportsc/status/1273887448242753536?s=21