The making of epics

When Australia visit India in October, a degree of disappointment will be inevitable. No matter how dramatic the events or stellar the individual performances, their excellence will be unable to surprise us. After the series of 2001 and 2003-04, expectation is strung to such a concert pitch that almost anything short of extraterrestrial intervention will feel anti-climactic.

Nobody anticipated the grandeur of the 2001 series; at the halfway point, in fact, it looked like a walkover. The pinch-me-I'm-dreaming power of the VVS Laxman-Rahul Dravid revival arose precisely because there was no foretelling it. When India then came to Australia last year, they startled by defying their reputation for being lions at home and lambs away, playing cricket of the utmost dedication.

So what now, since we have come to expect the wild, the freakish, the brave and the bold from India - qualities that Australia, indeed, seem peculiarly capable of provoking? While it may be exhilarating if Sachin Tendulkar, Dravid and Laxman make a ton of runs, it will scarcely be unanticipated. As Oscar Wilde said when an American invited him to share in the wonder of Niagara Falls: "The wonder would be if the water did not fall."

It is true that the opportunity exists here for one of the greatest cricket contests of our time, pitting against one another two outstanding teams with excellent recent records, both as fit, fresh and close to full strength as can conceivably be expected. Yet it is also worth reminding ourselves of how habitually such predictions go awry. After all, the last time a Test rubber was anticipated so keenly as this was when South Africa and Australia staged reciprocal visits in 2001-02; having approached one another like runaway trains bound to collide, however, the teams turned out to be on a funicular railroad with Australia ascending and South Africa descending.

So what does it take to produce a great cricket series, comparable, say, with the West Indies tour of Australia in 1960-61, Australia's tours of the West Indies in 1995 and 1999, the Ashes of 1882, 1902, 1930, 1961 and 1981, and any or all skirmishes between India and Pakistan?

It might be easier, initially, to discuss what's inessential. It seems axiomatic, for instance, that great players are a precondition of the best cricket - but it's not. Great players can play terribly tedious cricket too. Perhaps the classic example was the keenly anticipated 1962-63 Ashes series in which Richie Benaud's Australians, featuring Neil Harvey, Alan Davidson, Bob Simpson, Bill Lawry, Norm O'Neill and Wally Grout, met Ted Dexter's Englishmen, marshalling Fred Trueman, Brian Statham, Colin Cowdrey, Ken Barrington and David Sheppard, and played cricket colourless and soporific even by the standards of the era.

Sometimes, counter-intuitively, it is the absence of great players that heightens a game's intensity, by either levelling up the standards of the respective XIs, or begetting opportunities for the upwardly mobile. Would the 1981 Ashes series have been nearly so memorable had Greg Chappell been available? Would Australia's capture of the Frank Worrell Trophy in 1995 have felt so stirring had it not been engineered by the ersatz attack of Glenn McGrath, Paul Reiffel and Brendon Julian? It might be truer to say that the presence of great players needs to be leavened by that of great players in the making - the young, the ambitious, the fearless, keen to make their own reputations by knocking over a few existing ones. In this sense, Irfan Pathan and Michael Clarke might prove as important to the texture of the forthcoming Tests as Sachin Tendulkar and Matthew Hayden.

It is tempting to imagine that the best cricket requires the suspension of all other variables; `a fair field and no favour', to use the old English expression. And, to be sure, there has seldom if ever been a memorable cricket contest without impartial and competent umpiring. Nothing poisons cricket more quickly or critically than inept officiation; it has been toxic to more than a few encounters between Australia and India. Conditions, however, need not be similarly neutral - and they never are when Australia and India meet. Ricky Ponting's men will feel themselves playing not merely 11 cricketers from India but India itself, in all its sweltering, stifling, sprawling hurly-burly - and that is the very essence of international cricket.

It would also appear logical that the opponents in any historic series draw on some pre-existing narrative of the contests between them - which, in their last seven Tests for the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, India and Australia have assuredly built up. But again, though, this doesn't seem a prerequisite for memorable cricket. When Frank Worrell's men toured Australia in 1960-61, for instance, there had not been a West Indies tour for nine years. The visitors' record at the time, moreover, was mediocre, and they were soundly beaten by New South Wales before the First Test: that improbable, unimproveable tie. When India and Pakistan play, it doesn't seem to matter how much time has elapsed since their last encounter; even the captains' handshake is pregnant with meaning.

By the same token, the forthcoming showdown in India has already demonstrated the advantages - offsetting the host of disadvantages about which we ritually complain - of a frantically busy international schedule. Bizarrely, after the prodigies of 1960-61, West Indies did not tour Australia again for nearly eight years, and attempts to rekindle the excitement largely failed. Where 200,000 watched the parade that farewelled Worrell's West Indians, only 200 watched the last day played by Sobers's.

The back stories in India, by contrast, will be composed of fresh memories. Who can have forgotten Dravid's poise and Tendulkar's self-denial in Australia? Likewise Hayden's heroics and Jason Gillespie's courage in India? Past failings add an edge to the performances of others. We need hardly be reminded, for example, that Adam Gilchrist, Ponting and Shane Warne have unfinished business in India - that, in effect, they have barely started. Discounting Gilchrist's solitary big day out in Mumbai, their collective returns in India have been 306 runs at 12, and 20 wickets at 52 - paltry in their Test totality of nearly 12,000 runs and almost 950 wickets, catches and stumpings.

Getting at the heart of this question, though, entails reconsidering another: why countries first began playing cricket against one another. No one has significantly improved on the historian Bill Mandle's argument that playing cricket allowed those at the imperial periphery to prove their prowess and pluck to those at the centre. Playing cricket against England - because that's what helped define cricket in the countries it colonised - challenged the imported culture and validated it at the same time. And far from frustrating, cricket's ceremony and duration invested it with a certain majesty. It looked like - to use that polysemous word - a Test.

What was in it for the English? Imperial condescension? Social control? Apprehensions about their own decline? In his book Ornamentalism: How The British Saw Their Empire, the British historian David Cannadine has delineated conservative anxieties that underlay imperial expansion - the perception that institutions at home were imperilled by vulgarising capitalism and democracy. It may be that the English took up the cricket gauntlet thrown down by their subject peoples to stifle suspicions of decadence they held about themselves.

What does this have to do with great cricket series? This: international cricket has never simply been about two teams of 11 getting together for a swing and a shout; it has acted often as a metaphor for other struggles and quests. Thus the consuming passion for beating England, especially for the first time and especially in England: in the annals of cricket in the West Indies, Pakistan, India, New Zealand and Sri Lanka, the years, respectively, of 1950, 1954, 1971, 1986 and 1998 are heavily engraved.

A typical recollection is Clyde Walcott's of West Indies' win at Lord's in 1950: "It was the first time we had succeeded at cricket's headquarters and it was a symbolic moment in our lives and in the lives of millions of our countrymen. Many of them were arriving in Britain to build new careers in difficult circumstances because colour prejudice still lingered on. At the time I hardly drank but I had plenty that day ... We had beaten England, the country that brought cricket to the Caribbean, at their headquarters!" Or Hanif Mohammad's after Pakistan's victory at the Oval in 1954: "It was a glorious moment for all of us ... The win gave Pakistan a visible identity. Not many had known about Pakistan until then."

After a while, of course, England wasn't the only yardstick, for one could never beat them for the first time again. Thus CLR James's moving rumination, at the end of Beyond A Boundary, concerning the aforementioned farewell parade for Worrell's West Indians: "Clearing their way with bat and ball, West Indians at that moment had made a public entry into the comity of nations."

In a post-colonial world, these former meanings remain only vestigially. To be sure there are ardent rivalries in world cricket, deriving from proximity and similarities in culture: India and Pakistan, Australia and New Zealand. There are, too, antipathies based on specific personalities and issues: Australia and Sri Lanka because of the umpiring gauntlet Muttiah Muralitharan has run, Pakistan and England due to bad blood over ball-tampering. But we no longer play one another today as an expression of something bigger, older, grander or deeper. We play now chiefly because it's what we've always done, because a system exists to facilitate it, and because there's a buck in it - especially so when playing against India.

And the reason that we play so much cricket now - let's be frank about it - is the economic consideration that sport only has value to television when it is live. Unlike other broadcast content, like movies or TV series, sport's inherent value depreciates fast. If television's infatuation with cricket ended, if it was decided there were better forms of content and advertising space, there would be no need to play as much, if at all.

Which is not to say that this system doesn't provide cricket of quality and excitement; it can and does. But because the games exist only on the one level, anything other than the most brilliant feats and extraordinary results tend to pass very quickly from memory. It was fascinating when, before England's recent tour of the Caribbean, Brian Lara tried deploying the old imperial card. "It's important for us to beat the old colonial masters," he stated to the Wisden Cricketer. It sounded quaint, archaic and hollow, a sentiment decoupled from meaning, like a half-remembered line from a national anthem. And its success as a motivating tool can be judged from the verve and conviction with which his team proceeded to play.

This is not necessarily a development to be mourned. Sport can be a destructive force when it becomes a proxy for other tensions and disagreements - El Salvador and Honduras famously fought their `Soccer War' in 1969 after an unruly World Cup challenge. Yet the fading former meanings of cricket do leave a vacuum, which is being filled at present, with varying degrees of success, by hype, personality, money, marketing and a kind of manufactured nationalism, that runs as deep as the warpaint on spectators' faces. Australia and India 2004 may well turn out to be one of the greatest series in cricket history. But quite what that latter phrase means is, at the moment, in an intriguing process of renegotiation.