Why stadiums need a sense of place

There are many bad things about the new football stadium in Sao Paulo where the opening game of the World Cup was staged on Thursday (starting with its existence, given it was created for political reasons, when there were at least two existing stadiums in the city that with a lick of paint and minimal upgrading could have done the job perfectly well), but there is one thing that it gets emphatically right, and that is the fact that there are gaps in the corners.

There is a one-tier bowl, plus permanent second tiers down the long sides of the ground, with temporary stands at the two ends. In the corners are the big screens and television boxes, but they are low, so you can see through, and what that means is that you get a sense of where you are. After hours cooped up in the air-conditioned tent of the media, there's something refreshing about being able to see downtown Sao Paulo, shady hills in the background, a reminder that there is a world beyond the World Cup. When Brazil scored, you could see fireworks bursting in the evening sky.

This, of course, is an area in which cricket has a huge advantage over football. Because the stands tend to be lower, there is a constant sense of life going on outside, from Lumley Castle at Chester-le-Street to Table Mountain at Newlands, to Henry Blofeld's beloved buses passing Archbishop Tennyson's School outside The Oval.

That gives cricket stadiums an identity, a sense of place, that is vital but is all too often missing from football, with its identikit modern bowls that reach to the skies. And that's just thinking of the aesthetic, without considering what impact buildings or trees may have on atmospheric conditions: variety is good.

Old football grounds still occasionally have that sense of place. At Ninian Park, until two years ago the home of Cardiff City, for instance, you used to be able to see trains passing one corner of the ground. Roker Park, once the home of Sunderland, was one of many grounds that gave a glimpse of the terraced housing that surrounded them. At Tannadice, home of Dundee United, and Upton Park, home of West Ham United, there are flats that have a view into the stadium. They were or are grounds rooted in their communities. At the Estadio da Luz in Lisbon, home of this year's Champions League final, the castle is visible in the distance.

One of my favourite experiences in football was covering an Asian Cup game between Japan and Saudi Arabia in Saida, Lebanon, in 2000, at a time when it seemed the balance of power in Asian football was shifting from west (represented by the Saudis, winners of three of the previous four tournaments) to east (represented by Japan, who had won on home soil in 1992). To the right of the high main stand, the Mediterranean crashed against the rocks and a Crusader fort. Straight ahead, between the mountains that formed the western edge of the Bekaa Valley, a fairground was silhouetted against a purple sky in which lightning flickered. The scene was set for something dramatic, and what followed was the Gotterdammerung of Saudi football as they lost 4-1.

The backdrop added to the occasion. Too often, though, modern football stadiums reach up to the sky. In the homogenised world of the World Cup, it can be impossible to know where you are. I remember in 2006, in Germany, the sense of panic as I tried to add my byline and couldn't recall if I was in Cologne or Frankfurt. Thankfully FIFA, as though recognising the potential problems, add the names of the host cities on a hoarding by the halfway line.

But most of the time one football stadium is very much like another, particularly during major tournaments. The modern football ground is two or three tiers of plastic seats, with very little to distinguish them in terms of the angle of the seats or the distribution of the stands. They are comfortable and have good sight lines, but they are often generic, interchangeable.

Cricket grounds still have their idiosyncrasies, even if modern redevelopment - Adelaide perhaps most obviously - risks removing them. Of course it's understandable that executives want to pack in as many people as possible and maximise the returns on corporate hospitality, but at the same time cricket cannot lose what make its grounds unique - from the mountains of Dharamsala to the volcano at Pukekura to the trees at Kandy to the beach at St Vincent to the cathedral at Worcester. After all, without its quirks, cricket is nothing.

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Teams cannot risk tours to Pakistan

An armoured vehicle is patrolling a favela in Rio de Janeiro. Armed police guide national teams through streets that are cordoned off in this enthralling city. Poverty and wealth are uneasy neighbours, the fuse of a powder keg ready to explode. Months of demonstrations, of civil unrest, of violence and protests, have been an unexpected build-up. Nonetheless a government struggling for control is welcoming the world and promising a safe passage for the planet's richest sportsmen and their wide-eyed supporters. This is perhaps how sport should be, crashing directly into the rocks of social division. Brazil, in football, is the prime example of sport as national expression, a representation of the ambitions of Brazilian people within a complex sociopolitical environment.

The World Cup, this glorious showcase for the beautiful game, was never in doubt. No security issue is considered too hazardous, no stadium is declared too unready. High-profile international sport in a volatile country is possible. We all know that it is. A successful tournament may even heal some of the social wounds and conflict that now threaten Brazil's favourite sport.

A similar argument once seemed reasonable when discussing international cricket teams touring Pakistan. The security threats were containable. The benefits to Pakistan cricket and society in general far outstripped the remote, almost non-existent, risk of harm.

Three incidents destroyed any such logic. In 2002, a bomb exploded outside the Pearl Continental Hotel* in Karachi. Bombs are no longer unusual in Karachi, but this bomb detonated when the New Zealand cricket team was staying at the hotel. The Kiwis immediately returned home. Six years later and several hundred miles to the south east, a group of young men of Pakistani origin terrorised Mumbai. Cricket was an irrelevance, but cricketing relations between India and Pakistan became collateral damage.

Pakistan cricket, threatened with isolation in 2009, welcomed friends from Sri Lanka to demonstrate the safety of Pakistan as an international venue. Presidential-level security was offered, although this was moot, given the safety of Benazir Bhutto had been impossible to guarantee two years earlier. In the middle of the second Test in Lahore, near the Gaddafi Stadium, the home of Pakistan cricket, Sri Lanka's team bus was attacked, security men and bystanders were killed, and five players were injured. Sri Lanka went home and took international cricket with them.

Rather than sadness, it has become a blessed relief that international teams no longer risk tours to Pakistan. The risk of harm to players has far outstripped any possible benefits. No sport, no public morale boost, no symbolic hand of friendship deserves such folly. Ireland's pursuit of Test status and international acceptance does not require a suicide mission to Pakistan, where an alarming level of violence and terrorism is now the norm.

Other countries are also unsettled. Take Brazil, for example. But any promises of security from the Pakistan Cricket Board or the government are worthless. We saw it with Sri Lanka's cricketers and their presidential-level security. We saw it again at Karachi's airport. High-profile international sport is now impossible in Pakistan. It was once hard to imagine that cricketers could be terrorist targets but they seem obvious ones now. This is the moment, the tipping point, the point of no return.

A recently published report on urbanisation in Pakistan suggests that a third of Karachi is controlled by the Taliban. Rapid urbanisation of Karachi, other cities, and even some rural areas in Pakistan will create a fertile environment for more extremism unless measures are adopted now, says the report by the Wilson Center. Some of these measures are immediate but others are deep-rooted and long-term. Nothing will change in Pakistan fast, and by 2050 the Pakistani population will have reached 380 million. How is it possible for security to return quickly to Pakistan under these circumstances? Even if the correct strategies are adopted now, the benefits may not be realised for another two or three generations. Pakistan's security crisis has sunk so low, its sociopolitical circumstances are now so out of control, that there is no quick fix, no guarantee of safety.

Cricket may be doomed in the short- and even medium term, but Pakistanis are a resilient people, as their current cricketing exile has proved. Any prescription for recovery is a painful one but must centre on developing Pakistan's international base in the UAE to keep the national team competitive. Pakistan should also look again at England as an alternative home venue where support is strong.

Reinvigorating domestic cricket is a second strategic strand, so that it develops players, attracts sponsors and helps sustain the cricket board. Players who have scored centuries in Pakistan's domestic cricket go to play club cricket in England and struggle.

Finally, players must seize opportunities for development in other cricket nations, and the PCB must not be an obstacle here. If other national boards are genuinely willing to help Pakistan, why don't they allow a Pakistan A team to enter their domestic first-class competitions, for example? Clearly the long-term solutions are sociopolitical ones but the PCB needs to take a pragmatic view and accept the grim reality of Pakistan's ongoing security crisis.

Urging international teams to tour Pakistan is a futile exercise, a public-relations stunt, a show of misplaced bravado. The salvation of Pakistan cricket relies on other, more urgent and painstaking survival strategies.

Credits : Kamran Abbas 

Cricket's twin towers of evil!!!!

Two prominent aspects of contemporary cricket are disheartening, to say the least. The first of them is the shadow cast by periodic revelations of skulduggery in the form of match-fixing, spot-fixing and the like. The second - that of the scourge of chucking, though extremely depressing, would be irrelevant were the first to continue to besmirch the game. For, what would be the point in watching cricket with legal, illegal or suspicious bowling actions, if some unseen hand can determine the course of an over, session or match?

For the game to continue to attract loyal cricket lovers who know its intricacies as well as its history, a massive clean-up operation needs to be urgently launched on both fronts. It will be a bright new dawn that opens to untainted cricket and pristine bowling actions that do not need scrutiny on the global stage because they have passed stringent tests at the junior level.

Illegal bowling actions are, however, far easier to eradicate than cricket corruption, but we must first acknowledge the problem. The ICC's cricket committee's admission (to go by recent news reports) that "there are a number of bowlers currently employing suspect actions in international cricket" is nothing short of a bad joke. How can that be with all the precise science of measuring the flex-ion of the bowler's arms at our command? How can chuckers or suspects survive state-of-the-art scrutiny into international cricket? Do the ICC and its members have no method of eliminating illegal bowling actions before bowlers graduate from domestic cricket?

To be fair to the committee, it confesses that the ICC's reporting and testing procedures are not adequately scrutinizing these bowlers. "It recommended that changes be considered to encourage umpires and referees to identify suspect bowlers with greater confidence, to use the expertise of the biomechanists working in this area to assume a greater role during the assessment process," says the committee, which has recommended "ongoing scrutiny of bowlers once they have been identified under the ICC procedures". One of the solutions proposed is the opening of illegal-action testing centers in more countries (over and above the current facility in Australia).

While the proposal has merit, the will to remove the menace of chucking is more crucial to results than the nature and efficacy of the measures recommended. Parochial considerations should not be allowed to stand in the way of cracking the problem. One way of ensuring this would be to have an expert committee comprising recently retired cricketers and umpires (supported if must be by biomechanists, preferably with some cricketing background) closely monitor bowling actions in a tournament like the IPL, where emerging players rub shoulders with international cricketers. Ideally, such scrutiny should be backed by the re-empowerment of umpires to no-ball offenders on the field. Unfortunately, that would be wishful thinking.

Without tough legislation, how can we ever prevent the random and deliberate violation of the arm-flexing limitations in force by a bowler whose action has been cleared but is bent on bending the rules to his advantage? (In this regard, I remember what an opponent told me after one of my team-mates went for 100 runs in 20 overs but claimed six wickets in the process in a Ranji Trophy match. He said he chucked exactly six deliveries in a long spell, but chucked each of them unplayable).

Coming to the other, larger, menace of corruption in cricket, it has been heartening to hear some of the most respected voices in the fraternity of cricketers speak out against it. The Fab Four of Indian cricket, for instance, continue to inspire us after their playing days by urging young cricketers to follow their own upright examples of honesty and integrity. They stood firmly together in the international arena in the face of constant attempts to sully the game by an ugly nexus between the cricket underworld, cricketers and others. Despite that, over the past decade or so, it has taken all our loyalty to the game and its sterling ambassadors to continue to believe in the purity of the game, in the midst of horrendous rum-ours flying all around us, including Lou Vincent's recent revelations.

An acquaintance I often ran into socially in the first decade of this century, an inveterate punter, enjoyed telling me that all ODIs were fixed. However absurd that sounded, he had the last laugh more than once when his pre-match predictions were bang on target. The recent horror stories may have their origins in ICL cricket, but are they the tip of a way more widespread iceberg? Was the punter acquaintance right after all?

Amid the gloom, it is perhaps time for the Kumbles, Tendulkars and Dravids of Indian cricket to lend their weight behind efforts to stamp out cricket corruption forever by doing more than the very laudable messages they have been putting out to all constituents of the game. They and their contemporaries must share all their thinking and knowledge on the subject with the investigating agencies and help them root out the evil permanently. It can be done. It was, in England - a couple of centuries ago, when it first raised its head.

Why Cricketers shouldn't celebrate like Footballers

One of the reasons cricket is known as the gentleman's game is because it cannot, in good conscience, be called the beautiful game. And the reason it can't is that cricketers just aren't as good-looking, of course. Which is why it's very important that cricketers not try and celebrate like footballers do. Because, unlike their more glamorous counterparts, they simply can't pull it off.

In fact, they should never, ever pull it off. Certainly not in the manner that Aditya Tare took it upon himself to do after the knockout game against Rajasthan Royals, when in what will surely be remembered as the most gruesomely definitive footballing celebration gone wrong on a cricket pitch in recent times, he lifted up his jersey, presenting for the viewing pleasure of millions on TV an abdomen that can perhaps best be described as a "one-pack" (uni-pack?). He also managed to somehow get his shirt hooked around his head in such a manner that it covered his face. Team-mates who eventually caught up with him were as much celebrating as desperately trying to cover up the sight.

Tare is by no means the only one guilty of wobbling fleshily above his station. The collective psyche of the game is still struggling to come to terms with the whole Flintoff-Ganguly stripgate saga, widely considered to be the definitive yin and yang of bodily exhibitionism.

What cricketers need to realise is that they are not footballers. If the average centre forward is built like a Greek god, the average batsman would appear to have been blessed with the build of an Anjou pear. As World Cup football season hots up, cricketers will be increasingly tempted to mimic their more glamorous brethren. Here, then, are a few more reasons why they should just leave the sexy (or not, as the case may be) and eccentric celebrating to the footballers:

The heart-hands celebration: You know that annoying heart-shaped-sign thingy that Gareth Bale makes with his hands after he scores? Now imagine Kamran Akmal doing it. Imagine, for that matter, Stuart Broad doing it. Now quickly slap yourself across the face a few times to rid yourself of those images.

The "catch me if you can" celebration: Footballers sometimes like to sprint away from their team-mates after scoring, leading them on a wild goose chase that eventually culminates in an exhausted cuddle. When Piyush Chawla attempted to do the same after he struck the winning runs to help his team lift the IPL on Sunday, he waddled, encumbered by pads, bat in hand, and a physique perhaps not suited to running, let alone outrunning. He lasted all of seven-and-a-half baby steps before he was "caught".

The running-slide celebration: Outfields at cricket grounds are generally not as lush and velvety as football fields are, so attempting the slide is always fraught with danger, especially, it would seem, to the continued wearing of one's pants.

The "in your face" celebration: Also known as the "suck on this" celebration. Sometimes footballers will in their celebrations attempt to caricature something they feel they have been wrongly accused of. For example, Luis Suarez (and Jurgen Klinsmann before him) has been known on occasion to "dive" while celebrating, in response to being accused of the same. Similarly, Samuel Eto'o recently mimed the gait of an elderly man after scoring a goal, in response to his coach's talk of his advancing age. And yet somehow one gets the feeling that Saeed Ajmal mimicking a javelin thrower in Stuart Broad's face after getting him out, or Dave Warner shadow-boxing Joe Root all the way back to the pavilion isn't going to cut it with the third umpire.

The Peter Crouch "Robot" celebration: What's the one thing in the world conceivably worse than seeing England beanpole Peter Crouch doing the robot dance? The cricketing equivalent: Ishant Sharma or Morne Morkel doing the robot dance. As Bart Simpson would have said, had he been a cricket fan: Don't have a stress fracture of the lower back, man.

The running-to-the-corner-flag celebration: Perhaps the most memorable example of this in football is 42-year-old veteran Roger Milla's pole-dancing with the corner flag after each goal he scored for Cameroon in the '90 World Cup. Thankfully, cricketers have no equivalent to run toward, and we can thank our stars for that. If the thought of Pravin Tambe shaking a suggestive leg isn't enough to make you want to count your blessings, then nothing will be.

The group hug/pileathon celebration: Football players like to pile onto each other after a goal has been scored. It's just what they do. Cricketers like to look awkward trying to do the same. The latest case in point being when wicketkeeper Robin Uthappa attempted unsuccessfully to lie atop Piyush Chawla in celebration of the latter taking a vital wicket in the qualifier against Punjab. Uthappa aborted whatever it was he thought he was doing when he realised his helmet was getting in the way of expressing himself properly. In the end he settled for hugging his team-mate awkwardly as he attempted to lift himself off the ground, like a drunken sophisticate greeting another at a soiree.

The "Shh" celebration: Alas, this is another one that has slipped through the cracks from football to cricket. Footballers do it to prove a point to their naysayers when they think they have proved them wrong. Harbhajan Singh does it because… well, why does Harbhajan Singh do it? Someone needs to tell the poor man this is not okay. Especially since he isn't in the national team anymore. I mean, who is he shushing? Himself?