A Ball in Life

21 May A Ball in Life

It’s a solemn moment when the umpire tosses a ball to the fielding side, just after the toss. Since it’s likely that millennials have begun reading, I must clarify the context. There was a time when Cricket was played in white clothes with a red ball. Batsmen were supposed to hit the ball along the ground and bowlers actually looked to take wickets. You got a new ball as the fielding side, and a duty to keep it in working condition for 80 overs. Every team had an ageing bowler who was the specialist ball-chooser, to hobnob with the umpires and pick a ball from the box. A prominent seam, a suspicion of extra lacquer, a marginally smaller size for the spinners to grip… A good ball was a crucial ally, and a labour of love.

I want to tell you about this ball today.

The new ball was all about tender loving care. Apart from the all-important landing on the pitch, it wasn’t allowed to touch the ground. No throwing on the bounce, and the endearing medley of lobs from the keeper to the slips to cover, and then mid-off, with the cherished possession finally making a safe landing into the bowler’s grasp. Each custodian of the ball gave it a loving little brush on the trouser before passing it on. The ball was treated like a loved baby.

Just as the faster, more erratic first-change bowler came on, fielders would start to shine just one side of the ball, to maximise swing on one side. It helped focus the options for the faster guy. Just look to bowl quick and swing it one way. If a spinner came on at the other end, he’d look to extract drift from the shinier side.

By 25 or so overs, the intent to make one side of the ball different from the other would become an obsession. All attention was concentrated on the shiny side, rubbing it furiously, adding a little sweat or saliva to grease the odd blemish away, and letting the other side sort of go to seed. The swing wasn’t quite what you got from a new ball, but it kept you in business.

From the batting perspective, the whole line of thought about letting the ball lose shine before you brought out the big drive, about giving the first couple of hours to the bowling side before looking to score, is based on this time honoured method. The second session, just after the batsmen had settled in once more, is said to be the time in any level of Cricket, when the batting side can assume ascendancy. The ball stops working for the bowlers, and if the wicket is any good, there are runs aplenty to be had until the next new ball becomes due at the fag end of the day. The fielding captain then puts men in the deep and resigns himself to a holding job. The odd brain-fade, a stroke of overconfidence, complacency against the part-timers, or impatience against the accurate spinner… those are the only ways to expect a wicket. At forty or so overs, the fielding side sort of loses the plot, and the batting side takes over.

The way good teams beat this pattern, is by changing their approach. Instead of working to keep the ball new, they now work on creating a useful old ball. What was once an obsession with keeping the ball dry becomes a craving to supply sweat and saliva into the rough side. Fielders in the cordon start heaving in one-bounce throws to the keeper, ensuring that the rough side is the one making contact with the outfield. Spinners pluck feverishly at the seam when their back is turned on the umpires, as if trying to raise the Dead. Even batsmen invited to have a spell at friendly paced floaters pound bouncers to the mid-off fielder in mock warm-up.

The approach to the ball is a 180-degree flip, and when this happens, the ball starts to show tricks nobody thought it had. Spinners get bounce, sharper turn, and drift, and the quicks find that the ball starts darting towards the shiny side! The batsmen who walked in after lunch intending to boss the game suddenly find that the buffet has been cancelled. What looked like a 300 for 4 day is now looking like a crawl to 240 all-out. Instead of fading away into oblivion, the fielding side becomes the king of the ring, and much like Rocky in the fifth round, begins to connect with its punches. Teams that reinvent in the middle overs tend to dominate the entire innings.

The same holds true for our lives also. I look around today and find so many friends and colleagues who have fallen off the grid at the cusp of forty. They ditch tough jobs to pursue inane startups which then never start up. They get laid off and decide to follow their passions. They discover entrepreneurial zeal, consultancy assignments instead of jobs, travel, cooking, photography, Buddhism, astrology, belly dancing, even interior decoration.

I’ve heard the talk hundreds of times… It begins with carefully curated narratives of the hard life, the long commute, the thankless job, and the sightless spouse, and dovetails inevitably to the rabbit out of the hat. Passion. Just-discovered talent. Work-life balance. The real calling. Inevitably, these people flicker at the new avatar for a while and then fade away.

Life begins for us much like the new ball. Each ball is a piece of magic, treated with love and care, nurtured by everyone allowed to touch it, and allowed to be itself, to shine. Just as the new ball bowler is clapped away to third-man after his spell, the approach changes to shaping the talent instead of merely nurturing it. The focus is on one side of the ball now, replacing tenderness with vigour, and looking to make it do something. That’s the education phase, when academics takes precedence over a person’s other interests.

Just after this, is when the spinners come on, and the seam is still hard enough to find bounce and purchase. This is the early career phase. Your talent will still spawn an outcome – when you give the ball a tweak, it turns, when you hit the seam, it deviates. What you get from the ball is still a direct outcome of its natural attributes, only honed by the team.

That awkward 40-over point is the mid-life crisis. The ball stops doing stuff for you, it just goes on straight no matter what you do with it, and batsmen can now have their way with it. It’s the time you find your Life isn’t an unmixed blessing, that your talent doesn’t do the trick anymore, that most of your dreams will not come true. That you’ll never play cricket for India or date a Bollywood actress or become prime minister. You wake up one day to find that you aren’t the hero of even your own story any more, and that your looks or talent or natural gifts or even Papa’s money don’t get the job done. Promotions aren’t automatic, but there are more cheques to sign each month. The wife isn’t planning weekend getaways, but the in-laws are.

No man walks through or away from this phase without trepidation or damage, but this is where the old flight-or-fight instinct kicks in. And this is the crux of my analogy. Your traditional skill-set has stopped getting traction, and it was all you thought you had. You now have three options:

1. You can walk away into Buddhism, Interior Design, or Photography,
2. You stay in the game without reinventing, and take a beating,
3. You can reinvent. Learn new tricks. Fight your way through it.

How you work with the ball that has stopped swinging at the forty-over point will determine what your scorecard reads by evening. Guys who are not averse to a little punishment and persistence reinvent and pass through the furnace into a successful and relatively prosperous middle-age. The unwilling just lapse out.

This is what the cricket ball teaches us. The middle-overs is a time to unlearn old methods and learn new tricks. A time to be prepared to treat that ball different, and to dispel the notions and insights we’ve accumulated thus far. If we pull that off, the ball then begins to reverse for the quicks and bounce for the spinners. And this is what I have to say to you.

The life of the ball is a lot like yours. If you want to make it work through 80 overs, there are going to be some tough phases. Some batsmen will put your good balls in the stands. Your ideas will be challenged, your beliefs repudiated, your ability questioned. There will be roadblocks, phases of play when the nothing’s going right. When you hit such a phase, remember that the ball needs to be treated different at each phase of the innings. Sure, take a step back and check if you’re working the ball correctly, but remember, this is still Cricket, and it will not help for you to suddenly run away and try and become a badminton player.

The fact is, if you had a talent for photography or cooking, you would have discovered it a lot before the troubles began. Don’t run, stay. It’s ok that you won’t be prime minister, but that is not your concern for now. Work on getting through this phase, and better times will come.

Same game, new skills, is what I’m saying. Your talent & hard work brought you this far. Those skills are now in the background and you now need new weapons. To beat the forties, you need a little less imagination and a little more grit. Like Rocky, you have to stay in the bout, and take the beating so you can punch out a tired opponent. The only way out is through.