Virtues of gully cricket

The neighbourhood has been buzzing with a lot of talk about gully cricket. Since I spent a considerable part of my childhood patronizing the game, it is quite natural that I should be adding to the buzz. Coming to think of it, if it were not for my engineering degree, I would have probably ended up playing gully cricket all my life. The sport has been such a major influence on my life ! So...

To gully cricket With love. Read on.

After Dada and Viru, it is finally Jammy's turn to be rested. Rested, in cricket, is a gentleman's way of saying that a player has been dropped from the team due to various reasons, the most common one being a lack of form or consistency on the part of the player. Soon, the selectors of the Indian Cricket Team will start ranting about Jammy's poor performance to justify their decision to drop him, quoting all kinds of crazy statistics in the process. And to be fair to Jammy, they would also let him know what he could do to reclaim his spot in the team i.e go back to domestic cricket, smack those hapless bowlers left right and centre and get back to the team with truck loads of confidence. Sure, Jammy can do that and do it pretty well if I may add, but I think Jammy should start playing gully cricket if he is serious about getting back to the team as quickly as possible.

For a batsman like Jammy, gully cricket (GC) is a sort of panacea for all his batting woes. Here's why:

GC is typically played on streets which are about 60 metres (approx. 200 ft) long and about 2.5 metres (8 ft ) wide. In addition, the streets have houses on both sides;the houses in turn have windows of glass. Also the houses have uncompromising inmates who would go to any length to ensure that the kid who broke their windows will indeed cough up the money to mend them. In addition, the inmates would also go to the extent of complaining to the kid's parents, explaining to them in great detail how unruly their child had been and convincing the parents that the child had to be grounded for a week. Jammy being a nice guy, and his parents being nice and obliging neighbours, will definitely have to keep those windows in mind. This is going to be a huge challenge (quite a non-cricketing challenge if I may say so)

Now there are two ways of using a street to play GC. One could play along the length of a gully, or at times when a construction work in the neighbourhood has dumped bricks, sand (and what not) on the road, one could also choose to play across the gully. While playing along the length, a batsman is forced to go for straight shots - those which are executed by showing the full face of the bat to the bowler. He really can't go for that swash-buckling square-cut or a gorgeous flick of his legs, for those shots could land him in that immensely dreadful situation of being grounded for a week. However, the batsman can afford to loft the ball as long as he ensures that the ball flies over the bowler's head in a trajectory parallel to the rows of houses on either sides. In a real cricket match, this amounts to bisecting the gap between the long-on and long-off fielders to perfection, a shot that invariably results in a four or a six ! So a batsman could use along-gully if he thinks he needs to curb his shots square of the wicket and at the same time, improve his ability to play straight and through the line of the ball.

The other alternative of course, is cross-gully. Unlike along-gully, cross-gully lets a batsman experiment with his square cuts, pull, flick and the hook - shots that were fraught with danger in along-gully. Since the ball again travels parallel to the houses, no windows are broken and no flower pots are smashed. However, if it is required that pocket money be rather spent on collecting WWF stickers and improving the cricket infrastructure in the gully than on fixing window panes and flower pots, straight shots with an open face of the bat have to avoided. The question of a lofted drive doesn't even arise.

I told you that there were two ways of using a gully. Actually there is a third option too. This one is called diagonal-gully. To play diagonal-gully, one needs to find two trees on either side of the road, the trees being diagonally opposite to each other. The trees conveniently replace the stumps of along and cross gully thereby obviating the need to find six stones which would have served as low cost stumps in along and cross gully. Diagonal-gully obviously allows the batsman a wider range of shots and doesn't necessarily restrict him to playing either straight or across the line of the ball everytime. So, once Jammy has put along and cross gully to good use, he could graduate to playing diagonal gully and a bring a sense of "completeness" into his training.

If you thought shot-making was the only aspect of your batting that you could improve playing gully cricket, you are wrong. Since gully cricket is generally played in a very narrow and restricted space, as a batsman you are typically surrounded by several close-in fielders, some so close that you can feel their breath. Attempting a quick single amidst those close-in fielders and ensuring that you complete the run without crashing into any of them is indeed an art worthy of mastering. Also one needs to be mindful of the occasional passing by of a buffalo or a car and of course, the droppings of the friendly neighbourhood dog. Isn't this intense ? Time to trash all those computer games I tell you !

They say that as a batsman, you need to be capable of playing on all kinds of surfaces. Sure, a place like Jayanagar can offer Jammy a wide variety of pitches - from flat bouncy tracks in the form of its finest roads to pothole-ridden pitches exhibiting uncertain bounce. What an ideal situation to be in !

And finally, as PK points out, rules like one-hand-pitch-catch can improve Jammy's fielding and help him reinvigorate his reflexes. However, Jammy will have to pay special attention to the drains on either sides of the roads and ensure that he doesn't fall into them while taking off for that quick single or while diving for a pitch-catch. Minor risk, but it pays to be cautious nevertheless. After all he wouldn't want all this training to go down the drain.

Isn't gully cricket challenging ? How could you possibly achieve all this playing domestic cricket ? It is said that when Imran Khan was given the responsibility of putting together a cricket team for Pakistan, the first places he visited were the streets of Pakistan and not the grounds. To think that Jammy will regain his touch playing domestic cricket is absolutely preposterous !

This post was written in the honour of gully cricket and not with an intention of ridiculing any person, living or dead.