I t’s an old but not rambling video you probably can ferret out of YouTube. The BBC asked Fred Trueman what made him love cricket so much and the erstwhile English fast bowler, and he replied that it was a great leveller. You go up against a goodish team with players who can give it a tonk and you end the day picking up a rich haul, Trueman says in phraseology which is much less bookish. And then you probably find yourself in your next game bowling to a cluster of transparent nohopers you dont really count upon to turn the world upside down and they dont, but what they do proves enough to leave you frustrated with no wickets in your bag, putting you in your place, the cricketer says. It never really lets you get too big for your shoes.

The words would have flooded back into cricket buffs’ minds when Virat Kohli, after his recent century in the Port of Spain Test, let his hair down, opened his heart and allowed his fans a few glimpses of it. After the triple-digit knock, no one would have grudged him an understated selfcongratulatory moment but the former captain relished the opportunity, saying how things were all right in his life now, how he was adding copiously to his accumulation of Test runs abroad and, carried away, made the mistake of tangentially comparing the present with the past in terms of batsmanship, stressing how his personal fitness freed him from the limitation that had once been inherent in waiting for the bad ball to be spanked, letting him make twos of singles and not being shackled by stingy bowlers.

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The blowback was prompt and sharp when Sunil Gavaskar questioned the worth of the runs Kohli and Rohit Sharma made in the West Indies, where younger cricketers should have been sent as the hosts were a shadow of their own glorious past. Not only did Kohli show, rather egregiously, he knew little of what taking them on meant when their pace quartet and strokemakers lined up, especially in Test matches, but, also, going by the way he spoke, he wasted himself in vanity in the court of global opinion. That was daft, as was not recalling how West and South, unlike North, had never hurt themselves in terms of achievements without being fitness freaks. What international batsmen of earlier ages took from the West Indies of yesteryear would have left todays putative colossi, who face very little blinding pace and even less top-class spin, befuddled. One story should suffice to prove the point. In 1986 at Sabina Park, Mike Gattings nose was left pulped by a bouncer. When the ball went back to Malcolm Marshall for the next delivery, the West Indian bowler picked out a bone lodged in the leather. Kohli, like all his peers, is lucky he was not playing in those extremely scary days.

(Incorporating and directly descended from THE FRIEND OF INDIA – Founded 1818)