‘Virat Kohli the only one in this generation to keep Tests alive’

Australian journalist Gideon Haigh, who has authored 19 books on cricket and business, knows the game inside out. From the revolutionary Kerry Packer series to a dramatic rise of India as a cricket superpower, nothing has escaped his keen and critical eye over the last 36 years of his career. In an exclusive chat with TOI’s Mandakini Shalya, Haigh, who was attending the Jaipur Literature Festival, spoke about ‘brand Kohli’, revolution in Indian cricket and importance of Indo-Pak bilateral cricket ties among other things. Excerpts:
As writer of 'The Inside Story of Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket’, do you think it was the media mogul who changed the way cricket was played forever?
I certainly think Kerry Packer was the first individual to recognise that cricket had a commercial value that was being underexploited and took advantage of the fact that it was basically the playing talent that was available for cheap sale. What you are seeing now in the last 10 years that’s the accelerated version of the trend that Packer has set in 1977.
How do you see India’s rise as a superpower of cricket. Apart from its exploits on ground, today India even dominates world cricketing affairs.
It’s much of an outcome of demography as anything else. Here there are so many more people who are obsessed with cricket. Also, the Indian economy has revolutionised over the last 20 years, market forces have been unleashed and mass media understands that cricket has a unique cut through in a diverse country with many different ethnicities and religions. Cricket is one of the few things that touches everyone at some level.
What you will attribute to India’s firepower. Today, we have bowlers clocking 150km/hr. There was a time when Indian fast bowlers were termed “friendly medium-pacers”...
All I can remember about Indian team when they had come to Australia in 1977-78, the bowling was opened by Karsan Ghavri who was a good left-armer, but he had no express pace. And, it was four spinners in the Indian side — Bishan Singh Bedi, BS Chandrasekhar, Venkataraghavan and Prasanna. I never thought I would see a day when an Indian pace attack will out-bowl Australian attack in Australian conditions like I saw during last summer 2018-19. It was a revelation. India was always a very formidable country in its home conditions but always struggled when it didn’t have the support of its own crowd. Now India can win anywhere. And it’s the confidence that arises from there. That knowledge has made Virat Kohli a more aggressive captain and a more dynamic individual and in some respects most revolutionary cricketer of this time.
You have been critical about deification of Sir Don Bradman. Here in India, people tend to deify their cricket heroes — earlier it was Sachin Tendulkar and now it is MS Dhoni and Virat Kohli...
The thing about Bradman’s fame was, it was created in much earlier era. He didn’t have to contend with battery of electronic surveillance, oceans of social media that Kohli and Tendulkar to a lesser extent had to contend with. There was with Bradman’s fame, I think, a kind of a mutually agreed distance that public created. We chose to allow him his privacy. We all knew where Bradman lived but there wasn’t a huge crowd outside his house scrutinising his every action. We set him up as a god and as a result we did not want to look too closely at god. Kohli has taken a more proactive approach with managing his image. He has done that extremely shrewdly. It seems to me from a distance that he remains capable of being his own man. I would wait to see if he takes a political position on something.
In this age of instant cricket, do you think due to lack of spectator patronage Test cricket is facing extinction?
I won’t say that as during the Boxing Day Test this year in Melbourne between Australia and New Zealand we witnessed the biggest crowd ever over a period of four days for a non-England Test match in Australia. In some respects Test cricket has done much much better than it was imagined 20 years ago. It never had many great advocates in circles of power, but still it keeps on peaking. One thing I really admire about Kohli is his absolute commitment to the purest form of the game. He has been a great advocate of the game. If anyone in this generation can keep Test cricket alive it is Kohli.