When we play our galli cricket, the captain – and everyone else – shouts out instructions to the bowler. Bowl on the legside, don’t bowl so short, arre yaar, no wides, just aim at the stumps, and so on. These depend on our down-to-earth reading of the situation. What sort of instructions do you think the captain of a Test team yells out to one of his main bowlers?
Well, we got to actually hear Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s directives to Ishant Sharma in the post-tea session on the second day of the Brisbane Test. In a higher than usual alto, enough for the stump audio system to clearly pick them up and transmit to TV viewers across the world, Dhoni encouraged the long-maned bowler with the advice, which translated from Hindi except for the operative word, said: “Bowl in your bindaas way. Don’t worry. I will take care.”
Sanjay Manjrekar was commentating at the time, and he was hard put to explain to his fellow commentator, a foreigner, what Dhoni had told Sharma. Indeed, what does bindaas bowling mean? The word cannot be directly be translated into English but its connotative realm takes in “relaxed”, “carefree”, “chilled out”, “fancy free”, even “unfocused”. It is clear from these that bindaas is not a cricketing term. If I am not mistaken, the word is a part of Mumbai’s tapori patois and is used to denote a happy-go-lucky attitude to life.
What must Sharma have understood from his captain’s exhortation? That he should pepper the ball at the Australian batsmen wherever he pleased and that he, Dhoni, would be behind the stumps to gather the wides and the long hops? Or that he should go all out and bowl without the restrictions of having to bowl to a specific plan? Or that he should let rip without worrying about no-balls or hits to the helmets? Or that he should just enjoy his lazy outing on the grassy green of the Gabba?
I do know one thing though. Sharma bowled nine overs in the Australian innings on Thursday, the day Dhoni appealed to his bindaas ways, and conceded 47 runs without taking a wicket. He, thus, gave away 5.22 runs per over, a safe bowling average in one-day cricket, but extravagantly profligate for a Test match. In the process, Australia went from a rickety three down for 121 to a more solid 221 by the end of the day. God forbid, Dhoni hadn’t asked Varun Aaron too to bowl in a bindaas way, for the speedster too presented the Australian 59 runs in his 12 overs, an average of 4.91.
Dhoni is a successful captain and he knows how to motivate his players. If backing Sharma, who already has a rock-solid reputation for inconsistency, in being as wayward as he liked is the secret behind his success, then so be it. But I would think the word bindaas did not even approach within a mile of Virat Kohli’s grey cells in Adelaide when he was shouting out instructions to the bowlers.
