Bishan Singh Bedi. Mushtaq Mohammad. Majid Khan. Farokh Engineer. Zaheer Abbas. Imran Khan. Sunil Gavaskar. Kapil Dev. Javed Miandad. Wasim Akram. Sachin Tendulkar. Aravinda de Silva. Muttiah Muralitharan. Rahul Dravid. All candidates for an all-time Asian XI, and tied together by a common thread – county cricket.
Over the past few years, it's become fashionable to run down England's first-class competition. The standard perhaps isn't what it once was with fewer top-quality internationals free in the summer, but there's still a world of experience to be gained for a young prospect. The struggles of Pakistan's callow batting line-up in England, and the toothlessness of India's pace bowlers in Sri Lanka straightaway make one wonder just how much they'd benefit from a finishing school that helped the likes of Vivian Richards and Richard Hadlee.
Forget the quality of the opposition. Forget the paltry crowds. Think instead of a variety of venues, and an itinerary that puts the emphasis on match fitness rather than looking like a Manpower model. One week, you could be batting on a placid pitch where boredom is the biggest threat, and the next week will find you struggling to put wood on leather as the ball swings and seams prodigiously in overcast conditions.
As a slow bowler, you could revel one week on a dry surface and then get belted the next as the ball moves little off the straight. It adds up to the kind of well-rounded education that every young professional needs.
These days, fewer and fewer Asian prospects try their luck on English soil. In some cases, there's opposition bordering on hostility from their boards. And with others, it's the counties that get cold feet, considering them more of a risk than a reliable Kolpak-type signing who'll be around for the full season.
In some cases, the barriers placed in front of players make no sense at all. Piyush Chawla was not part of India's Test campaign in Sri Lanka and he isn't playing the one-dayers either. Neither is Yusuf Pathan. But despite Chawla's success at Sussex last season both men were stopped from being part of the county game this year. So was VVS Laxman, whose India appearances these days are restricted to Tests alone.
Apart from the pathetic clash of wills with the ECB – Lalit Modi and Giles Clarke specialised in this my-mum's-better-than-yours game – the reason advanced for the players being cotton-woolled is that they'll be too fatigued for assignments later in the season. That would have made sense if all the players hadn't been part of yet another gruelling IPL season.
The IPL, with its huge crowds and international cast, is certainly a test of a youngster's temperament, but it hardly prepares him for cricket at the highest level. It was instructive to listen to Rahul Dravid talk about Suresh Raina a couple of months ago, when he was on the cusp of a Test debut.
"There will be questions asked of his technique, and he'll be tested physically and emotionally too," said Dravid. "That's why Test cricket is a searching examination that goes on right through your career. In Twenty20 and one-day cricket, you can avoid certain questions. With Test cricket, you need to have all the answers."
That pertinent point has been beautifully illustrated during Pakistan's tour of England. Umar Akmal's career started off with some eye-catching innings, but in four Tests under challenging conditions, he hasn't once crossed 22. It's not that he's become a bad player overnight. It's just that he's confronting situations for which no amount of domestic cricket in India or Pakistan can equip you.
In the old days, when the Headingley scoreboard showed 0 for 4, players from east of Suez and west of Malacca weren't considered good enough for a county side. In fact, Vinoo Mankad was called up for the Lord's Test of 1952 while playing for Haslingden in the Lancashire leagues. What he did in that game did more for the profile of Indian cricket than much of what had taken place in the previous two decades, and there will be many Bangladeshis who hope that Tamim Iqbal's heroics earlier this summer are the start of something special rather than an aberration.
Players such as Chawla and even Ishant Sharma would benefit immeasurably from a few weeks on the county circuit. They only need to look at the man who was India's bowling talisman when they won in England in 2007. Zaheer Khan had been dropped and was on the road to nowhere when he pitched up at New Road in 2006. After 78 wickets at a measly average, he was back in the fold for a tour of South Africa. He's seldom looked back since.
"The best part about county cricket is you get to play non-stop and you're doing stuff absolutely on your own," said Zaheer in an interview last year. "You are not in a familiar environment. That forces you to think much more. If you are serious, it improves your game."
Ishant has had three mediocre seasons of IPL. He may have banked close to $3 million (£1.9m) in that time, but has only regressed as a bowler. And while those who have worked with him at the national level deserve some of the blame, his decline has become Exhibit A in the clash between traditional cricket and the 20-over version.
Once your technique is as well-honed as Tendulkar's or Glenn McGrath's, it doesn't matter what form of cricket you play. McGrath bowled some sublime spells in the first season of IPL, in withering summer heat. Tendulkar was top scorer last season. Just as Mozart had no trouble composing nursery rhymes, so great cricketers transcend formats.
But when you see Umar Akmal flailing at a ball two feet outside off stump, you wonder how much Twenty20 has wreaked havoc with unpolished techniques. The subcontinent places so much emphasis on limited-overs cricket, with its shirtfront pitches and one-bouncer rule, that batting at Headingley or Edgbaston becomes a Rubik's Cube in the hand of a toddler.
These days, A team tours aim to correct such glitches, but those who really need the experience seldom find a place there. Instead, they rot away in some academy or on the senior bench, waiting for chances that never come. And the county deals that they agreed in principle go to a South African or Australian, who then uses it as a springboard to something better.
When Pakistan cricket was at its strongest, they boasted a squad whose key members had all been steeled in the county crucible. That's no longer the case, and if the successors to the Majid-Zaheer-Javed tradition are not half as good, it's also because they haven't had anything like the same exposure. The Pakistan Cricket Board is a prime candidate for reviving the Carry On series, so farcical are some of its decisions, but if they want to do something right, they should tell Mohammad Irfan, the seven-foot giant, to forget about the Kolkata Knight Riders and look to England instead.
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