"plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose"

The French critic and novelist Jean-Baptiste Alphonso Karr's well known epigram "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose"loosely translated as"the more it changes, the more they stay the same " has acquired a significance to those of us who were old enough to follow the Eden gardens Test of 1977 involving the same two teams playing the Test  Match this week at the same venue.We were cheering, then for Brijesh Patel when he scored 56 to make England bat again and we were cheering for Ashwin when he ensured that England will bat again.More than 60,000 people came to watch England knock off the 16 runs required to win.Few thousands will no doubt turn up tomorrow morning.Yet, two world Cup and a t20 world cup win, a number 1 ranking in tests, a place at the ICC high table and India's becoming a talked about economy which have happened in the interim have still not impacted on the essential malaise of cricketers not taking cricket seriously enough.The cricketers were essentially amateurs then and remain essentially amateurs now.The difference is that they are substantially wealthier now and make money from endorsements and are in effect models or actors who also play cricket.The consistent performance which is required is not really important to these endorsers and cricket's nature where we can laud Ashwin even in our hour of defeat as we lauded Patel then in 1977. Even a below par performance in the Asia cup got eclipsed by Tendulkar's hundredth hundred.What is even more galling is that in 1976-77, the team had bowlers who could bowl England within 350 regularly.At present, both bowling and batting talents look in short supply and the West Indies Bangladesh fifth ODI will end with a better viewership than some days of this Test match.In spite of a decent run since that series in 1977 till the fateful series in England last year, the Indian team has come to resemble "the tag rag squad of bootleggers masquerading as a team called India" which certainly the Indian team of 1979 who were described as such which lost the series 1-0 and almost chased 230 to win was not.