Maybe India’s supporters suspended their disbelief to allow a magic spell to take hold. Maybe they confused cricket with cinema, politics with reality, patriotism with performance.
Telford Vice / Goa
NOT in that creepy Alanis Morrisette way, thank you India. For the warmth, the kindness, the humanity, the passion, the obsession, the colour, the chaos, the cricket and the food. In particular the dosa. Oh, the dosa.
Invariably the men’s World Cup is a jamboree. If it’s in India, stand back and watch the party explode like a supernova in the sky. Except you cannot stand back if you collide with a World Cup in India. India will not allow that. You will be part of the supernova, fearing for your sense and sensibility and unable to stop wondering what amazing thing might happen next. Because amazing things will keep happening.
The Netherlands beat South Africa at a fairytale castle of a ground ringed by mountains. England are stricken by a miasmic funk that robs them of the confidence and skill they showed in 2019. India sweep every opponent and look like all they need to do to claim the trophy is take a flight to Ahmedabad — only to crash to, who else, Australia.
Television types are incapable of saying, simply, India. Instead they speak of “the Men in Blue” or “Team India”. In pressboxes people wear journalists’ accreditation passes but behave like fans, with no regard for the reporters around them trying to focus on their work through the uncouth din.
Spectators wear India shirts regardless of which teams are playing at that ground that day. Others’ interest in cricket itself seems to vanish momentarily whenever something that happens in the middle doesn’t star an India player. They fall curiously silent, as if that boundary couldn’t possibly stay hit or that wicket stay taken if they don’t applaud. They look constipated with frustration, like they want to change the channel but cannot find the remote control.
These unfortunates might have been better off watching Sunday’s final on television, where the host broadcaster, Star, kept spewing India-rah-rah content despite the result. The Australians won? Who knew?
On Monday, The Telegraph, Kolkata’s venerable daily newspaper, published its entire sports section — headlines and text — in a shade of blue not dissimilar to the colour of India’s playing kit. Did they not imagine any other outcome except victory for Rohit Sharma’s team?
Neither, it seemed, did others. People who watched the final in a bar or on whatever screen presented itself on the streets of Kolkata appeared not at all anxious about India’s anaemic batting. Why should they have been? They had seen the same bowlers and batters win, handsomely, every game they had played in the tournament. However many runs India made, the Aussies couldn’t possibly make more. Maybe India’s supporters suspended their disbelief to allow a magic spell to take hold. Maybe they confused cricket with cinema, politics with reality, patriotism with performance.
Yet there was no joy to be taken from India’s failure to launch in the match that mattered most, and so become the first host nation in three editions of the tournament not to win it. Only the mean-spirited could take pleasure from this dashed dream. Where else would winning the World Cup have as shuddering a positive impact?
Others, Indians who are concerned at the way the game is being appropriated by forces beyond its boundaries, are quietly relieved at the fact that a non-Indian team have won a World Cup in India. They see, in India’s saffron training gear, for instance, signs of an unhealthy convergence between the team and nationalism.
At some level that is not surprising. Nowhere in the world is cricket as deeply rooted in society as in India. It is central to the happiness of the nation and important economically — the World Cup supernova could be worth USD2.4-billion to the country’s economy. The cricketminded of Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and even Nepal might quibble about India being put at the head of this pecking order. Let them, but only after they have been to a World Cup in this country.
That’s why politicians flock to be adjacent to the game. Proximity to the players offers them a prize they cannot win in an election. Places in India’s team are not decided by a public vote, yet the public loves the players exponentially more than any of the politicians for whom they vote.
Capitalism knows this, which explains why Sachin Tendulkar — not some legislator, worthy or not — still beams from a myriad advertising billboards 10 years after he played his last Test. The players know this, too. Hence Sunil Gavaskar and Virender Sehwag do a hilarious job of assuming their own contrasting caricatures in television commercials for Kamla Pasand, a brand of pan masala breath freshener. The ad has stayed on air despite complaints that it serves as surrogate promotion for tobacco products.
Examples like those fuel the notion that India is crazy for cricket. That is lazy, simplistic and infantilising. Closer to the truth is that India without cricket, or without it being quite as big a deal here as it is, is unimaginable. And that cricket without India is unfathomable. So the rest of the cricket world is invested, emotionally, economically and in every other way, in cricket in India. Note: not in Indian cricket. That is a different thing that is wholly owned by Indians. Cricket in India belongs to all of us.
Proof of that was on the same screens the day after they had gleamed with the World Cup final itself. There, live and large from MS Dhoni’s hometown of Ranchi, in a broadcast not quite as encrusted with advertising as the real thing, were Chris Gayle and Jacques Kallis. They were opening the batting for Gujarat Titans in a Legends League match against Manipal Tigers. The game also featured Robin Uthappa, Colin de Grandhomme, Thisara Perera, Harbhajan Singh and Praveen Kumar.
The squad lists included Irfan and Yusuf Pathan, Tillakaratne Dilshan, Shane Watson, Sulieman Benn, Liam Plunkett, Sreesanth, Gautam Gambhir, Hashim Amla, Kevin Pietersen, Aaron Finch, Ross Taylor, Suresh Raina, Martin Guptill, Tino Best, Morné Morkel, Jerome Taylor and Ben Dunk.
Not even the IPL, with its exorbitantly paid foreign stars, proves the universality of cricket in India like a slew of players, some more clapped out than others, wheeled out under the floodlights once more. Maybe, in this country, you are never a former player. Maybe you remain, once and forever, a cricketer. Especially if Indians will keep paying you to play and be seen playing.
If you turn on your television on Thursday evening and see India and Australia at it again, do not think you are watching highlights from Sunday’s final. Instead they will be live and large and engaged in the first of five T20Is — the fourth series these teams have contested this year; the fifth if you count the World Cup. The show must, does and will go on.
Maybe the best way to consider cricket in India is to think of dosa. It’s ubiquitous, an impossible order to get wrong whatever the amount of common language shared by you and your waitron, delicious, and easy to digest. And there’s always space for another.
Thank you India. For the dosa, but particularly the cricket. Oh, the cricket.
Cricbuzz
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